The fellowship holds one conviction above all others about the Essene way: that it is a way, a thing walked, and not a set of ideas to be admired. The ancient Essenes did not write theology. They wrote rules, hymns, and calendars, the documents of a people doing something every day. A student who has read every page of this site and done nothing is, in the words of one of our Lections, carrying water in a basket.
The practices below are the fellowship's. They are drawn from what the ancient witnesses report of the Essenes, from the scrolls, from the wider tradition, and from our own long trial and error. None of them requires a desert, a community, special clothing, or more than twenty minutes at a time. All of them require doing.
The Six Practices
- The Morning and Evening Watch
- The foundation. Twenty minutes before dawn, facing east, in silence, resolve, and communion. Ten minutes at night, in gratitude, examination, and release. The ancient witnesses say the Essenes prayed toward the sunrise; everything else the fellowship does grows from this root.
- The Still Lamp
- The fellowship's practice of sitting in stillness: the posture, the breath, the lamp, and the long patience by which the mind learns to be quiet and the student learns to pass the veil into the inner kingdom.
- The Fourteen Communions
- A brief contact each morning with one of the seven earthly forces and each evening with one of the seven heavenly forces of the Tree of Life, so that in a week every root and branch is visited and the student is fed.
- The Noon Peace
- Five minutes at midday, one of the seven peaces for each day of the week, in which the student asks where that peace is broken and takes one step toward mending it.
- Fasting and Simplicity
- The simple table, the blessing of food, the weekly fast, and the gradual shedding of what is not needed, after the manner of a people who kept their garments until they fell to pieces.
- Service and Kindness
- The outward turn without which the inward practices curdle: the common table, the care of the sick, the right weight in the market, and the daily kindness to the least creature.
How to Begin
Begin with the Morning Watch alone, and keep it for forty days before adding anything. The fellowship has watched many students begin all six practices in a burst of zeal and abandon all six within a month. The ancient Essenes examined a candidate for a year before admitting him to the common meal and for two more before admitting him to the full life. They knew something about the pace at which a human being changes.
After forty days of the Morning Watch, add the Evening Watch. After forty more, add the Communions, which fit inside the watches. Then the Noon Peace. Then the table. Service will come on its own by then, or the rest has not worked. The whole sequence takes about half a year. The fellowship's Begin Here page lays it out week by week.
A Word on Failure
You will miss mornings. You will fall asleep at the Evening Watch. You will forget the Noon Peace for a week and remember it with a sinking feeling on a Friday. The fellowship has been doing this for decades and we still do all of these things. The Rule of the desert community set a penalty of thirty days for falling asleep in the assembly, and we have sometimes thought that if we kept that penalty none of us would ever have eaten.
The practice is not the unbroken keeping of the hours. The practice is the returning. Every morning missed is followed by a morning kept, and the kept one counts. The Light, as the Lection says, keeps its appointments whether or not we keep ours, and it is not keeping score.