From time to time we receive invitations to speak to groups belonging to the "New Monasticism". That can be difficult because we are never quite sure what (as distinct from whom) we are being asked to address. While I certainly have no quarrel with the ideals or activities of most such groups, I am becoming a bit uncomfortable with the adoption of monastic terminology to describe something that to me is fundamentally not monastic. I wonder whether I am alone in that. Let me try to explain.

In "After Virtue", Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the world needed to recover a sense of moral order "through another and doubtless very different St Benedict". In 1998 Jonathan Wilson published "Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World" and proposed a fourfold interpretation and development of MacIntyre's argument: the "New Monasticism" he envisaged would strive to heal the fragmentation of the world by bringing all under the headship of Christ; it would involve the whole people of God, making no distinction between sacred and secular; it would be community-based; and it would be underpinned by deep theological reflection and commitment. (I hope my summary is fair and accurate; if not, please correct.)

To an old monastic like me, there is actually nothing startlingly new in that. You cannot spend a day in a Benedictine monastery, for example, without realising the sacredness of the ordinary, the theological underpinning of the monastic way of life, the role of community and so on. The New Monasticism's commendable engagement with the poor and focus on hospitality are prominent in the Rule of St Benedict. In our Benedictine associates, oblates and confraters, we also have a wider community of people committed to a monastic quality of living in their daily lives. Here at Hendred, for example, our associates and oblates are drawn from many different sectors of society: male and female, married and unmarried, belonging to various denominations of the Christian Church. As far as I am concerned, anyone who shares our monastic values and promotes them is to be encouraged.

So where's the rub? It's in the very word "monasticism". I know perfectly well that the term "monk" (from the Greek "monachos") has been used, often anachronistically, to describe many different forms of religious life. However, I would ague that monasticism can never forget its core meaning. The monastic movement is in origin a fourth century, Christian phenomenom with connotations of solitariness such as we find in the lives of hermits (the root word for monasticism, "monos", means "alone"). When monks began to live together in community as coenobites, the essential note of solitariness was retained: the monk is single for the Lord.

At the risk of offending my friends in the New Monasticism, I would therefore want to say that to be a monk or nun means a lifelong commitment to remaining single. More than that, it means a lifelong, exclusive attachment to the Lord which has all the particularity of marriage. Nothing and no one can usurp the place of that. Our vows of stability, conversatio morum and obedience are all ordered towards fostering and maintaining that bond. Theologically, it can be expressed in terms of covenant; which is why any infringement of chastity, any straying of the affections, is so grave a betrayal of what we have professed.

Perhaps the time has come to reassert the uniqueness of the old monasticism, to reclaim both the language and the vocation. In our sex-obsessed culture, the solitariness of the monk or nun is indeed a contradiction. To renounce even the goodness and holiness of family life for the sake of the Kingdom is to say with one's whole being that God matters. And that, I think, is the point. We talk about monastic life as being a process of searching for God, of seeking to live in the closest possible union with Him. That demands nothing less than everything.