What is the reason behind this popularity? Why do so many people want to come to a monastery in an age of health clubs and space shuttles?
"It is a powerful symbol of the sacred at the heart of the bustling city," says Father Smith.
"We're putting on things that are worth coming to," Father Smith jokes. "The task of finding authentic religious worship is a hard one. People need help. We provide a quality or worship missing at parishes."
"Monastics serve as a powerful symbol...of single-minded consistency in a life where fidelity and consistency are very hard to find," he adds. "People who make a consistent life choice to orientate their lives around the search for God often have a magnetic effect on people which helps them make their choices and take the risks of consistency. We will be together through thick or thin and we'll still be here 10 years from now. People will always say to us `you're always there.'''
In keeping with the community's role in providing a spiritual haven from an increasingly complex and harried modern life, it seems like a world away inside the monastery despite its proximity to Harvard Square. The monastery is a quiet, peaceful place with no pretention. The atmosphere is solemn but humble, and the only ornamentation is in the stained-glass windows of the chapel. In short, the monastery is about as different from the Square and the University as possible--which may be the key to its popularity.
"You really are getting away [from Harvard]," sophomore Hallward says. "It's not a holier-than-thou type of place. These people are very human."
The "modern" bent of the Society comes from the philosophy of its founder, Father Richard M. Benson, who began the society in Oxford in 1863. "There was a clear understanding in the beginning that part of our role would be ministering to the ministers," says Father Smith. The order set up shop in an unpretentious building ministering to the lower classes of Oxford, doing active works of evangelizing, teaching and preaching. Eschewing the traditional monastic habit, they adopted the simple black cassock of the Anglican clergy, but kept to the monastic regime and took the traditional monastic vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. "We were just something new," says Father James Madden, explaining the appeal of the new order. The order came to Boston in the 1870s, and moved to Cambridge in the 1930s from downtown.
Being progressive is built into the Society. In addition to sabbaticals, the monks also have Community Development Days nine times each year when an outside expert spends the day there speaking and leading discussions about such diverse subjects as liberation theology and developmental psychology. These days help the monks "to stretch ourselves in a relevant way in relating to the community and the world. [The monks] count on their new people to bring in new ideas. Part of our rule says that we have to keep in touch with the changing world," says Brother Scott W. Curtis, who is currently a novice in the community. Curtis, who is currently the cellarer--food buyer--for the community, has brought in theories of psychology such as conflict management to help the monks in working as spiritual counselors. "I'm surprised at how open they've been," he says.