The Anglican monks of St. Gregory's Abbey

Down a country road in Fabius Township, on a farm outside Three Rivers, a community of men gets up in the dark to sing. They are Benedictine monks — the bells, the chant, the seven services a day under the 1,500-year-old Rule of St. Benedict — and the surprising part is the church they belong to. St. Gregory’s is Episcopal.

Benedictine monasticism is something most people file under “Catholic,” so an Anglican abbey on a Michigan farm takes a second to absorb. The thread runs back to England. In the 1930s a couple of American Episcopalians traveled to Nashdom Abbey in Buckinghamshire to be trained by Anglican Benedictines there, came home professed as monks, and started a small community. It began in Valparaiso, Indiana, in 1939, then moved to the land near Three Rivers in 1946, and grew. For three decades it stayed tethered to its English mother house before standing on its own — St. Gregory’s became an independent abbey in 1969, with its prior elected the first abbot.

The rhythm hasn’t changed much since. The monks gather in the church roughly seven times a day for the office and the Eucharist; the rest is work, study, and silence, in that old Benedictine balance of prayer and labor. They take guests, too — people come to sit inside the quiet for a few days.

It’s an easy place to drive past without knowing what it is: a barn, a chapel, some fields. Behind the plain front is one of the few houses in the whole Anglican world where men have kept the full monastic day, hour by hour, for the better part of a century.