Monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience

Monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are presented as commitments that reorder an entire life around prayer, not simply as private declarations of faith. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, the sight of monks who had relinquished family and careers for this way of life unsettled ministry students whose attention had been fixed on social action. Their encounter opened a dimension of Christian life they recognized they had neglected, and made the monks’ example a question rather than an easy answer: what did the monks understand that the students did not?

Renunciation and encounter

In the 1950s, the book’s narrator and fellow ministry students were deeply engaged with the civil rights movement and debated whether to leave university in protest. Against that background, the monks’ renunciation of family and careers, and their life of poverty, chastity, obedience, and prayer, offered a strikingly different account of religious vocation. The difference did not resolve the students’ concerns; it widened their sense of what a Christian life could include.

The narrator made five trips to the Abbey of Gethsemani because drivers were needed and the narrator had a car. On two visits, Thomas Merton spent afternoons with the group, answering questions patiently and in good humor. The narrator did not then know Merton’s stature as a spiritual writer, but later read and taught most of his books. The trips also led to an independent study with D. Bard Thompson after the narrator had missed Thompson’s course on Christian spirituality. Readings from the course began a lifelong interest in spirituality and mysticism, which gradually narrowed toward the Cistercian tradition and the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux.

Vocation made into a daily rhythm

The vows’ significance appears not only in what monastics give up, but in the practices that fill the life they choose. On one visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani, a student asked a monk how to deepen a prayer life. His advice was to pray as the monks did, using the Psalms. The narrator adopted that counsel as a steady practice and learned to probe the songs and poems of the Book of Psalms more deeply. The encounter makes the monastic example practical: its influence is carried beyond the monastery through a repeatable discipline of prayer.

Hildegard of Bingen offers another instance of religious vocation shaped by communal routine. As a child she was placed with Jutta, who taught her to read the Bible in Latin and chant the Psalms as part of the Benedictine Divine Offices. Other women joined Jutta’s hermitage, which became a nunnery; as a teenager, Hildegard formally professed as a nun, and she became abbess when Jutta died in 1136. Her story distinguishes a particular monastic profession from the wider spiritual practices that other people may adopt: the commitment was lived within a community, under an ordered liturgical rhythm.

Beyond the monastery

The book places monastic life alongside forms of spirituality that do not depend on monastic vows. Quaker worship, for example, centers on silence and attention to the Inner Light; a person may rise to speak as moved by the Holy Spirit. The account emphasizes that Quakers have no sacraments, professional ministry, or official creed, and that their spiritual writing often records experience rather than setting out doctrine. Their silence and attentiveness resemble some monastic practices, but the book presents them as a distinct religious form, not as another name for monastic profession.

More broadly, it describes prayer, meditation, study, silence, fasting, communal worship, and a simple lifestyle as practices that can accumulate into a way of life. Some days prayer feels dry and others rich; growth lies in sustained practice rather than in securing a single extraordinary experience. The narrator’s own account follows that pattern: a counsel received from a monk becomes a continuing habit, while interest in spirituality develops over years of study and contact with Cistercian monks. These examples clarify the reach of the vows’ influence without implying that every disciplined spiritual life is governed by vows.

Service and the meaning of commitment

The narrator explicitly says that the discovery of monastic life did not displace concern for social justice. The book’s examples show why that distinction matters. Howard Thurman’s account is formed by racial segregation and by the history of Christians who used Paul’s words to justify slavery; in a conversation in Ceylon, he rejected the need to defend a Christianity compromised by that history and distinguished it from the religion of Jesus. Simone Weil, seeking to understand factory workers’ circumstances directly, took a leave from teaching in 1934–35 and worked in a factory, where machine failures and production quotas repeatedly cost her time and pay. These are not monastic vows, but they show the book’s attention to the demands of faith amid social and economic realities.

Dorothy Day likewise joined an interior religious life to concrete service. She prayed regularly and attended Mass daily, while understanding God’s presence chiefly through other people, especially poor people. With Peter Maurin, she founded The Catholic Worker, which reported on unemployment, labor, racism, and other social issues, and helped establish houses offering food and shelter. Day understood this hospitality through the teaching of Matthew 25: service to people in need was service to Christ. The visitors could be difficult to care for, and she described practical love as more demanding than love imagined in the abstract. Her example does not erase the distinction between monastic vows and social ministry; it places both within the book’s broader insistence that spiritual commitment must shape ordinary conduct.

The narrator’s later life holds these paths together: social justice concerns remained, while study of the mystics deepened a longing for God. The vows first appeared as a startling alternative to activism, but their lasting significance in the account is that they made prayer, simplicity, and sustained devotion visible as a whole vocation. They broaden the picture of Christian commitment without making renunciation the only measure of a spiritual life.