December 2020 – Notes from Bambi

Food!

Dear Benedict,

Chapter 39 of your rule, like many sections is both comforting and correcting. In this chapter about food you begin by making it clear that good healthy food should be available everyday for everyone in shared meals, but you go onto say ‘Overindulgence is inconsistent with the Christian life’.

21st century Christmas in UK is our feast of overindulgence. There are endless advertisements for all the good things you can have in abundance. There is continued emphasis on how special food fits a special time of year and how much of it we should all crave. Of course it’s quite likely that from our prehistoric ancestors onwards this midwinter time has always been used as time to get together and eat as much as possible.

At the same time there is real food poverty in the UK right now. These extremes are signs of our dysfunctional communal life and we find it a real struggle to set the balance right. Whilst we give out awards to those who try to feed the poor, we still seem not to want to ask why the poor have no food.

Our personal attempts to contribute to a better shared food pattern include buying local products from local people and buying Fair Trade products where possible. It’s only a small thing but if the pattern were more widespread it can make a difference, as the network of Fair Trade Towns bears witness. It began in Garstang, in Lancashire, a place I walked past on the Lancaster Canal on my End to End, and has spread across the whole country. We even past through the Fair Trade zone of North Ayrshire.

North Ayrshire Fair Trade Zone on my End to End in 2019

About now is the time for resolutions for the year ahead. How about a food related resolution?

From the remembered gospel: ‘Don’t worry about what you need to eat’ and ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. Are these two rememberings in conflict? How do you think they relate to chapter 39 of the Rule?

May all be fairly fed.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

A rota anyone?

Dear Benedict,

It’s a few weeks since my last letter to you and today I’m writing about chapter 38 of the your Rule. It’s about the practice of having someone read out loud during meals in the monastery. You are, of course, very thorough about the requirements, as I’d expect. You cover all the basics: how to feed the reader, and how they should prepare and carry out the duties and how the community should respond. Indeed this is a mark of all your advice about roles in the community. Most particularly with this you remind us that reading and singing is not a vanity project but ‘for the benefit of the community’.

I come from a tradition that has, in many places, been floundering on rotas. No sooner than you put your nose in the door and someone has your name down on half a dozen rotas. Of course every community needs participants to take part and it’s not a community if there are more observers than active members but as with everything, it’s balance that matters. As our churches have aged and dwindled in many places the names on the rotas have got fewer and fewer until the rotating is between only a couple of people but the list of tasks has become almost endless.

In small communities the same people may find themselves bound to the same place in the rota for what seems like a life-time. The joke about changing the light bulbs ceases to be very amusing when your name is the only one on the light bulb rota, you’re knocking on 90 and the ladder’s defective.

The plus side of the rota thing is planning. No last minute hitches or ‘can someone just….’ which can be disconcerting, as well as excluding. Once again a consideration of the Rule should help us discern a middle way which also has a radical edge: the task lasts for a set, short, time and is not dependant on rank. Listen then if you have ears.

From the remembered bible: May I open my mouth and use my lips to praise God.

Have mercy and spare us from endless rotas.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

A Dancing Day?

Today’s letter is to Mother Julian of Norwich, the first woman to write a book in English that has survived, from the 14th century.

Dear Mother Julian,

I imagine you missed them. How could you not? If the Black Death was anything like we understand it, then it was horrendous and to lose you family to it, dreadful. Other plagues would come and go. I’ve visited Eyam, for example, where there was plague in 1665, and seen the place where one woman buried her whole family, one after another. It’s here: https://historicengland.org.uk/services-skills/education/educational-images/riley-graves-riley-lane-eyam-6974

I often think of you in that simple space, made holy by your constant prayer. A quiet and austere stone cell, I have my own aluminium equivalent, but I also have the choice to open the doors, be inside or out.

Inside the Mobile Chapel of St Scholastica, Bambi.

I wonder what took you there, as I listen to contemporary stories of loss and grief, anxiety and sadness, of the missing and the missed, the lonely and the alone: was it like that for you?

Or did the stones seem warm and welcoming, resonant and reflective as you readily embraced this lone existence? Time to think, to remember, to grieve, to renew, to celebrate; we all need such times and places.

I first read your book about 40 years ago. It astonished me. It confirmed me as a woman of faith in ways some other word didn’t do. I could stretch out my hand to you over the centuries and see you open yours and show me the hazelnut; simple but significant. A woman, on her own, was enough, to be able to see God and say so.

I am not alone, not like you were. I flit back and forth, connected in different ways, by sight, by internet, by memory. But I still hugely value your insights and your persistence. As I dig down into the earth of faith, I am pleased to echo with you that ‘We shall not be overcome’ and ‘All Shall Be Well’.

From the remembered bible: Pray at all times.

In response to the call of Christ, I seek to live holy communion, create holy space and offer holy service. (Prayer of the Lay Community of St Benedict http://www.laybenedictines.org/)

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Young and Old together!

Dear Benedict,

I’m writing to you again about your Rule, this time chapter 37. You remind us that people of all ages lived in your community and that although the Rule was meant for all, some considerations needed to be made to accommodate the needs of younger and older people living together.

You say that it is human to ‘be compassionate’ to young and old alike. I’m not so sure. Either that or like many things, attitudes have changed over the centuries. We may think we are being compassionate to those who are young or old but COVID19 has revealed a marked lack of compassion in some instances. For example, poverty, is much more likely to affect the young or the old and with many more people now falling into poverty our compassion for young and old seem to be running out.

Getting to the root of it: a tree relies on old growth and young growth working together.

Fear seems to me one of the biggest drivers of division, insecurity and hate. Of the messages I’ve read recently more and more seem to show a lack of compassion, though I wonder if that is driven by fear. If we are afraid for ourselves and our own near ones then maybe we begin to shun a wider community of need, anonymous people we don’t know. If we are alone at the moment, our connections to community may be tenuous at best, maybe that feeds into limiting our compassion for groups like young and old people. ‘If I don’t have it, why should they?’ or maybe ‘I need it so they can’t have it’.

At the moment in the Lay Community of St Benedict, we are pushing ahead with our Youth Development work (http://www.laybenedictines.org/). another organisation I have worked with, the Diana Award, is looking to recruit young people to help with its work at the moment: https://diana-award.org.uk/get-involved/become-a-diana-award-young-judge/

These are small steps to creating the kind of communities were people of all ages can thrive. But they are important ones, because unless we do so on a local scale more and more of the young and the old will become isolated and marginalised.

From the remembered bible: Your old people will dream dreams, your young people will see visions.

May I unite young and old.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

I’ve got a little list

Dear Benedict, sorry to confuse you but I’m writing about something else, although being the Patron Saint of Europe I think you’ll find it interesting.

Last night I watched a film called Schindler’s List. It’s not about the sort of seasonal list that occupies the Christmas adverts. It’s about an altogether different sort of list and many readers may already have seen the film. I’d not seen it and we decided to watch it last night.

It’s a harrowing film, shot in black and white, except for one child in a faded red coat. It’s a chaotic film with crowds and crowds of people moving here and there, at one point I thought I don’t understand what’s happening even though I sort of knew the story. It’s an anonymous film, with only a few main characters, like Schindler, Isaak, Otto and Helena having names that stayed in my memory. All of the others were a huge anonymous mass. It’s a long film, at over 3 hours we’ve still to watch the last hour tonight.

In the film Schindler is not a sympathetic character. He is abrupt, appears not to listen, is dismissive at times and seems corrupt. Maybe that’s what it took to hide in plain sight. I understand he was arrested several times.

The list doesn’t feature until fairly late on. It’s a list of names of ordinary people. Schindler pays to keep these people safe. As he does this, all around him, Europe is in chaos and hundreds of thousands of others are being carted off to the death camps from which he is saving the people on the list.

It’s a film about racism in Europe eighty years ago. A time when racism was so acceptable that millions of Jews, Roma, disabled people and LGBT people were murdered. This mass murder, called the Holocaust, was the product of an ideology called Nazism and at the moment those on the political Right want us, ordinary people, to forget it ever happened.

I will not forget.

I will make my own list. I will remember the hate. I will call out racism, however ‘casual’ you may think it is. I will remember the camps and the cruelty. I will remember the ordinary people. I will continue to hope.

From the remembered bible: Pray at all times, give thanks in all circumstances. This is what God wants from you in Jesus Christ.

Even so, come then Lord Jesus.

Father Benedict, pray for us.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Note that St Benedict is remembered as the Patron Saint of Europe.

O Come

Another break from Letters to Benedict to post some O antiphons.

Traditional O Antiphons begin on 17th December but you can easily start a bit earlier by making up your own. Here’s a few to give you some ideas, based on my recent observations.

O heater of chestnuts

Thank you Jesus, that you feed us.

O sitter in doorways

Disturb us, homeless Jesus.

O sun dancer

From the margins of the cosmos, come and dance with us Jesus.

O morning blackbird

Come to your broken world, Jesus.

I’ve also written some short prayers to accompany the traditional Os. Here they are.

O Wisdom (17th December)

Lend me your wisdom, Jesus

O majesties (18th December)

I look to you for inspiration, majestic one.

O root of Jesse (19th December)

May I be rooted in Jesus

O key of David (20th December)

May I be open to Jesus

O rising sun (21st December)

Welcome, risen One

O ruler of nations (22nd December)

Welcome, kindom builder

O Emmanuel (23rd December)

Enrol us in your company, Always-with-us.

Janet Lees 09.12.2020 in Longdendale.

A Christmas Story for 2020

And in those days a decree was issued that put most people into tier 3, so Mary and Joseph couldn’t travel to their home town until they’d had two negative COVID tests five days apart. By the time the results had come through the transport system was heaving and social distancing was as far from reality it’s possible to get. The NHS was teetering on the
edge of collapse and they were lucky to find a vet and a barn on a celebrity farm, and Mary bought forth her first born son and laid him in a manger because the hospitality sector was still not fully open.

And there were some shepherds, keeping watch in the fields, still hoping a no deal Brexit could be avoided, and lo an angel of the Lord came down and said ‘Do not be afraid, for the good news is there will be a network of lorry parks in Kent. And this will be a sign to you, just off the M20, you will find the child lying in a manger.’

And suddenly the heavenly host were streaming ‘Glory to God in the High Street, peas in the food bank, and global goodwill to all.
Janet Lees, December 2020

A short break from letters to Benedict to bring you a seasonal story.