Community of the Transfiguration

The Journey of a New Monastic Community

Paul R. Dekar

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9781556354304
  9781498210782
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621890362
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In the 1930s, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer anticipated the restoration of the church after the coming second world war through a new kind of monasticism, a way of life of uncompromising adherence to the Sermon on the Mount in imitation of Christ. Since then, the renewal of Christian monasticism has become a great spiritual movement. Imbued with a love for God and neighbor, and with a healthy self-love, people are going to monasteries to deepen their relationship with God, to pray, and to find peace. While some monastic institutions are suffering a decline in traditional vocations, many Christians are exploring monastic lifestyles. This book introduces The Community of the Transfiguration in Australia, the story of a new monastic community and an inspiring source of hope for the world at another time of spiritual, social, and ecological crisis.

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The New Monasticism

Introducing the New Monasticism

Monasticism is not specifically Christian, yet Christian monasticism has existed since the beginnings of Christianity. Christian monasticism has taken many forms, yet members of this diverse family of communities share many common characteristics. Most familiar is a rhythm of life: work, study, and set daily prayers; stability under a rule of life; a contemplative and sacramental lifestyle; and practices such as hospitality, simple living, and a sharing of economic resources with community members and with those in need beyond the walls of the monastery.

Today’s new monastics are lineal descendants of earlier monastic generations. David Knowles, a Benedictine scholar, offers a biological analogy:1 Members of a contemporary monastery may adapt their community to the needs of a particular setting or reject explicitly elements of the heritage, but they nonetheless manifest the DNA of their monastic forebears.

I have visited great Benedictine foundations like St. John’s in Collegeville, Minnesota, or St. Benedict’s nearby in St. Joseph, and older monasteries like the Trappist, or Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. I have also visited new monasteries that are modest in terms of numbers and resources, such as the Orthodox Monastery of St. John, north of Point Reyes Station near San Francisco, California, and several monastic-like communities I discuss in this chapter—Iona in Scotland; Madonna House Apostolate in Combermere, Ontario; Little Portion near Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and the Caritas and Emmanuel House communities whose members live among and serve the poor in Memphis, Tennessee.

In each of the communities in this diverse family I have encountered a powerful witness to the Living Christ through compassionate service to others. All members of these communities might affirm words of Jubilee Partners in Comer, Georgia, “Jesus is Lord. Our life together is a response to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We joyfully order our lives in the belief that he calls us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves.”2

In addition to a shared way of life, a sense of gratitude for the experience of God’s love in Christ, and care of others, Christian monastics manifest a normal ebb and flow of institutional life. Monasteries are born, they grow, experience decline, and die. A few contemporary monasteries have a long history, such as Mar Saba in the desert of Judah, founded by St. Saba in 478, and Great Lavra on Mount Athos, founded in 963. However, these are exceptions rather than the rule. Hundreds, if not thousands, of monasteries that once flourished no longer exist.3

Related to this ebb and flow of institutional life, another common attribute of western Christian monasticism stands out. Over time, monastic practices tend to ossify. Vocations dry up. Then, every three or four hundred years, the Holy Spirit stirs up reform, renewed vitality, an increase in vocations, and sometimes, new orders.

In numerical terms, the phenomenon of monasticism has always been marginal. Especially today in secular, postmodern society, the new monastics have no voice, no sign from God, and no power to convince. They have only the journey that lies before them, the witness of their hearts, their lives of prayer and love, and a faith to move forward, as if always seeing the invisible.

Holy Transfiguration Monastery (HTM) grew in a Baptist congregation that began to take shape in 1869. Members write, “Our Community does not see Religious Life as a flight from the world, nor world denying or destroying. Religious Life is an injection of evangelical principles into the institutionalized structures of our age, both secular and religious.”4

Recalling an earlier time when monastic renewal helped save western civilization, they see their journey, their vocation, “as a great mystery, something that in two thousand years no one has successfully defined. . . .
[W]e must learn to be empty and quiet, making our journey, saying our prayers, always in the spirit of those who are poor.”5

Intentionally countercultural, HTM members see themselves as offering church and society a path of hope and transformation. In a book that offers an incisive analysis of western culture, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observes,

If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages that are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds of hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.6

Whether or not another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict or St. Scholastica emerges or has already emerged since the period of World War II, horrors at least as grim as those of the last dark ages are upon us. Humanity faces challenges that threaten survival such as environmental degradation, epidemics, famine, human rights violations, terrorism, and war.

Ten years ago, Jonathan R. Wilson, who holds the Pioneer McDonald Chair in Theology at Carey Theological College in Vancouver, British Columbia, discussed the call of Alasdair MacIntyre for the construction of local forms of community within which life can be sustained through the new dark ages that are already upon us. Wilson wrote that we should pray, hope, and work for a form of life that would be continuous with the old monasticism in some respects, and discontinuous in other respects.

Wilson urged that Christians reverse the capitulation of the church to the Enlightenment project and return to the living tradition of the gospel. He outlined four marks that would be needed by a new movement to sustain faithful witness: a desire to heal the fragmentation of our lives in North American culture; a way for the whole people of God; discipline; and practices and virtues by which an undisciplined, unfaithful church might recover the discipline and faithfulness necessary to realize its mission in the world.

Wilson acknowledged that theological commitment and reflection must undergird a new monasticism. Right theology will not of itself produce a faithful church, which he characterized as the faithful living out the mission given to them by God in Jesus Christ, but that mission can be identified only by faithful theology. “So, in the new monasticism we must strive simultaneously for a recovery of right belief and right practice.”7

Wilson was describing an insight that theological reflection informs practice; conversely, practices shape theological reflection. As in the Second Testament, following Jesus entails doing what he taught. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34–35). For Paul, faith was lifeless without love (1 Cor 13–14). For James, faith without works was dead (Jas 2:26). In the fourth century, Evagrius of Pontas wrote, “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian.”8 Medieval Christians summarized in Latin, lex orandi, lex credendi, the law of prayer and belief.

Soon, Wilson’s daughter and son-in-law, Leah and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, helped found a new monastic community in Durham, North Carolina. Rutba House is one of a number of communities of Christians who think the church in western society has accommodated itself too easily to the consumerist and imperialist values of the culture. Responding to a call to enter more deeply into the pain of the world, many persons in the United States and elsewhere are on a journey similar to that of HTM, joining in prayer, simplicity of life, and service to the poor.

In June 2004, Rutba House hosted a gathering of friends from around the country to discern the shape of a radical movement called the new monasticism. Out of the gathering came a book. Introduced by Jonathan R. Wilson, it offers strategic guidance for the movement. The new monasticism is diverse in form and characterized by these twelve marks:

1. Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire

2. Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us

3. Hospitality to the stranger

4. Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation

5. Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church

6. Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the community along the lines of the old novitiate

7. Nurturing common life among members of intentional community

8. Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children

9. Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life

10. Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies

11. Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matt 18

12. Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life9

Participants in the network that has birthed the new monasticism are not unified by a shared theological tradition, or denomination, but by the wisdom of a shared legacy, and a vision of a spirituality that can shape the Christian life in postmodern society. This chapter briefly surveys the legacy of Christian monasticism and stirring of the new monasticism. Three chapters, the heart of the book, present a case study of the Community of the Transfiguration. A final chapter invites others grappling with living in a world at risk to a journey of community, contemplation, and true personhood.

Surveying the History of Ch...

Table of contents

• Community of the Transfiguration
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The New Monasticism
• Chapter 2: History of Holy Transfiguration Monastery
• Chapter 3: Practices of Holy Transfiguration Monastery
• Chapter 4: Theology of the Resolve
• Chapter 5: Why the New Monasticism Matters
• Appendix
• Bibliography