I’m not sure I can articulate exactly what I expected with regards to my visit to the New Skete monastery, but I suppose I can try. What I expected was asceticism, elevation and separation achieved through asceticism I am incapable of. Constant prayer, hair shirts, sack cloths, dark-eyed mutterings of the Jesus prayer in stone cells. In retrospect I think that would have made me incredibly uncomfortable to merely visit; like visiting, not a zoo, but a reserve, perhaps.

What I found instead of those portraits of monks, were actual monks. Men who had dedicated themselves to prayer and to living a prayerful life. They raise dogs and eat lunch and wear blue jeans and it is normal. I am called to be a father some people are called to be carpenters and others painters, they are called to be monks. Like I said, they aren’t ascetics. There was something kind of disappointing about that I had imagined monastic life as transcendently challenging, and it may very well be at other monasteries and at this one, I have no idea what it’s like.

Some other people who visited with him shared disappointment in the reality of what was expected, which, while I felt the whisper of in myself, I find difficult to accept. I mean, these men wake up at four AM to pray before their first service at 8am, with a second service at lunch, and a final service at 5pm, every single day with more on Sundays and feast days with seasons of fasting and bi-weekly fasting thrown in. This is a life of no-small worship.

By the time we were leaving we had attended four services, an evening vespers when we arrived, morning middens, a mid-day service In the small chapel ad an evening vespers service with classes on contemplative prayer between all of those things and a blessing of animals we were too busy to attend. By the ed everyone was serviced-out to the point that I was the only person who attended the morning prayer before liturgy, which made the whole final affair fully three and a half hours long. Which felt pretty long.

So, imagining that carried on, day after day year after year…We can feel critical of them for wearing blue jeans and eating chicken and not having bags under their eyes from sleeping o the  stone cushion of the cells they rotate through, it seems important to recognize just how far beyond our daily lives they are operating, how far above. They might not be saints, I suppose, but neither are we.