Tag Archives: humility

Chapter 63: rank in the monastery

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The brothers will rank in order, depending upon the date of their entrance, the merit of their lives or the order of the abbot.

Where does power lie?

You don’t have to look far in the archives of my five years of blogging to learn I am egalitarian. I wrote my dissertation on establishing non-hierarchical communities of faith based on the principles of ensemble theatre practice. What egalitarian communities look like depends on the reasons why you want equality and what equality means. I have also written a lot about the term ‘equality’ and I have challenged the popular contemporary definition or understanding of this term. This could confuse many (it confuses me sometimes!)

I want to focus a little more on how non-hierarchical structures are created and how they work.

St Benedict is an orderly man; you can feel that throughout his Rule. It is very popular to be cynical and against order in society. This is expressed in semi-anarchist movements such as the Occupy Movement and Anonymous. I’m not totally against such movements, indeed I agree with the sentiment at the heart of them. My challenge to them, if I were to be so bold, would be to what end? How do such philosophies create a safe, secure society which encourages the well-being and stability to life for it’s people? Power is always present in any social dynamic and to deny that is dangerous; it’s not necessarily just about who holds the power but really about how it is held.

In most societies and groupings power forces people into a hierarchy: those with more are seen as over and above those that do not.

Egalitarians seek to change that thinking, some by taking power from those that have and give them to those that don’t. This, however, only flips the hierarchy and those that didn’t now do and those that did now don’t… the oppressed become the oppressors and so the cycle begins. You can see this in many ‘equality movements’. In order to re-address the balance of power those that have held power, e.g. men, are denied dignity and are shamed into handing power over to the oppressed, e.g. women, until the balance is found. This is a dangerous way of doing things as it is violent in nature. There is a temptation to unconsciously communicate a “this is what it feels like’ message in the re-addressing of power.

Peace and reconciliation is about taking the sting out of power. Power-sharing is a narrow and treacherous path to walk. Power is a dangerous weapon to carry and must be handled with great care. We must see it as the one true ring of Middle Earth that requires a fellowship to carry it safely in order to destroy it. Power must be shared before it takes root in one person and oppresses them and then those around it.

I have been reflecting a lot recently on reconciliation and how it can be discovered. For me it is about discovering the joy and power of collaboration. The journey to collaboration must pass through the difficult destination of ‘ego-death’. This, for me, is at the heart of the healing humanity needs, both individually and collectively. It is why the cross is the central point of our salvation. The cross is the singular sign of ‘ego-death’. There can be no healing, no reconciliation, no healthy relationships without the complete annihilation of our egos and God has walked it ahead of us.

This is the challenge that Jeremy Corbyn has to enter into if his vision for a ‘new politics’ is to be achieved. I’m not totally sure he’s up to the task but I’m willing to try and, in his wake, see many others follow through. I am, personally, excited about what he has begun but trying to lead a people so adversed to the painful walk of ‘ego-death’ will be nearly impossible. The reason I have reservations is that he has yet given a good enough reason to people as to why they should go through this painful procedure. With any healing, the patient must understand the risks of not having it as well as to having it.

My wife has recently had an assessment for a lung transplant. This procedure is dangerous with many risks involved. It is overwhelmingly scary to consider all the pain, the cost and the turmoil it could bring upon us. I found myself asking,

Why would we want to do that?

Well, the alternative of not doing anything is guaranteed to be worse (for me at least because Sarah will get to be with Jesus sooner!) The transplant seen in this way is the necessary healing.

I know that our society is crying out for equality and this healing from hierarchy but I fear the obvious path towards it will not solve the problem but by-pass the most needed part of the process: ‘ego-death’. I have spoken many times of distress of the process that brought about same-sex marriage. I have spoken of my deep concern for the way in which people try to achieve gender equality. I have written too much on how broken our processes are for achieving real change in a situation and it all revolves around the lack of ego-death, or rather it is focussed too much on ‘others’ dying to their ego whilst I remain unchanged, unchallenged.

St Benedict’s Rule looks at arbitrary measurements of seniority: whoever’s been here the longest is valued the most. This is not about age but is based on an understanding that the person who has lived the central principles of humility and obedience will have transformed the most. It is the monks who have been engaged in the killing of their egos that are given the power because they know the dangers of it better than any.

I had the privilege of listening to Jean Vanier being interviewed at the New Parish Conference in Birmingham this weekend. He was asked,

If you were given a magic wand that could stop the church doing one thing and make the Church do something more, what would you take away and what would you make happen?

Immediately he responded,

I would get rid of the magic wand!

That is what St Benedict is proposing; putting men like Jean Vanier who has been slaying his ego for the most amount of time being given responsibility for the power. It is these people who understand the danger who should be entrusted with the job of walking the painful journey to destroy the sting of power.

Reflection

Leaders of the local parish should be judged not by their qualifications but by their maturity of faith. At the centre of every neighbourhood should be the person who has slain their ego the most. The one who has been committed to humility and obedience for extended period of times. It is the one who has walked that journey down the narrow and treacherous path of inner reconciliation that should guide others into the same terrain.

This is where the monastic charism is so important in parish ministry. At the heart of all monastic calls is the commitment to humility and obedience that leads to ‘ego-death’. This is why the New Monastic Movement resonates with exile language so much because they inhabit the terrain of wilderness and have learnt to thrive in that post death world.

I often write a prayer that directs my reflections back to God. This time I want to use a liturgical response from Common Prayer’s Evening Prayer on Thursday.
May our minds be like that of Christ Jesus,
Who, though he was in the form of God,
Did not regard equality with God
As something to be exploited,
But emptied himself,
Taking the form of a slave,
Being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
He humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death,
Even death on a cross.
Therefore, God also highly exalted him
And gave him the name that is above every name,
So that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend,
In heaven and on earth and under the earth,
And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
To the glory of God the Father. Amen.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Chapter 62: priests of the monastery

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He will keep his entrance rank except in service at the altar…

Where is the discipline in our discipleship?

Again and again the Rule of St. Benedict causes me to reflect on my vocation to the priesthood. The ordering of the church with it’s various designated roles and callings which overlap and yet remain distinct is a confusing subject and it gets increasingly so as people try to re-order and make room for individuals as they explore their specific ‘charism’.

After the last two week’s reflections I begin to see clearly the challenge and, potentially, the call of God on the Anglican Church.

Where is the discipline within our discipleship?

This is a particularly important question when it comes to vocation. There seem to be so many different ‘ministries’ available but with our commitment to ‘the three fold order of ministry’ there is a natural hierarchical view of ministry built into the Church. We can try and promote the work of the laity but Canon Law, which governs and shapes us, forces us to hold the offices of bishop, priest and deacon higher than others. These three offices have wide ranging specifications outlined in the ordinals that it begs the question what is it that designates a priest from the rest of the people of God.

I have sat with the ordinal many times and prayed through it. I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by everything I am asked to be and do. I’m glad that the response to whether I can fulfil all that is asked of me is,

By the help of God, I will.

But even after I relinquish some of the responsibility onto the grace of god I still have to ponder when non-ordained members of the Church take solemn vows to participate in the work of the Church? If all these tasks fall on to the ordained only what is left for the laity to do and participate in?

My question is about how to value properly the work of all the people of God and not demand that, in order to be able to do any ministry, you need to be ordained. To put it another way: how do we stop the personalising of ordained orders in order that all vocations are rightly affirmed.

Changing tack, or rather to focus in on a particular issue; I am not against the Fresh Expressions movement nor the role of Pioneer Ministers (indeed I am active within it!) but there is a real challenge that is raised by the mixed economy of what exactly constitutes a call to the diaconate, the priesthood and to episcopal office. There is an argument that Ordained Pioneer Ministers are being given ‘time off’ to pursue the work that all people and ordained ministers should be doing anyway. ‘Non-pioneer Ministers’ argue that they would love to be creative and missional if only they had the time but their diaries are full of the ‘nuts and bolts’ of ordained ministry. Specifying ‘Ordained Pioneer Ministry’ from the ordained ministry has caused many to feel excluded from the work of contextual mission.

I have always and continue to argue that Ordained Pioneer Ministry is a necessary move by the Church of England in order to raise these questions and conversations and I feel we should be looking to use the questions to solidify our view of the three fold order of ministry. The experience of Ordained Pioneer Ministers should be helping to release and encourage ‘Non-pioneer Ministers’ to be pioneering. Whether this pioneering is done by laity or ordained ministers is a real question. For what it’s worth I suspect most of it should be done by laity but that does not release clergy from the responsibility to participate too.

If I was to be bold in putting forward a real pathway to fruitful debate it would be to propose that all disciples should be pioneers as we respond, through the Spirit, to the call of God to all his people to share the good news and herald in his kingdom. All disciples ordained or not should be looking at ways to do mission and evangelism in their particular context. Once our discipleship bears its fruit in the form of outreach and kingdom building we can then re-examine the role of deacons, priests and bishops within that.

As it stands we are trying to solve a problem in the wrong part of the system!

Like St. Benedict’s monasteries, the call to the priest comes from an established discipleship programme where everyone is subject to the same training and discipline. From this place, 62 chapters in, we then discuss the practical role of presiding at the Eucharist and leading the disciples in prayers. The role of priest does not change their need to follow the discipline of the community. They are priest at the table.

Here priesthood is not the same as leadership.

To be a leader you do not need to be a priest. It is thought that the abbot was not necessarily ordained as a priest and this makes for a fascinating insight into hierarchy in these religious communities. The abbot remains as spiritual leader whilst the priest has a different function. Terence Kardong explores this differences in his book ‘Together Unto Life Everlasting’, proposing that,

…the power of the bishop/priests is of sacramental order, that of the abbot is charismatic. The first power comes from the church: the second comes from the Holy Spirit. (Esther de Waal, A Life Giving Way: a commentary on the rule of st benedict (London: Continuum, 1995) p232)

That distinction is worth noting. I have been struggling to articulate that feeling for some time. My understanding and call to the priesthood is a sacramental order, a function of sorts. My call to specific areas, people or contexts is a charismatic one. All disciples are called to charismatic ministries; ministries that are contextual and unique within the shared call to share the gospel. Some are called to sacramental roles and that is a church function.

The Church, in my mind, should explore specifying better the three fold order of ministry so that those not called to a sacramental role are still encouraged in participating with equal anointing to the life and mission of Christ’s Church. There must be a greater articulation that those given an ordained office in the Church are not seen as of a higher rank or calling. They remain disciples but with a particular, sacramental role. Other disciples are called by the Holy Spirit with charismatic roles which should be honoured and encouraged.

There are parts of my job which I do because it’s my office (presiding at Holy Communion, visiting the sick and baptizing new believers, etc.) but there are other things I do because I feel the Holy Spirit calling me to do at that time and place (community chaplaincy, encouraging artists in the city, gathering and leading a small home group, etc.). Some are tasks that I alone can do in our community because they are sacramental, but many other tasks that I do as a disciple and not as a priest to which others may also be called to do. The specifying of these different tasks needs to be done more intentionally to release disciples into the work that they are called to do as disciples, ordained or not.

Reflection

As I contemplate moving from my curacy into a parish of my own, I think about how I will minister in the new context. There will be sacramental tasks I am called to do because God has called me to be a priest and the Church has acknowledged that. There will also be other things that I will discover God is calling me to, not because I am a priest, but because I am a disciple.

Our question should be, within the parish, should there be a distinction between the abbot and the priest? I would argue there’s room for this framework. It would require a rethink of how the Church views and discusses ordained ministry and that of lay ministry. I think God is already moving in this area as increasingly stretched ordained ministers find themselves forced into ever-widening job specifications and expectations. As more churches find themselves in longer interregnums and more multi-parish benefices are created, less ordained ministers feel ‘called’ to the struggling (mostly rural) contexts due to the ‘killer workloads’ and overwhelming pressures, as well as not fully understanding the discipline of discipleship. I speak from personal experience, here. It was in the intensity of college that I discovered the cost of discipleship (and I came from a ‘successful’, growing church).

We can any longer hide the charismatic call of all disciples to contextual mission in its infinitely varied forms. The praise and holiness of ‘leadership’ and the pursuit for better equipped leaders is futile as we increasingly discover that what is being asked of them should be the work of all disciples. To require a title like ‘leader’ or to need ordination to encourage someone in doing the work of the kingdom is a failure on our discipleship. Leaders come from a fully functioning discipleship programme (as we’ll explore in two weeks time). Naming someone a leader and then asking them to find followers is illogical to me.

You’ll be aware that I am convinced that only a focussed, intentional re-examination of the real life of discipleship where commitment is paramount and better more systematic re-ordering of God’s Church to ensure the discipline of humility is at the heart of all we are and do is needed!

Loving Father, gracious and powerful, you call us to be converted from our old life to new life in Christ. You have adopted us as your children and grant us true peace, found when we know our identity in Christ. Continue to call us closer to you that we would live in the freedom of your grace and that others would see your good work in us that hey to would respond to your call on their lives also.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Parish Monasticism: an update

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Suscipe me, Domine, secundum eloquium tuum, et vivam;  et non confundas me ab expectatione mea.

Receive me, O Lord, according to your word, and I shall live: and let me not be ashamed of my hope.

I started this blog at the end of 2013 as a learning project. I had no plans of what I would learn but would journal an intentional study programme of the Rule of St Benedict. I called is ‘Parish Monasticism?’ The question mark was important as I didn’t know if such a concept would work or be helpful to frame my reflections.

Well, 1 year and 9 months later and ‘Parish Monasticism’ is a thing! Who’d have thought it. By ‘a thing’ I mean other people are using the term independent from me. I had a parish priest who met me at a training event early this year use it and ask if I had heard of the idea. I asked him where he had heard it and he told me he had been told about it by a friend and that there was a Facebook group called ‘Parish Monasticism’ (no question mark). It’s funny how things develop…

I began this blog with a hunch; a hunch and a challenge laid down by Rev. Pete Askew at the Northumbria Community during a placement I did at Nether Springs in Felton. He said to me,

It’s impossible to live the way of life we live here at Nether Springs and be a parish priest. You’d have to be very stubborn to achieve it.

I don’t know if it is my stubbornness or something else but an increasing number of parish priests and ministers are not only discovering the benefits of monastic principles to ministry but also feel a sense that God is calling them to commit to the location in an intentional, communal way with other disciples.

This is at the heart of what ‘parish monasticism’ is, I feel. What I’ve been discovering in theory and, only in some parts, in practise is a way to effectively minister and transform neighbourhoods and communities through these basic monastic principles. No, it’s more than that. Parish monasticism is about reformation of the parish system to an explicit commitment to discipleship. I’ve discovered that the lack of effective mission and evangelism is a result of faulty discipleship. As I wrote before,

If a community is not engaged in mission then their discipleship is faulty; mission is the fruit of the tree of discipleship. There is no point in just forcing a community to ‘do mission’ and expect it to work. It would be better to go back to the basics of discipleship, correcting that and the fruit of mission will grow. You judge discipleship by the mission. (Ned Lunn, ‘Chapter 49: observance of lent’, Parish Monasticism? (Jan 17th 2015))

As the Church we have lost sight, as it did in Germany before World War II, of the cost of discipleship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s observations and reflections on the antidote to this is what has fuelled the New Monastic movement and I think we are now beginning to discover that it must be planted within the parish system.

It must be within the parish system because there is something deeply counter-cultural for the increasingly urbanised 21st century Britain where transport is easy and more people consume worship and community rather than create/live it. Where we have no strength to withstand the temptation to make everything into our own image and just as we want it we justify or sanctify our freedom to choose where we go and what we do/allow in our lives. The parish system challenges that ego-centric part of each and everyone of us who refuses to allow something external to change our inner life.

This journey of discovery has unearthed the interconnected roots of the saints of old who speak so clearly to me; St Aidan, Thomas Merton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Shane Claiborne to name a few. In focussing my reflections I have discovered a call deep down within me that sings of a theology rooted in Ash Wednesday and the creation story; we are made of dust, we must fully grasp humility and acknowledge we are nothing without the tender touch of our Loving Father God, humanity needs transformation and grace. From this root it grows into an acceptance of God’s mercy and love reaching out to lift us up from humble beginnings to healing and salvation as God adopts us and works on us so we can conform to His Son, the perfection of humanity, Jesus Christ. When we give ourselves totally to this process of redemption in every part of our life He seals us with His Holy Spirit to equip us for the task of heralding in His Kingdom in our lives and the lives of those around us like the first discipleship at Pentecost.

It all begins with humility.

It all demands obedience.

It all leads to community.

Parish monasticism, for me, is an emerging call to intentional, radical discipleship that seeks to convert our entire life to that of Jesus and heals us of our capitalist consumer, neoliberal culture that Stanley Hauerwas critiqued 34 years ago. Are we willing to be a stumbling block to both poles of the political and moral map found in the UK today? Parish monasticism is not about being ‘relevant’ which is banded about so much, it is about being faithful to the distinctive call to follow Christ who came to heal and healing means things change! We look at the complexities and crisis facing us on every side of our world today and we keep kidding ourselves that we know how to solve them: we don’t! We desperately want our situation to change but Jesus changes situations by changing us… and that means you and me.

Thomas Merton, who I return to whenever I reflect on our self-identity crisis in our society, continues to inform me,

The reason we hate one another and fear one another is that we secretly or openly hate and fear our own selves. And we hate ourselves because the depths of our being are a chaos of frustration and spiritual misery. Lonely and helpless, we cannot be at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we cannot be at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God. (Thomas Merton, The Living Bread (London: Burns and Oates, 1976) p.9)

This is the root of our problem. This is where real conversion and deep discipleship works out the healing and salvation of God’s grace, mercy and love for us.

So let us humbly acknowledge our total need for change. Let us obediently follow our healer’s instruction towards salvation and let us be adopted, by grace, into his family and live in true peace with him, ourselves and with others.

Chapter 61: reception of pilgrim monks

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A stranger from a distant locale may be received as a guest for as long as he desires providing he does not make unreasonable demands but accepts the ways of the brothers and is satisfied.

Where is the sacrifice?

A friend of mine has recently done some research on theological education in the UK. The research aimed to uncover the reasons behind a person’s selection of one theological training institution over another. My friend has not finished writing up the findings but they were struck by how the primary motivation for selection was personal preference.

That may not seem, on the face of it, a shock,

Of course, it’s down to their personal preference!

Personal preference always plays some part in any decision but when this is the primary reason we may be in trouble. Personal preference is now outranking God’s call along with the potential cost that that call may have on one’s life. The responses may well assume that ‘personal preference’ means God’s will but that is even more dangerous and leads me to some thing I’d like to briefly explore again.

Our current culture is so individualised that we have again committed the heresy of assuming too much that God is made in our image and not the other way round. Every generation is tempted to commit this error in different ways; ours has fallen for it in the way we interpret Scripture and discern the will of God. In our heady mix of neoliberalism and libertarian morals alongside the deeply ingrained consumerism we have arrived at the place where our primary authority in discernment is personal, private emotions.

I know God and He loves me just the way I am and He wants me to be happy. He’s not clearly saying “no” to this behaviour and it makes me happy so it must be ok.

This subjective authority is of no use in a functioning society. Yes, the heart is important but, as Jesus himself said,

”For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” (Mark 7:21-23)

We are capable of great love but we are also capable of great evil and discerning the two is not as easy as we assume. Love can be contaminated with these evil intentions. We have this arrogance to think that we know what love is but we limit it and we make out it is easy to love. Jesus showed us that great love has a great cost and the way to be like Jesus is narrow.

Where is the talk of radical, costly discipleship? Where is the conversation about the narrow road, the immediately exclusive way in Jesus spoke about this path of transformation? Consumer culture has infected Christ’s body and we need to deal with it. God can easily be thought of as blessing us with everything we want and our faith crumbles when things don’t go our way. We act however we like and we all search the Bible to justify our actions. We freely choose to behave in ways that seem perfectly reasonable and we judge them to be right by the happiness factor.

In a very banal way, consider church hopping.

I’m not against searching out a local congregation that will feed and encourage us. The style of worship has a part to play in whether you are called there, as is theological roots and tradition. You don’t want to be in a place where you are always frustrated and tempted to moan and grumble about that group of people. This desire to fit in though must be held in tension with God’s work in you.

I chose to go to Cranmer Hall in Durham not primarily because the people were nice, or it was closer to family but primarily because I felt God calling me to train in the difficult, urban communities of working class people very different from my experience. I visited Ridley Hall in Cambridge and it was great. I could have trained there and I would have learnt a lot and would have loved the people I trained with but the swinging factor was I felt God asking me to step out of my comfort zone and stretch myself. That was scary but my wife and I trusted that God would grow and change us and ultimately surprise us with what he can do through us.

I feel God is challenging His Church to readdress the question of commitment. I think there is a great move of the Spirit towards an acknowledgement of ‘costly grace’ and I don’t think any of us really knows what that looks or feels like but I can assure you that it won’t be comfortable.

Rowan Williams, in his book ‘The Wound of Knowledge’, says,

Humanity is created in God’s image – created with the capacity for relationship to God in obedience: its fulfilment is in this relationship…But the image is potential only, it must be made into a ‘likeness’ by the exercise of goodness. Had humanity been created in perfection, it would have performed its good acts automatically. (Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990) p.27-28)

The Anglican Church adopts a three fold authority structure to guard against mis-guided discernment: Scripture, tradition and reason. All three must play a part in the discernment process. This is why discerning moral responses to issues takes time because all three must be held in tension. In our current age we have, at times, thrown all three out of the window and adopted the authority of this world, private happiness.

Although it is not obvious, St. Benedict is talking about discernment in this week’s chapter. He talks about how a visiting monk should point out things he thinks are wrong and how the abbot should respond.

If he thinks something wrong and points it out humbly, charitably and judiciously, the abbot should circumspectly meditate upon it, for the Lord may have sent the stranger for that purpose.

Humility, love and wisdom. These should be our desires for ourselves. What does it mean to pray for humility? What does it mean to be loving? What does it mean to be wise? All of them are life-long journeys of discovery and our prayer should always be that God works these things through us and all of them will require that we change who we are.

Reflection

There has been a really interesting report out this week from the Centre for Theology and Communities entitled ‘Deep Calls to Deep: monasticism for the cities’. In it they have explored monastic expressions from various traditions in East London. At the end of the interviews they share the following suggestion,

The stories in this report are challenging to our urban consumer culture. They are stories of people prepared to commit to something for life, living together in community, willing to forgo and to share money for the benefit of others, devoting their careers to pursuit of the Common Good. (Tim Thorlby and Angus Ritchie, Deep Calls To Deep: monasticism for the cities (London: Centre for Theology and Communities, 2015) p.43)

The reason I would argue that the New Monastic movement is an evangelistic and missional movement is because of this direct challenge to our culture at this time. I see many people proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord and coming to Church but there is little focus on the conversion, the turning away from a previous life.

I guess Shane Claiborne says it best,

We are cultural refugees. The beautiful monastics throughout church history were cultural refugees; they ran to the desert not to flee from the world but to save the world from itself… Much of the world now lies in ruins of triumphant and militant Christianity. The imperially baptized religion created a domesticated version of Christianity – a dangerous thing that can inoculate people from ever experiencing true faith. (Everyone is a Christian, but no one knows what a Christian is anymore.) Our hope is that the postmodern, post-Christian world is once again ready for a people who are peculiar, people who spend their energy creating a culture of contrast rather than a culture of relevancy. (Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: politics for ordinary radicals (Michigan: Zondervan, 2008) p. 238-240)

The New Monastic movement is, I feel, taking an interesting turn in the UK towards a parish focus. This parish focus reintroduces sacrifice into a movement that could have been seen as pic and mix spirituality. With an emphasis on location the new monastics are called to even deeper obedience and commitment that counters that consumerism that is ingrained in all of us. With the emphasis on committing to a particular community and a particular area, no matter how hostile or challenging, the new monastics are bringing the contrast of the disciplined life into the heart of a culture and changing it. The new monastics are living in exile in the midst of an alien culture and living an alternative lifestyle.

Loving Father, you are unchanging and steadfast but we are not. We thank you that the path of transformation is open to us and that we can change. Guide us by your grace and your Holy Spirit that we would be transformed into the likeness of your Son, Jesus Christ. May we grow to be steadfast in our commitment to you, that we would be more and more faithful disciples, humbly loving the world and seeking to establish your kingdom here amongst us.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Chapter 60: priests who would live in the monastery

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Should a member of the priesthood wish to enter the monastery, permission is not to be immediately granted.

What is it God is calling me to?

Having discussed general principles of vocation and commitment for the last few weeks and having spoken earlier about a potential monastic understanding of vocation, the Rule now causes me to reflect on my own personal discernment. It’s been hard reading this chapter on the acceptance of a priest into monastic orders partly because it forces me to see my sense of calling to a form of monasticism from the other side.

This week I sat in front of a panel and answered questions of vocation. I think it went well. I answered as openly and honestly as I could but there will always be a small sense of disappointment in these situations due, in part, to always being unable to discern, precisely, the will of God. Discernment, for me, is a corporate activity; it is best done within a community listening to God together. This ensures personal agendas and egos are balanced and the Spirit can confirm itself through the Body of Christ.

What is it God is calling me to?

I have been asking that question for a year and a half now. My prayers have circled round this question as I have sought God’s leading for Sarah and I post-curacy. There have been some encouraging glimpses as God uses all the vehicles of communication to show us his plans and purposes.

But…

All of those glimpses are potential and not actual. Dreaming is easy (I can do it in my sleep!) walking them out is hard. Reality is a cruel beast with a seeming will of its own not easy to tame with our desires. The stirrings of my heart are one thing but what will happen may well be quite different.

There comes a point in the journey of discernment (and I have reached it now) where one falls on the mercy of another, usually a person in authority. This is an act of trust. In vulnerability one offers the dreams, the stirrings, the private wisps of conversation between ones heart and God and ask another to decide the path to take. This is never straight forward and the person to whom you pass those cherished fragments of one’s inner life to must handle them with great care. To trust that person with such treasure is made easier when it is done in relationship.

At some point in June/July I will head to my bishop with the fruit of my wrestling with God and ask him to discern my next step.

How do I communicate what I feel God speaking to me about?

Our lives, our vocation, everything that makes up the cocktail of what makes ‘me’ me is like a tightly knotted ball of odds and ends which are so intrinsically woven to discern what to do with it takes care; a mixture of gentleness and love alongside bold and decisive cuts. It is not something to hand over easily but, sitting with it in your lap won’t help either.

Yes, I feel called to ordained ministry as a priest. Yes, I feel called to the Church of England (for whatever reason!). Yes, I feel called to married life. Yes, I feel called to sit on committees/ strategy groups, Synods, etc. Yes I feel called to the ministry of reconciliation. Yes, I feel called to the wilderness context. Yes, I feel called to serve in the ordinariness of life and, yes, I feel called to monastic life, intentional community, a contemplative rhythm of prayer and action. What does this particular concoction of callings look like in practice? How do they connect and work themselves out? I do not know… and so the ball of confusion gets passed with great trepidation to the bishop with a prayer that God’s will be done in my life.

In the Rule of St. Benedict there is a sense that the call to priesthood is to be set under the call to be a monk. That monastic call supersedes the call to priestly ministry. This, for me, makes me reflect on how I see the priestly ministry. I still find myself considering it as a function rather than an ontology (a question of being). I see myself as being a priest in that I am someone who instinctively inhabits the ‘between places’ but I increasingly feel I am a monk in that I think I am at home in the wilderness with a gathered community of other desert dwellers.

The key question for me, as I wait for the call to move,

Where then is my home?

My answer (if I am forced to be so bold) is identifying the wilderness that is all around me and building the altars there. Abraham meets God in the journey and is called to encounter him there. There are increasing number of people who feel a similar call to establishing community of intentional disciples pitching a tent and setting up a place for God’s presence to be amongst them. Will the Church recognise this move of the Spirit which seems to be birthing monastic communities within the wilds of 21st century western civilisation?

Reflection

It can feel like what I am envisaging is having my cake and eating it! This chapter has highlighted that.

You want all the pleasure of being a monk without any of the cost

The New Monastic movement is criticised on this point, I know. How is it monastic if you’re not alone? If you rarely have to face the cost of poverty and chastity how is it any form of monasticism?

I do not have an immediate answer to that but I know that we will only come to an answer by living in those questions rather than jumping to some theoretical answers. The Desert Fathers and Mothers didn’t write out a plan, a strategy, a theory; they moved into the edge lands and lived, struggled, failed and persevered.

I want to end with a picture that I have begun to own for myself; the bear.

The bear is often a solitary animal but is fiercely social as well. They live in the wild and gently plod around existing in quite extreme environments. When you bring them into a different surrounding you have to cage them because they cannot be contained. They are wild, strong and dangerous when caged or cornered. They are resilient in their natural habitats but their defence mechanisms kick in when they are out of it and God have mercy on those who are on the receiving end of their fury.

As I wait in a context I don’t feel naturally comfortable in, my prayer is simple,

Father, lead me. Meet me. Strengthen and defend me.

Come, Lord Jesus

Chapter 58: the admission of new brothers

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Admission to the religious life should not be made easy for newcomers.

What does it mean to be a ‘Christian’?

It seems to me we have reached, in this chapter, another pivotal moment in the Rule. The issue raised in this chapter comes close to my central thesis (that sounds too pretentious) to this whole ‘parish monasticism’ project: what does it mean to be a ‘Christian’?

One of the trickiest parts of my role as a minister of religion in an established church is baptisms. You can choose any Anglican church in this country and ask the minister about their baptism policy and I can guarantee that they will speak, at some point, about it being ‘complicated’ or ‘disappointing’. It is on this single issue that I begin to consider disestablishment as a useful proposal!

I don’t want to go into my baptismal theology (it’s more Baptist than Roman Catholic but I understand the role of infant baptism) but I have never seen baptism as a legitimate evangelistic opportunity. The reason it remains disappointing is that we continue to delude ourselves that the majority of people bringing their baby to be ‘christened’ want anything to do with God. We invest time in ‘preparing’ babies to be ‘christened’ because we cannot refuse but in the end a small number of these families take the promises made at the baptism service seriously or anywhere close to understanding what they are committing to. The service becomes a theological farce in my mind and it forces me to ask: what is actually going on at those secular celebrations of our profound mysteries of God’s grace?

So, yes, I’m pretty distressed about this and easily slip into emotional rhetoric on the subject but to try and outline a positive response to the dilemma I will return to the question: what does it mean to be a ‘Christian’?

I ask this question at preparation evenings we host for potential baptism families. The phrasing of the question is important; I ask,

If your child, when they are 7 or 8 years old, comes up to you and asks, “Mummy/Daddy, are we Christian?” What will you say? And they ask, as they are likely to do, “why?” What will your response be?

From my year and a half of asking this question I have yet to hear any answer other than,

Yes. You were christened.

My heart sinks when I go month after month desperately hoping that one day someone will articulate in some way their desire to know Jesus. After they’ve answered I talk, quite passionately, about being a Christian, about following Jesus, wanting to be transformed into His likeness, to acting, speaking, loving like Jesus, to inviting him to direct my life, my behaviours and my attitudes. I, like many ministers, comfort myself with the only thing left to us: the ‘planting seeds’ analogy.

It is not that I don’t understand the sowing analogy but I have major theological issues when we’re sowing seeds at the point of baptism, our welcoming of new Christians into the Kingdom of God. Infant baptism, for me, relies, in part, on the faith of the parents and/or godparents. Of course, baptism relies on the grace of God and God’s relationship with the child but there remains big questions over whether salvation can be removed from someone; can someone turn away from God’s grace? It is about free will and choice in the matter of relationship with God. If choice is taken away from baptism then we may as well go round pouring holy water over people and proclaiming faith over them!

No, it will not do, for me!

Here, in the Rule of St Benedict, we hear of the admission to the religious life not being made easy for newcomers. In my heart I believe that baptism into the Christian faith ideally should be akin to taking up monastic vows. This does not deny infant baptism for the commitment made in that instance still takes the vows of the parents and/or godparents.

But, Ned, that’s monasticism and not ordinary folks!

Why do we still differentiate so much in this respect? Why can we not take the model of monasticism for general faith? Why must there be different levels of holiness, one level reserved only for the ‘monks’? Why do we not expect all Christians to be holy?

I have been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer recently and studying his views on ‘new monasticism’ as well as discipleship. I’ve recently been skimming through his ‘Letters and Papers From Prison’ in which he begins to outline a book he never had the chance to complete. In this book he begins to formulate a ‘religionless Christianity’. The argument, for me, is persuasive but, unfortunately, he never fleshed out the practical implications of his theories. If I ever return to academic study I would probably base my dissertation on Bonhoeffer’s use of monastic models in his view of Christian discipleship.

His use of monastic metaphors began well before his time in prison of course. It was in his book ‘The Cost of Discipleship’ that I first came across his explicit use of monasticism.

The expansion of Christianity and the increasing secularization of the church caused the awareness of costly grace to be gradually lost. The world was Christianized; grace became common property of a Christian world. It could be had cheaply. But the Roman church did keep a remnant of that original awareness… Here on the boundary of the church, was the place where the awareness that grace is costly and that grace includes discipleship was preserved. People left everything they had for the sake of Christ and tried to follow Jesus’ strict commandments through daily exercise. Monastic life thus became a living protest against the secularization of Christiantiy, against the cheapening of grace. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001) p.46-7)

This whole section from the chapter on ‘Costly Grace’ jumps from the page and into our time. He attacks the division of the church into ‘a highest and lowest achievement of Christian obedience’. The work of the monks was used to justify the lack of discipleship of the many in churches.

But the decisive mistake of monasticism was not that it followed the grace-laden path of strict discipleship… Rather, the mistake was that monasticism essentially distanced itself from what is Christian by permitting its way to become the extraordinary achievements of a few, thereby claiming a special meritoriousness for itself. (Ibid., p.47)

Prior to his publication of ‘The Cost of Discipleship’ Bonhoeffer wrote to his brother and proclaimed,

The restoration of the Church will surely come from a kind of new monasticism, which has in common with the old kind only the uncompromising nature of life according to the Sermon on the Mount, following Christ. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Testament to Freedom (San Francisco:HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), p.424)

If you put these two writings together you can see Bonhoeffer beginning to formulate an ecclesiology which broke down the cloistered walls and brought the discipleship of the monastic life into the wider Church. Bonhoeffer goes on to use the biography of Luther, himself a monk, who ‘escaped the monastery’ to bring the discipleship to all the world.

By the time he reached prison, Bonhoeffer was grasping the implications of this ‘new form of monasticism’ which was based fully in the world. Part of Bonhoeffer’s argument for a ‘religionless Christianity’ centres on the un-biblical premise that Christianity is a cosmic escape plan from this world to heaven. In this schema Christianity is a religion interested only in metaphysics and individual salvation. His prison letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge, critiques our modern view of Christianity which desperately attempts to preserve itself against an increasingly forceful argument against the existence of God. In an baptismal homily written for Bethge’s son, Bonhoeffer writes,

Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christian today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. All Christina thinking, speaking, and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: SCM Press, 2001) p.105)

If the reality of faith in Christ that God does not desire us to leave this world or be concerned with other worldly things but to follow Christ in committing to this world in all its suffering and challenges then what place does something as religious and metaphysical as prayer have in this faith?

I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In doing so we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world–watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; that is how one becomes human and a Christian (cf. Jer: 45!)(Ibid., p137)

I know I’m quoting alot of Bonhoeffer but I think it’s important to show his thorough study towards an ecclesiology which I find helpful in pursuing this disturbing experience of baptising, wholesale, babies to parents who show no indication of any desire of relationship with Jesus Christ.

It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored. What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion, and that remains his really great merit; but he put in its place a positivist doctrine of revelation which says, in effect, “Like it or lump it”: virgin birth, Trinity, or anything else; each is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which must simply be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That isn’t biblical. There are degrees of knowledge and degrees of significance; that means that a secret discipline must be restored whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are protected against profanation. (Ibid., p.369-70)

And so here it is, what I’ve been building upto!

Confession of faith is not to be confused with professing a religion. Such profession uses the confession as propaganda and ammunition against the Godless. The confession of faith belongs rather to the “Discipline of the Secret” in the Christian gathering of those who believe. Nowhere else is it tenable…The primary confession of the Christian before the world is the deed which interprets itself. If this deed is to have become a force, then the world will long to confess the Word. This is not the same as loudly shrieking out propaganda. This Word must be preserved as the most sacred possession of the community. This is a matter between God and the community, not between the community and the world. It is a word of recognition between friends, not a word to use against enemies. This attitude was first learned at baptism. The deed alone is our confession of faith before the world. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Testament to Freedom (San Francisco:HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), p.91)

Baptism is not an opportunity to teach people the faith. Baptism must remain the result/ the response to an encounter with the resurrected Jesus in this world. Baptism is the secret admission of another into the community which professes by its prayer and action the reality of God amongst us, reconciling and restoring this world.

Reflection

I believe, now more than ever, the reformation of the Church will come through a new form of monasticism which breaks down the cloisters and is embedded in the lives of all Christians. By Christian I mean those who seek to know God in the world through the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his Holy Spirit. This means a Church which knows itself as disciples living contrary to the world around them but still remaining embedded in it as Jesus once did. Jesus remains enfleshed in the very reality of God and so there will never be any division between flesh and spirit.

Jesus also differentiated between the crowd and the disciples and was unashamed in the distinction. We are not disciples to sell Christ as a product. We are disciples to seek Jesus and to be more like him. The established church has lost this distinction in our baptismal theology and we continue to cheapen the power and transformation of grace by colluding with it.

Having said all of this, I fall into silence at the horror and pain of my feelings and pray earnestly for wisdom. I know that I am at the very first stages of understanding and may be heading down a treacherous path but still that dissatisfaction for where we are now.

Gracious Father, let me not be pushed down the wrong path but rather be led by your Spirit into your will and right thinking. May my mind be your servant as well as my heart and life. I pray, have mercy on us all and lead us into the path of righteousness for your Sons sake.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Chapter 57: artisans and craftsmen

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… if anyone becomes proud of his skill and the profit he brings the community, he should be taken from his craft and work at ordinary labor.

Who am I?

As June 2015 approaches and I come to the end of my official curacy, marked by a final assessment panel and an interview with my bishop, I am finding it hard not to think about the reports that will be gathered about me and my suitability to minister. On the bishops desk will be a minimum of 9 reports assessing my progress over the last three years, my competences, my character and every aspect of who I am. It is a pretty daunting thing if you think about it too much!

I have also been undertaking some intense ‘soul searching’ and reflection for the last few months guided by a counsellor. This has helped me to understand a little more as to what makes me behave and think like I do. I am acutely aware of the complexity by which God works through my own free will and psychological and genetic tendencies to reform me. When is something to be named as ‘God-given’ and when is it not?

I find it hard to accept that all talents and skills are to be ascribed to the spiritual realm. There are things that I’m good at which are there because I have worked very hard at learning and perfecting them. When I was an atheist I would get frustrated with religious people saying God gave them that ‘gift’ when it could be taught without involving God at all. I’m not saying that God can’t use those skills that one learns and does courses in but that we shouldn’t ascribe all skills to God for there are some skills which do not honour him nor would he want us to use. Take learning how to torture someone. It may seem facetious to say this but there are some people who are very good at taking other human beings to the edge of their life but holding them on the brink to force them to speak on the desired issue. This is a skill which not everyone can do. We wouldn’t dream of saying,

They’re really good at that it must be a god-given gift.

What is the distinction? Is it in the purpose of the activity? If someone learns a skill without knowing God and uses it to actively deny God is that still God-given? Is everything we are and do because of God? If this is true then why does he change us? In saying that all skills and talents are God-given, to me, denies the wonder and power of God’s redemption.

There are things that I have picked up through my experiences that are not healthy. I respond badly in certain situations which are not edifying and I am not proud of and I wouldn’t dream of turning round to the people I hurt and say,

This is the way God made me so you can’t complain.

It would be nice to say that because it takes all the pressure for me to change off and to blame God for making me ‘this way’. The truth is God didn’t make us ‘this way’. We were made by flesh and blood and we’ve been shaped by an imperfect world filled with imperfect people. Some parts of me are messed up and need reforming and that’s also true of you.

When St. Paul talks about spiritual gifts he is both vague and specific. The lists of gifts are not, in my mind, exhaustive, nor are we meant to be focussing on the list of gifts but rather the point of these passages (1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12 and, some would argue, Ephesians 4 but I have my questions on that!) is to highlight God the giver of grace through his Holy Spirit. God equips us for the tasks he calls us to. In my view and my experience, God never equips us for no reason. God calls first and equips after. This order makes more sense for God wants us to serve and behave dependent on him not on ourselves. Naming and blessing all our capabilities on behalf of God is not the same as truly experiencing the transformation of God via his Spirit.

That’s why, in The Rule of St. Benedict, I think it is clear that the ‘artisan’ is described as having a ‘skill’ and not a ‘gift’. But, you may protest, what about Bezalel!

The Lord spoke to Moses: “See, I have called by name Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah: and I have filled him with divine spirit, with ability, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, in every kind of craft.” (Exodus 31:1-5)

My reading of Exodus 31 is that Bezalel is given ‘skill’ for a specific task. The call comes first the skill second. God helps Bezalel to learn the necessary skills with the other aspects of the gift, ‘wisdom, understanding and knowledge/intelligence’ (from the original Hebrew).

Now, I’m not saying that these skills are not important and can’t be used by God; quite the opposite! It is a testament and a witness to the redemption of God and how God works that he does use those things we learnt before we received his gift of grace. The distinction I am wanting to make is between that which God has given to us and how God uses us. The former is perfect for it comes from God and the latter is imperfect but redeemable if we choose to obey God’s will. Does this distinction need to be made? I would argue it does for we can easily slide into blessing everything we do as ‘God-given’ and controlled by God without considering the important aspect of our own fallenness and brokenness.

When it comes to questions of my identity I struggle to communicate such a concept because of the confusing assumptions of both myself and the hearer. When I sit before the panel assessing my vocation and competences and I talk with my bishop, I will struggle to communicate seemingly simple questions about discernment. This is not about what God is calling me to specifically but about how he has equipped me. What of my personality is God-given? What part of who I am is from God?

What it comes down to is I can only be sure of this: I am in Christ being renewed for his glory all the rest is debatable.

Reflection

The most significant challenge in this chapter of the Rule is the guidance,

…if anyone becomes proud of his skill and the profit he brings the community, he should be taken from his craft and work at ordinary labor.

As I face the panel I will be sensitive to my own pride and, as with most days of my life, pray that God will humble me, that he will remind me of my identity in him and to speak only of that.

We are so keen to establish our self esteem because we all are confused about who we are at the deepest level. We feel we should know ourselves but the truth is we don’t and that’s scary. Thomas Merton suggests,

The reason we hate one another and fear one another is that we secretly or openly hate and fear our own selves. And we hate ourselves because the depths of our being are a chaos of frustration and spiritual misery. Lonely and helpless, we cannot be at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we cannot be at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God. (Thomas Merton, The Living Bread (London: Burns and Oates, 1976) p.9)

In his extended commentary on identity in ‘New Seeds of Contemplation’ he says,

In great saints you find that perfect humility and perfect integrity coincide. (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1972) p.99)

Humility, Merton asserts,

…consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God, and since no two people are alike, if you have the humility to be yourself you will not be like anyone else in the whole universe. (ibid.)

For Merton the practical things of everyday life should not be items of conflict,

The saints do not get excited about the things that people eat and drink, wear on their bodies, or hang on the walls of their houses. To make conformity or non conformity with others in these accidents a matter of life and death is to fill your interior life with confusion and noise. (ibid.) (my emphasis)

My personality and my preferences are ‘accidents’ not to be seen as static like some perfect idol but rather to be sacrificed before God to used and changed as he wills. My skills and competences, likewise.

Genes, parenting, and spiritual forces do condition who we are. But for believers whose spirits have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit these conditioning factors cannot determine who we are unless we choose to allow them to do so. (Gregory Boyd, God of the Possible: a biblical introduction to the open view of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000) p.147)

In order to know who we are we must know who God is and discover who we are before him.

But under the steady bombardment of meaningless propaganda that is always directed against us, we surrender our privilege to think and hope and make decisions for ourselves… And we will never find God if we are not ourselves mature persons. To find God one must first be free.(Thomas Merton, The Living Bread (London: Burns and Oates, 1976) p.11)

Freedom comes when we follow Christ into his death and live in his resurrection and new creation. Death of our ego, death of our personality, death of everything we think defines us which is not Christ. In uniformly being in Christ we find we are uniquely ourselves.
Abba Father, you call us to life in you through participating in the death and new life of your son Jesus Christ. We humbly approach you and ask that you take every aspect of our life and use it for your glory. We ask you keep our eyes fixed on you and to continue the work of discipleship.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Chapter 54: the receipt of letters and presents.

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Without the abbot’s permission a monk may not receive from or give to anyone…

What is community?

For Ash Wednesday this year I was away on holiday with some of my dearest friends. We go away for February half term to the Lake District each year and this year it happened to coincide with the start of Lent.

I love Ash Wednesday. My theology and spirituality begins with the central premise that we are dust and not gods. God is God and He, by His grace gives us life and His Spirit. Each day of my discipleship I remind myself of that basic truth of what I am made of, not in some twisted attempt of self-flagellation but so that I can appreciate, in fuller measure, the overwhelming reality of the grace of God upon me.

Discipleship without starting from this humility is going to de-rail somewhere down the line.

Ash Wednesday is all about humility. Humility, says the writer of Proverbs, is the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 22:4) and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10). Humility is about knowing who you are. Charles Spurgeon once wrote,

True humility will lead you to think right about yourselves, to think the truth about yourselves. (Charles Spurgeon, The Soul-Winner (Tennessee: Lightning Source, 2001) p.15)

If our anthropology (our understanding of humanity) begins anywhere other than as creatures of the earth, coming from the same primordial ooze as everything else then we have begun in the wrong place. If we imagine, for even one moment, that we are born special, set apart from the rest of creation, that we are in some way born of the same substance as God then we are not being truthful.

But we must also remember that God has lifted us up from the dust and, in his gentle hands, formed us and shaped us into His beloveds.

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. (James 4:10 NIV)

It starts in dust but it moves away from that into the hands of our Father who shapes us and moulds us into His people. We always remain dust, flesh, finite and fallible but, if we turn to God He will lift us up and redeem us.

That is why, for this Ash Wednesday, I created a liturgical space for my friends and I to reflect on the ash cross that we mark on our heads each year but also the cross of water some use at baptism. Ash Wednesday points forward to our redemption where we enter into the life of Christ who took on flesh that we may become one with God. Through the water of baptism we are renewed and we clothe ourselves in Christ, who did not reject flesh and dust but redeemed it by His life, death and resurrection.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Once we enter into the Body of Christ the symbol of flesh and God united we seal it with mark of oil for commissioning, being set apart for a task. We are called to be used by God’s Spirit who breathes through us and makes us living beings.

The service was called ‘Ash Water Oil’ and at each stage we discussed a word that has spoken to me through the Rule of St. Benedict which resonated with the theology behind each symbolic cross on our foreheads. For ash, we discussed ‘humility’, for the reasons expressed above. For water we discussed ‘obedience’; how we as disciples must turn to God and obey his hands as they shape us and redeem us. We follow in the footsteps of Christ as he obediently committed his body to death in order to be raised again. We reflected on these two quotes,

…faith exists only in obedience, is never without obedience. Faith is only faith in deeds of obedience. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001) p.64)

For the Christian to be perfectly free means to be perfectly obedient. True freedom is perfect service. (Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: toward a constructive christian social ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) p.131)

Finally, for oil we discussed ‘community’; how, through humility and obedience we are led, by God, into the community of believers and the community of the Trinity. The characteristics of Christina community should be marked by humility, rooted in flesh but filled with the Spirit, and obedience to the will of the Father through the example of Christ.

It was this final discussion on what we understood about community that sparked the most conversation. Community as a word is hard to pin down because it’s use is so varied and conflicting. We all think we know what it means and what it looks like and feels like but it shifts endlessly, it’s definition is always, it seems, just out of reach. We hear just an echo of its definitive state.

As I heard my friends struggle to find words for what this thing they are passionate about I was reminded of how we describe the Trinity. There’s a quote (which I can’t source) which says,

The Trinity is not a formula to be understood but a community to be experienced.

Why am I telling you all this?

When reflecting on seemingly cruel and strict chapter in the Rule of St. Benedict, it strikes me that the reason this and other chapters challenge is because it is cutting deep within that which makes us fallen beings. At the times of uncomfortableness, I can often find where I am finite and fallible. In this particular case with this strict removal of a monk from the ties to the outside world I am challenged by my need to be identified with material possessions and relationships with other people however well meaning I think they are. How many relationships must I lose before I realise I only need God? I think we judge too soon the answer to that question.

I can hear the protests and the reasons why we don’t need to sacrifice that much to know that we need God but I know for myself that I only want to say that because if I were to live it out I would find it too painful. The cost to this call is too much and so we don’t bother trying. To comfort ourselves we judge those who do that insane, unnecessarily severe but I look at the monks I know who have risked it and found great spiritual treasure from the discipline.

This of course doesn’t make it any easier to contemplate how much I am willing to cut myself off in order to discover the life of total dependence on God!

Reflection

I have been thinking a lot recently about where God is calling Sarah and I next. I keep returning to this call to monastic life and how it might look alongside other aspects of our calling. The call to humility, obedience and community fills me with delight even when it becomes slightly more uncomfortable than I’d like. Chapters like this one, where an abbot is given charge over letters and parcels, strangely make sense to me and in that sensation I am aware of how counter cultural that is.

I find myself thinking,

Maybe the Church should be living out a completely different culture to the one around it. Maybe we have completely lost sight of what true discipleship looks like.

I think of that quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

Is the price that we are paying today with the collapse of the organized churches anything else but an inevitable consequence of grace acquired too cheaply?… We poured out rivers of grace without end, but the call to rigorously follow Christ was seldom heard. What happened to the insights of the ancient church, which in the baptismal teaching watched so carefully over the boundary between the church and the world, over costly grace? (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 53-54)

I fall into humble silence before my God and ask for Him to lift me up out of the miry dust and form me into the likeness of His Son, to redeem me into His life and to fill me with His Spirit.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Chapter 49: observance of lent

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A monk’s life should always be like a Lenten observance.

Why wait?

This week I have mainly been… Writing lent material for our church family.

In May this year we celebrate the fiftieth year of the church of St. Aidan in Acomb and to help us mark this occasion we have decided to spend some time reflecting on the patron saint of our church to see if there is anything we can learn from his life and work (spoiler alert: we can!)

Writing this material has been an exciting and challenging task. It is exciting because there’s such potential that this time reflecting together, through sermons and small group material, will change us as people of God; grow us as disciples of Jesus. It is challenging because that potential is reliant, in a small way, on how I construct and frame the material to encourage that growth.

Lent is a great chance to focus our attention on one aspect of our Christian life. It’s like an annual MOT for our discipleship, a fine tuning of certain places where we ‘fall short of the glory of God’. Although we must remind ourselves that it is God who grows and transforms us into the likeness of his Son, there is a small part we must play in this work. We must allow our wills to be in line with God’s. The season of preparation before the great feast of the resurrection is an intentional focussing of our attention on our obedience to God’s will.

Lent is not the excuse for not doing this kind of spiritual work throughout the year but is merely an annual focus on it. Like an MOT we shouldn’t treat this annual checkup as an excuse not to look after a car, not fill it with oil or petrol. My wife has gone through times when she doesn’t take her medicine or do her necessary exercise and then just before a doctor’s appointment has tried to catch up with herself. It is equally unhealthy to store up developing and growing in our discipleship for the forty days of Lent.

A monk’s life should always be like a Lenten observance.

During Lent, St. Benedict suggests the community,

…devote ourselves to tearful prayer, reading, contrition and abstinence.

I wonder whether ‘tearful’ is solely describing the kind of prayer we do or whether we are also to do tearful reading, tearful contrition and tearful abstinence. I don’t think it really matters but there is a sense that when we dedicate ourselves to intentional focussing on our failings it should make us tearful in all aspects of our life. I wonder if this is why we are unable to maintain a Lenten observance all year round.

The Lent material I have been writing is looking at how St. Aidan went about evangelism and mission. His approach seemed to be about establishing and sustaining a intentional community of disciples from which mission will happen. Mission, for St. Aidan, is a natural outworking of true discipleship. If a community is not engaged in mission then their discipleship is faulty; mission is the fruit of the tree of discipleship. There is no point in just forcing a community to ‘do mission’ and expect it to work. It would be better to go back to the basics of discipleship, correcting that and the fruit of mission will grow. You judge discipleship by the mission.

I have continued to be struck by the Alan Roxburgh quote about discipleship which I have used before here.

Discipleship emerges out of prayer, study, dialogue and worship by a community learning to ask the questions of obedience, as they are engaged directly in mission. (Alan Roxburgh, Missionary Congregation, Leadership and Liminality (Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 1997) p.66)

Here Roxburgh argues that discipleship comes out of mission but I would argue that mission comes out of discipleship as well; the one feeds the other and vice versa. This community ‘learning to ask questions of obedience’ should engage in ‘prayer, study, dialogue and worship’. These four things all lead disciples within community to engage in mission. Prayer must involve listening to the will of God and having our hearts tune into his heart and his heart is for people. Study must involve reading the Scriptures which clearly describe a God who is mission, sending his people to the world to proclaim his good news. Dialogue must involve us speaking to others as people of God about our life, lived out in relationship with God. Worship is any activity done with the intentional purpose of laying down control of our lives and allowing God to use us.

With this in mind I was struck when St. Benedict suggested that Lenten observances should be ‘tearful prayer, reading, contrition and abstinence.’ The first two clearly have a direct correlation with Roxburgh’s ethos (prayer and study). The second two actions (contrition and abstinence) may be less direct but I still see a connection with (dialogue and worship).

Contrition comes from the latin words ‘terere’ (to rub) and ‘com’ (together). Contrition is what occurs when two or more things are rubbed together. I see a connection with dialogue which requires two or more things to come together and impact each other. I’d guess that what St. Benedict had in mind, from a Roman Catholic perspective, is an engagement in the sacrament of confession where a person must face his sin with true sorrow and desire to repent. I see great worth in confessing sins in the presence of another and this form of dialogue leads me to acting out the amendments required for repentance.

Abstinence is the withholding from something, usually a great temptation for us. This is famously worked out during the season of Lent as many people give up chocolate or something that they enjoy which may be taking a focal point in their life rather than God. A disciple is encouraged to abstain from those things which are not God to move God back to the centre of our decision making. One could say that we can often worship something instead of God, idols such as money, sex, power, other humans. What we mean when we worship idols is we look to them to make decisions for us. Take a celebrity; if a person worships, say, Lady Gaga, we mean that someone allows Lady Gaga to be the model for how they live their life. If they want to make a decision as to how to act, dress, live, they must ask, “What would Lady Gaga do?”. If we say someone worships money then we mean that they’re end goal is to have more money, their thoughts are consumed with the being close to or attaining money. Abstaining from those things is a discipline because it must be an intentional rejection of a un-conscious behaviour. Abstinence is a deliberate denial of an inner desire to act in a certain way. Worship of God is always a form of abstinence because it is a deliberate action to place God at the centre of our lives and not another thing or concept.

Reflection

Any Christian community must be a centre of intentional discipleship. From this life of discipleship comes a heart for mission. The focus is not how to do mission better but how to do discipleship better. We can tell people about Jesus until the cows come home but it won’t mean anything unless we do it all in complete obedience to God under his guidance by the Holy Spirit stemming from a life of prayer and study. We must be rooted in a life solely focussed on God.

Mission has often failed because people have sought to talk about God when they have not yet talked enough to him. It must be seen that they enjoy the presence and the love of God. They must show God is real, to be met and to be enjoyed. (David Adam, ‘Aidan, Bede, Cuthbert: three inspirational saints’ (London: SPCK 2006) p.33)

In a world of binging I see some of our approaches to Lent as a spiritual binging/purging. We live the other three hundred and twenty-five days of the year living life with no deliberate focus on the work of growing as disciples and then for forty days we sprint the race. Our whole lives should be intentionally aimed at allowing God to grow us by his Holy Spirit.

Loving Father, Create in us new and contrite hearts, open to receive from you mercy and grace. Bind us together, Lord, to be lovers of your tender guidance and teaching and by the power of your Spirit complete the heavenly work of our rebirth through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Come, Lord Jesus

Chapter 46: offences in other matters

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If the cause of the sin is secret (hidden in the soul), the monk should confess to the abbot or one of the spiritual fathers.

Who can I tell?

When the Lord comes,
he will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness,
and will disclose the purposes of the heart.
Therefore in the light of Christ let us confess our sins.

This is a seasonal provision in Common Worship for an invitation to confession from the First Sunday of Advent until Christmas Eve. I’ve been saying this for four weeks as I’ve led services in different contexts. The wording is from 1 Corinthians 4:5 and is a great image of bringing everything into the light.

Darkness, after the initial shock, can be quite comforting. No one can see what you’re doing and so no one can judge your behaviour. You are alone with your thoughts and those probing eyes of others are gone; you can do whatever you like. You’re free. Darkness brings this sense of privacy where you feel in control, released from judgement.

Darkness is also scary, isolating and lonely. With no sense of sight your other senses are heightened and, those of us who are reliant on our eyes most of the time, struggle to interpret the sounds, smells and other sensations that we are now aware of.

I’ve been involved in many a party game where someone is blindfolded and asked to feel an object and guess what it is. Part of the thrill or anxiety that is created is the unknown, the unseen. What if the worst thing imaginable is placed into our hands? Not knowing what the object is means you cannot prepare yourself for the possible movement of the object or the danger that it might be. There’s a great wave of relief when you see, even if you don’t like it, what the object was. When it comes into the light there’s a fuller understanding of what it is you were dealing with.

St. Benedict has returned to discussing issues of mistakes, faults and offences in community life. We all make them, they all have an impact beyond ourselves and we should all be prepared to admit them and try and make amends. In this chapter St. Benedict reminds us again that there is no difference between what happens in the ‘sacred’ to what happens in the ‘mundane’; we are to behave in the kitchen, cellar, garden, bakery, refectory, etc. as we do in the chapel/oratory. If we make a mistake or offend God or neighbour then we should treat it as if we did it in a ‘sacred’ space such as a church building. We are to go and make a public admission in front of abbot and the community so that no one is left in the dark over such matters.

Like the previous chapter, we are encouraged to admit quickly before the issue becomes larger by deceit and covering over the fault. It is easy to try and keep mistakes private out of fear of being seen to have failed and stumbled but greater is the shame if you are found to be using the darkness to cover such mistakes. The darkness is easy to use as a tool to select what others see of you and to build the false image of yourself but this creates a kind of division within yourself of that which others know about and that which you’d rather hide from them out of fear you will be judged.

In our culture we demand that no one judges another but we do it all the time and judgement is a necessary part of growing and developing. Imagine education without anyone telling you when you get an answer right or wrong, the same is true of the development of character and behaviour. If you want to be a part of a society then you must act within the framework and worldview of that society, if you do not then you are not united in behaviour and outlook with those around you and the bonds are broken. Judgement helps us to connect with others and to learn how to live and behave with those around us.

The problem arises when mistakes and ‘failures’ are seen to be feared and resisted. This view leads to the inevitable hiding of faults and a desperate and futile attempt at being perfect in the eyes of others. Judgement, in this culture, becomes a devastating rejection of a person into the abyss of eternal damnation. The community portrayed within the Rule of St. Benedict, however, is one rooted and established on grace and a desire to be humbled (‘humiliated’ in the truest sense of the word.) With grace, mistakes and faults are to be expected and open to redemption by God who, when invited to, can cleanse us from all faults and make us perfect by his Spirit. Judgement, in this culture of grace, is seen as a diagnosis of a problem that is curable by the great Healer. The rejection of judgement is the resisting of full force of grace and healing within the Body of Christ.

In the issues of mistakes in the ‘mundane’ parts of communal life, St. Benedict is essentially saying in this chapter,

See above.

Although there is one difference in this chapter which has not been said in previous chapters,

If the cause of the sin is secret (hidden in the soul), the monk should confess to the abbot or one of the spiritual fathers. (my emphasis)

Throughout the Rule so far, the advice is to take confession to the abbot and he shall make judgement on the form and severity of correction. Here, however, there is the option of not going to the abbot but ‘one of the spiritual fathers’. When the fault is internal, i.e. not a tangible, which does not impact the community in a practical way, then the monk can go and admit it to another with authority granted to them by the abbot. This must be done, as with other sins, quickly before it becomes habitual or longer lasting.

This is characteristically practical of St. Benedict. I know that I have thoughts and temptations each day which pass, unseen by others, through my mind which effect my behaviour and attitude towards others. I can keep them private out of fear of being judged for thinking or feeling such things and no one would be any the wiser, their opinion of me would still be good and I wouldn’t upset or hurt them and thus cause them to reject me in some way. I justify the hiding of these mistakes by saying I don’t want to upset my brothers or sisters and cause them to act out of anger but it’s not the full truth.

In the Apprentice this year, one candidate made a mistake which cost the team dearly in the task. He was obviously ashamed of his failure and, instead of admitting it to the others, he ‘made a business decision’ and ‘for the morale of the team’ to not tell them: he lied. In the boardroom the truth came out and he continued to persuade the others, Lord Sugar and himself that it was solely for the morale of the team. I was surprised to hear, after he was ‘fired’, that others said this was a reasonable thing to do and was an established ‘technique’ in business. It was hiding in the darkness out of fear of the idol of himself he had made would crumble and he would be humbled.

Going to another and confessing the thoughts or inner sins stops us from building the idols of ourselves whilst, at the same time, protecting those who may not yet have the grace to forgive and pray for our healing from the mistake. The hearer of the confession may feel that the wisest thing to do in order to be healed is to go to others who may be affected by the inner mistake and admit it to them without involving others in the community. That other person may be the abbot and so it would be wise to time that admission for the danger is, the abbot still being human and able to fall themselves, might respond rashly out of anger or fear.
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Sacred/Mundane

I had a good conversation with someone this week about the frustrations of church and they were keen to express their disappointment and anger at the irrelevance of church services to the majority of the population of this country. They had no problem with the Church, the people who make up the Body of Christ, but the worship services were a waste of time. I wonder whether the division between these two things is the problem here. What I mean is, if you don’t engage in the worship services of the Church then how do you engage with the other aspects of the Church’s life? You should have the same attitude when you go to a Sunday service (if your church meets on a Sunday) as you do when you meet together for social times because worship encompasses both activity/tasks and the devotion of time in the presence of God. God should be involved in all that we do, no matter where we are as individual disciples or with other Christians. We know this, so why is it that we say in one instance,

This particular group is my church.

and in another,

I don’t get that group of believers or how they express their faith (if indeed they have one)

The Church is the Church. It is, at it’s most basic level, a gathering of disciples of Jesus Christ. When we meet together we remind ourselves of the Body of Christ and we re-member Christ amongst us by his Holy Spirit. In this posture we humble ourselves before him and lay down our wills in favour of his and we worship, either by enacting his commands or proclaiming his greatness and majesty to position ourselves firmly beneath his will and command.

This should happen whenever we are with other followers of Jesus. Everything we say and do therefore should be worship in these two sense: reminding ourselves and each other of who we serve and to be humbled before him and also doing Christ’s work on earth/building his kingdom and not our own. The kitchen, cellar, garden, etc. then become places of worship because where ever we are we worship God.

If everywhere is sacred does this mean we no longer need specific places of worship? I would say that if we didn’t meet in one place we’d meet in another space and it would become sacred, therefore, we will always have specific sacred sites which we congregate in to intentionally praise and re-member Christ amongst us and receive from him. If we close our church buildings we’d need to find other buildings in which to meet for worship and if we moved we’d lose the connection with the two thousand year history and tradition of our faith and re-member with those ‘saints’ which have gone before.

Indeed, the whole of the worship service as passed down from generation to generation is a tool to connect with the saints throughout the ages to have relationship with the past, the present and the future. It is the mysterious work of God’s Spirit to bring us into the communion of Saints who will all stand, one day, in glory to sing God’s praises. Our worship services are, whether we feel it or not, a foretaste of this heavenly reality. We want to hold onto tradition, not because we are fearful of change, but because we want to honour our brothers and sisters before us and worship with them. It is a lesson we must heed in our time, to lay down our own preferences and choose to honour others before ourselves. This is painful and difficult thing to do because sometimes it feels like a one way street but we enter, in part, to Christ’s approach to us that when we were still sinners he came to meet us. He chose grace and became in the form of a servant and was obedient… to the point of death on the cross.

When we don’t appreciate the sacred in the mundane there is the danger that we will make the sacred, mundane. We stumble into our times of worship together and informality leads us to laziness and blindness. Samuel Beckett writes in his play ‘Waiting for Godot’,

But habit is a great deadener.(Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) p.83)

We all find it easier to differentiate between ‘work’ and ‘life’; we talk of achieving the work/life balance but in the life of faith everything is work and everything is life. When you head into the office, the school or wherever you ‘work’ you do not leave your discipleship at the door. You’re going to that place with the mission of Christ ringing in your ear. The priority for disciples, over and above the job description, is to build God’s Kingdom here on earth, to make disciples, to be light in the world. In this mindset we approach worship as a duty that we feel forced to do in our ‘spare time’, there is then the pressure of making it beneficial and for us to feel something. When the service doesn’t live up to that expectation we reject it and complain and grumble. If we were to approach it with the knowledge that we should always be worshipping and encouraging one another as disciples then whenever we meet it is a joining in of what is going on in all of our hearts. Worship then is not the shop window of the community but the factory, the powerhouse at the centre. We return to this place of communal re-membering of Christ to be fed and to be sent out. Inviting people into the community is through the thresholds of the community and via the waters of baptism.

Reflection

This chapter is a bridge between two important points. We are moving from the discussion on the need for swift admission of faults and mistakes, firmly establishing an attitude towards judgement within the framework of grace and humility. We are moving to a discussion on the erasing of a sacred/mundane divide which protects us from the demands of discipleship. The establishing of a distinction between sacred and mundane is done for the same reason we find we want to maintain both light and darkness. In one we can do what we like and behave without judgement and shame whilst still being able to enter into the other controlling what others see and what they don’t.

Those who argue that darkness must exist in order to appreciate the light are trying to justify the maintaining of that small corner of our lives that is useful to feel comfortable and in control. The problem is, without the light reaching those parts we cannot appreciate the full force of grace which transforms and heals us to be the fully resurrected people of God. The Refiner’s fire must burn into every aspect of our lives and change us. This is a painful experience but until we go through it we cannot know the full brilliance of our God who we invite to lead us to holiness and peace.

Our communities must be rooted and established in grace. In this we intentionally seek to be humbled and then to see judgement in the right way as a means to be in the right position before our God who we worship in every aspect of our lives. This means to be actively seeking to be in right relationship with other Christians and trusting in the vehicle of grace: God’s Body, the Church.

If we are not channels of grace then we have no right to call ourselves church… The body of Christ the ultimate vehicle of grace. (John Barclay, a lecture on the wisdom of the cross in 1 Corinthians, Tuesday 4th June 2013, Diocese of York Clergy Conference)

Gracious and healing God, bring into light those things we long to keep hidden in the darkness. We invite your judgement onto us knowing that you are tender and loving towards those that fear you and you have come, in the person Jesus, to heal sinners like me. May our communities be places where mistakes and faults are dealt with quickly so we can experience more fully your grace and love for us.

Come, Lord Jesus.