Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants by Dennis Okholm

One of the bright spots in present-day evangelicalism is that the long impoverishment of it’s tradition of spiritual formation seems to be coming to an end. Witness the proliferation of books in the last two decades on the spiritual disciplines. When Richard Foster came out with Celebration of Discipline in the early eighties it was a bit of a radical book. Today, it is a classic of discipleship quoted by everyone else. Dennis Okholm has made an excellent offering in this field with his book which successfully makes the broadest principles of Benedictine spirituality accessible to Protestant laypersons. He makes a good point that St. Benedict actually preceded the existence of the Roman Catholic Church as we know it today and thus the tradition is actually more universally Christian belonging to neither Catholics or Protestants alone. That aside, Okholm invites the reader to consider the practices of listening, poverty, obedience, humility, hospitality, stability, and balance which are practiced to this day by those with a religious vocation. As an example, Okholm points out that the vow of poverty does not mean a monk has no resources. He actually has all he needs to do live his life and do his work. He or she just owns it communally instead of individually. A protestant can practice the same by generously sharing his possessions with others and creatively networking to pool things that are only used occasionally. Hospitality for Benedictines meant taking in and ministering to the needs of a stranger as if he were Christ in disguise. Protestants may not have a retreat house like a monastery does, but they might have a spare bedroom. Just treating the many strangers that cross our path in a given day as if they were Jesus Himself would be a form practicing Benedictine hospitality. The book does a good job explaining how all of these practices are directly connected with scripture and how they enable us to be more available to Christ that we might become more fully transformed. I would recommend this book to be read first and then follow it up with Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart and Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines.