Between the Thresholds: A Benedictine Reflection on the Distinctive Diaconate

Br. Margaret-Thomas is a Benedictine monk discerning a call to the distinctive diaconate. Their work focuses on liturgy, inclusion, and life at the Church’s thresholds.

There’s a line I return to often — somewhere between memory and prayer — that I heard from a street preacher in Fort William: “The Church is most itself when it has one foot in the sanctuary and one in the street.”

That phrase has clung to me through all my movements — across denominations, cities, and callings — and it’s taken on particular resonance lately as I continue discerning what it means to be both a Benedictine and someone drawn to the distinctive diaconate. Because those two vocations, though rarely spoken of together, seem to me to be woven from the same cloth. Both are threshold vocations — lives lived on the edge of something holy, with hands stretched in two directions: toward God, and toward the world God so loves.

In the Rule of St Benedict, there’s a rhythm that shapes everything: ora et labora — prayer and work, held in harmony. This rhythm is not about productivity or performance. It’s about attentiveness. About anchoring yourself in a pattern of life that leaves room to listen — not only to God, but to neighbour, to creation, to the cries that go unheard at the edge of society.

And isn’t that the deacon’s calling too?

The distinctive deacon doesn’t graduate into priesthood. They remain where they are planted — in the in-between. In doorways. In margins. In communities where the Church might not always go unless led there by someone who belongs both to the Church and to that place. It is a vocation of radical presence. Not upwardly mobile, but downwardly faithful. And in this, it is strikingly monastic.

There’s a kind of humility to both vocations that runs deeper than personality. I don’t mean quietness or timidity. I mean a holy downwardness. A refusal to dominate or perform. A choice to serve without needing to control. To dwell in the space between proclamation and accompaniment — between preaching the Gospel and simply being with someone in the silence that follows.

In both the monastic and diaconal traditions, there’s an emphasis on availability. In the monastery, this looks like hospitality and stability — staying put long enough for people to trust your presence. In the diaconate, it looks like showing up again and again in places where people are used to being forgotten. Both are about showing up, not for your own sake, but so that others might glimpse the presence of God — not a God who hovers high above, but the God who kneels to wash feet.

I feel the Benedictine vows not as constraints, but as lenses through which the whole world becomes more visible. Obedience, in this light, is not servility but listening. Stability becomes a commitment to presence. And conversion of life — conversatio morum — becomes a long obedience in the same direction: not toward achievement, but toward becoming more real. More whole. More Christ-shaped.

It’s this last vow, conversion of life, that feels most aligned with the distinctive diaconate. A continual turning toward the world’s woundedness — not to fix it, but to be with it. To bear witness. To recognise Christ in the faces others overlook. The deacon’s stole, worn over one shoulder and tied at the side, is not just a symbol of service — it is an embodied reminder that their life, like Christ’s, is bent toward the forgotten. Just as the monk’s habit marks them as someone given wholly to God, the deacon’s stole marks them as someone given wholly to the world, for God’s sake.

Both the Benedictine and the deacon live lives shaped by boundaries — time marked by bells, bodies marked by vows, roles that resist the pull toward status or control. But within those boundaries, there is astonishing freedom. The freedom to be — not to achieve or produce or ascend, but simply to be present, attentive, ready to respond to God and neighbour alike.

In a Church that is often tempted to mimic the world’s obsession with hierarchy and speed, both vocations offer a different way. A slower way. A holy stillness in motion. A life that listens before it speaks, and blesses without needing to be seen.

I don’t know yet how the path will unfold — whether the call to the diaconate will become formal, or remain woven silently into my Benedictine life. But I know this: the place where I feel most like myself, most like who God is calling me to become, is at the threshold. One foot in the choir, one foot in the street. One hand lifted in praise, the other reaching toward someone who isn’t sure they’re welcome. Standing in that space, I remember again that this is where Christ stands too.

Not on the throne. Not in the spotlight.

But at the door.