Michael CASEY, Coenobium: Reflections on Monastic Community. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2021. 212 pages, $19.95. ISBN 978-0-87907-067-0. Reviewed by Thomas SIMMONS, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota 57069.

Michael Casey’s deep and deliberately cultivated maturity is stamped upon every page of Coenobium. It’s a maturity he has refined over the past sixty years in a Cistercian monastery, having been a monk of Tarrawarra Abbey (near Melbourne) since 1960. He is a prolific author of books and essays on Benedictine rule and Saint Bernard.

Casey writes thoughtfully on monastic communities and the coenobitic life; their challenges, aims, and rewards. His considerations are balanced, practical, critical, and spiritual. He is neither a skeptic nor a romantic. The reader, even one unfamiliar with the inner workings of religious communities, will sense Casey’s authenticity. Casey’s perceptions are sharp; his wit is practiced and understated. His prose is both welcoming and precise. He is a joy to read. He is inviting. And he bids us to consider the inner workings of monasticism for ourselves.

Without any clumsiness, Casey portrays the challenges and rewards of community life on two levels: first, the esoteric religious monastic community and second, the ordinary lay parish experience. The balance is calibrated in the first two sentences of his book: “Those of us who live in a monastic community quickly learn to develop a tolerance for all sorts of odd behavior. We understand that in a community, as in marriage, there is room for a lot of give and take, that we cannot hope that things will be decided always as we wish, and that what is self-evident to us is often unaccountably obscure to others” (7).

Being married is often not unlike being a monk – insofar as having to put up with an odd monk at one’s elbows. Indeed.

Monastic community living obviously presents unique challenges, but those challenges are for the most part magnifications of issues in anyone’s community life in the Christian faith. The aspirations of the nun or the monk are no less the aspirations for the laity: “to grow in the stabilization of personality and spirituality that will ensure that visible perseverance is matched by the corresponding interior attitude” (179). Such are the shared goals of both religious and ordinary Church members.

The path of every Christian is to advance, step by step, toward the goal of detaching from material meaninglessness and becoming fixed upon true spiritual goodness. To love God above all else. To value that which matters. Such are the destinations sought by monks as well as truck drivers, domestic workers, accountants, nurses, and laborers.

The monastery parallels the parish, but in a concentrated form. Within the spiritual churnings of monastery life, the laity might hear an invitation. A call.

Individual spiritual advancements can only be best achieved – paradoxically – within a community of oddballs, eccentrics, and misfits with distractions of their own. (Any community has at least a handful of codgers.) To pursue individual spirituality, one needs a crowd of others. The community represents not a hurdle to spiritual advancement but a catalyst to it, for living harmoniously requires obedience as well as selflessness. And these are the virtues which must be embedded within the individual as he or she pursues a spiritual journey.  
Casey: “[T]he setting aside of self-will is among the most fundamental requirements of any who wish to build a pleasant and functional community. The condemnation of self-will – voluntas propria as distinct from propria voluntas – is commonplace among monastic writers of all centuries” (134). An “overarching negation of self-will” (135) (though not slavery) is demanded from all of us, Casey clarifies.

Benedict of Nursia’s Rule (circa 550 A.D.) can still command 21st century persons toward a union with Christ. Though the Rule was designed to moderate the zeal and rigidity of isolated households of male monks in pre-Medieval Italy, still, Casey – a 21st century Australian – compels us to consider the application of the Rule in our own lives.
Achieving harmony within a community brings us to God’s love. Getting along with other sons and daughters, and loving them, of God is part of His plan for us. It’s neither easy nor unachievable. Yet it’s the path of redemption. To accompany others – even oddballs – on the journey.

Freedom depends upon obedience and conformity, without insisting that the nonconformists in the group curtail their weirdness. “Monastic life, because it aims at a degree of freedom from instinctual domination (traditionally termed apatheia or purity of heart), creates a climate in which love flourishes naturally and without distortion” (183). To desire the welfare of other community members must become instinctual. Natural. Therein lies the path of the monks, the sisters, and us, too. A patch is sketched and illuminated within the pages of this book.

Coenobium: Reflections on Monastic Community is a warm, challenging, and practical book. Brother Casey’s text overflows with love for all communities of men and women, religious and laity alike, as children of God.