This post is part of the Neo-Monasticism Synchroblog.

There have been monastics in and out of my life since I was a teenager. The very first time I ever hung out with some was in 1981. I was a sophomore in college, a new Christian, and I made a week-long retreat over Thanksgiving break with the Sisters of St. Margaret, who were then on Beacon Hill and have since moved to Roxbury. (Oddly, after I moved here, one of my ordination process assignments 10 years later was to do volunteer work with the SSM.) I noticed five things during that retreat that have since been verified over and over again at almost every monastery/ convent/ abbey I've been around since:

1. monastics like to put little signs on things;
2. there is always someone a bit odd and awkward in the cast of characters associated with a monastic house;
3. the food is good;
4. the liturgical calendar has its own very deep and complex logic that will go as far with you as you are able to take it;
5. and corporate prayer is everyday ordinary workmanlike business, comparable to sweeping floors or changing toner cartridges.

I later, of course, learned more standard lines to say about monastic life: Praying the Psalms. Hospitality. Monos means alone. Rocks rubbing up against each other in a tumbler makes them smooth. Ora et labora.

Thanks to the tradition I'm part of, monasticism was always around, always a sort of resource you might want to draw on. I went through a big Benedict phase in '94-'96, I read the complete journals of Thomas Merton while in bed with adult chicken pox, I went to hear Kathleen Norris speak at Glastonbury Abbey, I made further retreats at Transfiguration Cincinnati, Emery House, the Order of St. Helena (who would have been my default order to join had I not been called to marriage), the Petersham Benedictines (in Latin!). As year succeeded year I spent an hour or a day or ten minutes in prayer at... oh my gosh, let's at least give this a shot: SSJE houses in England and here; Senanque; Holy Cross West Park; Weston Priory; the Poor Clares in Jamaica Plain; Klosterneuberg; Three Rivers Abbey; the Cenacle; Carmelite chapels in Danvers, Dublin, and the North Shore Mall; the Wrentham Trappistines; the Franciscan chapel in Downtown Crossing; the Oblates of the Virgin Mary both near Fenway Park and in the Pru (I will not repeat the rude name my RC seminarian friend had for them); Citeaux; Spencer Abbey; Taize; the Pink Sisters in St. Louis; many random monastic liturgies in random European parishes manned by random monks; and of course, the place anybody alive now who has read about monasteries in English wants to visit: Gethsemani (where the Trappist in the reception area wearily said, "well, some people want to see Fr. Louis' grave. Thomas Merton... have you heard of him?")

So given all this history, I suppose it's obvious that when Mark and I decided to start MSH and to (at least) not protest when people called it "neo-monastic," this had nothing to do with our suddenly deciding that monasticism was cool and romantic. It isn't. Businesslike is what it is. Ordinary is what it is. That's the thing about monastics that makes people romanticizing them so funny, cause man, they are done with all that. In fact, the sheer lack of romanticizing anything was one of the main monastic qualities we wanted to make sure was conveyed here, especially in chapel. And the food being good, and the liturgical calendar being what you live by, and putting little signs on things, and having odd and awkward random people show up a lot. Cause basically if you've got all that, you've pretty much got as much of the monastic thing as you need.

Other bloggers participating in the Synchroblog:
Phil Wyman at Phil Wyman's Square No More
Adam Gonnerman at Igneous Quill
Steve Hayes at Notes from the Underground
Jonathan Brink at JonathanBrink.com
Sally Coleman at Eternal Echoes
Brian Riley at Charis Shalom
Cobus van Wyngaard at My Contemplations
Mike Bursell at Mike's Musings
David Fisher at Cosmic Collisions
Alan Knox at The Assembling of the Church
Sam Norton at Elizaphanian
Erin Word at Decompressing Faith
Sonja Andrews at Calacirian