6

NEW MONASTICISM

When I tell my friend Meredith that I’ve started hanging around a monastery, she says she’s not surprised.

“Stina,” she says, “you’ve always been into that new monasticism stuff. Remember Shane Claiborne?”

Ah yes. Shane Claiborne. When Josh and I were in college, Shane came and spoke at one of our chapel services. He was a white guy with dreadlocks and patched jeans; he told stories about living in solidarity with homeless people and embracing a life of downward mobility. When he spoke about the intentional Christian community that he and a bunch of college friends had formed in Philadelphia, my peers in the chapel seats took notes. Shane told tales of hosting neighborhood barbecues, running afterschool programs, and doing circus tricks during community block parties. His stories sounded a lot like the parables that Jesus told, and his community sounded a lot like heaven.

I wasn’t the only one at my college enamored with Shane’s vision of intentional community. When I was a junior, I was close with a group of seniors who shared common values—community, social justice, simplicity—and wanted to live them out together. The group met a few times over the spring semester, ultimately deciding to look for a big house to rent in Chicago after graduation. When I returned to college for my senior year, those friends had found jobs in the city and moved in together. Some of the students already had connections in North Lawndale, where a Christian community health clinic and church worked in partnership to promote wellness in a high-poverty community.

So a new intentional community house was born—they named it the Kedzie House for the street where they found a rental. It was the heyday of the new monasticism movement in the mid-2000s Protestant church, and young-adult cohousing communities were springing up like dandelions.

The new monasticism movement inspired a generation of mostly white Protestants, like me, who were looking for another way to be a Christian. We didn’t want to follow the expected trajectory: buy a single-family house in the suburbs, take the occasional vacation to Florida, coach little league. It didn’t help that many of us graduated from college into the recession of the mid-2000s, where high paying jobs were rare and the ethics of unpaid internships were unquestioned. Living cheap in those early post-college years was a necessity.

I recently reread School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism, an anthology of essays about the distinctive attributes of the movement published in 2005. Chapters by new monasticism leaders like Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove inspired me all over again with their stories of radical welcome. But when I went to look at the website referred to in the book, I found that the domain newmonasticism.org was for sale. I wondered then how many of the young adults inspired by new monasticism ten years ago had flamed out like me.

If you asked me why Josh and I were inspired by new monasticism, I would tell you about Shane Claiborne, sure, but I would also tell you about the faith we shared then—about how Josh once told me that shoveling snow was the best part of his prayer life. He was reading books about the holiness of work and prayer. He embraced a fully embodied faith. It is a very monastic concept—to toil in the monastery’s gardens, to bake bread or brew beer for the monastery’s business, to cut trees and craft furniture or keep bees or distill sugar maple sap into syrup as an act of prayer. We both felt a calling to live our Christian faith in community; we both romanticized life and work outside the mainstream in the alternative economy.

When Josh was a Christian, he would write Psalms on notecards and have them delivered to me on our college campus. He loved to make pottery, to fix and ride bikes, and sit on the back of a tractor at the organic farm where he worked for three growing seasons after we got married. And at night he would read volumes by Teilhard de Chardin or Henri Nouwen or Jacques Ellul. When we spent six months apart in college (me volunteering in a refugee camp in Kenya and Josh serving with a mission team in an urban slum in Venezuela), we wrote prayers of blessing to each other nearly every day.

After graduating from college, we didn’t join the Kedzie House community in Chicago, but we did belong to a house church with other young wannabe radicals in Minneapolis. We didn’t make much on our AmeriCorps stipends and nonprofit salaries, but our Sunday night dinners and Tuesday night prayers made us feel rich. We hosted clothing swaps and craft nights and went on long bike rides around the chain of urban lakes. I never felt lonely; there was always a weekly potluck to go to. Soon after our wedding, the house church fizzled, and our faith began its slow drift. We started dreaming of something bigger, of buying a farm, maybe (we were all reading Wendell Berry, of course), or driving out to Philadelphia to join Shane Claiborne’s community.

So less than a year into our marriage, Josh and I left Minneapolis and spent five months at Jubilee Partners. Jubilee is an intentional community in rural Georgia, where it sits on 280 acres of a former cotton plantation. Its red soil was depleted from decades of cotton farming, but the mostly Mennonite community members have fed organic material back into a two-acre garden plot, building up the nutrients into loamy, brown dirt that supports a plentiful sweet potato harvest. The acre plot of blueberry plants is tended carefully; shovelfuls of pine needles have been heaped around the base of each plant, adding back the necessary acidity for them to bear fruit.

I was attracted to Jubilee’s ministry to recently arrived refugees and Josh to organic farming. For five months, we pitched hay in grassy fields together. We wore bandanas on our heads and cooked gigantic vegetarian meals in the community kitchen: pizza with homemade dough, baked potatoes with à la carte toppings, groundnut stew with pumpkin and peanut butter. I learned how to make twelve loaves of bread at a time using the Simply in Season cookbook. We taught basic English to people from Burma and Mexico and the Congo using laminated flashcards and bingo games. We sang “Old McDonald” and nursery songs to the children, read Green Eggs and Ham, and practiced basic conversations: “Hello! How are you?” “I’m fine, thank you.”

Those of us who were volunteers lived in awe of the older, wiser Christian radicals, some of whom had founded the community thirty years prior and had found a way to live in an interdependent, communal way for the long haul. Josh and I particularly admired one Mennonite couple who were just a few years older than we were. He was a classic farmer who wore suspenders and took care of the cows and goats, and she had long, brown hair down to her elbows and tended the plant nursery.

One late winter morning, the cohort of volunteers gathered in the library for a meeting. Some sat on the floor, others on the couches, others on mats that rested directly on the ground. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and I cupped a mug of weak coffee from the community kitchen, settling into my spot on the floor. Over the course of our volunteer term, partners shared their life story with our volunteer group, and today it was the young farmer’s turn. He was generally so quiet, I was curious about what he might say.

“When I first came to Jubilee Partners it was like Christmas every day,” he said. “I thought, What is this place? How can I stay here forever?”

He shook his head. “I never knew how painful a place like this could be.”

I leaned forward in my chair and looked over to catch Josh’s eye from across the room, but he wasn’t looking at me. We had been talking about staying at Jubilee ourselves, committing to live as novices for a year. During that process, we would discern whether we were called to become long-term members of the community. Though we, too, thought life at Jubilee was like Christmas morning, I couldn’t help noticing how tired all of the partners seemed and how reticent some were to get to know us, the ever-rotating community of volunteers. Some underlying tension, some undercurrent of pain, rippled through our conversations. We heard that a key family had recently left, leaving behind torn relationships and lingering resentment.

The young farmer spoke about the trials of community living, the frustrations, the endless meetings to decide if movies were permitted in the community or if both cake and ice cream could be served at birthdays (normally ice cream was restricted to just two evenings a month). Managing the land was a joy but also hard when other community members didn’t understand the investments that needed to be made. The Georgia climate was hot, and fire ants swarmed the soil.

Clarence Jordan, founder of the Koinonia community in nearby Americus, Georgia, wrote about intentional community as an alternative model of living, meant to be a “demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God.” Maybe not everyone would join one, but the communities pointed to the prophetic nature of Christianity. They showed that another way was possible.

But we were learning that even in our ideal community that practiced radical hospitality, there was suffering and pain. For all their hardships, the young farmer and his wife stayed at Jubilee Partners, choosing to continue their ministry in the community instead of walking away. But the cost—the struggle—scared us and so, when our five-month volunteer term at Jubilee was over, we went home to Minneapolis. Still, in those early years of our marriage, we talked often of going back.

I only visited the Kedzie House a handful of times, but what I remember is this: trash along the boulevard and in the gutter, neighborhood kids running in and out the front door, my friend Shea washing dishes at the kitchen sink. I stood beside her as she rinsed dinner plates, listening to her talk about her job in the community health clinic, about her plans to apply for medical school. The others in the house held a hodgepodge of jobs: AmeriCorps volunteer, ESL teacher, barista, nonprofit grunt. They had meals together a few times a week.

The community lasted for a few years until people started getting married or getting into graduate school or getting tired of community meetings and sharing bathrooms with seven other people. I’m not sure if the residents of the Kedzie House prayed together regularly, but they did embody many of the “twelve marks of a new monasticism,” which outlined principles such as “hospitality to the stranger” and “relocation to abandoned corners of the empire.” To join a new monastic community, you didn’t need to be celibate or a member of the Catholic Church, nor did you have to take a vow of obedience to an authoritative abbot or abbess. Each community had its own process for accepting new members, but they were not as regulated as the ones that Catholic sisters undergo before joining a religious community. They were not lifelong vows.

For young Catholic women who feel the call to simplicity and service, who want to live in a big old community house after college, there’s a different model. They can go on a discernment tour and visit the Carmelites, the Dominicans, and the Franciscans, comparing rules of life, exploring monastic versus apostolic communities. There are vocation directors to guide them and novitiate years to undergo. Instead of creating something new, these young idealists submit to hierarchies and read spiritual masterpieces like the Rule of Saint Benedict on life in community.

Plenty of women start the process to become nuns and then decide to leave, but some stay and make vows and live their whole lives in the rhythm of prayer and service. The institution’s stability is what makes the call to community last, because there is support enough to see it through. There is wisdom baked into the structure itself. I wonder now if God calls some to be monks in every generation. New monasticism and other experiments in community are what happen when your tradition doesn’t have an established outlet for that vocation.

But vowed religious life is often viewed as useless by those on the outside, especially the life of cloistered communities that make prayer their primary activity. Why waste your life praying all the time? Why forgo sex and money and autonomy? What is the meaning of a life spent cloistered behind a grille, ensconced in a nun’s habit, teaching elite Catholic girls their grammar lessons?

It seems to me that the new monastics focused more on social justice than on developing a contemplative lifestyle centered on spiritual disciplines. They hosted homework clubs for neighborhood kids, tended community gardens, and provided temporary housing for the homeless. Communities like the Kedzie House had more in common with the settlement house movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s, popularized by Jane Addams’s Hull House (where modern social work was born), than with cloistered communities that rose at four to sing morning prayers. New monasticism was good with its theology of social action, on solidarity with the poor, on hospitality to the stranger, but sometimes lost when it came to the contemplative center of these traditions.

Intentional communities often fail. Some of the new monastic communities latched onto ancient traditions, like the Rule of Saint Benedict, in an attempt to create a more sustainable structure to guide community life and even developed a popular book of common prayer for “ordinary radicals.” Most of the communities featured in the book 12 Marks of New Monasticism, like the Simple Way, Reba Fellowship, and the Rutba House, are still going strong.

I wonder now if the Kedzie House failed for the same reasons that Josh and I didn’t go back to Jubilee Partners after our volunteer term. Living in community is hard work, and without vows to keep us there, who would want to stick it out?

In the evangelical worship services of my youth, I sang with other Christians, asking God to “set my heart on fire.” We were “sold out” for Jesus. Our churches encouraged us to throw ourselves into whatever passions God had given us in order to love and serve God better. For many years I was nothing if not earnest about my faith, about following Jesus with every ounce of my life.

This spirit of passion was characteristic of my peers in the new monastic movement as well. We were inspired; we were idealistic. We wanted to actually live the way Jesus did; we wanted to be like the early church and share everything among ourselves. But old-school monastics knew something that most of us didn’t: passion can only get you so far when you encounter inevitable struggle and pain. Most hot and holy fires are unsustainable.

In the months after I visited Sister Theresa for spiritual direction, I finally sat down and read the Rule of Saint Benedict. Instead of “following your passion,” the Rule values stability. It teaches that “all things are to be done with moderation.” Accepting your limits—that one cannot sustain a high level of engagement or enthusiasm 100 percent of the time—is the only means to living a consistent, centered life for God.

I wonder now what a modern worship song about the Benedictine values of moderation and stability would sound like. Instead of “I will go, Lord, where you lead me,” we would sing, “I will stay put, Lord, and remain faithful in my daily tasks.” Instead of “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord,” we would sing, “Help me to rest and say no, Lord.”

Those revised lyrics are not sexy, not at all like the church retreats, the summer camps, the special seminars that throughout my teens and early twenties ignited my idealism into a giant flame. I would return home each summer from camp certain that this would be the time my life would be transformed. I would set high goals for myself and then crash with disappointment at the inevitable letdown.

When Josh left Christianity, much of our shared idealism went with it. We stopped having “maybe, someday” conversations of returning to Jubilee Partners; we no longer wrote prayers of blessing for one another. I grew cloudy with disillusionment, no longer able to see a way to live out my faith in the countercultural or communal way I’d hoped I would.

But when I discovered that the Visitation Sisters were in the neighborhood, it was as if God was winking at me. My dreams of joining a new monastic community may have been gone, but look! God seemed to be saying. Here are some actual, old-school monastics for you to befriend—the real deal. Go learn something solid from their rhythm of life with God, something that has stood the test of time. Maybe the stability of their vow had something to teach me about marriage.