Monasteries and Taverns

You may not think there is much in common between Orthodox Monasteries and playing an open mic night at a local tavern. There's not. . .on the surface. But yesterday I had a chance to do both, and so I conducted a little experiment while playing at Mock Crest Tavern in Portland and found out there is a connection.

Let me set the stage: Mock Crest is a neighborhood Tavern frequented mainly by middle-aged locals. . .clean, bright, and friendly people. Rollie Tussing was running the open mic and so he kicked things off with three traditional blues tunes played on his cheapo Kay guitar and a jangly thingy tied to his foot which provided a little do-it-yourself-hi-hat-action. His forte is slide playing, and he ended with a rollicking number that got a few people's attention in the bar. I was up next, with my acoustic guitar. I don't do blues. I do melodic, slow, ballad singer-songwriter stuff, and this is where the experiment occurred. For some reason. . .maybe because I had just downed a beer rather hastily. . .I was completely calm and confident. I knew my music was going to come off as rather low key compared to Rollie, who is a local fave, but I didn't care. I was into what I was doing. So I just did it. During the first song, nobody much paid attention. I didn't care. During the next song, a few people started quieting down and looking my way. I still didn't care. By the third song, Rollie and at least a couple other people were paying close attention to what I was doing. I still didn't care much, but I was pleased that I had connected with a couple people.

So, how does this relate to a Monastery? Well, it struck me that when you go to a Monastery, they don't change things to make the pilgrims more comfortable. That is, they don't cater to us. They just continue their life as they usually do, which is much more sober and without all the exclamation points those of us in the world live with every day. They invite us into their world, and if we are able, we enter a little and benefit from the calm they live in. In a more prosaic way that's what I did last night. I invited the people in the bar into my world, which is reflective, subtle, and somewhat quiet. A few people came in for a few minutes and we connected. It was nice.