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About Ant
Baptised into the Roman Catholic Church, after a mission team was invited to his parish church, at the age of 14 he was sent by his family and community to join a team in America preforming Christian dance and arts. Coming back aged 15, he spent the next five to six years, along with a growing ecumenical community; writing, preforming, and teaching Christian dance both in the UK and North America.
In 1995 whilst at university studying Civil Engineering, he married his first wife Clare, as they both embarked on a love affair with what was becoming known as Celtic Christianity. Having spent a four-week honeymoon travelling Ireland and its Christian sites in a converted motor home, they stumbled upon the Dingle Peninsula and the story of St Brendan. They know that this special place and story was to become a vocational pursuit for the rest of their lives.
They both joined a dispersed ecumenical community called the Northumbria Community and started to explore what it meant to live life as a vocation towards what God had planted in their hearts. The vehicle for this was through a new monasticism. After University under the advice of their spiritual directors they sort careers to test out their vocations. After a year they both felt a calling to vocation so in the Winter of 1997 along with their newborn child, gave up their jobs and moved to the Northumbrian Community’s mother house to help set up a research centre and continue in the Christian arts.
They returned to Leicestershire in 1998 to continue their journey along with Ant’s parents and a few close friends. Ant pursued an MA in Celtic Christianity and Clare a teaching qualification so she could teach maths, both were exploring ways of supporting their vocation and not careers. They also started to explore how living in the ‘spirit’ of community can help sustain both family and friendship. Sadly in 2001 Clare pasted away leaving Ant with two small children. He along with the families returned to the Dingle to take Clare back to her place of resurrection.
Having remarried his wife Carey, life continued exploring how family can be sustained in community, albeit now different. Ant and Carey now had four children and had moved into Ant’s parent’s family home. Life was tough until the Christmas of 2011 when the four generations of family living in a small home, decided to move to a larger property on the land of Mount Saint Bernard’s Abbey to continue in their journey together. Ant and Carey now have five children and are heavily informed in various projects associated with Monos.
In 2022, Ant completed his doctorate in new monasticism. This can be found at: https://research.stmarys.ac.uk/id/eprint/5676/