Advice for evangelicals exploring monastic ideas

I just read this article:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/02/03/the_unexpected_monks/

It talks about how a growing number of evangelicals are looking into some of the principles of monastic life, and similar traditions of the Roman Catholic religious orders, to revitalize their faith and secular lives. I think it's great and I hope this becomes a growing trend. So I need to make some suggestions.

One is that don't put the cart before the horse. The reason for religious orders such as monks and nuns was not for the simplicity, charity and social work, those are wonderful byproducts. The purpose of these communities was, and remains, to have daily Mass, the sacraments, and continual communal and solitary prayer. The "chores" and lifestyle choices are therefore organized AROUND the original priority of full time devotion to prayer to God. So evangelicals who want to design a new model for their secular lives ought to first define the times and amounts of daily prayer and worship service attendance in each day and that becomes the foundation of the rest of your decisions. For examples, monks decided what simple foods to eat around the two problems 1) when to time meals around the devotions and the chores and 2) what food they could obtain. It's not like they wondered "what Jesus would eat" but they ate what they could raise on their farm land that sustained them, or what they could get in donations. So worrying about pudding or jello is not your priority. If you want to be like a monk you plan your prayer life (and of course the hours of your secular jobs and child care responsibilities) and then eat the food that will sustain you in the prayer life and your responsibilities. If cheese doodles before your equivalent of Vespers gives you the satisfaction and calories then go for it. It's the prayer that matters and your simple approach to it.

To help also on some historical perspectives I'm going to post a number of stories of real people who became religious order members. These are taken from "Dictionary of Saints" by John J. Delaney. This is because many evangelicals don't know the human social history of life in the "dark ages," "medieval times," the renaissance," and so forth and so stereotype people who became priests, monks, and nuns. For example many were married people with children who became widowed, or their children died, or they entered into celibate marriages. Often they were orphans. So monastic or nunnery life was often a "second career," to put it in modern terms. If you read stories about real people and their life circumstances it can give you more perspective about choices you make today to thread some aspects of monastic or religious order practices into your individual set of life circumstances.

Hope this helps.