A Benedictine monk in the United States recently noted what he called a paradox, the large number of people in society who are interested in monasticism but the small number who join monasteries. Moreover, of those few who join, fewer stay. While he could notice this pattern, he could not offer any solutions.

This paradox is much like what some people find when reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. As one man said to me about that book, “This is great, but then you have to join a church and put up with all the stuff that entails.” He said much more, but it boiled down to not seeing what putting up with the bureaucracy and what to him seemed to be the morally wrong decisions of an institution had to do with his relationship with Christ.

His insights go a long way to addressing the paradox of more people being interested in monasticism and few joining monasteries. People make retreats at monasteries and find comfort and solace in the slower pace and in the liturgies, and it could be retreatants assume that their favorite monastery will always be there as their haven. Becoming a monk or nun, though, well, that is for other people, and for other people’s sons and daughters.

Books and websites about monastic prayer and spirituality abound, and their proliferation indicates how much they help many people grow closer to Christ. Just as a few generations ago people from comfortable homes and hectic jobs sought solitude and stillness by reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, now they read edifying reflections by Michael Casey and Erik Varden.

Those resources point the way to finding refuge from the pressures and noise of modern life. As Pope Benedict XVI said in 2010 in a book-length interview with Peter Seewald, Light of the World, “The Church is not here to place burdens on the shoulders of mankind, and she does not offer some sort of moral system.” He added, “The really crucial thing is that the Church offers Him.” Where the Church would seem to offer Him in a most undiluted form would be in a monastery. However, as one young man said who was packing up to leave his monastery after finding modern monastic life to be a big let-down, “What’s all this have to do with Christ?”

What he meant was his impression that the inertia of the institution outweighed anything related to his seeking a deeper connection to the Lord. From his perspective, his monastery was seeking first everything else and hoping the Kingdom would be included, while his prayer life outside the daily liturgies was up to him, like when to fit in time for physical exercise. He felt frustrated by the emphasis on the monastic community itself and on submerging the individual into the community, when it is obvious that the individual is more important than the community. Otherwise, we would believe in euthanasia.

As can happen with a break between an individual and an institution, the blame for any young monk’s departure gets put on him. “He was here to join us,” one older monk at another monastery said in such a situation, “we’re not here to join him.” Another critique from another monastery: “These young guys are just too rigid.” And from one elderly monk as he looked over statistics confirming that each year his monastery was burying more monks than it received into its novitiate, “What’s wrong with guys out there? Why aren’t they joining us?”

Needless to say, the myopia and projection exemplified by these comments and questions keeps those aging monks from seeing that their myopia and narcissism are as much a part of the problem as their institution’s inertia. If a monastery keeps failing to attract or retain members, it just might be like the man who keeps getting divorced and remarried and wonders what could be wrong with all those women who leave him.

Even thriving monasteries would do well to look in a metaphorical mirror and ask some tough questions. Struggling monasteries in particular need to ask why they have trouble getting and keeping members, and all monasteries need to ask why anyone ought to join them. What is any monastery offering young people that they cannot find anywhere else?

Sixty years ago, the Second Vatican Council said that monasteries needed to get back to basics, back to the ideals set forth in their founding documents. In the case of Benedictines, getting back to the basics of the Holy Rule of Saint Benedict, written in the sixth century, poses some challenges, much of it being culturally obsolete. To take but two examples, the Rule says that monks are to avoid bathing, written as it was during an era when the baths were a place of public nudity and locker room banter. Also, the Rule calls for corporal punishment.

True, some young people are seeking an ideal at the expense of the real. One undergraduate said that he and some friends wanted to go off somewhere and live just like the Irish monks of the seventh century. He was not pleased when I said, “That might be fine for an afternoon, or until you need a dentist.”

All the same, in their dreamy and impractical way he and his friends were saying that current monastic life would not be helping to develop their spiritual lives. To that end, they saw no reason to support what to them seemed like a hidebound geriatric center. Monastic vocations are delicate things: They come from the Holy Spirit but can be wrecked by the human spirit. As another young man said when rejecting contemporary monasticism, “I can pray on my own and go to Mass at my parish, and what they’re calling ‘community life’ I can get from the Elks Club.”

A monastery has recurring expenses, from utilities to food to toilet paper, but for those idealistic young men, how to make ends meet within an institution seems to be a question that interests them not in the least. Meanwhile, their fervor is not a flaw to be fixed, and what comes across to some as rigidity is in fact good character refusing to compromise its integrity. Some monasteries joke that their unofficial motto is “We’ve always done it this way.” Before long, that joke may turn out to be their epitaph.