In reality, a monastic community consists of broken people living a life of repentance. Like all broken people, monastics come into intense conflict with one another, conflict which visitors and pilgrims never see because monks and nuns tend not to “wash their dirty linen in public.” What the visitor to a monastery experiences in the gracious hospitality and respectful distance is absolutely genuine, but it has little to do with the experience of the monks and nuns themselves. Outsiders who visit a monastery may consider the members of the community to be “perfect, holy, peaceful, and sinless.” Members of the community know better. The basic difference between monastic life and parish life in this respect, then, is that the problems in a monastery become far more severe, but the solutions become even more profound and life-changing.
They say that in any average monastery nine out of ten who come to try the life end up leaving. It’s all about handling the pressure of interpersonal relationships. Either you give up and go away or you stay and make it work. Ultimately there is only one way to make the monastic life work—by demonstrating the willingness to resolve conflict by forgiving others, asking their forgiveness, reconciling with them, and by humbling yourself even when you think you are right. This process does not take place in every monastery, and as a result the monasteries which are healthy are very, very healthy, while the monasteries that go bad go very, very bad. In either case, they serve as an example to the parish, either a good example or a bad example.
What monastic life, at its best, has to offer the parish is a vision of what the Kingdom is like when we make our relationships with other persons work, because ultimately healthy relationships – with other human persons and with God – are the only thing that matters.
Monk Cosmas Shartz in the current issue of In Communion, journal of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship of the Protection of the Mother of God, February2011, p. 35, also available here.
A vow of conversation 
March 1, 2011 at 12:16 pm
I recall how two young Benedictine monks at a priory in Washington DC expressed their mutual irritation by vigorously pushing the salt and pepper shakers back and forth across an invisible border in the middle of the table across which they faced each other. It was my first experience of the hostilities that can occur within monastic life.
March 1, 2011 at 12:48 pm
“…by demonstrating the willingness to resolve conflict by forgiving others, asking their forgiveness, reconciling with them, and by humbling yourself even when you think you are right…” Now if only I could see those words every time I blink, they are far too easy to remember only in retrospect. I like Monk Cosmas very much – his article on Love on the In Communion site is also very good.
March 2, 2011 at 6:03 pm
Monastery like a parish? How about like a FAMILY? Pass the friggin’ salt [so I can shake it into your wounds!] It’s what my Presbyterian brother, Dan, would call,”Just GARDEN variety problems!”
March 2, 2011 at 7:49 pm
I recall a more heated moment of monastic irritation. I was visiting the Abbey of Gethsemani early in 1961. Thomas Merton and I were walking down a basement corridor that linked the guest house kitchen to the basement of the main monastery building. There was a point in the corridor where it made a leftward turn, and standing there, next to a large garbage container, was an older monk — Fr Raymond Flanagan — who was not so much reading as glaring at the latest issue of The Catholic Worker, which he held open at arm’s length as if the paper had an unpleasant smell. There was an article of Merton’s in it, one of his essays about the urgency of taking steps to prevent nuclear war. Father Raymond looked up, saw us coming his way, balled the paper up in his fist, hurled it into the garbage container, and strode away without a word, leaving a trail of smoke.