Monastic Rhythm

We’ve been living here at the International Baptist Theological Seminary for over four weeks now. The Seminary is unique in that it offers students postgraduate degrees in theology and mission that serve not only as “divinity” degrees but also “magister” degrees. A magister degree is approved by the Czech government and therefore will qualify its graduates for teaching work in secular institutions. Therefore, unlike other seminaries and Bible colleges in Europe, these graduates can put their degrees to work in the church or in the wider job market.

But the seminary is more than classes and degrees. It also has a monastic feel to it. Physically the seminary comprises four main buildings arranged around a central courtyard with a fountain. It takes little imagination to see a columned cloister garden in the layout. The seminary has a cafeteria that serves breakfast and lunch to the students, visitors, and those on sabbatical, so meals are eaten very much in common. The seminary holds chapel every morning at 9:00. This time includes singing, the reading of scripture, and intercessory prayer; on Wednesdays one of the community members offers a homily and we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Sunday mornings the chapel hosts a congregation that is open to the wider community but contains mostly students and faculty to the seminary.

All of these factors conspire to produce a rhythm to life which is rare to find anywhere outside the traditions of monks and nuns. It is a daily heartbeat, a thud-thud that speaks of constancy even in a place where a wide variety of backgrounds and languages makes for lots of curves and surprises. The rhythm is something to be cherished, I think. It is something to be craved, I suspect, for I find it answers some deep indescribable hunger that I barely knew I had.

Yahweh gave the Israelites means by which to live with a rhythm: the Sabbath, the feasts and the festivals. I think the Church must keep up that rhythm. There is a new way to keep the Sabbath of course, and there are new feasts and festivals. But together we must keep them. To keep them—to attend Sunday worship, to participate in a Wednesday prayer group, to sing carols at Christ’s Mass, to wake up early for Easter, and to light the Advent candles—means keeping the systole and diastole of the Church’s heart. To skip these things, to allow them to slip away from our busy schedules, is to suffer arrhythmia. Just as a palpitating heart gives us cause for alarm, so should a life that does not beat with the regular thud-thud of communal rhythm.

Like a single cardiac muscle cell in a Petri dish, the single believer cannot make the heart of the Church beat. It is only bound together in that tight, fist-sized mass that those cells can squeeze the Blood of Life through the entire Body. So we must bind together, beat together, and let the Blood course through us together. So we must keep the monastic rhythm of life.

I hope that we can find this in the Church when we return home.

~emrys