Quotes About Monastic life

These paradoxes, these Whitmanesque multitudes, helped make Thomas Merton one of the protean figures of twentieth-century Catholicism. His open and honest 1948 memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, which details his journey to the Trappist monastery, was a publishing phenomenon that even the savvy Merton was unable to foresee. It introduced contemplative prayer to millions of readers and heralded a postwar renewal in monastic life in the United States.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.

Some men craved deference; others craved wine, or the bodies of beautiful women, or the monastic life of order and obedience. What did Ned crave? The answer came into his mind with a speed and effortlessness that took him by surprise: justice.

In monasteries, seminaries, retreats and synagogues, they fear hell and seek paradise. Those who know the mysteries of God never let that seed be planted in their souls.

If you understand why a monkey in a family is always mocked and harassed, you understand why monks are rejected by all--both old and young.

I like the monastic life... in the prayer and the praising... this has charged me with new energy, spiritual energy. This is very important for my ministry outside the monastery.

If you are going to put down spiritual roots, taught Benedict, you need to stay in one place long enough for them to go deep. The Rule requires monks to take a vow of "stability"—meaning that barring unusual circumstances, including being sent out as a missionary, the monk will remain for the rest of his life in the monastery where he took his vows.

Monastic life cuts off the distractions and emotional entanglements one becomes involved in, in the lay life.

The split in him was between the monastery with its ikons and its penance on the one hand, and his father, the robust hunter who had dragged him away from the monastery that fatal day.

Monastic life thus became a living protest against the secularization of Christianity, against the cheapening of grace.

It was given to Abba Anthony to see a doctor in Alexandria who was simply and humbly doing what God had given him to do. His inner being stood in the presence of the Lord as he worked and prayed. According to the literature of the desert, this is the goal of our life in this world as it is set out for all Christians, a goal that the solitary monk tried to attain through his special vocation.

La verilitá, he thought, hardness of stone, heat of fires well banked. This man should never be a monk, nonetheless… Julian paused and chided himself. "Tuttavia e realmente dedicato." Dedication, a rare and wondrous quality, one he himself had lost during the stultifying years of Court life.

That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks, studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening, and going once a day to beg for food.

The hermit Anthony once told me that a monk is like a fish: take him out of his element and he dies. Silence is his element. In silence you can trade this shoddy world for Heaven.

Sometimes the pagan spirit of Roman poetry arouses qualms. Guibert of Nogent confesses in his autobiography that early in his monastic life he took up verse making and even fell into "certain obscene words and composed brief writings, worthless and immodest, in fact bereft of all decency," before abandoning this shocking practice in favor of commentaries on the Scriptures.

I describe myself as a simple Buddhist monk. No more, no less.

If I were to ask about my seven months at the Abbey, Did it work, did I solve my problems? the simple answer would be, It did not work, it did not solve my problems. And I know that a year, two years, or even a lifetime as a Trappist monk would not have worked either. Because a monastery is not built to solve problems but to praise the Lord in the midst of them.

People even lose their vocations because they find out that a man can spend forty or fifty or sixty years in a monastery and still have a bad temper.

Pippin ordered Childeric III tonsured and sent to a monastery, where he died five years later, the last of the Merovingians.

I always thought if I was born 2000 years earlier, I would be a monk, probably carving a monastery or some giant pantheon buildings.

On the whole, monks do not become famous - and that is a good thing - but monasteries do - and that is an excellent thing. In other words, it is the community that matters.

The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?

desire to practice meditation means you are being blessed in a most extraordinary way. You are being led into the waters of meditative awareness, in which hermits, monks and nuns living in monasteries, and countless devout women and men living in the world have found a deep and abiding