Quotes about Monastery

One learns more of Christ in being married and rearing children than in several lifetimes spent in study in a monastery.

But God has not called us to erect a little family monastery. Please read carefully what I am going to write next. Monastic parenting will not deliver your children from moral danger.

THE MONASTERY IS A SCHOOL—A SCHOOL IN WHICH WE learn from God how to be happy.

Hullo, Brother," I said. He recognized me, glanced at the suitcase and said: "This time have you come to stay?" "Yes, Brother, if you'll pray for me," I said. Brother nodded, and raised his hand to close the window. "That's what I've been doing," he said, "praying for you.

People even lose their vocations because they find out that a man can spend forty or fifty or sixty years in a monastery and still have a bad temper.

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.

If I were to ask about my seven months at the Abbey, Did it work, did I solve my problems? the simple answer would be, It did not work, it did not solve my problems. And I know that a year, two years, or even a lifetime as a Trappist monk would not have worked either. Because a monastery is not built to solve problems but to praise the Lord in the midst of them.

If I have learned anything this week, it is that there is a contemplative way of working that is more important for me than praying, reading, or singing. Most people think that you go to the monastery to pray. Well, I prayed more this week than before but also discovered that I have not learned yet to make the work of my hands into a prayer.

We know that immediately upon entering the monastery, Luther was lent one that was bound in red leather, for he recollected this often in his later years. It seems that Luther did not receive the book lightly, for he not only read it but almost devoured it. He read it over and over until he was inordinately and perhaps even peculiarly familiar with it. This would of course have everything to do with the events of his future and the future itself.