Departure, Homecoming

It was early on the morning of my departure. Faint light slanted into the small room where I sat waiting for my train. Nearby sat a small group of Russian Orthodox travelers. I had just spent the previous week with them together at Bose monastery in northern Italy. There was time before our trains departed, so I pulled out a book and began reading. They retired to a small waiting room nearby, placed an icon against the wall before them, and began chanting morning prayer. There were maybe nine of them, both women and men, and soon they began to attract the attention of other travelers in the station. But they continued on, seemingly oblivious to this, quietly chanting the psalms and from time to time crossing themselves and reverencing the icon. They were intent and committed to this work of prayer.

I beheld them with a strange mixture of embarrassment (for their bold public declaration of faith) and admiration (for their humility and lack of self-consciousness). This was a group, I knew, for whom such regular practice had become a matter of cultural and spiritual survival in an increasingly secularized Russia; and they were not going to alter their practice while traveling abroad. Indeed it was essential in their ongoing effort to renew their own spiritual tradition and make a place for it in the world. Still, I was abashed by the simple transparency of their prayer here in this public place and found myself reflecting upon my own spiritual identity in a new light and considering again the character of my own commitments. Eventually, one of the women motioned for me to join them; after a moment of hesitation, I did so, little by little entering with them into that ancient ritual.

I have thought about that moment often, especially when considering the complex question of how members of a spiritual tradition choose to engage both their own tradition and the world around them. And what considerations figure most importantly in determining when one is being called to focus attention narrowly on the renewal and retrieval of classical spiritual forms and practices (and perhaps adopt a fundamental posture of resistance toward one’s cultural milieu); and when one is being called to open oneself to broader influences and to a more open stance toward contemporary culture as a whole. This little community of Russian pilgrims had adopted a common and often-effective strategy of careful and insistent retrieval of ancient forms of spiritual thought and practice. Only faithfulness to those forms, they were convinced, would enable them to recover a way of being in the world—and a way of experiencing God—that had become largely inaccessible to them in contemporary Russia. It was difficult to judge how self aware they were regarding the social and cultural meaning of their actions. But they seemed assured in their strategy—the narrowed focus and shrinking of horizons that characterized their approach to renewal. There was an undeniable audacity to this tiny remnant, especially in their determination to honor and remain faithful to their distinctive vision of life. I found it arresting and moving.

Their approach to renewal stood in marked contrast to what I observed during my stay at Bose. The Bose community is also deeply respectful of the ancient forms; but they have developed a more flexible, open attitude toward renewal, viewing the forms as capable of continuous adaptation and reconfiguration. It is a relatively new monastic community (its founding is generally dated to 1965), although from its inception until the present day it has sought assiduously to follow the ancient traditions of Christian monastic living. Still, in its ecumenical and mixed-gender composition and in its unusual blending of traditionalism and progressivism, it transcends classical monastic models in important ways. In Italy, the monastery occupies an ambiguous place along the borderlands between the conservative and progressive elements in the Church, a position that has enabled it to reach out to a remarkably broad audience in contemporary Europe. Still, Bose’s particular model of monastic living has not been widely imitated; this, one suspects, is because of the inherent difficulty...