Every year, during the month of November, the readings of the Church calendar center around the end times. Every year they sound more apropos—as we all age, and as the world itself seems progressively more apocalyptic.

Nor is it only Catholics who feel this way. A few weeks ago, news hit the international media of a Dutch family discovered in a remote farmhouse. The father of the family, a former member of the Moonies cult who broke with them as a consequence of his still more unusual beliefs, apparently kept his six children on the farm, having persuaded them that the isolation was essential to preparing for the end of the world.

It is far from being the first such story: isolationist cults have been part and parcel of American culture, real and imaginative, for decades. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village is one rendering of the idea, of which Margaret Atwood’s novel gives another side. In both fictional worlds the imaginary sectarian elders seem victorious; in real life, the infamous Waco siege of the Branch Davidians is proof that cult authorities do not always come out on top—and that, in their rush to the bottom, they often drag down women and children with them.

The Catholic Church has its own experience with millennial fantasies. The approach of the year A.D. 1000 was heralded with fear and trembling by many: the churches were filled before midnight, and the bars afterward. But the Church, as distinct from some of its members, and from cults that are splinters many times removed from the barque, has never endorsed millennialism. The notion of a moral imperative to take one’s family into the woods and live by sustenance farming is alien to the Catholic idea of the lay state. But there are three distinct versions of Catholic life that resemble, superficially, the isolationism of the Dutch family van Dorsten.

First, there are the hermits who have haunted the Church for centuries. Beginning with the desert fathers, these men and women—some solitary, some living loosely in community—have been a part of the Church militant, seeking by their withdrawal from the world to sanctify their souls and the souls of those for whom they pray. The Carthusians and the Trappists are the orders best known today for their eremitic lifestyle. An even more extreme (in some ways) version of the hermit’s life can be seen with anchorites like Anthony the Great, Julian of Norwich, and Richard Rolle, whose asceticism involved a commitment not only to solitude but also to claustrophobically small cells attached to the walls of parish churches.

Second, there is what has been dubbed the Benedict option: the idea that in any time, and especially in modern times, the Christian life is, broadly speaking, lived best in community. The breadth of community deemed desirable varies depending on which “Benedictine” one asks; but in general the idea seems to entail a commitment to spending more time with Catholic friends than among non-Catholics, and deliberately structuring one’s education and hobbies, one’s feasts and celebrations, to coincide with those of one’s Christian friends.

Third, there is the true millennialism preached from orthodox pulpits across the world: the idea that, while the end of the world is shrouded in mystery (none know “the day or the hour,” Matthew 25:13), the end of our world is inevitable. Each of us will indubitably die; and it is personal preparation for death—not social preparation for the apocalypse—that in fact makes us better people, and (ironically) the world a better place.

These Catholic forms of “seclusion” bear some similarity to their distant relative, modern millennialism. In all four cases there is a suspicion of the world which appears to the outsider as foolish, even paranoid, a suspicion which leads the religious person to channel their life into a smaller stream. But there are differences too, chief among which is a distinction that Catholics make which manifests in the different forms Catholic seclusion takes. Catholics have always suspected the World, in the sense which is taken by the phrase “the World, the Flesh, and the Devil”; but at the same time Catholics know that the world—in the sense of creation—is good. Chesterton’s King Alfred, facing the nihilism of the pagan Danes, tells them that

Our God hath blessed creation,
Calling it good. I know
What spirit with whom you blindly stand
Hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God’s death the stars shall stand,
And the small apples grow.

The spirit that rejects everything—the spirit that imprisons children in a remote Dutch farmhouse—is Satanic; it is not the spirit of God. There are indeed those whom God inspires to abandon even the good things of the world—small apples and distant stars—there are anchorites and hermits, whose vocation is to live as such. But this is neither the norm nor something to require of the immature nor indeed to impose upon anyone except oneself, and that last only with due consideration and the consultation of wiser persons. Some form of seclusion is necessary to be holy—we do need to reject those parts of the world which lead us, personally, into sin—but extreme seclusion is the calling of a rare few.

Nor is it right to think of any of these forms of “seclusion,” especially the lay Christian life (to the extent that it is “secluded”) as a “waiting.” There are no holding patterns in Christianity; the Christian life is a work, just as all Christians are works in progress. We “wait” only in the sense suggested by the Creed: we expecto, that is, “look forward to”; and what we await is not an end but a beginning: “The resurrection of the dead, and the Life of the World to come.”