How Our Monks Live Out Stability in Daily Life

Across the Australian continent, where vast distances separate neighbour from neighbour, the notion of staying put feels countercultural. In a nation where families regularly relocate from Perth to Brisbane or from Adelaide to Hobart for work, where fly-in fly-out contracts shape mining towns and where renters change suburbs every few years, the vow of stability taken by our monks sounds almost foreign. Yet this very vow has shaped our community at the Mother of the Redeemer Monastery in Plaisance, Louisiana, since its foundation, and it continues to order our days with a quiet rhythm that many Australians quietly long for.

Visitors from Sydney or Melbourne who step into our chapel often remark that the first thing they notice is silence. After a week of commuting on crowded trains or navigating busy weekend markets in Fremantle, they find themselves breathing more slowly within a few minutes. The change is not accidental. Stability is not simply about staying in one building; it is a lifelong commitment to remain rooted in a particular place, with particular brothers, in a particular pattern of prayer.

This rootedness takes concrete form in thousands of small decisions made each day: which stall to feed, which bell to answer, which chore to begin at a fixed hour. While Australian labour law emphasises fair contracts and the right to change employers freely, our monastic economy runs on an older logic. Goods and responsibilities are shared, tools are passed down, and the same plot of soil is worked year after year by successive hands.

Australians who travel through the wine regions of the Barossa or the orchards of Tasmania might recognise a similar instinct. Generations of farming families have stayed with their vineyards through drought and flood, drawing identity from the land itself. Our monks understand that pull, and they give it a name drawn from the Rule of Saint Benedict: stability.

Stability woven into the hours of prayer

The first setting in which our monks practice stability is the choir stalls, where the Divine Office is sung seven times a day. Lauds at dawn, Vespers as the sun softens, Compline after nightfall: these prayers anchor our community to specific moments that do not shift with the seasons of the news cycle or with the latest figures from the Australian Securities Exchange. The same psalms return week after week, year after year, until they become a kind of breathing.

This repetition is not laziness but fidelity. Just as surfers at Bondi read the same tides with renewed attention each morning, our monks approach the psalter with ears tuned to nuances that only long familiarity reveals. A brother who has chanted the same antiphon for thirty years hears things in it that a visitor simply cannot. Stability here means giving the words time to sink below the surface of the mind into the memory of the heart.

Silence is the partner of this stability. Between the offices, a profound quiet settles over the corridors and refectory. We have written elsewhere about the role of silence in our life, and it is enough to say here that silence gives stability its texture. Without it, the routine of prayer would become noise; with it, the hours acquire depth.

Stability rooted in place and soil

Beyond the chapel, stability shows itself in our relationship with the land around Plaisance. The same gardens that feed the community in winter will feed it in summer. The same path from the dormitory to the oratory is worn by sandaled feet in every kind of weather. A guest from the rural townships of western Queensland once told us that the red dust tracked onto our floors reminded him of home, and that recognition is the point.

This rootedness includes the dead. Our cemetery lies within walking distance of the refectory, and the brothers are buried among the lay oblates who shared their lives with us. We have prepared a guide to the cemetery for visitors who wish to walk among the graves and learn the names engraved there. Stability extends beyond the grave, declaring that our belonging to this place does not end with the final breath.

The land itself asks for care. Louisiana weather, with sudden squalls and humid summers, demands constant attention to roofs, gutters and fences. Brothers cycle through the same maintenance tasks in a rhythm that mirrors the liturgical year. Lent brings pruning; Advent brings repairs; the long green months of Ordinary Time bring painting and clearing.

Stability in fraternal relationships

A monastery is, above all, a house of brothers. The vow of stability binds a monk not only to a place but to the specific community living there. The man who makes promises at profession is promising to remain with these particular faces, with their particular habits and accents, through seasons of consolation and difficulty.

This commitment can be tested. Like workers on Australian sites subject to the Fair Work Act, brothers sometimes disagree about how a task should be done or how a resource should be spent. Yet the Rule of Saint Benedict offers tools for reconciliation: private conversation, prayerful listening, and, when necessary, the patient labour of community chapter. Stability does not mean the absence of conflict; it means the refusal to run from it.

Many of our oblates, scattered across places as different as Darwin and Geelong, write to us precisely because they long for this kind of durable friendship. They share meals with the same brothers each month, attend the same annual retreat, and pray the same prayers for the same intentions. The bonds deepen rather than fray with time.

Stability expressed through manual work

Work is the third pillar of our daily observance, alongside prayer and reading. Each brother receives an assignment suited to his gifts, whether in the kitchen, the gardens, the workshop or the guesthouse. Australians who visit often express surprise at how much of our day is given over to manual tasks, but for us this labour is a continuation of the prayer that began at Lauds.

The principle is sometimes called ora et labora, prayer and work. A brother who spends the morning weeding the herb beds and the afternoon arranging the chapel flowers is doing one thing in two modes. His hands remain occupied while his mind descends into the psalms he has just sung. This unity of activity is a quiet expression of stability: the same hands, the same tools, the same patch of earth, day after day.

We also recognise that stability must reach beyond our own walls. The monastery supports local food banks and welcomes school groups who want to understand contemplative life. A new guide for parents explains how families in places as far away as Bunbury or Cairns can introduce their children to the rhythms of the monastery. Stability, properly understood, is generous; it sends roots down in order to bear fruit for others.

Stability as a witness for a mobile world

In a country where the average Australian moves home every seven years and where working holidays send young adults across the Tasman and beyond, stability looks like a provocation. Yet it is a gentle one. We are not asking anyone to imitate our way of life; we are simply showing that another pattern is possible.

Our brothers have discovered, over decades of fidelity to the same place, that stability does not narrow the world. It deepens it. The monk who has never left Plaisance often knows more about its soil, its seasons, its neighbours and its history than a traveller who has crossed many continents. Stability turns the local into the universal, because the same human longings appear in every postcode from Parramatta to Palmerston.

A fascinating comparison can be drawn with the monastic libraries of the Iberian world. A study of the brotherhood's library in Portugal shows how generations of monks preserved and copied manuscripts across centuries precisely because they stayed put. The same principle operates here, on a smaller scale, with our own collection of liturgical books and spiritual commentaries.

If something in this picture draws you, we invite you to come and see. Our guesthouse welcomes men and women who wish to spend a few days in prayer with us, to walk the cemetery paths, to share a meal in silence, and to experience stability as it is lived by our community. You can write to the guestmaster through the contact page on our website, or simply arrange a visit during one of the public liturgies listed in our calendar. The door is open, the table is set, and the bells will ring at the same hour tomorrow as they did yesterday.