Camaldolese monks follow the Brief Rule of St. Romuald, a tenth-century Italian monk who sought to combine the best of the hermetic and communal traditions in the church. “Sit in your cell as in paradise,” the Rule begins. “Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish.” I am not Catholic, but I love the Catholic reverence for tradition and wisdom, the memento mori that was absent from my evangelical upbringing. At Vespers, the evening prayer service, we sang from Psalm 116: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones.” To sit in one's cell as in paradise, one has to be still, to cease the frantic activity that we mistake so often for life. A friend of mine recently posted a beautiful sunset photo on Instagram with the caption, “the world ends every day.” If that's the case, there is no better place to watch the world end than at a monastery at the edge of the continent, where each sleep is a death and each morning you rise as in paradise.
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