The monastic choir

Abbot Michael offered the following remarks at a recent
Church Assembly for the School.

Around 300 A.D., a man in Egypt heard the Gospel about giving up all his possessions read and did exactly what it said. He went off into the desert and became a monk. He was Saint Anthony the great, known as the Father of Monks. Behind this church, running north east of the dining hall is a building called The Monastery. In it live people called monks, of which I am one. I was told that many of you don’t know much about either monks or monasteries and that I should tell you something about both.

Monks were invented very early in the life of the Church, in the 200’s. Originally they were hermits. That’s where the word monk comes from, monachos, a Greek word meaning solitary or alone. Eventually individuals formed into small groups. Then the groups became larger. After the persecution of Christians ended, it became very popular to become a monk. Because people wanted to be heroic. The martyrs were heroes, and to become a monk was considered to become a “white martyr,” in contrast to those “red martyrs” who had been executed for being Christian. Some early monasteries in Egypt had over 1000 monks. They were modeled after military camps. They weren’t very solitary. But they needed to be organized.

In western Europe, in Italy, sometime around 516, St Benedict wrote a rule for monks in monasteries, which is a constitution for monastic communities to follow. It provided organization. One of the monks who followed St Benedict’s rule in Rome became Pope Saint Gregory the Great, after whom this Church and Monastery are named. In 597, he sent a monk named Augustine with a few companions to Canterbury in England. That is considered the beginning of the English Benedictine Congregation, the oldest congregation in the oldest religious order in the Church. In 1919, a monk of that congregation from Downside Abbey in England founded this monastery, and this school opened in 1926.

Back in the early years of monasticism, someone asked one of those Egyptian monks: What do you monks do in the monastery all day long? He answered: “We fall and get up; we fall and get up; we fall and get up.” It’s a little more complicated than that. But the opening paragraph of the rule says: This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord. So, monks are like soldiers in God’s army, but the real activity, the real war, is inside us, against selfishness. Monks take vows, just like married people make vows to each other. We take a vow of obedience, obedience to the rule, the Gospel, to the Church and to the abbot of our monastery.

We take a vow called conversatio morum, conversion of life, which means to constantly work at growing into being more like Christ, to live the monastic way of life until death. So this includes not marrying or having sex, and not owning anything. Everything that I or any monk has is owned by the monastery, not the individual, and theoretically I could say to Fr. Edward, “Give your backpack to Fr. Gregory, because he only has his little canvas bag to carry things in.” And Benedictine monks take a unique vow of stability. I wish I could say that means we promise to be mentally stable, but it means that we vow to remain here, part of this monastery at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, until we die. And afterwards. We have our own cemetery. Fr. Edward, Br. Sixtus and I took that vow in St. Louis and vowed to remain there. It required two years away and the permission of this community, the abbot in St. Louis, and the Abbot President of the English Benedictine Congregation for us to transfer that vow here.

Well those are vows. But what do we do all day? The rule and our constitutions say we are to do three things. First and foremost, pray. And then to work, and to read and study. We are also allowed to eat and sleep, and there are rules for that too. Praying is the most important. We get up by 5:00 AM, some of us by 3:00 or 4:00, so we can say morning prayers at 5:45 AM. You are free to join us. There is Mass at 7:20 AM. You are free to join us. Midday prayer is at 11:45 AM. You are free to join us. Vespers or evening prayer is at 5:30 PM. You are free to join us. Dinner is at 6:00; we take turns reading aloud while others eat. After dinner we have about a half hour of conversation. Compline or night prayer is at about 7:00 PM. You are free to join us. All those prayers we say together here in the Church. These prayers are called the opus dei, the work of God. We are obliged to pray Lectio, with the Bible, every day, and to meditate every day for 30 minutes. Prayer is about becoming united with God, and praying for others, you, our benefactors and those who ask us to pray for them. And we work. Some in the school, some in the monastery. Some monks are students, some teachers, some administrators, some retired. But above all we are supposed to be working at being and becoming more humble, like Jesus Christ. We all read and study. We serve each other and help each other. In all of this we fall and get up; we fall and get up. We make mistakes, we fail, but we get up and continue.

Back in 1994 when I announced to my company that I was leaving to join a monastery, the secretary of the Vice President of Operations broke into tears. I asked why. She said because I would never again walk on carpet or eat off a tablecloth. As far as the monastery building goes, we do have some carpeting, but we only use table cloths on Sunday. Some of you have asked me about art treasures in the monastery. I hate to disappoint you, but we don’t have any treasures there. We do have some nice pieces of art, and others like the pizza painting that hangs in the new science building that for years sat on the floor against the back shelf in the stacks of our library.

The monastery is simple. Some rooms have air conditioners, some don’t. Some have more heat than others. Likewise light. The furniture is simple. Some monks are hardcore and sleep on the floor. I’m not one of them. The monastery library is quite good, and that is available to you too if you want to use it. Before I entered the monastery, I had a nice house with a swimming pool and 25 parrots on a spacious corner lot; I had two cars and a great job with a nice salary and lots of perks. Now I live here in this monastery. I have my brother monks, 7 parrots and I have you. I’ve never been happier. One day you could live here or someplace like this. And you could be happy too.

Abbot Michael Brunner is the superior of Portsmouth Abbey