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My Monastic Fishhook

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In yesterday's entry , I extracted from Greg Peters' introduction to The Story of Monasticism (TSM) the importance of identifying and summarizing the evolution of my fishhook into monasticism. Here is a six-sentence version. 1) I was raised as an atheist materialist by a single mother in upstate New York during the 1970s and 1980s and became emotionally dependent on pornography and masturbation in middle school. 2) During my junior year of high school, I began to exhibit symptoms of bipolar schizophrenia, but I avoided a formal diagnosis until my late forties. 3) I quit high school when I had a spiritual awakening - or was it a psychotic break? - shortly after reading The Brothers Karamazov for a humanities class. 4) This led to independent study of Krishnamurti's The Awakening of Intelligence , the start of a Zen Buddhist practice, and a psychedelic-induced near-death experience at the age of eighteen that convinced me of God's existence, the reality of Jesus, and my...
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The Monastic Impulse

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I am very impressed and helped by what I have read so far in  The Story of Monasticism: Retrieving an Ancient Tradition for Contemporary Spirituality by Greg Peters. Check out Peters' webpage at Nashotah House:  The Rev. Canon Greg Peters, PhD, SMD . It's profoundly encouraging, and humbling, to see what a gifted man can accomplish if he stays on the straight road to Christ from the start of his college years. My thought at this point is to take a deep dive through The Story of Monasticism (TSM) here on my blog. These will be fairly informal study notes that tackle one small section of TSM at a time. Eventually, I might like to work this into a three-year curriculum, but I am not pressuring myself. This could grow in a different direction. Peters begins TSM with an introduction titled "The Monastic Impulse." What I would like to do in today's note is unpack the first paragraph of this introduction, which contains three key components. The first component is a cl...
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From Saint Antony to Saint Benedict to the Book of Common Prayer

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Now that I have the basics of an horarium established (see The Twelve Gates ), and I am seven days into my Lent 2026 retreat, I want to start reading an introduction to Western Christian monasticism when I don't have anything more pressing to attend to during my daily 3-6 PM "Watch of the Steward" time block.  There are several introductory pathways to choose between: https://share.google/aimode/fwGUMirl8VrDBLmm7 After a bit of research on Gemini and Amazon, it looks like my best next step is  The Story of Monasticism: Retrieving an Ancient Tradition for Contemporary Spirituality  by Greg Peters. His background fits perfectly with my interest in the Book of Common Prayer : https://share.google/aimode/ocrnjczYTJSnKvWge I am also thinking about starting a daily deep dive into   The Rule of Benedict with Reflections from Christian Meditators  on Saturday, 2 May 2026. It's a course of study that will take four months to complete. We will see if I am really call...
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The Twelve Gates

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Here is a summary of today's session: https://share.google/aimode/iQ5GAvaCFCBtghkIG For reference, this is  Hebrews 13 :9-14 (BSB): "Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace and not by foods of no value to those devoted to them. We have an altar from which those who serve at the tabernacle have no right to eat. Although the high priest brings the blood of animals into the Holy Place as a sacrifice for sin, the bodies are burned outside the camp. And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate, to sanctify the people by His own blood. Therefore let us go to Him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace He bore. For here we do not have a permanent city, but we are looking for the city that is to come."
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Evolving Divine Office: Calendar, Horarium, Horologion

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4:10 PM Thursday. Alright, heavenly Father, it looks like you are calling me to view Tuesday's  Lent 2026 Horologion Capstone  as a constructive rough step in the right direction. Now I need to clarify that my "Stewardship of the Gates" watch from 3 PM to 6 PM every day is the calendar, mail, filing, and checkbook component of an emergent new monastic Divine Office. I should further clarify that secular use of a Microsoft Outlook calendar as part of my annual Office 365 subscription seems to be turning into the religious management of a horarium (the temporal structure, or "trellis") and a horologion (the prayerful contents of the calendar structure, or the "vine" that grows on the trellis and produces "fruits"). Despite Tuesday's "capstone" accomplishment, it would be totally wrong for me to suggest that I have put a final Lent 2026 Horologion into place. Rather, what I mean to say is that I will be working out the structure of...
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