“The whole globe is shook up, so what are you going to do when things are falling apart? You’re either going to become more fundamentalist and try to hold things together, or you’re going to forsake the old ambitions and goals and live life as an experiment, making it up as you go along.”
—Pema Chödrön
This quote from Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön opens the 2011 book “Walk Out Walk On” by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, who explore case studies of communities choosing to subvert the current status quo and “live the future now.”
In the book, the authors use “Walk Out Walk On” as the uniting metaphor of contemporary institutions. The phrase “Walk Outs Who Walk On” was inspired by their friends in India, who created a network of young people who chose to leave school. Rather than identify as “dropouts,” they became “walk outs” who left school “because they wanted to be learners, not passive students. They walked on to discover many ways they could contribute to creating change in their world.”
Wheatley and Frieze apply this pattern to additional contexts, those in which people are walking out of destructive, dying institutions, and walking on to communities with more creativity and life-centered values. Essentially, they offer this as a framework for our moment in history: how can we walk out of what is no longer serving us, and walk on to alternatives together?
As I reflect on this question, two groups come to mind as exemplars of walking out and walking on: “nones” and monks.
First, “nones.” The narrative of “the rise of the nones” and the phenomenon of increasing identification as “spiritual but not religious” has grown significantly in the last decade, as young people especially have been leaving behind religious institutions while often carrying with them rich spiritual practices and deep communal longings. More and more people are recognizing that religious institutions of exclusion and exploitation are not serving us or our future, and that if we try, we can co-create sacred communities that do.
As someone who left the religious affiliation of my upbringing, I often get sorted into this category of being a so-called “none.” But “none” is clearly insufficient and even inaccurate, being only the start of the story. The more interesting part is what happens after someone leaves a religion or institution, and how they discover their own spirituality and community.
For me, my life as a seeker brought me to a place that has been a home for seekers like me for over 1,500 years: a Benedictine monastery. I moved into a monastery right after divinity school, and quickly I began to observe the countercultural nature of the monastery and of monastic history, feeling parallels to the longings and questions of my fellow so-called “nones.”
Which brings me to the second group: monks (in this case, Christian Benedictine monks).
There are many moments at the founding of Christian monasticism that ring deeply resonant with our own social, spiritual, and political moment today. In the sixth century, the Roman Empire was collapsing. The European continent lay in political, economic, communal, and social disarray. The systems that people used to depend on were no longer functional, and alternatives were needed.
Enter: Saints Benedict and Scholastica of Nursia. These spiritual leaders gathered people around “living otherwise” amid collapse. They created communal hubs, called monasteries, in which a person’s needs–material and spiritual–were cared for, and by, the whole.
This was the beginning of communal, also called cenobetic, Christian monastic life. Drawing a parallel to our own day and age, Sister Joan Chittister wrote in her 2011 book “The Monastery of the Heart,”
“Today, in this time of cataclysmic social upheavals, of global transitions, of technological breakthroughs of unimagined proportions, we must [walk another way]. Old patterns are breaking down; individuals, families, and small groups everywhere … are seeking to shape new ways of living for themselves in the shell of the old.”
Sister Joan is not the only one who sees parallels between the collapses and innovations of early monasticism and the patterns in religious and social life today. Krista Tippett, host of the radio show and podcast On Being, wrote in her 2016 book “Becoming Wise”:
“The Nones of this age are ecumenical, humanist, transreligious. But in their midst are analogs to the original monastics: spiritual rebels and seekers on the margins of established religion, pointing tradition back to its own untamable, countercultural, service-oriented heart.”
In the “nones” and in the monks, both contemporary trends and ancient tradition are pointing us toward the wisdom of and possibility in “living otherwise” — of walking out and walking on.
Many religious teachings and spiritual leaders speak to this sacred cycle of collapse and innovation. In the Jewish story, we see it as Exodus, Struggle, and Renewal. In the Christian story, it is expressed through Jesus as Life, Death, and Resurrection. Father Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest and contemplative teacher, calls this “the wisdom pattern” of Order, Disorder, Reorder. Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön wrote about it, above, as falling apart, letting go, living as an experiment.
We can all imagine ourselves as a part of this sacred cycle, one that does not end with the story of exodus, disaffiliation, or collapse, but begins there as a site of creativity and vision. It is about how we choose to be in this moment of change and chaos; in the entropy and possibility between the old and the not-yet, the ancient and the emergent.
As we witness the profound transformations of our world, our traditions, and our institutions, we would be wise to follow the insight of Black theologian Howard Thurman, who encourages us to “Look well to the growing edge!”*
Long before us, early monastics did this by seeing that there was another way to live than that of the empire. Today, many “nones” are compelling religious institutions to consider spiritual practice and community beyond current forms. What else might we re-imagine as we follow the example of “nones,” monks, and Thurman … and look to the growing edge of our traditions?
