Remain Simple
Monastic virtues for daily living
I recently had the privilege of spending a few days at St. Gregory’s Abbey in Three Rivers, Michigan. St. Gregory’s is a community of Benedictine monks in the Episcopal Church. Many people are surprised to learn that there are religious orders of friars, monks, and nuns in the Anglican tradition. This was not always so. King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and confiscated their property; more for political and economic, rather than theological, reasons. However, this decision opened the door to the anti-monastic sentiment that permeated much of Protestant thinking. Thankfully, much of the ethos of monastic, and especially Benedictine, spirituality was preserved in the English Reformation through our Prayer Book tradition.
Religious orders would not reappear again within the Church of England until the Oxford Movement revived catholic thought and practice in the early 19th Century. The first religious orders in the Church of England had an activist bent and were deeply engaged in social reform movements and ministry with poor and working class communities. By the early 20th Century, more contemplative orders were founded, including the Benedictine community at Nashdom Abbey in Buckinghamshire, England. St. Gregory’s was founded as a priory of Nashdom Abbey in Valparaiso, Indiana in 1939 and moved to Three Rivers, Michigan in 1946. In 1969, St. Gregory’s became an independent Benedictine abbey and elected its own abbot.
Religious orders witness to values and practices that are important to all baptized Christians. The earliest religious orders were counter-cultural movements that sought to radicalize Christian commitment to alternative values when the Church became captive to cultural conformity. This remains true today.
The first thing one notices at a Benedictine monastery is the centrality of the Daily Office. The monks gather seven times daily to pray the “offices,” which consist of chanted psalms, readings from scripture, a hymn and prayers. At St. Gregory’s Abbey, Matins is at 4 am, Lauds is at 6 am, Terce is at 8:15 am, followed by the daily celebration of the Holy Eucharist, Sext is at 11:30 am, None is at 2 pm, Vespers is at 5 pm, followed by a period of silent meditation, and Compline is at 7:45 pm, concluding with the chanting of one of the traditional Antiphons of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Terce, Sext, and None are briefer offices of 10-15 minutes in length, while the other offices are 20-30 minutes.
Thus, at the center of the monk’s life is the continual remembrance of God. This seven-fold pause infuses the day with unceasing prayer, grounding all of the other work done in the monastery. This practice has several important consequences. To begin, it cultivates a certain detachment from the day’s work. No matter what the monk is doing in between the offices, when the bell is rung calling them to worship, the monk lays down his work and turns to prayer. The monk is not identified with his work as an indication of his status or value, no matter how important it may be.
The Offices continually remind him that his identity is given to him by God. It is intrinsic, for like all of us, the monk is created in the image and likeness of God. The monk or nun seeks a particularly intensive practice of remembering their true identity as children of God. The first Christian monks and nuns, as well as the theologians of the early Church, understood this to be a return to their natural state. While they did not deny the “fallen” condition of human nature, they saw this fallenness as a kind of false consciousness resulting from cultural conditioning, and not a quasi-biological condition (contra Augustine). By grace, one could be restored to one’s natural condition.
The monk’s practice of prayer supports his intention to receive his identity from God and to be restored to his natural state. It serves to cultivate the virtue of simplicity or purity of heart, so that we do not lose ourselves in the many roles and expectations that distort our identity and foster desires that lead us to become who we are not. We become who we think other people want us to be or react against it.
Mar Philoxenos, a 5th/6th Century Syrian monk and bishop, counsels us to
Remain simple with regard to all that you hear, and let those who talk about you not change you and not make you become as they are. For the adversary brings all this about in order to turn your spirit away from its meekness, to disturb and trouble your purity of heart, to make your simplicity deceitful, so that you will become like those who fight against you, that you may be filled with anger as they are and become a vessel of wrath like unto them, putting on the garment of iniquity.
He also writes, “The Kingdom of Heaven is a soul without passions, having knowledge of that which is.”[1] When we are free of passions (disordered emotions, attachment to distorted desires and false identities), we become clear and lucid. We reconnect with reality, with our true nature. Those who seek this freedom are spiritual anarchists, refusing to conform to societal norms that undermine the dignity of human nature.
They are also people who refuse to be identified with what they do. How often we say, “I am a nurse, or teacher, or priest, or parent, or spouse.” We identify with our role in relationship to other people or institutions, rather than our God-given identity. Our life becomes a very complicated and often stressful attempt to balance all of these competing identities, rather than to realize “the one thing necessary.”[2] When we are recalled to our natural state, this simplifies our identity and integrates our life.
Simplicity or purity of heart is the most important virtue in monastic teaching; not poverty, or chastity, or obedience. These other virtues (and in the earliest monastic communities they were understood as virtues which one continually cultivated, not vowed states) were in the service of simplicity.[3] Simplicity is also related to two other crucial virtues in monastic teaching: humility and discretion. Humility is genuine self-knowledge, understanding that one is no more or no less than human, and that one’s humanity is created in the image and likeness of God. Humility allows us to see our roles and relationships as just so many ways to be of service to others, rather than loading them up with the need to give us our identity – to make them all about us.
Simplicity also fosters discretion, what Philoxenos refers to as “knowledge of that which is.” The integration of our identity and our life allows us to perceive reality more clearly, rather than through the mist of our projections, illusions, and fantasies. We begin to see people, institutions, and situations as they are, rather than as we want or need them to be, much as humility allows us to see ourselves in that way. This allows for discretion, proper judgment about how to respond to people and situations in a balanced way. Discretion is a kind of intuitive perception and capacity to respond to reality. With it comes the freedom to act rather than react. Perhaps most importantly and most often, it allows us to recognize when no response is needed, because it isn’t about me.
The Daily Office is a practice of remembrance that supports our willingness to integrate our lives around our true identity, and to cultivate the virtues of simplicity, humility, and discretion. One of the gifts of the Anglican Prayer Book tradition is the inclusion of four of the Daily Offices in the Book of Common Prayer: Morning Prayer (lauds), Noonday Prayer (sext), Evening Prayer (vespers), and Compline. They can be prayed individually or collectively. Helpfully, our Prayer Book also provides shorter versions of these Offices in the form of “Daily Devotions for Families and Individuals” (BCP p. 136 ff).
The work of prayer is about the transformation of consciousness that returns us to our natural state, cultivating the virtues of simplicity, humility, and discretion that are so desperately needed in our world today. Perhaps what the Church needs is a new monasticism, an intentional commitment to the practices that renew us in the image and likeness of God.
[1] Quoted in Thomas Merton, A Course in Desert Spirituality: Fifteen Sessions with the Famous Trappist Monk, edited by Jon M. Sweeney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019), Lecture Fifteen.
[2] Luke 10:38-42.
[3] Henry Chadwick offers this insight in his book on John Cassian.
Perfect meditation as many of us get ready to jump into busy fall schedules. Thanks for this!
Simplicity to include conscious withdrawal from the constant seductions of our consumerist society. “Retail therapy” as harmless, but misguided. Stuff can never fulfill its promise of wholeness.