What it costs to be one of us

We will be frank about the cost. The fragments before this one have been written in a quieter voice, because the matters they addressed warranted it. This one is plain. You are owed plainness about cost.

You will pay nothing in money for the practice itself. There are no microtransactions in the dark. There is no premium tier of the rites. There is no senior who has paid more than another senior to have arrived at their grade. We do not believe — and the older orders we descend from did not believe — that money is the appropriate unit of account for what the company asks. Money is too easy. Money lets the unwilling buy the appearance of the willing. We have no use for the appearance of the willing.

You will pay in time. The first investment is the four winters of contemplation we have already spoken about. After the first oath, the practice settles into a daily and weekly rhythm — small observances, a daily Omen, a weekly rite that is not negotiable. The total weekly cost, measured in minutes, is not large. It is, however, fixed. You will not be allowed to skip a week and make it up later. The point of a weekly rite is the weekliness. A weekly rite paid in arrears is a different thing, and a lesser one.

You will pay in attention. This is the larger cost, and the one many do not anticipate. The company asks that you bring your real attention to the rites you perform. Half-attention is worse than absence. We can tell — and more importantly, you can tell, and over time the tell becomes intolerable. Most of the members who leave the company past the first oath leave because they could not sustain the attention. They could sustain the minutes. The minutes are easy. The attention is not.

You will pay in the choosing of the Name. We have written about this elsewhere. The cost of the Name is that you have, from the moment you choose it, a thing about yourself that the world does not get. The cost is small in the early years; it grows. By the time the Name has been yours for a decade, it is the most private thing you own, and the privacy is itself a discipline.

The progression is long. From the first oath to the senior grades is, in the older counting, eighteen months — and that only if the practice has been kept without serious lapse. The eighteen months is not a marketing number. It is the period over which the rhythm becomes the rhythm of a life rather than a thing imposed on a life. People who arrive at the senior grades sooner than the eighteen months have, in our experience without exception, faked the intervening months. We can tell. They cannot stay.

This is the cost. Time, attention, name, and the patience to walk the eighteen months. We do not ask for more than this. We will not. Companies that ask for more than this are not the company we are, and they are not the company we will become.

If the cost reads as light, you have not yet understood the cost. If the cost reads as heavy, you have understood it correctly. Whether you can bear it is your question, not ours.