The Practices
What we actually do.
Two things first. You don’t have to do any of this to come — come and see, and decide nothing. What follows is what the men who stay actually take on. And none of it is aimed at making you a monk. These are practices for men with jobs (or not) and families (or not) who want to get into the bones and marrow of living.
The weekly evening
We meet in the evening, in a room, in person. Phones off.
- Silence. We sit in silence together. Not long, at first. Most men find it harder than they expected, and that’s the point — you can’t sit with a man in the worst week of his life if you can’t sit still with yourself.
- Discussion. Short. About one thing, and always something you can actually do — how to listen without building your reply, how to walk into a room without a plan, how to leave one without carrying it home all week. There’s usually a reading, a page or two, and it’s never required.
- Practice. Then we practice it, badly, on each other. This is the surprise, and it’s uncomfortable at first. You don’t learn to be with people by discussing it. You do it with somebody who tells you afterward what you actually did.
- Listening. One question. You speak from your own life or you pass — nobody gives advice, nobody fixes anybody, nobody compares. What’s said in the room stays in the room. That isn’t a nicety. The whole thing collapses without it.
Then we’re done. There’s food and drink, and men who want to stay a while stay a while. Some of us may pray together, or sit longer — but nothing is ever required or pushed.
That’s roughly the shape. It won’t change much, on purpose. The sameness does more work than the content.
The rest of the week
The evening is for looking at this — your daily life. The quality of your life is the quality of your days.
None of it is asked of a visitor. It’s what men who have thrown in with each other do, and it’s where most of the change actually comes from.
- Silence. You sit in silence or pray every day. A short stretch, same time, same place. Small enough that you’ll actually do it — five minutes to start. We’ll teach you if this is new. Either way: you sit down, you stay put, you stop managing yourself for a few minutes.
- Reflection. You look back at the end of the day. What happened, where you were awake, where you turned away, what you owe somebody tomorrow. The Jesuits call it the examen. It’ll work you in ways you can’t predict.
- The precepts. The plain floor both traditions keep, and what the looking back is measured against: not lying, not taking what isn’t yours, not using people, not numbing your life away, not running another man down. Nobody keeps them perfectly. You notice where you didn’t, say so, and turn back around.
- A partner. Not a friend you picked — a man you get assigned, who gets rotated, and who you text every day whether you did the work or not. The text is the point, not the report. We show up for one another.
- One true thing. You write to the group once a week. Three sentences. Not a status update — one true thing about the week’s work.
How it moves
Roughly three stages, over a few months. What they build in a man is a particular kind of character.
First, the ground. Before you can be with anybody, you have to be somewhere. Staying put. Getting honest about what’s broken — naming it, not fixing it yet. Learning to pay attention, which is a moral skill and not a productivity one, and which our phones are built to take from us.
Second, the encounter — what happens between two people. How the urge to fix is mostly self-protection. What care really looks like, and what it takes to keep caring, even about those you don’t know. The counterfeits — pity wearing the face of compassion, being needed wearing the face of love — sometimes hard to tell apart. How to hold conflict, how to drop the reactivity, how to be generous in spirit.
Third, turning outward. In twos, always. Hospice, recovery, the jail, the parish, the homeless — helping whoever’s been at it for years. This happens in stages, over time, with support from the organizations already doing this work. We’re not pretending twelve weeks makes us qualified to hold a family through death. We start where we are, and we look at where this place needs us.
Somewhere in there, before anybody goes out alone, we do a day together. All of us, out where suffering already is, with no role and nothing to hand out and no way to be useful. That day teaches. It’ll cost. And it’ll change us for the better.
The work is the practice
People miss this. The labor isn’t the reward for the practice. It’s one of the practices. Zen calls work practice samu — the cooking, the sweeping, the woodpile, done with the same attention as sitting. The Church has the same list under a different name: feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, bury the dead.
Read that list again. It’s the same one on the front page. We didn’t invent it. It’s been the assignment for two thousand years, and it’s mostly gone unclaimed around here.
So when we split wood for a widow in February, that isn’t charity bolted onto a spiritual practice. It is the practice. It forms a man the way sitting does — differently, and just as surely.
After that
For men who want it, there’s more: a longer commitment, a written rule of life, real obligation, and the work of holding the room for the men who come next. We’ll build it as we go. You don’t have to know now whether you want any of it.
We’re still figuring out the details — the night, the room, how long each stretch runs. The shape above is roughly right, and we’ll settle the rest together.
What a first visit asks of you
Show up. Sit for a while, badly, like everyone did at first. Say something true or say nothing.
Go home and decide.
You don’t have to believe anything, and nobody will ask you to.
And you are always welcome back. Always.