“Why monasticism? Especially why the desert fathers and mothers? The desert mothers and fathers because, partly, they started it all — not the ascetic impulse itself, which lies within the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (and, indeed, within many of the world’s religions), but the specifically monastic impulse, organized asceticism, as it were (though some monks I know, living and dead, would call 'organized asceticism' an oxymoron). Those Christian monks at the origins — the original margins — were attempting something new and groundbreaking — and breathtaking, living out the Gospel, not for the first or last time, but nakedly, to and at the bone. As Jerome of Jerusalem, a canonized and curmudgeonly monk, famously said, 'Follow, naked, the naked Christ.' “