The four winters before the first oath

We ask those who come to us to wait. Not days, and not weeks, but seasons — four winters, by the older counting, before the first oath is offered. We ask this because the orders that came before ours asked it, and they asked it because they had learned, slowly and at cost, what the early oath produces. It produces defections. It produces the convert who is on fire one summer and absent the next. It produces a body of half-people who have spoken what they had not yet understood, and who later resent the speaking.

We are not interested in any of these. We are interested only in those who, after four winters of contemplation, are willing to say a single sentence and mean it. The sentence is short. The years are not.

Eighteen winters and older — this is the line we draw before the contemplative period even begins. It is not arbitrary, and it is not a regulatory shrug. It is what we have learned about the human animal: that the years between eighteen and a slightly later age are the years in which the self learns the difference between conviction and enthusiasm. We do not want enthusiasts. Enthusiasts burn briefly. We are not a fire. We are a long, slow burning that someone tends through a winter.

The four-winter discipline is not a probation. It is not a vetting. We are not appraising you. The point of the four winters is yours, not ours: it is the period during which you discover whether the rhythm of our life is the rhythm of yours. You may decide it is not. We will not be wounded by this. The rhythm of one company is not the rhythm of all companies. There are other rooms, and other doors, and other names you might be called by. We are not the only one.

But for those who do return at the end of the fourth winter, we have an oath ready. It is not theatre. It is not signed in anything that does not wash off. It is, in its plainest form, a statement of an intention, said aloud in a room where others are present, and recorded in the book that has been the book of this company for longer than any of us has been alive.

Patience is the first virtue because it cannot be faked. You can fake bravery — for an evening. You can fake devotion — for a fortnight. You cannot fake four winters. The years either pass or they do not. The contemplation either deepens or it ends. We can tell.

If you are reading this and the suggestion of four years strikes you as absurd — as obstructive, as gatekeeping, as a sign of an order that is not serious about welcoming — we say with all gentleness: the suggestion is doing its work. It is meant to strike you that way. The you who arrives at the end of four winters will not be the you that struck. That is the point.

Wait.