The Relevance Of Monasticism

That’s not putting it quite right, that title. But the book I’m reading is an overview of the many ways in which monastic communities in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages strove to perfect concentration, in order to stretch their minds toward God. So just a quote from the book, to justify my title.

The chapter is on the body, and how body and mind must work in partnership, or perhaps better be worked in partnership, towards the goal of the pure contemplation and awareness of God. The subject is celibacy, and how sexual desire is one more distraction which must be disciplined by concentration.

In one widely shared story, a traveling male monk who encountered a group of female monks moved off the road to avoid them. The highest-ranking woman in the group disapproved. “If you were a perfect monk,” she told him, “you would not have noticed that we are women.”

The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction 

A story that is astonishingly contemporary, right down to the implicit concept of the “male gaze.”

The struggle is real. And it’s very, very, very old.