Questions and Answers

They existed. Three independent ancient writers describe them, two of whom had met them, and the settlement and scrolls by the Dead Sea fit their descriptions closely enough that most scholars accept the connection. What is legendary is much of what has been said about them since: the secret lineages, the hidden masters, the claim that Jesus was trained among them. The fellowship tries to keep the two apart on every page.

We do not know, and the honest answer is that the evidence does not allow anyone to know. The scrolls never mention him. The gospels never mention the Essenes. The parallels in language, practice, and hope are many and real; the differences are also many and real. The fellowship's position is given in The Voice in the Wilderness: the Way and the desert community drank from the same well, and whatever the historical relationship, the student who knows the one understands the other.

Probably not in the modern sense. The scrolls regulate the eating of fish and locusts and describe animal sacrifice in detail, and animal bones were found at the settlement. The tradition that the Essenes, or at least the Nazarene branch, refused flesh comes from later writers. The fellowship teaches the Sanctity of Life as a direction to walk in and says plainly where it comes from.

Some died in the war with Rome. Some returned to the common life of Israel. Some, the fellowship believes, joined the Way and became the Jewish-Christian groups the later church called heretics. And some, we think, simply kept the hours where no one wrote about them. See After Jerusalem.

You have to be willing to find out. The fellowship asks no one to sign a creed, and several of our longest-walking students began as agnostics who were drawn by the practice. The Essene way is a way of knowing, not of assenting; the teaching of Knowledge, Wisdom, Understanding says that faith which refuses to know is fear. Keep the hours, face the Light, and see what you come to know. We will not tell you in advance.

It is a form of the oldest Christianity, the Way of the first followers before there was a word Christian, and it is also older than Christianity, since the Essenes were keeping the hours a century and more before Jesus. The fellowship honors Jesus as the teacher of the Way and reads the gospels, canonical and forgotten, as scripture. We do not hold the later creeds and do not ask anyone to. If this makes us Christian, we are glad. If it does not, we are still here at dawn.

The fellowship is not. We have no clergy, sacraments, buildings, membership, or authority over anyone. The way we teach could be called a religion in the oldest sense of the word, a binding back of the soul to its source, and the Essenes certainly practiced a religion. But a student may walk the way inside another religion, or inside none. Many do.

The fellowship neither teaches nor denies it. The ancient witnesses say the Essenes held the soul immortal; the scrolls speak of eternal life and eternal light; neither speaks of return to the body. Some in the wider tradition hold that the soul returns until its learning is done. The fellowship holds that the Light which sent us is patient, and leaves the mechanism to the Light. See The Soul and Its Journey.

What the scrolls mean when they speak of the Prince of Lights and the spring of light, what the gospel means when it says the light shines in the darkness, what the psalmist means when he says in your light we see light. The fellowship uses the word because the tradition does and because it is a word that does not claim too much. Whether the Light is a person who hears, a principle that orders, or both at once, is one of the questions the Seeker is given to live with. We have found that the practice answers it, slowly, in a form that cannot be handed to another.

Yes. Keep the Morning Watch at the first moment you are alone and awake, and face east anyway. The ancient Essenes rose before the sun because they had no electric light and nothing else to do; we rise before it because it is good, but the Light does not punish a nurse coming off a night shift. Keep the shape of the watch and let the clock be what it must.

Students report, almost universally, that something has changed by the end of the first forty days, though they often cannot say what. The communions produce effects within weeks. The Still Lamp takes months to open and years to deepen. The teaching of the soul and the end of fear takes, in our experience, a decade or more, and cannot be hurried. The fellowship suggests not watching for results. The cedar does not check its own height.

No. Keep the next day. The practice is not the unbroken keeping of the hours; it is the returning. A student who has missed a week and keeps the next morning has done the practice. A student who has missed a week and gives up because the chain is broken has misunderstood what the chain was for.

The Essenes would have said yes, absolutely; the Unity was the whole point. The fellowship says: it helps enormously and it is not strictly necessary, because most of our students have no one near them who walks the way, and they walk it anyway. If you can find one other person to keep the hours with, even by letter, do. If you cannot, the Lection says: seek the brethren of the Light, and if you cannot find them, be one.

Yes, and many do. The watches, the Still Lamp, the communions, the Noon Peace, the simple table, and the service are compatible with any tradition that has room for silence, gratitude, and kindness, which is most of them. The fellowship has students who are practicing Jews, Christians of many kinds, and people of no tradition at all. The way is older than the walls.

A small company of readers and practitioners who have kept the hours together for many years and who maintain this site. The keepers are named on the About page. We are not a church, a school, or a publisher, and we are affiliated with no other body.

Because we decided early that the site would ask nothing of anyone. The Essenes despised riches and held all things in common; we cannot manage the first but we can refuse to make the teaching a product. The site is paid for by the keepers. There is no list to join because there is nothing to sell you later. If the fellowship ever needs to be reached, we will say so; until then, the Light is a better correspondent than we are.

No. The Lections of the Morning Watch were written by members of the fellowship, in the voice of the tradition, for devotional use. We say this on every page where they appear and we will keep saying it. The ancient texts are in the Scriptures room, where we tell you what they are and ask you to read them in good translations.

No. We claim to have read what they left, to have tried what the ancient witnesses say they did, and to have found it good. The desert does not need a lineage. It needs someone willing to go.

Yes, freely, for personal and non-commercial use. Say where it came from if you can. The teaching was handed to us and we hand it on; it was never ours.