For Continuing Students

You have been walking a while. A year, perhaps, or three, or ten. You keep the hours, mostly. You have read the texts, more than once. And something has gone out of it. The Morning Watch that once felt like standing on a terrace at dawn now feels like sitting in a cold room looking at a candle. The texts that once stopped you on every page now read like texts. You have begun to wonder whether any of it was ever anything, or whether you made it up, and whether you should stop.

This page was written for that morning. The fellowship has had it, every one of us, more than once. Here is what we know.

This Is Not Failure

The first thing to know is that the dryness is not a sign that the practice has stopped working. It is a sign that the first stage of the practice has finished working and the second has begun. The first stage runs on sweetness: the novelty of the hours, the shock of the texts, the sense of having found something. Sweetness is a gift for beginners, as milk is for infants, and it is withdrawn when the student is ready for bread. The withdrawal feels like loss. It is weaning.

The ancient Essenes knew this. Their Rule did not promise the member visions; it promised him a rank, a meal, a third of every night of study, and the company of the holy ones, and it penalized him for falling asleep. Theirs was a practice built for the long middle, not for the honeymoon. The hymns that speak of being raised from the pit were written by people who had spent years in the ordinary dark first.

Keep the Hour Anyway

The second thing is practical. Keep the hour. When you cannot pray, says the Lection, keep the hour anyway; the Light keeps its appointments. Do not try to recover the sweetness. Do not change the practice, add new texts, look for a better method, or decide that what you really need is a different tradition. Those are the mind's attempts to turn dryness back into novelty, and they work for a month and then you are dry again, in a new place, with less to show for it.

Sit in the cold room. Look at the candle. Say the words, or say nothing. The fellowship's experience is that the hour kept in dryness is worth ten kept in sweetness, because in the dryness you learn whom you are keeping it for. If you were keeping it for the feeling, you will find that out, and that is worth knowing. If you were keeping it for the Light, you will find that out too, and the Light will have found it out with you.

The Plateau

Sometimes it is not dryness but flatness. Nothing is wrong, exactly. The hours are kept, the table is simple, the Still Lamp burns. But nothing is changing. The student who grew so much in the first year has grown, as far as she can tell, not at all in the third.

The fellowship's answer is the Lection of the cedar. A cedar is a year in showing a hand's breadth and a thousand years in the mountain. The weed is up in a week and gone in a season. The growth you can see is the growth of weeds; the growth that matters is slow, underground, and invisible to the one growing. Students on the plateau are almost always growing faster than they were in the first year. They cannot see it because they are looking at the leaves.

Ask someone who has known you five years whether you have changed. Then believe them rather than yourself.

Doubt

And sometimes it is doubt: not dryness in the practice but a crack in the belief beneath it. Was there ever an Essene way, or is it a tale told by later writers? Is the soul immortal, or is that a comfort invented by the frightened? Is the Light a person who hears, or a word for the way sunrise feels? The fellowship will not pretend these questions are easy, or that we have settled them. Some of us have doubted for decades and kept the hours anyway.

What we say is this. The ancient Rule admitted, in writing, that the children of light go astray and that the darkness has dominion over even the righteous until the end. A tradition honest enough to write that into its constitution is honest enough to hold your doubt. Bring it to the evening examination. Write it in the notebook. Do not resolve it by force in either direction. The teaching of Knowledge, Wisdom, Understanding says that faith which refuses to know is fear. A faith that refuses to doubt is the same fear. The God of knowledge is not threatened by a question. Keep asking it, and keep the hour.

A Cycle for the Long Middle

For students in the long middle, the fellowship offers a cycle of twelve themes, one for each month, to give the year a shape when the days have lost theirs. Take the month's theme into the Morning Watch as the text, into the Noon Peace as the question, into the Evening Watch as the examination. Repeat the cycle each year. It will not be the same cycle twice.

Your Path

A Letter

One of the keepers wrote this to a student who had written to say she was stopping. We print it with her permission and without her name.

You say the mornings are empty and you no longer know why you rise. I will tell you why. You rise because the sun does, and because for twenty centuries there have been people who rose with it, and because you are one of them now whether you feel it or not. You are not keeping the hour for the feeling. You never were. You were keeping it for the Light, and the Light has not gone anywhere; it has only stopped flattering you. That is a compliment. Children are flattered. You are being treated as a Seeker, which is what you are.

Keep the hour. Light the lamp. Do not expect anything. One morning, and I cannot tell you which, you will blow it out and realize you are not tired of this. You are only tired. Those are different. Sleep more, and keep the hour.

Peace, in all seven.