The Monk’s Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity will be published by Oxford University Press on December 20.
Dr. Paula Pryce is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UBC and a convenor (with Dr. Harry Maier, Vancouver School of Theology) of Green College’s current interdisciplinary lecture and discussion series Worlds of Wonder: People Making Places Sacred.
Passage from The Monk’s Cell:
I woke at 3:30am just before the alarm was to go off, grateful because I didn't want to disturb my roommate. Audrey wasn't interested in quite so early a start. There was no time for me to lose, however; I threw the pile of blankets off the guesthouse bed, dressed in layers of wool and down as quietly as I could, then headed out the door to make my way across the mountain valley and down the lonely mile to the monastery for the office of Vigils.
Stepping into the frosty air, I gasped. The stars! At this altitude, in this cold, the stars really did have points, five crisp points just like a child's drawing. Except for the faint starlight, the earth rested silent in deep moonless dark. Periodic flashes from my light helped me keep to the unplowed gravel road. The beams caught the hoary frost, glittering, almost magical, on the sagebrush, grasses, and fence posts.
Entering the austere Trappist chapel, then edging my way to a side bench up against the brick wall, I moved into another variety of silence. It was dark except for a few starry votives at the tabernacle and icons. The monks, in hooded, ivory-coloured habits, sat motionless on wooden benches in the antechapel. Their quiet seemed to blossom through space. A pungent silence, it had a kind of density, not accidental but filled with intention and potency.
Paula Pryce was raised in an inter-religious contemplative household and grew up with a fascination for the wisdom and myth of diverse cultures. Through cultural anthropology and the performing arts, she has explored the practice and concepts of silence, death, time, and space, both close to her home in Canada and in far-flung places like the Andes, the Himalayas, the South Pacific, and the wilds of the metropolitan United States. Always intrigued by the intensity, cohesiveness, and embodied symbolism of formal ritual and ritualized life, Paula has focused her last decade’s research on American Christian monasticism and inter-religious contemplative practice. She is the author of The Monk’s Cell: Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2018) and “Keeping the Lakes’ Way”: Reburial and the Re-creation of a Moral World among an Invisible People (University of Toronto Press, 1999).