“Symbolic Monks” and the world's ways

What is the purpose of a monastery today?

Erie Benedictine Sister Mary Lou Kownacki, who died in 2023, defined monastic life as, “A rhythm of life that fosters mindfulness.” In thinking about it, I decided to add a third component: living with integrity. Monastic life is a rhythm of life that fosters mindfulness and choosing to live with integrity.

While living in a monastery can offer a stable rhythm of life, there is no single “right rhythm.” Just as the pianist can create a near-infinite number of rhythms with eighty-eight keys, so too can disciplined monks create a great variety of monastic rhythms.

The interest in things monk-related began creeping up in the late 1990s as evidenced in an nGram of “monk,” “monastic,” and “monastery.” As the desire to find meaning in monastic wisdom continues to grow, cenobites can follow the tradition of their forebears as they foster the mindful creation of monastic “institutions” for the 21st century. But why? What is the purpose of a monastery today?

In Chapter Four of his Rule, Benedict says the monk’s way of living should be different than the world’s way. I’ve been living in a monastery for thirty years and, to be honest, I don’t physically live that much differently than many of my friends and associates. Our rhythm of life may differ (not being a parent, I’ve never had to let my rhythm be determined by children!), but on the salary scale most of us in the monastery would be in the middle-class range. Our level of education and the professional fields in which we work—or worked before many of us retired—would situate us in the upper-middle class.

Benedict was not one for grand gestures of austerity. He wanted his monks to have what they needed to live their ordinary lives well and made allowances in his Rule for weak wills and different tastes and seasonal changes, for example. At the same time, he did not say monks should never be inconvenienced or avoid challenge and hardship.

Back to my addition to Sister Mary Lou’s definition: a monk is one who chooses to live with integrity. That choice is what I think Benedict is referring to when he tells his monks that their way of living should be different than the world’s way. It has little to do with having or not having, with what career or lifestyle one chooses. It has to do with making sure that that our behaviors and choices align with what we say we believe. Which means we must know what we believe and have the courage to make the right choices even when it is difficult.

Which brings me to “symbolic monks,” an idea I extrapolated from the work of Musa Al-Gharbi in We Have Never Been Woke. He maintains we have never been “woke” but rather cloak ourselves in the idea of “wokeness,” a commitment to important justice issues that give us a sense of worth. But when the time for action comes, action that would cost us, could impact our comfortable and convenient lifestyles, we balk. We don’t practice what we preach.

Al-Gharbi’s book was one of several I picked up after last November’s presidential election in an attempt to gain deeper insight into the obvious fractures in our society and to begin thinking about changes we need to make to heal divisions. His insights and scholarship were most helpful to me. The core argument of the book is: “A set of idiosyncratic ideas about social justice have come to inform how mainstream symbolic capitalists understand and pursue their interests—creating highly novel forms of competition and legitimation.”

“Symbolic capitalists,” broadly interpreted, are those who often consider themselves woke but do little to actually create change. Al-Gharbi writes, “Symbolic capitalists tend to be supportive of egalitarian causes. However, we (Al-Gharbi considers himself a symbolic capitalist) generally concentrate our efforts on the symbolic realm—how people talk and think, what they say and feel—rather than the reallocation of power and resources.” His book “illustrates a profound gulf between symbolic capitalists’ rhetoric about various social ills and their lifestyles and behaviors ‘in the world’.”

Borrowing his framing, a “symbolic monk” would be a monk who outwardly does all the right things—they immerse themselves in monastic prayer and formation, read the Rule, and support good works. But just like the “symbolic capitalist,” they find ways around anything that threatens the life they have defined for themselves, whether they live in a monastery or not. Without integrity, they live a whitewashed kind of monk’s life—one that Benedict would probably add to his list of detestable kinds of monks.

One purpose of a monastery, then, whether physical or virtual or something in between, is to support monks—cenobites and the Fifth Kind of Monk—and oblates and seekers as they each strive to find a rhythm of life that fosters mindfulness but also gives them the courage to choose to live with integrity in big and small ways, even when it costs.

But we monks (except the hermit) don’t go it alone. And that’s a second purpose of a monastery—to foster relationship-building mindfulness in the community. Through most of the 1,500-year-history of monastic life, that meant living in close proximity, including within medieval walls. But we live in a new age that makes the creation of other ways of living community possible and makes it easier to both challenge and support each other in hard or uncomfortable choices for integrity.

And the third purpose of a monastery is to shape the future, not just of the monks and seekers but also of the local region where the physical monastery or community gathering place is located. We humans need physical proximity so there will be local community. But there can also be hybrid and non-local community, too. And as we monks and seekers choose to live differently, we offer opportunity to others to live differently, too. And in so doing we build a better world.

One final thought from Al-Gharbi: “Our lives and societies are typically far out of sync with our aspirations. …the struggle to bring these realms into closer alignment is a core source of purpose and meaning in our lives.” This is why we are monks, why we need monasteries. To support a way of living that is different than the world’s out-of-sync way.

I recommend Musa Al-Gharbi’s book. I’ve also recently found his Substack, Symbolic Capital(ism) I have only read one of his posts, “Smart People Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling,” the reading of which could help you decide if you’re interested in his book.