I'm sitting here, listening to Gregorian Chant. I've just censed my room and sprinkled holy water.

These are things that would have been completely counter-intuitive to me for most of my life, but I do them now and it feels so right. It's so strange!

Lately, I've been having a growing disturbance within me though. I haven't really talked about it anywhere. I've actually been feeling it for a while now, but it's growing stronger.

I feel a growing need to become a renunciate. I'm still attached to a few things but I've found lately that breaking attachments has become easier; I've been selling off things I don't need any more and I find I don't really miss them. I've been more focused and disciplined in my meditation on the meaning of things from a Gnostic perspective. I feel wrong and unnatural being asked to find a career and pursue status when all I want is to spend the rest of my present earthly life in contemplation.

And yet, I don't know where to start. The obvious answer, joining an abbey, would be tricky for a number of reasons (my Gnostic theology and my gender presentation would be two big things). One could argue that gender presentation is just another attachment I need to let go of but for what it's worth, it was in no small part female hormones that made me mentally stable enough to start considering a more ascetic life over a life of militancy and paranoia in the first place. As for the theology, that is a matter of deep and sincere conviction and is not negotiable to anything except the truth itself.

So without an abbey to fall back on, where do I go? There was a time when mendicants were given more generous charity; nowadays, as a mendicant I'd no doubt be subject to accusations of laziness and cynical insinuations that I was simply using my ascetic status to shirk getting a job like everyone else. We really do live in a sick age, when compulsory participation in the marketplace is a pre-requisite to gaining the resources needed to live.

I think of Matthew 6:28-30 often these days: And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

It sounds so easy: just jump into renunciation and don't worry about details like where you'll sleep, what you'll eat, and what to wear. And yet it is one of the most vexingly difficult things for a person who is already struggling to make ends meet to really take to heart.

Then I think of some of the ascetics in history who lived in abject, extreme privation and I'm put to shame that I can't make that commitment, that I can't let go of it all and eat dirt like the ascetics who ask the least of life tend to do.

And yet, it seems if you are unprepared to either turn on your beliefs or eat dirt, you can't become a true ascetic with no interest in buying, selling, jockeying for power and prestige, and all these things I no longer have any interest in. All you can manage is compromise, that invariably shepherds you back into this whole infernal business of compulsory participation in a market.

With that in mind, I may well have to make my spiritual goal to prepare myself to eat dirt; such is the way of the world.