The Home, a Monastery?

Cheri and I wanted to get married. Inspired by Francis of Assisi, the Poor Clares, Brother Lawrence, the Sojourners community, and others, we also longed to live “sold out to Jesus.” What could that mean for people who didn’t join a religious order or missionary enterprise – for an ordinary family like ours? Once married, we explored rhythms of private and family devotions. We kept our spending to a minimum and invested significant time and energy into various ministries.

As I pondered how I would make a living with a PhD in Christian spirituality, I told Cheri I wanted to integrate prayer, studies, manual labor, and ministry into a single fabric. Cheri looked at me and said, “That sounds kind of like the Benedictine Rule. Maybe you want to be a monk.” We have been pursuing some form of married, semi-monastic life ever since. Yet we never joined an intentional Christian community. Wherever we lived, we joined a local congregation and enjoyed friendships with other communities of faith. Simplicity, fidelity, humility, rhythm: these guided our search for a way to embody love for God and love for others in a way that seemed appropriate for us.

Along the way Cheri and I have discovered many kindred spirits, some who lived hundreds of years ago and some who are living today, who have shared our hunger for something like a “family monastery.” Let me introduce some of these, and their habits.

Consecrated Life as Families

While Christians since the earliest centuries have sought to live a consecrated life individually, at times entire families have chosen to live some kind of semi-monastic life as a family. Perhaps the most celebrated example in the early period is that of fourth-century Macrina the Younger and her household, including her brother Basil the Great. Macrina led and gathered her brothers, mother, household workers, and others into a devout Christian lifestyle centered around their home in Annisa (modern Turkey), devoting themselves to a rhythm of prayer, work, hospitality, and ministry to the needy. They reconceived traditional household roles, masters performing the duties of servants and vice versa. Historian Elizabeth Castilli describes their household as a “home monastic community.” Macrina biographer Anna Silvas summarizes this as the “commitment of the entire family to pursuing a life of Christian piety.”

A thousand years later, in the British countryside neighborhood known as Little Gidding, another woman, Mary Ferrar, bought a piece of land complete with an old home and an abandoned chapel. She convinced her family – most significantly her son Nicholas, who was a member of Parliament and an ordained deacon – to move in with her to live a life of prayer, labor, and caring for poor children. Priest and poet George Herbert, a friend and fellow MP, moved nearby and helped the Ferrars rebuild the chapel before transferring to Bemerton, where he became a country parson, inviting others into his own devotional life. Robert Van de Weyer, founder of a 1980s community on the Little Gidding location, writes of the similar aims of the pair: “While Nicholas Ferrar created a residential group, like a monastery, George Herbert lived a similar life within a normal parish.” Like Macrina and her household, the Ferrar family reordered their lives around what they understood to be – and we would perceive today as – monastic values and practices: rhythm, prayer, simplicity, submission, study, and compassion for the least.

Photograph by Paul Close, www.paul-close.com. Used by permission.

Sometimes, when the Spirit moves, God’s people respond by spontaneously joining together as associations of committed families. In the eleventh century, a group of families in the same neighborhood decided to pursue a life of virtue, and particularly the virtue of humility. They were called the Humiliati. Profits and produce collected beyond the needs of the communities were given to the poor. They fasted on the fourth and sixth day of each week, except during feast seasons. They observed the canonical hours, reciting the full seven-fold divine office. Their clothing was to be neither too grand nor too abject. They came together each Sunday for a time of instruction and mutual support.

Historian Augustine Thompson tells of another group of families in Italy which formed in the late twelfth century following a wave of interest in the penitential life. They “practiced an asceticism based on that of canonical public penance (save for celibacy)…. They vowed conversion of life, wore a kind of habit, recited the traditional hours, if literate, or the Pater Noster if not. They met for periodic Masses, sermons, and chapters of faults. The group held common property, but they were not monks, nor were they attached to a monastery.”

In the thirteenth century, Franciscans and other orders carved out ways for families to follow in their footsteps without leaving family and career. These “third orders” provided ways for families to make significant commitments of lifestyle regarding wealth, prayer, and more.

During the Reformation in the sixteenth century, some Anabaptist groups pioneered new forms of intentional Christian community, demonstrating the gospel message through village-sized collections of devout families. Scholars have often compared Anabaptism and monasticism, noting their strong sense of distance from the world, their rhythm of worship and work, their mutual submission, and their commitment to a shared economy. Unlike traditional monasteries, though, these were communities of families giving themselves to a radical expression of gospel life.

A more recent group emerging from the Anabaptist tradition is the Bruderhof, a network of communities founded in 1920 and currently consisting of around three thousand people living in twenty-nine settlements on five continents. They see themselves as following Jesus and inspired by the example of the early church. A majority of Bruderhof members are married. Bruderhof members take vows: to “give up all property,” “to uphold sexual purity,” and “to yield in obedience to Christ and our brothers and sisters.” If this sounds familiar to students of monasticism, the Bruderhof is explicit: “Vows of membership are made in the spirit of the traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.” They also publish this magazine.

More recently, we have seen a flowering of intentional Christian communities in the United States and in Europe. While some of those communities have struggled and some dissolved, a number have matured and thrive even to this day. The ecumenical Alleluia Community in Augusta, Georgia, for example, grew out of charismatic prayer meetings in the early 1970s. A core group decided to sell their homes and move closer together, covenanting to live out a deeper commitment to their faith. Rhythms of prayer, mutual care through small groups, and sharing of resources characterize their life. Families are a significant aspect of the Alleluia community, which operates its own school.

These are just a few examples of a quiet tradition of “monasteries for families” – or something like that – throughout the history of the Christian faith. Many Christians have not found it necessary to renounce marriage in order to live “sold out” for Christ. Other ways are possible.

Borrowing Monks’ Habits

Suggesting particular spiritual life habits for families is dangerous. So I’ll just agree with my readers from the start. You’re right, I don’t know your kids. I don’t know your spouse. I don’t know your employment situation. I know that merely listening to these ideas may trigger oppressive guilt that has been heaped upon you for years, making you feel bad when you fail to put them into practice. Yes, I am aware that the choice to “simplify” is itself a privileged choice.

It’s not a question of what we should do, but what we could do. Making the home a monastery is not about restrictions. It’s about freedoms. Macrina knew that. The Humiliati knew that. Cheri and I have come to know that.

How, then, do we arrange our family life so that we can experience some of this richness? There are books on family spirituality, giving advice on how to find God in the midst of the chaos of young children. There are manuals on how to follow the Rule of Life of a particular order. I hope to thread a needle between the two.

Let’s start with housing. What could a family “cloister” look like? Well, it could be a few houses in the same neighborhood, where a couple of families live in each house. A little like the Humiliati, or the Alleluia community. It could look like a farm, where several families and volunteers live on the same property. A little like Little Gidding, or the Jubilee Partners community in Georgia. But could it look like an old trailer by itself out in the country, like ours?

Members of religious orders often wear habits, clothing that is simple and distinctive. To wear a habit means to renounce fashion and to express one’s identity differently. Your “habit” could be to acquire clothing at thrift stores. I know people who have bought identical shirts and pants. They no longer need to decide what to wear and their clothing is simple and durable.

Monasteries are known as places of prayer. How could we make our “home monasteries” places of prayer? Many religious orders recite a daily office: a certain program of prayers throughout the day, and all of the groups I presented above were keen on making regular prayer a central part of their life as families and communities. One of the best decisions I ever made was to take our phone off the hook (remember those days?) most evenings so our family could have “story and service”: reading a good book and then worshipping together.

This brings up another issue of monastic – and family – life: time. If monasteries are known for anything, it is the rhythm of work, prayer, and meals. If we listen to some accounts, families are known for their pandemonium. I love Charles Dickens’s description of one family gathering: “They were not forty children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.” I have seen treatments of monastic spirituality in the home recommend an equivalent to the monastery bell. When the bell rings, monks put down their tools and leave one task for the next. Some parents will tell you they don’t need a bell: you might want to cook dinner, but the diaper needs to be changed.

And yet in another sense our time is our own. We can, to some extent, choose our family rhythm. Everyone knows children’s extracurricular activities can be overdone, but at times the rhythm of such a group ends up being the best gift we can provide the children. I know communities of families who have devotions in the early morning. It is assumed that as a member of the community you will not take a job that requires leaving before devotions. Yes, a sacrifice, but for the sake of freeing yourself to enjoy family and community. Others have chosen to live off a single part-time income in order to spend more time working, learning, praying, and playing with their family.

This brings us to the next issue: money and possessions. Traditionally, nuns, friars, and such leave their income and possessions at the door when they enter religious life. They take a “vow of poverty,” which may be interpreted differently according to each order, but which in any case exhibits a radical alternative to contemporary approaches to careers and finances. So it could be today. The question is not, “How can I make a living?” but rather “What kind of life do I want to live?” When we first married over forty years ago, Cheri and I chose to live simply, needing as little as possible. At that time we were thinking mainly about global equality. But as the decades went by, we discovered how much freedom we had without car payments, credit card debt, and the latest gadget. Again, I know that things are different for every family; for one, we have been fortunate when it comes to medical issues.

What about fasting? I hear much about “fasting from devices,” undertaken in order to free us for richer ways of relating or being present. What about asceticism? We all need to notice our unhealthy urges or habits, and then exercise self-control over them. What about accountability? One family I know has adapted the monastic practice of a “chapter of faults and affirmations”; they periodically gather around the dinner table to admit their failings, and to affirm one another. What about chastity, which, needless to say, is not just for the celibate, and means much more than mere abstinence?

What potential is there for “the home, a monastery,” for families to follow the waves of the Spirit into creative experiments like those that led to the historical movements I described above? The possibilities are endless. Cheri and I sometimes regret not finding a community with which to share this journey, but it’s been a wonderful life nevertheless. We didn’t enter the cloister, but neither did we join the mainstream. And when it feels lonely, we remind ourselves that we are not alone in this adventure. Other have gone before us, and there are many kindred spirits alongside us today.