The Rule of the Thelemites

Br. Monday has leveled up from gyrovague to sarabaite

Good news everyone! We’ve found Br. Monday.

But here’s the thing: he’s found a new community and isn’t coming back to the desert with the abbas.

You see, while we were looking for him, he came across a new kind of monastic community, the Abbey of Theleme. Some say it was built by the giant Gargantua, and that its monks and nuns live more like lords and ladies going out hunting and returning to cells cleaned by maids. Let’s have a look at the monastic “rule” of Theleme:

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,

Do What Thou Wilt

And because in all other monasteries and nunneries all is compassed, limited, and regulated by hours, it was decreed that in this new structure there should be neither clock nor dial, but that according to the opportunities and incident occasions all their hours should be disposed of; for, said Gargantua, the greatest loss of time that I know is to count the hours. What good comes of it? Nor can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment and discretion.

– From Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais

So basically, Br. Monday is the Lucille Bluth of monks. There’s a monastery just for him and a prison just for her.

Br. Monday doesn’t know how to wink either, but he does a great chicken dance.