After he and his fellow monks sang morning prayers in their church nestled in a forest, Brother Luke (pictured with pup) walked back to his residence to be greeted by a different kind of choir.
Lucy and Iso excitedly woofed as they spotted the Orthodox monk, who heads the monastery’s German shepherd breeding program, coming to take them and 10-week-old Pyrena for their morning walks.
For nearly six decades, the monks of New Skete in upstate New York have financially supported their community and deepened their spiritual life by breeding German shepherds and running on-site, weeks-long training programmes for all kinds of canines.
“One of the things that a dog teaches is about God — forgiveness and love and connection, those are attributes of God,” Brother Luke said on a sunny October morning, while Lucy nosed around fallen leaves and Iso kept a vigilant eye on his monk.
“In the rough and tumble of life, we don’t always exhibit God’s love as well as the dog does.”
The New Skete monks’ path from Catholic to Orthodox
The small community — today comprising 10 monks and about the same number of adult German shepherds — was started by Franciscan friars who were seeking a more contemplative yet rooted spiritual structure than the Catholic orders were providing them, said Brother Marc.
One of the founders — and now 82 — he directs the choir at New Skete together with Brother Luke.
They were inspired by the “explosion of wonderfulness” of the Second Vatican Council to return to ancient but simpler and more accessible practices, like those of the first ascetics in the Egyptian desert, from whom the name skete derives, and who also received pilgrims and performed other community services.
The monks officially joined the Orthodox Church in America more than four decades ago; icons of male and female saints from Eastern and Western Christianity adorn the golden walls of the larger of the monastery’s two churches.
By the late 1970s, what had started as a gift Skete monksof one German shepherd, Kyr, to protect and keep company to the little band of brothers on a forested mountainside where New York and Vermont touch, was revolutionizing their monastic life.
“He became part of the emotional life of the community. All these celibate men living together, where’s the heart in all this?” Brother Marc recalled of Kyr and how his presence brought joy and smoothed over any tensions.
When Kyr died, the monks decided to get more dogs, and to breed them to help sustain the monastery, which like most convents around the world needs to pay for its own upkeep.
Then they had to take on training them, so the growing pack could peacefully share the dormitory, refectory and even church with the brothers.
Training for dogs — and humans — starts at the Orthodox monastery
Visitors were impressed by the well-behaved German shepherds and asked the brothers to train their dogs too. One of the early clients turned out to be an editor who encouraged the monks to write about their training philosophy, which was far gentler than the norm at the time.
More than half a dozen widely popular books and a TV series later, the monks today train about 120 dogs a year in the monastery, said Brother Christopher, the prior and director of the training program.
“Training the dogs became for me a means to see more broadly the mystery of God’s presence in creation,” said Brother Christopher, who joined the monastery in 1981.
“Dogs are absolutely guileless, they don’t lie. They mirrored me back to myself in a way that was very helpful to my own self-knowledge.” Read more
- Giovanna Dell’orto is a freelance journalist for Associated Press
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