If you are interested in finding out more about a possible vocation at Mt. Saviour, we strongly recommend that you visit the monastery for a week if possible.

Even if you are not yet sure what form of life you are being called to, a few days in a monastic setting may be a big help in getting in touch with yourself. The monks' simple life-style is centered on Christ who leads us to the Father through the gift of His Spirit. With its rural, wooded setting and a pace of life with its strong moments of the Mass and the chanting of the Divine Office Mt. Saviour Monastery provides a place of calm and prayer that is especially conducive to reflection.

All such work is secondary to a common life of praying and working together, and in that context the communal prayer, the chanting of the Office, that Benedict calls "The work of God," has a special place. So we space these hours out in a traditional way, rather than grouping or combining them to allow time for other work (as the more active monasteries must).

Study and lectio divina are perhaps next in value for us. But the monks in fact engage in a variety of jobs, developing their own skills and preferences: take care of the farm and sheep, the orchard, the business office, maintaining the buildings and vehicles, developing and cataloguing the library, and so on. We have always had monks who developed their talents in music and the arts and crafts: painting , ceramics, book-binding. Because of our openness to guests, monks are often called upon for formal or informal conferences with individuals or groups of guests.

Since ours is not an "active" monastery, there is not a great need to have many of the monks ordained as priests. Our primary vocation is to be monks. We can arrange for priestly studies and ordination for brothers as the occasion arises.

Notes on Monastic Discernment

Jon Perrotti

I would like to write about the motivators that brought me here, but life is too complex to put a testimony in a paragraph, so I will just assume that readers of this publication can identify with one who is taking faith seriously enough to be in discernment.  Just for honesty’s sake, I don’t want to pretend that everything fell into line when I just straightened up and decided to be a good Catholic boy.  My relationship with the Church has been an uneasy one, and whatever the quagmire of errors and misunderstandings may have been, I have often felt provoked to defensiveness as much as nurtured, given the nature of my particular struggles.  But Jesus Christ was and remains the constant star of hope on my spiritual journey.  Sometimes I was praying the words of a bumper-sticker that said, “Jesus, save me from your followers.”  Sometimes I was praying, “Lord, you’re not giving me answers, but I don’t know where else to go.”  There are discernments within discernments within discernments.  However it happened, I have been drawn to consider a monastic vocation – a life of relative withdrawal from the world that most people may find strange. 

Having come to the point of wanting to heed the words, “Leave all things and follow me,” a new level of attention has arisen in me to make sure that I am indeed following the Lord and not some false allure or fantasy.  It is critical that the monastic calling be squarely and uncompromisingly in the service of Jesus Christ, and not just an existential dreamland.  I am not by nature a fundamentalist.  My life has afforded me a great deal of travel and adventure, and I have had much contact and rich encounters with people of other faiths, and indeed even religious experience outside of Christian tradition.  I first meditated in a Zen Buddhist temple when I was a 17-year-old exchange student in Japan, and practiced meditation off and on into my adulthood.  I have done Hindu kirtan chanting and took part in a sweatlodge ceremony on an American Indian reservation.  I have had conversations with and been impressed by the intellectual honesty and integrity of atheists, taken part in inter-faith dialogue and prayer with Muslims, and danced and drummed with pagans.  Yet, for me, this vocation would not be remotely possible if I could not bring my heart and mind into exclusive loyalty to one faith.  I will be the first to admit that religious insularity (“We know the truth and you do not; our way is correct and yours is wrong”) is repugnant and intellectually indigestible.  It is tempting to want to roam the mountain when you think that all paths are leading to the same place.  I don’t know where other paths are leading, and ultimately I must learn to balance and release conflicting instincts with regards to other faiths.  I only know that my life has brought me, sometimes gently and sometimes brutally, to a realization that I can find my salvation in Christ alone.  Readers who identify with that understand that the denial of self to which one is called from that initial understanding is really the crux and fulcrum of life in Christ.  After that, it’s just a matter of how to follow Him. 

I happen to have been born and raised Catholic, and something consistently drew me back to a Catholic expression of Christian faith, but the major turning point of my life that brought me to where I am today happened at the ecumenical monastic community of Taize.  There, the fragmented Church, the broken Body of Christ, comes together to declare that Jesus Christ is the Light of the World.  I learned there that the monastic life is not lived just for the sake of the life itself and its consequences to the monk.  It is a radical life of following Christ courageously focused on powerful prayer and powerful witness. 

What a gamble it is to act on the hope that I can make as much of a difference in the world with prayer as I might by political activism or humanitarian assistance or missionary work or educating children.  Do I really believe in God enough to take such a risk with my life?  I don’t want to be wasted!  Can I trust God to hear my prayers?  I heard someone say once, “If you fall down in the middle of the road, you better not just pray for God to come and pick you up – you have to get up and get out of the way so you don’t get hit!”  Well, the world is like a person who has fallen in the road.  There a lot of political thinkers, sociologists, scientists, soldiers, and revolutionaries who feel the call to push that body to its feet, move it to a better place and keep the world safe.  Where do you start?  The problems of the world are so great.  Am I running away from the challenge by going off to pray?  Am I a coward, leaving the man, which is Mankind, lying in the road as I go off to pray?  Not if I believe the words of our Lord.  He promised us that we would move mountains with our prayer.  By the grace of God, that is what monks are doing and are called to do – move mountains.

How about proclaiming the Gospel?  The Lord told us, “Do not put your light under a basket, but put it on the hill to shine for all to see.”  By shutting out the world behind cloister walls, doesn’t the monk make the terrible mistake of burying his treasure?  The risk of failing to proclaim the Gospel is the same for monks as it is for any other Christian.  But the monastery has a unique and powerful opportunity for witness in the modern world, perhaps more than it has in any time in the history of Christendom, because as the world becomes more outrageous in its injustice, depravity, greed, and insane pace, the anomaly of the monastery stands out in stark relief for simply not following suit.  More importantly, something happens when believers come together and dedicate their full lives to prayer and praising God.  The Holy Spirit makes His presence known.  An encounter with real holiness has got to be the most powerful witness to the existence of God that anyone, believer or non-believer, will find.  In my own experience, it was not the brilliant writings of apologists or the powerful preaching of evangelists that melted my own heart of stone; it was an encounter with undeniable holiness that swept over me when I took the risk of visiting a Spirit-filled monastery at a time when I thought I had put Christianity on the shelf for good.  I know the power of that witness, and therefore I can believe that with few words and little attempt to trawl the sea of humanity for souls, the brothers of a monastery can lower their humble nets of prayer with confidence that the Holy Spirit will call souls to faith. 

There are many in religious life who were supported in their gravitating towards their vocation by the influences of a devout Catholic family.  Surprisingly, there are also many converts.  As one who grew up Catholic but didn’t always strongly identify as such, I have often viewed and considered the proposed truths of Christianity in the context of its prevailing expression in America—the evangelical Bible-Only cultural phenomenon reflected in Christian radio and mega-churches.  As that influence filters into my discernment, I am inclined to consider the same questions as non-Catholics who might view the monastic life as foreign.  It is good common ground to acknowledge together that John the Baptist, and then Jesus himself, modeled the withdrawal from the busy world to pray and listen for the voice of God when they spent extended periods of time in the desert.  The particular customs and images of monasteries that developed over the centuries raise other legitimate questions. I will take a moment here to share some of the questions that came up for me.  

Is all this vow-taking biblical?  I was always particularly impressed with Jesus’ admonishment about making oaths.  “Do not even swear by your head, because you cannot make a single hair white or black.”  This always rang true for me – live in the Now, man!  I didn’t even like to say the Pledge to the Flag because I thought, why should I pledge allegiance to my country?  Who knows what our government will do tomorrow!  Someone pointed out to me that vows are really statements of hope.  A couple who make vows of marriage join in a common statement of hope that, with God’s grace, their love will survive.  I can conceive of taking vows because I have hope in Christ, and because that vow of obedience speaks my desire to obey God whose voice overrules all other authorities.  I cannot make a hair of my head white or black, but with God, all things are possible, and if I believe he is calling me to a particular life, I can make a vow as a statement of hope that I may be able to answer that call to the end.    

Another important question has to do with a big stumbling block that held center stage during much of the Reformation—the question of “works.”  Is there a tendency in monastic life to endeavor toward the earning of one’s own salvation by living a holy life of penance and prayer?  If the members of the community were not daily confessing the name of Jesus, praising his name, and worshiping him as their Lord, then indeed it would appear that way.  If life in a monastery is holy, it is only because Jesus is Lord of the monastery.  Where else would holiness come from, unless it was a sham?  Just as Jesus said, “My sheep know my voice,” a believer who wants to serve the Kingdom in this way will sense holiness when he encounters it.  I think this even becomes clear to the Protestant ministers who sometimes come to the monastery for a retreat. 

Is there a danger of spiritual elitism in the monastic temperament?  Without a doubt, there is certainly a danger of that.  But it is the same danger of elitism that accompanies any calling.   While experiencing this trial residence with the monks, I have been asked to practice silence, and especially to decline from talking to guests.  I can understand why the practice of silence has evolved and why it is considered valuable.  One can easily sense that the guests are interesting, intelligent, and spiritually-minded people.  Just seeing them makes you want to socialize, share life stories, why not a glass of wine, etc.  That kind of atmosphere continuing all the time would be the undoing of a monastery.  After a day or two of feeling resistance, I decided to throw myself completely into the silence and separation that characterizes real monasticism.  I wanted to find out what would become of such a practice, what its fruits would be.  This has forced me to confront the issue of spiritual elitism because I imagine that I may seem to be excessively aloof, cold, and disinterested – far away in the tower of my own spiritual world.  The truth is, I would love to rub elbows with the guests.  And, I must admit, there is something tantalizing about the thought that I may look like a real insider to the mystique of the monastery.  It is human nature to seek affirmation and want everyone to like and admire you.  This must be scrutinized.  A trade-off is made, and it is an exchange of norms.  A different kind of “normal” is possible here because community members are largely spared the pressures and expectations of maintaining a public personality.  The fact that this can be construed by outsiders as elitism, or even milked by the monks themselves who could get a heady gratification from it, must be acknowledged as an occupational hazard.  It is not, in my opinion, a good enough reason to reject the life, any more than any other kind of minister would reject his/her calling for fear of looking uppity.  God has ways of putting us in our place.

These concerns are the concerns of a Christian who doesn’t want to stray.  The more daunting fears are the fears of one who has made his bet with Christ.  If I give up my freedom to do as I please and follow a path that is in many ways fixed by scripture and creed, is it for nothing because God is a myth?  If my choice to follow the Lord puts a wedge, or even a world of distance, between me and others, be they strangers whom I would have befriended or members of my own dear family, will that sacrifice have been for nothing?  Would God let me make such a mistake?  What if there’s not a God, and my choice to live a life of prayer is a choice to waste my life?  The greater fears about a monastic vocation are not “Christian” fears, they are human ones.  Surely there will be days when God seems to be absent.  I think that is true for any pope or street-corner preacher, as it is for all who seek God through their lives.  Because I am a human being, I cannot comprehend God; because I have a soul I cannot live without God.  So I will do my best on those days to sing with the psalmist, “Why do you hide your face, O Lord?” I pray such days will be few.  I believe they will be few, because so far, God keeps showing up, amazingly.