Psalm of My Life
A maple tree veils the church in red. Branches shroud the entrance, and leaves dangle like mistletoes above the double doors, as if the church had conspired to kiss a stranger under its Tudor arch. Diamond-paned windows slot the stone exterior and, most prominent of all, two gables of different sizes punctuate the steep roofline like the semicolon of a sentence. The church is a complete thought that isn’t finished.
Inside the chapel, next to the rostrum, a pipe organ collects dust. Rows of pews climb to the back where a sturdy wooden bay door divides the chapel from the cultural hall. A projection booth dots the cultural hall, and parquet flooring underlines it, ending abruptly at a velvet-curtained stage where, lodged in a dark corner, a stale, half-eaten muffin hides with its crumbs.
Classrooms encircle the building. Faded black-and-white photographs hang on the wall in one, tracing the congregation’s history. In the genealogical library, a fireproof vault protects filing cabinets full of microfilm. And in a secluded office, notes from a 2018 meeting of missionaries remain on the whiteboard like petroglyphs from when the building was last used by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Erected in 1929, the Portland Stake Tabernacle occupies a stately hill in the southeast of Oregon’s largest city, sandwiched between Hawthorne and Division Streets, the busy commercial corridors to its north and south. More rare than a meetinghouse but not as sacred as a temple, the iconic Mormon building is for sale for the second time in three years. It’s been on the market for seven months.
The cultural hall, stage, and film booth could be the building blocks of an institute for performing arts. The family history center could expand to include ancestral wisdom from all the world’s traditions. The layout lends itself to daily use as a school, pre-K through eighth grade. All of this could be couched together as a regional hub for contemplative activism.
But it took me a couple hours that afternoon to acknowledge that I felt off. The tour reminded me of how enfolded I was in purpose as a member of the church, even if that purpose had been foisted on me. I missed the structure and rhythm of being on a mission with others. And although I neither belong to a religion nor attend a church, I want to consecrate my days, to devote myself—like a monk.
The monk orients his life around intimacy with the divine, eliminating whatever distracts from his singular aim. He departs from the norms of the world because in his heart is the deep human impulse to question contemporary culture in search of transcendent truth. Monasticism emphasizes simplicity, intentionality, and inner transformation, and throughout its history, Christian monasticism has expressed itself in three main ways: eremitical, cenobitic, and mendicant.
The eremitical expression is that of the hermit. When he was 20, Anthony of Egypt gave away his money, possessions, and inherited land to live a solitary life in the desert on the outskirts of the Roman Empire. For many years he lived in an abandoned, enclosed fort where eventually a colony of ascetics, inspired by his example, formed around him. Anthony became known as the Father of All Monks.
When more Christians withdrew to the desert, Pachomius, who’d been a Roman soldier, recognized the growing need to structure this alternative lifestyle. He encouraged discipline and obedience with methods like manual labor, silence, fasting, and long periods of prayer. He also introduced a trial period before one officially joins a monastery. This was the start to the communal, or cenobitic, expression of Christian monasticism.
It gained momentum when, around the year 500 AD, 20-year-old Benedict, fed up with the immorality of Rome, quit his studies to become a monk. After a difficult attempt to organize others, he surveyed the guidelines of Pachomius, Saint Basil, and Saint Augustine, and a document known as the Rule of the Master. Based on these influences, he authored his own Rule, which detailed how to live a Christ-centered life on earth and run a monastery efficiently. The Rule of Saint Benedict spawned a confederation of autonomous communities in the European countryside during the early Middle Ages.
The Cistercians of Strict Observance, or Trappists, are an offshoot of the Order of Saint Benedict, reformed to emphasize silence and simplicity. Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating are well-known Trappists who lived during the last century.
But quiet contemplation is not the sole expression of this monastic impulse. By the early 13th century, monasteries had become remote and irrelevant to the needs of the poor. There rose up a movement in towns and cities to live in the midst of the people, among the poor. Saint Francis of Assisi is perhaps the best-known figure at this time. The son of a rich cloth merchant, he denounced his father and his wealthy inheritance to live in solidarity with his brothers in Christ. Unlike the cloistered Benedictines and other cenobitic orders, the Franciscans are embedded in the world, ministering to those around them wherever they are.
The Beguines emerged in the Low Countries during this same period, and while not technically nuns, they devoted themselves to good works and prayer without taking vows. These women lived as neighbors engaged in apostolic service, expressing a similar spirit as the Franciscans, Dominicans, and other mendicant orders.
Vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are not the essence of monasticism. The essence, Catholic priest and scholar Raimon Panikkar says, is blessed simplicity, a simplicity that supports pursuit of the Ultimate by any means—ascetic or artistic, scholarly or meditative, evangelical or ministerial.
“The goal of monastic life,” poet Kathleen Norris says, “is to let oneself be changed by community ritual, ceremony, and the repetition of the psalms, until, in the words of one hymn, our lives become a psalm in praise of the glory of God’s name.”
Norris is a Benedictine oblate, a layperson affiliated with a monastic community. As I listen to the psalm of my life, for the song that is mine to sing, I’m learning about this possibility, among others. Somehow, here and now, I’m both whole and becoming more than I’ve been.