Throughout watching The Monastery, I believe that we can learn many things from the principles that the monks follow. This includes key parts of monastic life. These key parts include having a greater silence, multiple services per day, being obedient, having humility, participating in manual work, being accepting of others and of yourself, and forgiving yourself and others. While some of these are harder to achieve and maintain than others, such as participating in multiple services each day, other aspects of this lifestyle are able to be brought into modern day life.
Some aspects of monastic living that can be used throughout modern times are silence, obedience, and humility. The aspect of silence can be seen through maintaining silence in certain parts of our day where you take that time to reflect on your life. For any person who commutes, time in the car or on the train can be spent in silence rather than listening to the radio or chatting with nearby passengers. This could provide time for reflecting on what you have done, what you can do, as well as learning something new to add to one’s life. Obedience can also be used throughout your daily living, such as in abstaining from counterproductive actions or in continuously pursuing the other aspects of monastic life. For example, being obedient when keeping up with the silence in your life. Humility for some might be harder to maintain because of one’s pride and happiness over what they were able to achieve, but, in the monastic way of living, one must always be humble and not constantly talk of what one has. These are some things that we should learn from the monks and take to use in our lives because of the outcomes and ultimately, happiness, that we can be granted in the long run.
I believe that the men, throughout their 40 day experience, did have some trouble, as you can see in the videos, but that at the end of the 40 days they were really able to take something away from it all. These five men were able to take an aspect of monastic living and incorporate it into their lives outside of the monastery. They were especially able to use the monk’s principles to learn to get past challenges in life, including learning to live with others in a harmonious fashion. This is so that they could leave behind their old, normal life to create a new normal. While at the beginning of this documentary, these rules may have been hard to follow or fully understand, the men went through the 40 days and began to uncover and grasp why it is that these monks keep with these ideals of living.
Victoria’s Perspective on Christianity 