Monk?

On the face of it, the monastic life is a very ordinary life; it is a life of routine, simplicity, regularity. In fact, its very predictability is one of the great challenges for the monk, becoming the place where he encounters himself and the truth of it is revealed. Sometimes it’s not a pleasant discovery.

But the truth is we all live by routines. I have to get up at the same time on workdays and get to work on time and put in a full day’s effort, not leaving the office until it’s time. I take the same route to and from work. I work with the same people day in and day out, and perform the same tasks, more or less, each day. There’s some variety, but the overall schedule is there and needs to be followed. The routines at home are very much the same as well from day to day.

So what’s the big deal about the patterns of the monastic life; after all we all follow some kind of “program” in life? Well, there’s one fundamental difference that make the monk unique. There is no vacation from the sameness of the monk’s day. Just like the rest of us he gets up, goes to work, etc., but with a difference. He knows he won’t be going on to the web to check out the best deals on flights to the Bahamas for a week’s break. He’ll be getting up and going through his day as he has since entering the monastery, and will until one day they bury him. This fact is both a great weight and a key to liberation; one is not possible without the other.

Most of us, especially in the developed countries, spend a lot of our time looking for creative and stimulating ways to distract and entertain ourselves so that we don’t have to face the sameness of much of our existence. The monastic, by contrast, not only doesn’t have the multiplicity of opportunities to avoid the tediousness of much of life, he wilingly takes it on, embracing it, knowing it is a door through which he is let go of self-preoccupation and concern as someone who has a special “claim” on happiness at the expense of others.

The routine of the monk’s life is yet another tool designed by the great authors of the monastic life - Antony, Pacomius, Benedict, Basil - and written into their rules of life, to confront the demons of selfishness which prevent us all from encountering the depths of our need for love and to love. It’s here we’re all called to be, called by the great liberator, Jesus, to be friends of God. The monk hears the call and freely gives up all the “interesting” choices life has to offer, takes up his cross of ordinariness and discovers what real freedom is.