Getting Started: Preparing for Urban Monasticism

Started December 1st, 2019.
Join us as we live our lives:

Present with God
Present with Others

We are inviting you to join us. The more people who commit to live this way of life together the more wholistic and faithful this will become. During the time of preparation we are actively working on building the resources, and practices that will become the foundation of Urban Monasticism.

This time of preparation began with Advent in 2019, and will continue through Ascension 2022. Following the liturgical calendar in this way will allow us to learn and adapt from our first time through non-ordinary time, and then implement our learnings as we go through the following years together. If you are interested please reach out to us. Many of us have already started, but it is helpful to have a formal fixed start date for us as a community. We started on December 1st 2019.

Goals for this Time

There are a number of things that we hope to accomplish during this time of preparation. This list may adapt based on what we learn and how we grow through this time together.

• Clarify and solidify our Commitment/Rule.
• Develop and practice our monastic lifestyle in our cities around the world in a number of vocations.
  • With a focus on living a life of grace, and experiencing the presence of God and others.
  • Focus on our daily and weekly rhythms and practices.
  • Developing our out-of-rhythm practices (done locally).
• Develop our Practice of the Hours
  • Including at least Lauds, Vespers, and Compline.
  • Publish online in some capacity.
  • Create a monastic platform to support our liturgical calendar, breviary, scriptorium, and other practices.
  • Start the translation process for an English Breviary, with portions available in French and other languages.
  • Explore colaborating with other organizations and institutions to publish and support their hours.
  • Explore developing musical aspects for parts of the prayers.
  • Possibly create audio of each hour to pray along with to increase the sense of community.
• Develop our practice of Communion.
• Develop our practice of fasting (regular and special)
• Develop our home green spaces, and integrate it into our practices.
• Develop our scriptorium application and start using it.
  • This is an online repository of texts, with the ability to manually translate them for different purposes
  • This tool will allow us to develop our Hours in a modular approach.
  • Will allow us to publish historic works with modern translations written by scholars within our community.
  • Would be built for use of our community, but could extend the audience.
• Publish a book/film/resources with our learnings on how to integrate these practices into our lives.

Timeline for our Preparation

Since starting in December 2019 we have made a few changes to this time. It was originally scheduled to end in 2021 and was called a pilot. With the global pandemic hitting so early it was clear we would need more time together. We did not expect to be restricted to meeting virtually for the majority of the pilot time. The naming of this time has also changed to Preparation. This is to better convey the work being done, and to further distance ourselves from the capitalistic implications of ‘pilot’ programs.