This is the third in a series of posts. You can find the first two here: Domestic Monastery Part 1: The Framework of Ora Et Labora and Domestic Monastery Part 2: Tailoring the Framework to What Your Life Already Is

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I roll over in bed at two thirty in the morning this past winter, hearing my infant’s cries. Usually in that moment all I want to do is keep sleeping. Yet there are breaths now when a thought reminds me: this is my monastery bell tolling. I have to get up and answer that bell.

Ronald Rolheiser writes of monks, “whenever the monastic bell rang, they were to drop whatever they were doing and go immediately to the particular activity (prayer, meals, work, study, sleep) to which the bell was summoning them. [St. Benedict] was adamant that they respond immediately, stating that if they were writing a letter they were to stop in mid-sentence when the bell rang. The idea in his mind was that when the bell called, it called you to the next task and you were to respond immediately, not because you want to, but because it’s time for that task and time isn’t your time, it’s God’s time. For him, the monastic bell was intended as a discipline to stretch the heart by always taking you beyond your own agenda to God’s agenda” (19-20).

I don’t live in a monastery but I have a bell that sounds throughout my days. Currently it is largely my children. A nursing baby. Mealtimes when my kids want fed, yet again. The audacity! The rhythm of school pick-ups. The cry of a child awake from a nap. A poopy diaper. The buzz of the laundry machine. Dysregulated tears or sibling fights. The hardest is perhaps my alarm in the morning, when I lay in bed and think, oh, I have to get up and do it all again.

An older friend has to cancel our plans to be together one day and texts, “Have you ever done the right thing and really wished you didn’t have to? Ugh! I was SO wanting to be with you today.”

“Only every day in my current stage of parenting,” I respond.

Rohlheiser points out, “A parent hears the monastic bell many times during the day and has to drop things in mid-sentence and respond, not because they want to, but because it’s time for that activity. […] The rest of us experience that monastic bell each morning when our alarm clock rings and we get out of bed and ready ourselves for the day, not because we want to, but because it’s time” (20).

How does the monastic bell resonate throughout your own life?

I’ve leaned into this idea of a monastery bell so hard this year. Largely because if I don’t, then I grow increasing frustrated at my lack of time to sit and “be spiritual.” I’m not going to rise an hour early to sit in quiet meditation before the sun comes up only to yell at my children out of cranky exhaustion in the afternoon because I haven’t had enough sleep in the name of spirituality. In some seasons and for some people, rising early is a viable solution. I have not yet found it to be so for me. So I must find other ways to engage.

Some days I sneak bits of reading or contemplation during baby’s morning nap. Some days no naps happen when I think they will. Some days I feel accomplished if I get my fifteen minutes of core workout done in an attempt to knit my postpartum body back together. Some winter days I sneak outside for a brisk walk, a scarf wrapped around my face in the ten-degree weather. Some days my shower comes twenty-four hours later than I intended. Everything I can’t control suddenly becomes an opportunity to practice a subtle form of internal surrender.

If I yearn for transformation then I must find it inside the commitments I already have.

Someday things will shift enough that I can also choose other intentional avenues, but for now, I get to work with what I have. My monastery bell—the current scaffolding of my life—is what I have. Yours will look and sound and smell different than mine. But we each get to trust that whatever the conditions, they are the perfect conditions for our own transformative pathway.

Rohlheiser invites, “Stay inside your commitments, be faithful, your place of work is a seminary, your work is a sacrament, your family is a monastery, your home is a sanctuary. Stay inside them, don’t betray them, learn what they are teaching you without constantly looking for life elsewhere and without constantly believing that God is elsewhere” (37).

In Mirabai Starr’s chapter on motherhood from Wild Mercy, she describes a spiritual woman named Asha. She writes, “As the mother of four girls, Asha recognized early on that unless she focused on parenting as a spiritual practice, she would have no spiritual life. […] ’Family is the most powerful spiritual teacher I have ever known,’ Asha told me (and she has known many teachers) […] ‘It pokes you and wakes you up. It’s easy to become complacent on the spiritual path, to start thinking that you know something and have freed yourself from your bad habits. No matter where you are in your practice, family can undercut your awakened state and pull you right out of the present moment.’ She acknowledged that when you have small children it’s almost impossible to maintain a spiritual practice. Your family has to be your practice. And the opportunities for practicing are abundant!” (122-23).

Some days I trust this better than others.

Yet I do find myself noticing my internal reactions more often. Oh, there it is, my desire to react, to resist, to get angry, to snap at my kids. Something in me is activated. I resist what is. What if I could sense that resistance in my body, acknowledge it and work to let it go? This is out of my control, I find myself saying inside my head—often. The implication is that fighting it is only wasted energy. More than once now I have turned to chanting while washing a screaming child in the bath. I do it for my own sanity. Remind me that the streams of my Divine Mother and Father’s love are abundant and present despite my drained and fatigued and overstimulated state. Remind me that it will be enough to pull me through. And perhaps in some small way the shift in my energy will invite a sense of calm for my child who is also reacting to an internal lack of control within their own being.

These are the small moments that arise hour by hour, day by day. These are the true moments that measure a person’s transformation. Not whether they can show up to a place of worship once a week, or quote sacred texts from memory, or even put on loving behavior to serve at a charity for a few hours a week. It’s who we are at home, with the people that love us most and hurt us most, that push our buttons. It’s who we are as we respond to frustrations at work, or coworkers our ego would rather not have to interact with. It’s who we are when the alarm goes off in the morning, inviting us to whatever the scaffolding of our day holds.

When the monastery bell calls, how will I respond?

He who has a body to sense this truth, let him sense.

Resources:

• Previous posts in this series: Domestic Monastery Part 1: The Framework of Ora Et Labora and Domestic Monastery Part 2: Tailoring the Framework to What Your Life Already Is
• Domestic Monastery by Ronald Rohlheiser
• Introductory Wisdom School course at Wisdom Waypoints
• Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today by Joan Chittister (I have yet to read this one but it’s in my cue of books!)
• The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris (a memoir about a lay person’s experience in a monastery)

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Shalom.