Unique monastery outside Canon City nurtures the business of God with 'radical' lifestyle

FREMONT COUNTY • Hidden deep in the foothills outside of Cañon City, a steep, rocky terrain and towering evergreens flank a winding dirt road that eventually leads to an indigenous moat, where the Tallahassee Creek flows over the narrow lane.

Once the water is crossed, several log buildings ahead form the Monastery of Our Lady and Saint Laurence, where God is king over 600 acres of pastoral serenity.

The idyllic setting that was once a private hunting getaway provides the needed tranquility for residents and spiritual retreat-seeking visitors to focus on the Creator.

His work abounds in big and small ways: An abandoned bird’s nest lying on the retreat center’s front porch takes its place as art as much as the religious iconography hanging in every room.

The sacred Antiochian Orthodox Christian monastic community in the Western-rite tradition follows the directives of Saint Benedict of Nursia, who became known as the “Father of Western Monasticism” in sixth-century Italy.

Encased in every minute of every day for the community’s seven monks, three of whom are off-site this season, is an intentional practice of serving God.

“These men are offering their lives, praying without ceasing. It’s mankind’s effort to add to God’s natural beauty. That’s what they’re doing in the valley, away from the rat race,” said Stephen Greenlee, a board member of the Benedictine Fellowship of Saint Laurence. The nonprofit organization owns the property and supports the monastery.

While Benedictine monasteries are well-known in the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions, their presence is rare — “exotic” even, Greenlee said — for the Orthodox Christian denomination.

In fact, the Monastery of Our Lady and Saint Laurence is the only one of its kind in the nation. A similar location in Niagara Falls closed in recent years, as did another in Canada.

“Monastics are a natural part of the Christian church — they’ve been around since Christ’s incarnation, his Nativity and birth,” Greenlee said. “These are men and women who have sought out of their own volition a very radical form of life.”

Radical in the sense of the extremes they undertake to know God.

“They’re renouncing their own self-will in favor of trying to follow and serve God’s will, just like Christ,” Greenlee said.

Monks vow to be obedient to their abbot, to live in celibacy and to embrace poverty. They also pledge fidelity to the monastic discipline.

“There’s nothing a monk can say is theirs — my room, my computer, my stuff,” Greenlee said.

Everything belongs to the brotherhood of a form of monastic life called “cenobitic,” which means “living in common.”

“It’s a shared life that’s incredibly radical in our world,” Greenlee said. “There are not a lot of these folks, but they have a calling, and that’s what they do.”

Too often, people on the outside focus on what the men and women who live as monastics give up, said The Right Rev. Theodore Phillips, abbot. For those on the inside, it’s about what they gain.

“To make one’s relationship with God the whole point of your life in a way you cannot do in the world” is a richness that is often misunderstood he said. “Over and over, I hear people say, ‘I wish I had more time.’ It’s not always easy but we get that kind of time, we get the quiet.”

From vision to reality

The Benedictine Fellowship of Saint Laurence bought the property in 2001 as an outgrowth of St. Mark’s Orthodox Church near Washington Park in Denver.

“We had a priest who had this inspiration that we could have a retreat place in the mountains. A beautiful place that, God willing, would turn into a monastery,” said Greenlee, a parishioner of St. Mark’s and a real estate agent in Fort Collins.

Over the years, the vision has come to fruition.

The property had one large lodge on the site, where the church began offering retreats 22 years ago. The Benedictine Fellowship constructed a chapel, or oratory, in 2009, where monks offer praise and thanks to God during church services.

The monastery opened formally a decade ago, and the community was granted canonical status as a monastery in 2015, under the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.

While not easily understood by secular society, the work of the monastery remains relevant and important today, Greenlee said. In addition to providing retreats, the monks produce and sell beard balm, sell burial plots for their on-site cemetery, offer a mausoleum and also provide a pet cemetery for the public. Three raised tombs of clergy rest outside the chapel building.

One of the miraculous outcomes is that the fruits of the monks’ labor do not remain siloed, Greenlee said, but rather have “a very positive impact on even the non-Christian community around it.”

“Monasteries are a wonderful, powerful thing,” he said. “A thriving monastery is a reflection of a healthy Christian community around it.”

Among their customs, the monks practice silence for more awake hours than not, in the morning, at the main mid-day meal and again at night. The latter is called “the Great Silence” because it lasts into the middle of the following day. That means no talking unless there’s an emergency, Phillips said.

“While talking, in and of itself good and useful, it is also a way of evading self-awareness,” he said.

He cites the biblical psalmist’s edict, “Be still and know that I am God.” The verse references God as the source of refuge and strength, no matter what’s happening in one’s life.

The monks also are steadfastly faithful to attending six to seven worship services daily. The services vary in length, from 12 minutes to an hour. Most are held in the campus’ Orthodox-style chapel, engaging in traditional prayers, chanting, Scriptural lessons and hymns.

In a place where clocks sometimes stop and the sun is the timekeeper, a digital bell peals outdoors to alert anyone on campus that prayer is at hand.

The first service begins at the bleary-eyed hour of 4:30 a.m., the final is at 6:45 p.m.

The Western Orthodox style of worship practiced at the monastery differs from the Eastern Orthodox tradition in that it is slower paced and can use different readings, Phillips said.

The lifestyle is not for everyone, he acknowledges.

The location’s quietude “enriches the spiritual practice, allowing less distraction, creating an atmosphere conducive to prayer and reflection,” Phillips said.

He recalls an important biblical scene when God speaks to Elijah in front of a cave on Mount Sinai. The wind, an earthquake and a fire whiz by, but God was not to be found in those elements of nature.

Rather, God addresses Elijah in a low whisper, “a still small voice” that remained in the aftermath of nature’s wrath, reassuring the Hebrew prophet that he is not alone.

No need for closets

The monks live in “cells” — monastics being the first to coin the term, which means “a small part of the whole,” Phillips said. The tight, sparse sleeping quarters contain a bed, a dresser, a hanging rack for clothes, a table to place a Bible and a connected bathroom.

Cells don’t have closets, Phillips points out.

Why would you, he said, when you wear the same thing every day — a long, loose-fitting and hooded robe, also called a habit.

Phillips, a former Roman Catholic monk and deacon and religious brother in the Episcopal Church, converted to the Orthodox Church in 2002. He arrived at the monastery in 2012, the year before it became a full-fledged operation.

“He kind of fell at our doorstep,” Greenlee said.

Phillips became one of the co-founding leaders of the monastery.

A small log cabin built in 2013 and previously occupied by a Benedictine Orthodox nun who has since died has become Phillips’ home.

He relaxes in a chair in the comfortable, simple abode and speaks thoughtfully, in a slow cadence that presses the listener into patience.

“In the Christian tradition, even before Christianity became legal under Constantine, there’s been a segment that were drawn to withdrawing apart from society, those who wanted to pursue a life of prayer and take seriously the exhortation from St. Paul to ‘pray without ceasing.’”

The monks have chores, cleaning the guest house, tending a vegetable garden and fruit trees during the growing season and chopping a copious amount of wood for fuel to heat the buildings when it’s cold.

Solar panels were added on site two years ago.

“Before that we were completely off the grid, but the generator was not enough,” Philipps said.

The monks observe fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Contrary to what some might think, monastic life is not dying, said Father Joseph-Marie, a former senior executive for a retail corporation who has been a monk at the monastery for five years and a monastic for 15 years.

“In just a couple of places, in Oklahoma, California and Missouri, little communities were refounded on the original principles of their monastic calling, and they were dismissed and made fun of,” he said. “But they held on, and through prayer and very hard work and dedication and not listening to the critics, and now those communities are exploding. They can’t build buildings fast enough.”

Most communities require medical and psychological evaluations, Joseph-Marie said.

“So, these are not the wacky and edgy, although we are kind of wacky and edgy,” he said. “But this is not crazy people that would have no other choice in life; it’s a very deliberate choice that people are making. And making it pretty much for the same reason that I did: they’re looking around and saying to themselves, this, this is not right. Things are messed up.”

Brother Arsenius, 26, arrived at the Monastery of Our Lady and Brother Laurence two months ago, after being raised in Tennessee as a Southern Baptist. He decided in college that he wanted to be a monk.

“It’s really the only vocation I’ve had that I actively wanted to do” he said. “There’s a really solid emphasis on stillness and silence and peace and a regular order of the day in the cycle of prayer and community — things I’ve come to learn are very much in the spirit of St. Benedict and that really touched me. The ideal of spirit and a familial sense.”

Five months into his standing as a novice, Brother Edmund, 28, who grew up as a charismatic Baptist in Washington, became Anglican at a Christian college and dabbled in Catholicism before converting to Western Orthodoxy after walking into an Antiochian church and feeling a sense of holiness sweep over him.

“I felt peace, joy and love for all humanity, which I later found out was a visitation of divine grace,” he said.

After meeting Orthodox Benedictine monks, “My Baptist worldview was shattered by the idea that you could live the gospel radically, and I thought, ‘This is what I want.’”

That started a 10-year quest to find a monastery where he felt he would fit. He’s now in his third monastic trial and said it feels right.

“I’ve had a couple of stints back in the world to try that out again,” he said. “And every time I do that I just find it’s like living in a desert, and there’s very little water around for my soul.”

Aresenius said he was drawn to the new doors that the monastery opened — “a sense of purpose and heart and place and family.”

Said Edmund: “Once God’s called you to this particular life and it gets in your bones and sinks deep into your marrow, no matter what you do, it’s going to be there and you’re not going to be happy and experience true joy until you’re back in the monastery where you’re supposed to be.

“It’s the oasis.”

People from around the nation come to stay at the monastery’s guest house, Phillips said, in search of spiritual development and growth, in a place where the nearest neighbor is 2 miles away and the troubles of daily life melt into the background.

The community’s subtle yet deep-seated influence on society becomes apparent when a flock of monks in their traditional robes shop at stores in Canon City and other nearby communities, Greenlee said. People are known to stare, gawk and titter but also ask questions, such as who are they and where do they live.

“People are curious; they want to talk to them and know what they’re doing,” Greenlee said.

“I view it as our feeble efforts to help this little monastery have legs and continue on and be successful. Hopefully, it’s going to be a little jewel that’s a help to future generations of Christians and non-Christians.”

Contact the writer: 719-476-1656.