I teach a course called ‘The Inner Transformation of a Peacemaker’ in the online Certificate program of the Jim Forest Institute for Religion, Peace and Justice at St. Stephen’s University (jfi.ssu.ca). The foundation of this course is Christian contemplation and asceticism as the basis for our intuitive peacemaking and love of enemies to the extent that we have been transfigured rather than an artificially contrived imitation of Jesus’ more difficult commandments (among many other applications).

But I often have students in this course who don’t hail from a high church tradition or otherwise a tradition that has created space for the contemplative life of mystics and monastics.

As a result, I encounter bouts of trepidation from these students when I invoke monastics, both past and present, as unencumbered and undistracted models of attentiveness to one’s inner life as the ontological — or essential and existential — basis for genuine peacemaking that emanates from who we are rather than merely from what we try to do.

I therefore wanted to address this suspicion of the life of a monastic, eremitic (solitary) or otherwise. As I often encounter those who either forcefully or subtly condemn monastics because they ostensibly flee their responsibilities to our world and society, I have a few points to make below that I hope will prove helpful to some.

I could, of course, draw attention to the mendicant monks whose original monastic flavour was to live outside cloistered walls and minister to the poor and marginalized, or nuns who engage in “holy mischief” and participate in protests against the mistreatment of refugees, environmental degradation, ongoing colonialism, war and empire-building, or any other destructive actions and policies in our world. Or I could underscore how monastics show us that Christianity “works” if we also seriously, attentively, and consistently use what the Church gives us as tools for our transformation and salvation (cultivating the divine virtues of humility, patience, self-control, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and so on).

They (the good ones anyway) are our goal and show us that our own attentiveness to the inner life, even if more piecemeal and sporadic, is not in vain, that Karl Rahner’s remark that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all” is actually a hopeful observation.