Chapter 1: On the Kinds of Monks - January 8

It is well known that there are four kinds of monks. The first kind are the Cenobites:

those who live in monasteries and serve under a rule and an Abbot.

The second kind are the Anchorites or Hermits: those who, no longer in the first fervor of their reformation, but after long probation in a monastery, having learned by the help of many brethren how to fight against the devil, go out well armed from the ranks of the community to the solitary combat of the desert. They are able now, with no help save from God, to fight single-handed against the vices of the flesh and their own evil thoughts.

The third kind of monks, a detestable kind, are the Sarabaites. These, not having been tested, as gold in the furnace (Wis. 3:6), by any rule or by the lessons of experience, are as soft as lead. In their works they still keep faith with the world, so that their tonsure marks them as liars before God. They live in twos or threes, or even singly, without a shepherd, in their own sheepfolds and not in the Lord's. Their law is the desire for self-gratification: whatever enters their mind or appeals to them, that they call holy; what they dislike, they regard as unlawful.

The fourth kind of monks are those called Gyrovagues. These spend their whole lives tramping from province to province, staying as guests in different monasteries for three or four days at a time. Always on the move, with no stability, they indulge their own wills and succumb to the allurements of gluttony, and are in every way worse than the Sarabaites. Of the miserable conduct of all such it is better to be silent than to speak.

Passing these over, therefore, let us proceed, with God's help, to lay down a rule for the strongest kind of monks, the Cenobites.

This calls me to me to assess who I might be and within which group I might be pegged if St. B. were in the room. The 4th kind of monk are not really monks at all, only impostors. Is that I how I lived my life for years prior to 2007? To pretend to be something is far worse than simply being bad because of the damage we do to those who might who might believe the pretense we show the world. I can't long consider this possibility because if it was me, I choose to put that reality far back in the past. The future might find me coming back to the life of the Gyrovagues if I should stumble and fall but I pray that my direction will lead me ever further from such a disastrous future.

How about the Sarabaites? Have I climbed up out the depths where the Gyrovagues  dwell? Is there hope I am moving in the right direction, toward the Lord rather than away? This is likely more were I belonged before my dedication to recovery. Not truly bad but certainly not good. I pretended to be faithful but it was only a mask that only glimmered faintly with a true expression of belief. I am certain that without daily commitment and re-conversion, I would easily  back slide into this status. I can see where leading what appears to be holy life can be easy to mimic but with no real heart, I would still fall prey to the things which would distract me from my true calling, union with and a pervading love of God which is expressed in devotion to those who rely in me. I am only just now realizing the extent to which it is necessary to push away and tear free from anything that might become an unnatural desire. Things are not God and they offer nothing more than a gauzy appearance of fulfillment.

I still hear reverberations of the recent past echoing around like the call of the sirens but the sounds no longer lure me. The tend to sickened me and cause me to turn away just as the smell of alcohol now repulses me rather tempting to sip the next swallow. The reprieve from addiction is only temporary because I can relapse at any moment so I have to be just as painstaking about any form of addiction as I was alcohol.

Finally we come to the Cenobites. I am an oblate so I do not live in the abbey and I have not taken a vow any more stringent than to follow the rule every day to the best my station in life will permit. What does that mean? I am called to finally study the rule to see how it applies to me, today in the evening of my life. My re-commitment is to pray the hours using my breviary every day that I can. On the days when I cannot, I intend to pray in some fashion to keep the daily prayer habit going. I will truly engage the challenge of Ora et Labora and the nature of stability as it should apply to me. I am not a Cenobite. I am an oblate but I am an oblate of Mt. Angel Abbey, a Benedictine monastery.