Father Aelred

Father Aelred, Benedictine monk and founder of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, says:
"The monastery is not a refuge, not a solution for dealing with problems of adjustment. Monasticism is a head-on collision with reality, and the more silent, the more solitude, the more head-on it is."

Withdrawal from the world gets all kinds of flack from people. Say what you will, the raw idealistic commitment of classical monasticism inspires respect from me. It attempts to hollow out a space within the dense, destructive weight of a fallen world, pulling at and stretching out an ever-thinning membrane that enforces the boundary between a sin-enslaved existence and one defined by absolute freedom to obey. Forced to admit the inevitably human anchoring in the present fallen world, fanatical monks struggle to live in sync with another, incoming world.

What does a contemplative monk do? Pray. Meditate. In a practical sense, nothing. It is by definition impossible for the entire body of believers to abide in this state and what a malformed body it would be if everyone tried to or wanted to.

Speculatively, we could say that contemplative monasticism is the nervous system of the body of Christ: A network of cells, flowing upwards and inwards, towards that central point of contact with the Brain, convulsing with electric impulses which are the first physical traces of another level of consciousness.