Instruction 
Instruction on the Rule by noteworthy modern day monastics or oblates
Spiritual birth
He who is spiritually “born” as a mature identity is liberated from the enclosing womb of myth and prejudice. He learns to think for himself, guided no longer by the dictates of need and by the systems and processes designed to create artificial needs and then “satisfy” them. This emancipation can take two forms: first… Read More ›
Renouncing Resentment
The problem is to learn how to renounce resentment without selling out to the organization people who want everyone to accept absurdity and moral anarchy in a spirit of uplift and willing complicity. Few men are strong enough to find the solution. A monastery is not necessarily the right answer; there is resentment in monasteries… Read More ›
We Live in the Time of the Two Advents of Christ
History itself acquired a new meaning, or rather its hidden meaning was revealed, when the Word of God became incarnate and entered into history. Time itself was now an Epiphany of the Creator and of the Redeemer, the “Lord of Ages.” And yet time also acquired a new solemnity, a new urgency, since the Lord… Read More ›
Surviving Advent as a Single
Tips for handling feelings of disappointment in a season filled with families and gatherings Soon enough Christmas music will flood the stores. All things holiday will insist that we are part of beautiful, functional families. Many of us simply aren’t. It isn’t always easy to embrace a season filled with families, children and abundance when… Read More ›
Truth lives and is embodied in men
A sincere man is not so much one who sees the truth and manifests it as he sees it, but one who loves the truth with pure love. But truth is more than an abstraction. It lives and is embodied in men and things that are real. And the secret of sincerity is, therefore, not… Read More ›
Bear in ourselves the fury of the world against Christ
The great question then is how do we communicate with the modern world? If in fact communication has been reduced to pseudo-communication, to the celebration of pseudo-events and the irate clashing of incompatible myth-systems, how are we to avoid falling into this predicament? How are we to avoid the common obsession with pseudo-events in order… Read More ›
Have you turned a deaf ear?
We ought to have the humility to admit we do not know all about ourselves, that we are not experts at running our own lives. We ought to stop taking our conscious plans and decisions with such infinite seriousness. It may well be that we are not the martyrs or the mystics or the apostles… Read More ›
Life closes the ego upon itself
The tragedy of a life centered on “things,” on the grasping and manipulation of objects, is that such a life closes the ego upon itself as though it were an end in itself, and throws it into a hopeless struggle with other perverse and hostile selves competing together for the possessions which will give them… Read More ›
The General Dance
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in… Read More ›
All is “Zero”
All has become one, all has become indifferent, all has been leveled to equal meaninglessness…. It is not that all is “one” but all is “zero.” Everything adds up to zero. Indeed, even the state, in the end, is zero. Freedom is then to live and die for zero. Is that what I want: to… Read More ›