It is still dark when the priory bell announces the day. In the small, spare chapel built of fieldstone and used wooden beams, 14 brothers gather for their vigil prayer. They arrive singly, dressed in work clothes and blue Oriental-style overblouses. In the choir space, illuminated by a single candle, they wait in quiet meditation until all are present. With them on this weekend morning are some 40 visitors.
"Calm is the night, O Lord, as we wait for you," begin the seated brothers of Vermont's Weston Priory, singing one of the simple contemporary hymns written by their own Brother Gregory. "All the stars are laughing at our wonder." They continue antiphonally, "Christ yesterday and today/ The beginning and the end/ The alpha and the omega." And then they sing, "Glorify the Lord with me/ Let us praise his name/ Those whose spirit is crushed/ He will save." After John Denver's recording of Annie's Song is played, two brothers strum a simple accompaniment on guitars as monks sing, "When we come to the table of life/ We keep faith with the risen Christ/ Giving in freedom, love, as did Jesus his life."
Now they sit in one of the frequent periods of meditation that separate portions of prayer. They end in song: "We go on waiting/ Knowing you have come." In 30 minutes dawn has waxed to daylight through the windows above their heads.
For centuries monks followed unchanging, intricate patterns of prayer and work while withdrawing from the world to try to discern God in their own lives. Seeking the same goal, the brothers of Weston have developed new forms of prayer and work that draw them into the outside world in ways uncharacteristic of contemplative monks. Small and simple, a fledgling beside centuries-old Benedictine monasteries, Weston Priory has become a beacon of new directions in monasticism since its founding in 1953 by German-born Abbot Leo Rudloff. At the time, Rudloff, who also headed the Benedictine Abbey of the Dormition in Jerusalem, had modest hopes for Weston. But it proved more robust than he had imagined. He says now, "It's like a little plant. What comes out you have no control over; it grows according to its own laws and potentiality."
From the start, Weston was not a traditional monastery. With the encouragement of the Benedictine abbot primate in Rome, the brothers updated rituals while keeping faithful to the spirit of Benedictine monasticism. When several monks failed to appear for matins at 4 a.m., for example, the brothers examined the need to make the prayer more their own. What had been an hour and a half of psalm singing and Scripture reading is now a third as long and much more contemporary. Among the readings are excerpts from modern theologians like Edward Schillebeeckx and Henri Nouwen and from Third World proponents of "liberation theology," who consider social and economic activism central to the church's mission.