It’s a funny question, “Why did you disrobe?” Never mind the double meaning (are we talking return to lay life or take off your clothes?). The question whiffs enough of possible failure or scandal for most to avoid it altogether. When it does get asked, though, it seems to come from a genuine place, somewhere close to the questioner’s own spiritual yearnings and doubts. Anyway, it’s an entry point for conversations about spiritual development, about the purposes monastic life does and doesn’t serve, and about moving beyond that experience and identity of “monk” – towards what I now think of as “life” (or as we called it at the monastery, “the world”). And it’s timely. So this is the question I’m writing on now. I hope you’ll stay tuned for this writing when its ready.

As a preview, I’ll take a shot at describing a shift in attitude tied up for me with the process of disrobing. It’s a shift in social orientation, in how I am with others (and therefore, inescapably, with myself). In retrospect, there was a directionality to how my fellow monastics and I related to each other at the monastery. Or you might call it an ideology, or an agenda. At the monastery we called it “the dharma” – inaccurately, I think, since the dharma is not an ideology. In contrast, I’m drawn in post-monastic life to relationship for its own sake, rather than, “in service to the dharma.”

In other words, there was a kind of instrumentalism to monastic life, of relating to others (and yes, to myself) as means rather than end. For me, this gave life as a monk a strangely (or perhaps, alienatingly) impersonal quality. Now I’m interested mainly in the personal — with others in community, and with myself. Now I subscribe to the dharma that Kant captured with his profound insistence that human beings be treated as ends, never as means.

This has been my takeaway, ultimately, though I’ll have more to share.

An adapted excerpt from Newsletter 1, which went out by email recently to subscribers to this website. Sign up for future mailings here. Be sure to check the opt-in box at the bottom. For now any further newsletters will be occasional, even very occasional (the first one took three years…).