I read with interest and pleasure your essay on Jesus Abbey (link above). It occasioned some touching impressions, such as looking up photos online and seeing Ben and Yancey; and the Abbey in snow with a row of gigantic kimchi jars outside.
It so happens that I have been reading a little Korean modern history and generally feeling a little nostalgic for North Asia — I was in extra receptive mood for your paper.
I am not enough of a religion scholar to tell you where the Abbey fits in the tradition of Christian monasticism, but my overall impression is that Catholic monastic communities tend to emphasize either community living and working (where work and prayer are communal) or individual hermitage (where community’s purpose is to create economic basis for a life of quiet, isolated contemplation; you may have seen the film The Great Silence which illustrates an example). I suppose one narrative I could construct for my biography would be that I was trying to achieve the latter for myself. The fact that every major religious tradition evolves contemplative orders tells you that there is a genuine human need for such a mode of life; and I suspect we have done a lot of harm to a segment of humanity when we abolished/defunded contemplative orders in the west. A lot of people now have no alternative but seek employment as librarians and look for a contemplation-substitute in chick-lit. It was probably both much easier and much more fulfilling to pay one’s dues by communal prayer and the limited prescribed work and then be left in peace for the rest of the day in one’s cell or the monastery garden.
Another common need, which may in fact appeal to a different type of personality altogether, is one of purpose and discipline. What some find in the reading of a scripture, meditation to understand it, and the effort to shape their life and conduct in accordance with a reflection on what it may or may not impart, others find in… body building. I do not body-build, per se, but do attend the gym (or at least used to until I built my own here) and so met these people, not all of them men, and my impression is that they do it for the sake of having an overarching purpose, which dictates their eating, sleeping, exercise — whole life really.
I also found very interesting your story of how seminary students weren’t really interested in your father’s innovative thinking about role of religion in life and really preferred to study texts and hone their theological debate. That, too, is religion. Religion fits in different people’s minds in different ways, not all of them compatible, which is why it is such a powerful construct; but also why internal debates and disagreements within every major religion are inevitable.
A real breakthrough in thinking about religion came, in my view, in Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (1917), where he observed that “scared” is a certain feeling of which some of us are capable in response to some objects and events. Namely, a sacred tree is a perfectly ordinary tree except that a person, or some people, may perceive it as sacred. I am certainly capable of that feeling, sometimes in response to objects or events which stand in clear contravention of religious dogma or so called “moral teaching”. I experience it frequently, but just cannot connect it to any believable theology; and happily resign myself to thinking that my own perceptions of sacredness (as in “peace”, or “beauty” etc.) are valuable in their own right merely because they elevate my life in my own perception.
Thank you for this touching essay. I will probably bask in its pleasure for a few more days.
Oltre Mare 