The monks next door
My family is in the TV room, enjoying a good Thanksgiving food coma; I’m here in the computer room, fighting the food coma to stay in practice with my writing. Lousy deal for me, eh? Well, just a quick word on the Buddhist monastery down the street.
That it exists at all is the most remarkable part. This is down the street from my parents’ house, planted firmly in the corn belt. (My folks rent out 15 of their 20 acres to a corn and soybean farmer.) It’s not territory wherein one would expect to find enough Buddhists to support a monastery. But there it stands, with a big, gold-painted arch at the driveway, lettered in a weird, pseudo-Burmese font. I appreciate that archway sign, because it’s the only indication of anything unusual at all. Otherwise, the property is an unassuming little farm: a few barns, a grain silo, a yellow house near the front, a second-hand car in the drive.
And isn’t that what a monastery is supposed to be? A quiet spot removed from the world? And, to be removed from the world, it needs to make a fair stab at self-sufficiency, so a farm is almost axiomatic. It scarcely differs from the medieval abbeys, apart from the relative sophistication of the rest of the world. Once, monasteries were islands of literacy and systematic industry in the remains of a disintegrating civilization. Now, they’re hard-pressed to find anywhere distant from the relentless expansion of civilization. Already, my parents complain of the sprawl of subdivisions rolling out of Rockford. How much more, then, must the monks feel the pinch?