Lessons from the Monastery

(this is an article I wrote for a home educators magazine about how we lived lockdown 2020 as a family)

Lessons from the Monastery
by Susanne, Bristol

As a marketing manager in my 20’s, I loved the fast pace of my job – juggling many projects, traveling all over the country, it was in equal measure exhilarating and exhausting. After running hard, I occasionally needed a strong dose of stillness.

Worth Abbey in Surrey

I found that stillness in monastic retreats: I often took part in silent, individual or group retreats at a variety of monasteries, most of them Benedictine. One year, I spent a long weekend every month at Worth Abbey in Crawley. Those times were like skidding to a halt, a sudden and disorienting drop from my high energy job and buzzing mind – into stillness, yes, but not only stillness. As I learned, monks actually do not sit still all day, every day!

It was those times I looked back on when the lockdown came in 2020, that unprecedented global skid to a halt, the Great Pause. By then a home educator with two children, 6 and 4, my life had become just as activity-filled as my marketing job had ever been. Every day we had somewhere to be, usually in the morning as well as in the afternoon; home was only ever a place to eat and sleep.

At the very beginning we were told, two weeks at home would be all. I remember thinking it would probably be more like three months, so I knew we needed to shift gears and make this a liveable family normal for a while. And I looked back at the lessons I learned from the Benedictines as I shaped the rhythm of our days….

• Prayer. If monasteries are known for one thing, it is prayer! With kids aged 6 and 4 though, of course it’s not a case of praying silently for hours on end; happily, we came across Olly Knight Music on Facebook. Olly, a worship leader and father, decided to spend half an hour in simple worship with his guitar and broadcast it for others to sing along with, on Facebook every weekday morning. We would start our mornings at 8.30 with Olly (and he’s still going!) and when he finished, we would attend a virtual Mass (through www.churchservices.tv). Spontaneous prayer throughout the day also became much more frequent than when we were busy running here and there all day.
  
  
• Service. I volunteered with my local council and was assigned a local lady who wasn’t able to walk her dog due to lockdown. As a family, we served by walking her dog every other day. I would also pick up groceries and things from the pharmacy for her and her neighbours.
  
  
• Work. “Ora Et Labora” is the well-known motto of Benedictine monastic life: pray and work. It felt important to me to productively achieve something each day, even if that was simply a deep-cleaned kitchen or a mowed lawn. Every day, after starting the day off in God’s presence, I set to work – often, but not always, joined by the children. If they didn’t feel like helping, they would just play freely.
  
  
• Nourishing mind and body. In the Dark Ages, monasteries preserved pockets of learning and literacy - and of course they're still known for their libraries. I try to keep the amount of books we have to a reasonable number (a hopeless undertaking) by building up my Kindle library, but at any one time I have five or six books going. In lockdown, I noticed that this wasn't helping me to focus, and I decided to stick with one book at a time - and similarly with the children, instead of a piecemeal approach to reading whatever short book or chapter of a book we felt like on the day, we decided to stick with one book or theme until it was finished. This really deepened our engagement with each of the books. 
  In terms of looking after our bodies, I slowed down in the kitchen. There wasn't anywhere else to be, so as I had the time, I began focusing on cooking from scratch meals that would nourish our bodies and keep us well, rather than making whatever was fastest to do. Of course, this wasn't always the kids' preferences... but we worked at adjusting our tastes to what was good for us. With the occasional treats, of course.
  
  
• Outside Time. Benedictine monasteries always have well-maintained grounds, and that is for a reason: not only to feed the monks or nuns by maintaining a kitchen garden or orchard, the outside is also understood as a vital space for relaxation and meditation. It’s easy to marvel at God’s creation while walking through it! So we spent as much time as we could outside every day. In the garden (the trampoline was a fantastic investment), in the nature reserve behind our house that has a wildlife pond where we could watch the tadpoles grow each day, or while walking our borrowed dog. This was easier in Lockdown 1, but even now in winter we don our gear and get out there as much as we can tolerate.

We aren’t a screen-free family, and we didn’t attempt to live a monastic life as such – I simply took the lessons I learned from the Benedictines about rhythm and purpose and applied them on our own family, and truth be told, even nearly a year after first going into lockdown we are finding it a liveable, joyous way of life. Missing our friends and family is a terrible hardship, but we have learned valuable lessons about slowing down and being intentionally together: lessons that will stand us in good stead even when lockdown, finally, becomes a term consigned to the history books.