At some point in 2018 I was referred to the website Catholic Gentleman by a friend and began reading the articles there.
Later, the website promoted a program called Exodus90 and just before it began in 2019 a friend reached out to me spur of the moment asking if I’d like to join a group he’d organized.
What is Exodus90?
Exodus90 is a 90-day program for men leading up to Easter (Day 91) that builds up the “exodus man’s” spiritual life through prayer, asceticism, and fraternity. Originally geared toward seminarians, the program now boasts having formed over 50,000 men.
The “prayer” aspect focuses on a daily holy hour (not necessarily in front of the blessed sacrament) or a minimum of 20 minutes of silent prayer.
The “asceticism” aspect is by far the heaviest. No use of technology outside of work, paying bills, and checking in on your group. No sweets. No alcohol. No eating between meals. Abstinence from meat and a modern Ash Wednesday/Good Friday style fast all Wednesdays and Fridays. Cold showers daily and three stints of intense exercise per week. Of course, black coffee is still allowed, and the disciplines say nothing about smoking. 🙄 You are allowed to relax one discipline on Sunday but encouraged not to relax the abstinence from technology.
The “fraternity” aspect is the lightest. One fraternity meeting per week and periodic fraternity activities like hikes, Mass, holy hour in an adoration chapel. Each man is supposed to have an “anchor” with whom he checks in via text message daily.
My Exodus90 Experience
Exodus90 was a significant boost to my spiritual life. It pushed me to develop a daily prayer life for the first time in years. The asceticism took the edge off my worldliness and short circuited my addiction to professional sports and tunnel vision on money and professional success. The fraternity built relationships that have lasted for years (and gave my third child his godparents).
The readings and reflections instantly made sense. Day 1 said “You are in Egypt. The surrounding area has grown progressively more hostile over the years.” Oh, I see what you did there.
The first week was miserable because I didn’t realize the extent of the disciplines and I was at a work retreat for my California startup in which I was surrounded by beer and snacks the entire week. I ended up being designated driver home from the bar for 15 people while one coworker felt up my arm from behind the driver’s seat, the CEO hid in the trunk, and my boss in the passenger seat calmly helped me navigate through Palm Springs at 2 AM in a party van past a police officer.
Thereafter we had weekly fraternity meetings in my friend’s garage. Occasionally we would rotate. Guys typically struggled with the cold showers, reflections, and daily prayer. I typically struggled with the exercise and the technology. I would go on nightly walks in the cold praying the rosary and trying to invoke the intercession of my favorite saints. One time we set up a card table and ate dinner in a church parking lot before rushing into the adoration chapel when we heard police sirens. Another time all our families went to Mass at one guy’s church in Amish country and went on a country hike following Mass. I admitted my hangups were a thirst for freedom and time, and that I felt oppressed by the burden of raising two young children.
Easter was a tremendous relief, and I still have a photo of my family with my bright, smiling face wearing a bowtie and pocket square following Easter Mass that year (the last, it would turn out, before the dark night of covid).
We stayed in touch to an extent, and the group leader and I are still good friends and see each other at least once a month. We didn’t follow any formal programs after Exodus90, though I’ve retained the cold showers, abstaining from meat on Fridays, daily prayer, and generally don’t eat between meals.
The following year I was asked to do Exodus90 again. I agreed to do it but only for Lent, which meant about half of the full 90-day period. It was the height of covid and meetings were exclusively on Zoom, with conversations dominated by covid.
The Good
At its best, Exodus90 is a great example of stimulating the spiritual life by adapting traditional disciplines to the needs of modern man. The theology behind it is brilliant and taught me clearly for the first time how sin is bondage and holiness is freedom. The readings did a great job of emphasizing that, as well as the importance of reverent liturgy, self control, and accountability to one’s family and community. The saints are mentioned from time to time. And the program acknowledges that we modern people have a need to step back from technology.
I’ve heard that Exodus90 has the reputation of being an antiporn initiative, and I can see why given the heavy emphasis on letting go of technology and checking in with an anchor daily.
And it has certainly spread organically. I know multiple men who called me crazy for doing it in 2019 who had signed on in either 2020 or 2021.
Critique
The Catholic faith is not meant to be an independent research project or a commodity. It is meant to be handed down organically through families and parishes.
Exodus90 recognizes that Catholic men are not receiving spiritual nourishment and renewal through the disciplines the Church currently asks us to take on during Lent. Unfortunately its solution is to reinvent a program that leaves out much of the richness and community of the Church’s traditions. A cynical person might say that this is because simply handing down the Church’s traditional disciplines is not as easy to monetize. One can discover and practice traditional Lenten fasting, Mass, and Divine Office readings without a $10 membership fee.
90 days is too long. The program states that the timeline is based on the psychology of how long it takes to form and break a habit. The problem is that this ignores the Church’s season of Lent and traditional penitential season of Septuagesima (a traditional liturgical season that begins 70 days before Easter). This elevates modern psychology ahead of the Church’s time-tested tradition. That logic exacerbates the problem Exodus90 is trying to solve: men have been led to addictive, destructive behaviors by trusting the wisdom of the world over the wisdom of the Church.
Exodus90 demands that men begin a period of (by modern standards) heavy penance barely a week after the Epiphany, smack dab in the middle of the traditional season of Christmas. This means that men are already worn down by 45 days of discipline, and often fatiguing, before Lent even starts. This inevitably makes it harder to fully enter into the penance of Lent and harder to connect our penance with the 40-day fasting of Christ.
I downloaded their latest guide to making a holy hour this morning. It makes no mention of the Divine Office, rosary, novenas, or meditations handed down to us by saints like Francis de Sales or John of the Cross. Instead, men are left to largely make up their own prayer life based on a loose outline.
I tried this for years and struggled to get my prayer life off the ground. Exodus90 tends to target spiritual beginners, and we spiritual beginners should not and often cannot invent our own prayer life. The Divine Office, available online at Universalis (1970 Liturgy of the Hours) and Divinum Officium (traditional) would be a perfect way to give men a strong prayer life rooted in the daily psalm rotation of the Church. Christ himself prayed the psalms on the way to the Agony in the Garden and on the cross. The Office would also unite them in prayer with the priests throughout the world and the saints through the ages. “Teach us how to pray.”
It’s hypocritical that a program banning most technology is run through a smartphone app. They have a book with the readings and reflections, just send that to everyone in the program if you really want to get them off their phones.
The readings and reflections are very good. Yet I cannot help but think that they should more fully include commentary by the saints, and especially the fathers. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, let the saints unpack the meaning and depths of these passages rather than trying to to do ourselves. And point us in the direction of other strong saints’ commentaries on Scripture so we have something to feed on after the program is over. There is plenty available for free on New Advent and Sensus Fidelium.
The disciplines are too legalistic. An FAQ on their website clarifies that podcasts are indeed banned under their “nonessential technology” rule. This is silly because it prevents men seeking spiritual formation from accessing healthy Catholic content from groups like the Institute of Catholic Culture, Saint Irenaeus Institute, Father Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year, and Thomistic Institute. Us working fathers often do not have time to sit down and do spiritual reading given the prayer and fraternity commitments and we’d like the option of having content spoken to us through technology. And is an exodus man really supposed to go incommunicado to all friends outside his Exodus90 group for 90 days to fulfill the ban on “unnecessary” texting and emailing?
Only relaxing one discipline on Sunday is silly. Sunday has never been a fasting day in the West, and Exodus90 essentially makes it so for a quarter of a year. On St. Patrick’s Day my first go round this meant not being able to have a guinness after I ate a cupcake at a Church social. It also means that most men who opt for warm showers on Sundays then have to abstain from all sweets and alcohol even on Sundays for the entire 90 days. If you get an ice cream with your family are you violating two disciplines by eating sweets and eating between meals? Just tell people they can relax the food and drink disciplines on Sunday and have the anchors manage any excesses.
The program does clarify that if your anniversary or wife/child’s birthday occurs during the program, you can make an exception. I would expand this exception to include major feasts like Candlemas and St. Patrick.
The fraternity piece is solid yet it is also the most lacking of the three areas. Is it too much to ask for one in-person meeting per week and 2-3 Zoom meetings that include common prayer? The practical experience ends up being a lot of individualized devotion with a one hour meeting a week, and cutting oneself off from friends outside the group. This is tough given that our fragmented modern life means that Exodus men almost never live in walking distance of each other.
There is also a risk that Exodus90 creates a clique that excludes men who wish to grow spiritually but who decide the program isn’t the right fit.
It is also bizarre to me that I know several guys who are making this an annual thing. I don’t think that’s quite the point. Exodus90 is supposed to shock a man out of his doldrums and start him on the path to a deeper spiritual life. Repeating a program for beginners seems like it’s keeping us at level 1.
All in all, I plan to send them a message highly recommending that they work with a branding expert to build a 70 day program beginning on Septuagesima that is more liturgical in nature, focusing more on communal liturgical prayer like the Divine Office and Mass readings and on traditional dietary rules and less on heavy restriction of technology.
Day 91…
By the following year I discovered Septuagesima and the traditional Lenten discipline surrounding fasting and the traditional Mass readings. I realized that Exodus90 was, intentionally or not, cribbing some elements of traditional practice without fully explaining what those older practices were.
It was grueling and I had to lighten up at times (thank goodness the traditional calendar is heavier on major saints’ feasts during Lent) but felt unity with the Church through the ages and deeply renewed come Easter.
As Romano Amerio points out, there is simply no replacement for the experience of heavy fasting from food for a prolonged period. It is humbling in that it points out how fragile we are and how reliant we are on God and our fellow man to meet our bodily needs. It is also a visceral way to tear down our need to focus our lives on feeding our appetites and to create room to pay attention to God and to those around us.
A friend once talked about how he never gives up coffee for Lent because of how nasty he becomes to his family. But that is precisely the point. Achieving perfect charity requires us to confront and fight our selfish urges, both the appetites and then the negative reaction when they aren’t fed. You’re not going to have your morning coffee in purgatory.
In the end, I think a traditional Lent of reading the daily Mass readings, reading the patristic commentaries from Matins, saying the hours of the Divine Office, and intensive fasting provides the spiritual cleansing and renewal that men need to unite themselves to Christ and celebrate the mystery of Christ’s Resurrection.
Though I will always be grateful to Exodus90 for serving as one of my many gateways to tradition.
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