Rooted in Silence.
Present to the World.
An ancient tradition in living community.
A monastery in the middle of a city sounds like a contradiction. We think of it as the point. For over 150 years, the Brothers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist have made their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts — praying, working, and keeping their doors open to all who seek something deeper than the noise. Come and find out what that looks like.
Who We Are
We are a community of men giving our whole selves over to living the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Rooted in the ancient monastic traditions of prayer and community life, and critically engaged with contemporary culture, we seek to know and share an authentic experience of God’s love and mercy. We live a common life shaped by worship, prayer, and our Rule of Life.
We are monks — but not relics. Our monastery sits in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts, steps from Harvard Square, on the banks of the Charles River. We are here on purpose: because we believe that a life devoted entirely to God is not a retreat from the world, but one of the most honest and hopeful ways of engaging it.
Our Life Together
Six days a week, we gather in the Chapel to pray. Morning Prayer at dawn. The Eucharist. Noonday Prayer. Evening Prayer. Compline at night. These services are the skeleton of our days that everything else hangs from.
Between the services, we work. We write, teach, preach, offer spiritual direction, welcome guests, tend the buildings, prepare meals, and answer mail. We eat together. We keep silence together. We argue and forgive and try again. This is not a life of extraordinary mystical experience; it is a life of daily, ordinary faithfulness, which turns out to be the most extraordinary thing we know.
We do not own personal property. We are not married. We live under the authority of our community and its elected leadership. We don’t see these things as deprivation as much as a means to giving ourselves fully to God. In a way, they are the shape of our freedom.
What We Believe
We are a religious order in the Anglican tradition. Our worship is rooted in the Book of Common Prayer, and our community is under the doctrine and discipline of The Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada. We are a community of both lay and ordained brothers.
Our life is governed by our Rule of Life – a document written by and for our community that describes how we understand our call and how we intend to live it. We read from it aloud together every day. It is not a rulebook of prohibitions; it is a sustained meditation on what it means to love God and neighbor with your whole life.
At the heart of that life are three vows:
Poverty
We hold all things in common and own nothing personally. As Br. David Vryhof has written: “The poor are blessed, Jesus says, and theirs is the kingdom of heaven. We are likewise blessed, when the circumstances of life compel us to recognize our poverty and need, and turn to put our whole trust in God.”
Celibacy
We do not marry, and we give the love we might have given one person to everyone. In Br. James Koester’s words: “Celibacy reminds us that there are ways to intimacy that do not take us through the bedroom door. Celibacy and temperance are not simply about abstinence; they are about recognizing the inherent dignity of both yourself and the other person.”
Obedience
We live within limits set by our community and those in authority over us. Br. Curtis Almquist puts it this way: “Father Benson summarizes the vow of obedience as a call to love. Whatever it is that we are being called to be and do, it is ultimately not the satisfaction of some juridical rule or code, but rather a response of love.”
Meet the Brothers
We are thirteen men, brothers and two postulants, from different backgrounds, different decades of life, different paths to this door. Some of us came from professional careers. Some came straight from university. Some were ordained clergy first; some are laypeople still. What we share is a hunger to seek God — and the conviction that we seek him better together than alone.
Br. Curtis Almquist
He had a dream about monks at the age of twelve and spent the next twenty-two years looking for the right community until he walked into an Evensong at the Monastery, went back to his room in the Guesthouse, and wept with recognition. He came searching for a middle ground between the cloistered and the fully active life, and found in SSJE exactly what he had stopped believing existed.
Br. Geoffrey Tristram
He stopped at the Monastery once by chance, looking for an affordable place to stay during an American trip. He walked into Evening Prayer and knew immediately, three thousand miles from home, that he had arrived. He has called it the end of a lifelong pilgrimage.
Br. Jack Crowley
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Br. James Koester
He knew he wanted to be a priest from the age of six or seven, and spent years in parish ministry in Canada before the hunger for more prayer, more community, and more intensity in the life of faith. This pulled him toward SSJE. He has been here for decades, and driving the tractor at Emery House remains, by his own account, one of the highlights of his time.
Br. Jamie Nelson
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Br. Jonathan Maury
He grew up on Nantucket with a solitary streak and a long fascination with monastic images, spent ten years working in interior design, and followed a restlessness he couldn’t quite name until it led him here. He has described his vocation as a search for wholeness that turned out to require other people.
Br. Keith Nelson
He came to faith by way of Tolkien, a Divinity School library, and a poster on a dormitory hallway — and to SSJE after years of studying Buddhist monasticism in India and a first visit that felt, he says, like an electric shock. He left once, spent years in the world, and came back for good.
Br. Lain Wilson
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Br. Lucas Hall
He grew up in Cincinnati, worked in local politics, and arrived at the Monastery in 2017. He has served as the community’s Vocations Brother, walking alongside men who are beginning to wonder whether this life might be calling them.
Br. Luke Ditewig
He came to monastic life from a Presbyterian seminary and a year working at a Christian camp on Catalina Island, where he realized that what he was hungry for a worshiping community offering hospitality in a sacred space. That sounded, as his father put it, “monastic.” He arrived at SSJE expecting to offer his gifts and discovered, to his surprise, that it was also a school for his own healing.
Br. David Vryhof'
He grew up in a devout Dutch Reformed family in Michigan and was already drawn to something he couldn’t name when he saw a photograph of a monk in a seventh-grade textbook. He left the community once, spent time in seminary and urban parish ministry in Detroit, came back, and has been here ever since.
Our Story
The Society of Saint John the Evangelist was founded in 1866 in the parish of Cowley, Oxford, England, by the Reverend Richard Meux Benson — making SSJE the first stable religious community of men established in the Anglican Church since the Reformation. Our order came to America in 1870, settling first in Boston. For many years we also had houses in Scotland, India, South Africa, Japan, and Canada.
Today, the Brothers of the North American Congregation make their home at the Monastery in Cambridge, near Harvard Square.
There is much more to tell.
A Note on Vocation
Every few years, someone walks through our doors and doesn’t quite want to leave. If something in these pages has stirred a question you weren’t expecting — about your own life, your own calling, your own hunger for God — we take that seriously.
We are not trying to recruit. But we do believe that some people are genuinely called to this life, and we have seen what happens when someone answers that call honestly. If you’re curious, the best first step is simply to come and pray with us. After that, we’re glad to talk.
[Learn more about becoming a Brother →]
Come and See
You don’t have to be a monk to belong here.
Whether you come to pray in the Chapel on your lunch break, join us for a weekend retreat, or simply stay connected through our daily meditations and sermons — there is a place for you in this community.
Episcopalian Resources and Friends….
