I Want To Be A Monk When I Grow Up

Isaiah 55:6

Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on Him while he is near.

My family and I recently moved back in with a Benedictine religious community of the Episcopal Church - a place where we lived after we were first married. When Chelsea and I moved to another neighborhood in Aliquippa in 2009, we always knew we’d someday return to these rowhouses. When we left, we had a newly born baby boy in our hands. We’ve returned with a teenager, two more kids, and having flipped and inhabited two homes in the neighborhood up the hill we called home for over 10 years.

It feels good to be back.

Our history with The Community of Celebration began in 2005. I was a college student starting a summer day camp program for kids in the Linmar Terrace neighborhood of our city. If we were going to serve the community, I wanted to live in it - if even for a summer. Someone mentioned to me that Celebration might have space in one of its twelve row homes, so I gave their office a call. Not only did I find a third-floor bedroom to sleep in for the summer, I discovered dear friends.

Before moving in with Celebration, I was in a sort of ecclesiological crisis. I say ecclesiological because my doubts weren’t with Jesus - my christology was quite intact, but I was struggling with the nature of the church, its structures, history, and institutions. At Celebration, I found friends who lived differently than I had ever seen. They ordered their lives around prayer, lived in radical community, and seemed so unworried. Their connection to Jesus, love of His Presence, and beyond-words experience of His voice felt familiar in some ways to the Pentecostal/charismatic upbringing of my youth, but it was soaked in stillness, ancient spiritual practices, and contemplation. Also, these friends were older than us, and for reasons I probably couldn’t explain at the time, I knew we needed older friends. I was hooked. Another summer of visiting as a college student, and Chelsea and I were ready to move into one of the row homes after our marriage the following cold January.

The Community of Celebration’s roots are with a revival that took place at the Church of the Redeemer, an Episcopalian parish in Houston, Texas, during the Jesus People movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In those days, hippies were coming to faith in Jesus out of the disorientation of drug culture and social turbulence, churches were rediscovering healing and speaking in tongues, and young adults were attempting to radically live out the call of Jesus to share all their belongings, resist the idolatry of materialism, and stand in solidarity with the poor. The spiritual renewal drew artists and musicians, and new songs were being written - songs of the Spirit birthing a movement.

After some of our friends from college followed me and Chelsea and moved into Celebration with us, we discovered a CBS Pentecost Sunday special that had been originally aired in the 1960s and was now uploaded to YouTube. We were almost giddy as we watched our older friends - here in their 20s - expressing the joy of this time of spiritual renewal, reporting healing, describing their shared lives together in mutual submission and hospitality, and these Episcopalians - liturgical, Eucharist-celebrating Episcopalians - singing in tongues and prophesying to one other. Something about it drew us in.

Eventually, a large segment of people involved in the movement ended up on an island off the coast of Scotland where they moved into an old convent. From here, they ministered with their music across Europe and the United States for some years until they were invited to return to the States by the bishop of Pittsburgh in the 1980s. At that time, the steel industry in the region was collapsing, blue collar workers were suddenly without work in Aliquippa, and the community purchased and renovated two sets of row houses on the main thoroughfare of the city along with some other buildings.

Although the community experienced some challenges after settling in Aliquippa, they eventually adopted a Benedictine rule of life - a way for them to continue to live out the values of the renewal they had experienced in stability and contemplation. For 38 years now, they’ve prayed the daily offices and weekly celebrated the Eucharist on a block of the city that now includes a chapel, meeting rooms, and beautiful gardens among which they’ve lived from a common purse while being steadfastly and obscurely present in a community experiencing challenges.

And now we’re back. For reasons I might reflect on in a future post, Chelsea and I decided to return to the row houses this last April. Again, we’re living on a property soaked in beauty and prayer.

Brian Sanders, in his book The 6 Seasons of Calling, writes about the movements of the Spirit in the various chapters of our calling over the seasons of our lives. In it, he mentions that new seasons of our calling often involve feeling inadequate and insecure with an invitation to press deeper into intimacy with Jesus. I’m certainly in such a season, so I think it’s the prayerfulness of this place that has drawn me in again.

I’m in a new season. I’ll soon be transitioning away from the Lead Pastor role at the Gospel Tabernacle, where I’ve served for the last 15 years. The Greenhouse Network - a decentralized, released family of missional outposts - is growing regionally. Leaders are multiplying. And I’m now serving in a new role in our denominational District of The Christian and Missionary Alliance. All of that to say, I often feel incompetent at my job(s), and the learning curve feels steep.

Time to press in deeper with Jesus. Time to root myself in prayer in a more essential way.

During my undergraduate studies at Toccoa Falls College, I was captivated by a sentence in the end of Catholic philosopher Alasdair McIntyre’s book After Virtue, in which he suggests this moment of moral fragmentation in Western societies (of which the church has been a too-often willing participant) needs a “new St. Benedict.” He saw parallels between our current cultural moment and the fracturing of the Roman Empire in which some radical Christians retreated from empire’s seductions into monastic communities in order to regain faithfulness while being on mission. Think of how the early Benedictine monks in the 6th and 7th centuries retreated into lives of prayer and contemplation while engaging acts of mercy to those being crushed in the collapse of empire. The monastic communities were formed in an integrated atmosphere of prayer while also becoming the missionary societies of the church.

I discovered Alasdair McIntyre in college while researching and writing a paper on a movement called The New Monasticism - a modern-day, cross-denominational, reinterpretation of St. Benedict for our time in which Christians are once again forming communities to rediscover prayer and mission. Maybe unsurprisingly, I wrote the paper with the intent of criticizing the movement. My youthful bible college know-it-all-ism and evangelical church suspicion of new movements of God made me want to prove my theological faithfulness by critiquing something. But instead, I was captivated. The Benedictine tradition, McIntyre, and some of the authors of the New Monasticism seemed to not only affirm some of my theological convictions but integrate those convictions into a way of life I longed to embody. Not long afterward, seemingly because of God’s sovereignty, I one day called The Community of Celebration asking for a room to sleep in for the summer. God was bringing together theory and practice.

I’m no expert on St. Benedict and his Rule of Life, but the more I get to know this ancient way of discipleship and mission, I find it resonates with longings in my soul. Anglican author Esther de Wall explores Benedictine spirituality as a way of embracing contradictions - living within the spaces of mystery and paradox the Scriptures foist us into. For instance, the Benedictine way of mission has both to do with stability and sentness. It’s committed to being faithful in a particular place, but being present in that particularity is part of what it means to be on mission to the world. My friends at Celebration have lived this beautifully. For almost four decades now, they’ve lived and prayed on a particular block of my city, but this place has also been a place from which missionaries, evangelists, community development practitioners, and activists have been formed, supported, and launched. The vision of life Celebration embodies here has to do with rootedness and sentness. That makes sense to me, and each of these modalities have their own sanctifying effect in our souls as we follow Jesus.

The rootedness in this place (what Benedictines refer to as stability), takes on a particular rhythm I now get to witness by living here. This religious community has worked over the years - in social service and chaplaincy jobs in the community, in gardening, and in the baking of bread. Woven throughout this plodding work is prayer - the celebration of the Communion Table’s wine and bread and the three-times-a-day praying of the offices. The property is beautiful but simple, a revitalized block of the city without the materialistic trappings of gentrification. The buildings are filled with folksy pottery, painted icons (yes, one of my friends here paints icons), and vases of flowers picked from the property that remind us of the beauty that commonly surrounds us but often goes unnoticed. Our front porches face the busy vehicle and pedestrian traffic of our city (mission), and our back yards face a common green space hemmed in by a wooded hillside where I often see deer and rabbits (stability).

Somehow for me, life makes sense here. Empire continues to fracture all around us, and all too often the church along with it. But here, there’s at least an imperfect attempt for all of life to come under the lordship of Jesus, His Presence, and His mission in the world. It feels like my soul heals here no matter if I pick the front or back porch to sit on during summer evenings.

Recently, I was reminded of the inspiration I gained from authors in the New Monasticism those years ago, so I picked up Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s 2012 book The Awakening of Hope: Why We Practice a Common of Faith. Per the title, it sounded, so…well…hopeful. Why did everything sound more hopeful before these more immediately recent years? Here Wilson-Hartgrove imagines a collective life together formed by shared meals, mission, prayer, and practices that cultivate justice. I hadn’t read anything from this stream of the church for a long time, and it was like water to my soul. It felt hopeful because the vision Wilson-Hartgrove presents made me think once again that an integrated life with Jesus in community with others was possible. Empire’s fragmentation and fissuring is so in our faces, I sometimes forget anything different is imaginable.

So here I am, going on the record that I want to be a monk when I grow up - as least as much as such a thing is possible. I’m not a vowed member of this religious community even though I live here, but I want to lean in more. Of course, I’m not an actual monk, but I want this Benedictine way of life to influence me.

I don’t know what you think of when you think of Benedictines, but I think of my friends here at Celebration. They’ve been more likely to be found with long hair, bandanas, jeans, Berkenstocks, and guitars in hand than the traditional robes. They’re a non-celibate community, so they’ve welcomed single folks, married couples, and families into their vowed community. Sometimes they chant the haunting worship of Taize in Latin, but most of the time they sing the folk worship music of the 60s and 70s. I don’t know what that means for me since I prefer to wear shoes instead of sandals and can’t play guitar (I did, however, start to grow my hair longer!), but all I know is I want to be like them.

Wilson-Hartgrove in his book describes the monastic life as one of embodied practice instead of only stated theological belief. I want not only orthodoxy but orthopraxy. I want prayer. I want mission. I want to lean into the radical call of Jesus in a way that actually challenges my proclivities toward materialism, individualism, and racism. I want this. I don’t want to just observe, I want to change. I don’t want to just live here, I want this place to shape me.

More than anything else, I think this means embracing and integrating new practices into my life and the life of my family that pay attention to the movements of the Spirit in and around me, resist the narratives of empire, and center my life around prayer. Surrounding me here are friends baking bread, praying, singing, and sharing resources and meals in ways that make visible the call to follow Jesus with their whole lives. I want that, and I want it tangibly.

So, little by little, I’m going to be joining these practices with my friends. Who knows. Maybe I’ll start praying and fasting in new rhythms, maybe I’ll help with the garden, maybe I’ll learn to bake bread, maybe I’ll sit or walk in silence more..but I need this.

Fair warning - I know I can be impulsive which is nothing like what monks are supposed to be. Sometimes I get excited and then don’t follow through. I want to write about this journey as I lean into it, but part of me embracing the slowness and plodding nature of this place will mean not running ahead. I always want to live in the future (which isn’t all bad), but I can sometimes miss the present. If I only write about my journey here in future tense, I’ll post a bunch of intentions I won’t fulfill. So I’m going to do it differently.

One by one, I’m going to step into new practices of living here - practices that now surround me. But I’m not going to tell you about it until after I do it - at least for three months. Hopefully that’s long enough for the particular practice to find its way into my regular life and challenge my emotions, impulsivity, and idolatries. Hopefully it’s long enough for me to begin to begin to experience conversion.

Evangelicals tend to speak of conversion as a moment, but Benedictine/contemplative types tend to talk about it as an ongoing process (akin to how evangelicals might speak of sanctification). One reason we’ve moved here in this season is because my friends are asking what conversion to Jesus looks like for them in this season of aging - something I’ll want to reflect on in future posts. It’s beautiful. While they convert, I want to as well. In this season of calling, I want to turn to Jesus again. I want that to mean something about how I live.

As I incorporate new practices that hopefully shape how my family and I live, I’ll want to share with you. I’m well aware there could be less than holy motivations for sharing such things, but I’m certain of my intentions in this case. In short, there’s plenty in this world - in empire and its church-supported seductions - that I know I don’t want to become at this season of life. And when I see what surrounds me here at Celebration there’s plenty I do want to become. Maybe it’s the evangelist in me, but that feels worth sharing with you. When I delight in something, I want to tell people about it. So maybe when you read along you’ll delight with me.

We’ll see what happens next. I want to be a monk when I grow up.