We can talk at length about life’s big questions, but above all: we have to live them. As cycling needs to be done, existential questions want to be lived. No better place to learn doing that than Monastic Laboratory JanXVII.
‘Life, what’s it all about? Wat does it mean to be human? An ‘I’, a self what are they?’ Of course: you can have tons of opinions about issues like these. But existential questions only make sense if you learn to listen with an open ear to what your daily life has to say about them. As Franciscan friar Richard Rohr puts it: “we cannot think ourselves into a new way of living, but we can live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”
Anyone who takes life’s big questions seriously, leads a questioning life. Thus slowly reaching the acknowledgement: ‘I don’t know the answer to the most important questions in my life’. After which the only sensible way forward is to build your existence on that recognition. On the apparent ‘mystery’ that carries us. Only then to gradually discover that this, apparently, is our essence. This inner dimension of silence that we experience in our best moments as pure, unconditional love.
Would you like to make such a ‘listening life’ your job? Your work and your life?
Experiment in progress
You can. At the experiment in progress which is Jan XVII.
Our commitment: to live the question what a contemporary contemplative monastic life could also look like.
That much is already clear: different than usual.
For example, we have developed our own practice. Liber . A ‘do-it-yourself’ coaching method that teaches you to ground you sense of self in your becoming a welcoming presence for whatever you think or feel. In the process you discover that life only wants one thing: to love you madly.
Interested?
Read all about it here.
