February 2021 – Notes from Bambi

Time!

Dear Benedict,

I can’t decide if time goes more or less quickly during a Lockdown. It certainly seems odd, nearly one year after the first Lockdown to be seeing the seasons begin to repeat. I make my daily pilgrimage through Longdendale, stopping to admire each breaking bud or gaze at the reflections of the valley. These are my hours, my opus dei.

Snow Moon setting over Longdendale, photo by Bob.

In a community things need some organisation. It helps to have a timetable for community activities, especially the most important ones as you point out in chapter 47 of your Rule. One of the gifts of the COVID year to our Lay Community has been a very full timetable of on line events developed since Easter last year (see website for details).

However, the gyrovague in me is still off up the valley in my ‘What shall we do about Janet’ habit gazing at the moon and admiring the reflections of the valley. My smartphone replaces my rod and staff as essential equipment.

There’s a lot to see here even after a year. Each day reveals some other glory, as the psalmist puts it.

There are no bells in the valley so no one summons me home, only my tired legs and the promise that God will grant a quiet night.

From my remembered bible: The sun announces God’s glory from one end of the day to the other.

Glory to God!

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

Enough!

Dear Benedict,

I’m thinking about your chapters 44-46 which are especially concerned with accountability. Reading your Rule in 21st century some details are different: whipping youths who stumble over reading loud would not be allowed these days, thank fully. But the basic notion that being in community puts you in relationship with others to whom you are accountable is fundamental. You mention various places in which this accountability has obvious consequences: in worship or work, the chapel or the kitchen for example.

In our 21st century context work can look very different. Before lockdown there was commuting, now there’s zoom. There were visits to hospital, now there’s COVID19. Schools were open, now they’re shut, soon to open again. All this has happened in a society in which the notion of accountability has been changing. Some of that change is recent: in an emergency what does accountability look like, some might ask?

Books at the Savings Bank Museum near Ruthwell

But some of it has been going on for longer. To fly to far flung destinations or own a particular sort of car is to some an individual right, even if that damages the planet and we neglect our accountability to the poor. If we can make money at something does it matter if we impoverish someone else? To Benedictines it matters a lot.

This Lent I’m practising being human and accountability is both a welcome and an unwelcome aspect of human integrity. My humanity has a knock on effect to the way I respond to the humanity of others. I’m fortunate to have a warm, dry , safe place to live. This is a fundamental human need. I do not therefore think it acceptable that other human beings don’t have this. A landlord should not make money by renting an unsuitable dwelling. The government should not house asylum seekers in a place reported as unfit to house military personnel.

What do we do with our accountability? If we want others in our community to recognise our shared accountability, how can we do that? The main challenge of interpreting your rule today is this larger canvas. I could with hold ‘seconds’ to those who have not done their share of the weeding but what can I with hold from the dishonest landlord or those making unfair decisions in government. A society in which there is less accountability is a sicker one. How do we reinstate accountability to the civic agenda. It seems to me, enough is enough!

From the remembered bible: Do justice, love mercy.

Help me understand enough!

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

Not giving up!

Today is Shrove Tuesday, or pancake day, the day before Lent begins. I am not giving up pancakes today, or any day if I can help it.

The part of the Christian tradition from which I have come is not very strong on giving things up for Lent, so I never knowingly have. This year I will be keeping the same practice of not giving up.

This year I will not give up on being human. Each day I phone my dad, who is getting very deaf and as we shout at each other down the phone he tells me he is still breathing. I’m hoping he’s not going to give that up for Lent either.

I’m on Twitter but I shall not be giving that up for Lent. I know it has its dark side but I’ve found a lot of friends and encouragement there. I meet mushroom people and talk about fungi. I discuss writing projects, nature and walking, finding pebbles and creative arts. All this has helped me to not give up on being human.

In the Rule of St Benedict I find a lot about being human. Some of it sounds very sixth century of course, hence my weekly letters to St Benedict, but in general I meet some human issues and am helped to apply them to my own human life. The Nuns of Twitter are a great source of encouragement in this.

Each time I visit the social media platform I am invited into the lives and concerns of other humans. I hear about the struggles on the NHS frontline or the daily emotional roller coasters that challenge mental health or just getting by. Too often I learn about those who have died or who are dying from COVID19. All this is only a breath away. So for this Lent I’ll not give up on trying to be human. I hope you’ll join me.

From the remembered bible: He lived in the wilderness for 40 days.

Keep me Human, Wilderness One.

Janet Lees, a Friend of Scholastica, resident in Longdendale. On Twitter as @Bambigoesforth

Happy Day!

Dear Benedict

Today we celebrate the life of your twin sister, St Scholastica. Of course even as I write this I am making a whole host of assumptions about her, you and the story. Some wonder if she really existed, some wonder if she really was your twin sister and some wonder if she had a story of her own.

I’m a great one for wondering. It gets me by. I’ll go with Scholastica as sister and twin for the purposes of wondering. That tradition has it that she lived a monastic life and that her community used your Rule, as do so many still today. It would be obvious to any who knew me that I’d borrow St Scholastica’s cover story for the Mobile Chapel of which I’m the unconfined hermit.

Bambi, the Mobile Chapel of St Scholastica, in her winter coat, January 2021

The idea that both twin communities were following the same rule gives it a greater strength. It was being tried out and lived with in different circumstances. Although the scholar in me would like to have more words actually attributable to Scholastica, I think there are plenty in the Rule that are probably hers. You heard her and it would have influenced what you wrote. As I write to you I try to find a short title for the day, and I attribute that search to Scholastica: an urge to find a few words that resonate with contemporary life.

Bambi, the Mobile Chapel of St Scholastica, in Longdendale in the summer of 2020

I also learned that Scholastica is known as the patron saint of children with epilepsy. As one who worked with children who have epilepsy and their families for many years this is dear to me too.

From the remembered gospel: At the bottom of the mountain, Jesus meets a family of a boy who has seizures. This child’s father says to Jesus ‘I believe, help my unbelief!’ The mother is silent.

So today I once again think of all those silent through the ages, not necessarily by choice, but often by convention. I remember the silent unrecorded ones, those who’s words were not written down or remembered. I remember all those who have helped my unbelief.

Like Scholastica, may I follow The Way.

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

Late!

Dear Benedict,

Being late has consequences, that’s one thing we learn from chapter 43. That’s because it’s not just ourselves who are affected by lateness. Your instructions about what to do with late monastics show how inconvenient lateness is in a community. Frustrations, resentments, anger all boil up and when they boil over other things result: isolation, exclusion, insularity to name a few.

Keeping a community going needs a lot of thought and attention to the common good, something that individual human beings seem poorly equipped to handle. For many of us the punishment for being late will take us right back to the naughty step and some infantile encounter that left us humiliated. It will not be character building but we will feel exposed and possibly ridiculed: ‘You couldn’t even be on time!’.

But what if being late is a much bigger thing? Late to wake up and smell the coffee may mean more than just cold coffee. Late into lock down and the consequences run to thousands. Late into quarantine and we need a different set of vaccines. Late to understanding the fragility of democracy and the step we find ourselves on is much bigger than the childhood naughty step.

So, don’t be late, even on zoom (last night I took my goat to a zoom meeting for the first time, see footnote for explanation). Understand the consequences of lateness and work to include not exclude so that ‘late’ and ‘on time’ have adult interpretations rather than evoking the humiliation and ridicule of childhood in ways that cause as to sulk rather than amend our ways.

From the remembered bible: The time is coming….

May I be timely in what I think and what I do.

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

Goat Note: I was glad to see that a new habit of taking a ‘surprise goat’ to zoom meetings was flourishing in some places. I have always struggled with meetings, whether zoom or physical ones. Eating jaffa cakes only goes so far, particularly on zoom, but taking a goat to meetings seemed worth trying. You may see me with my goat at further meetings. It’s possible that there’s a chapter in the Rule about this.

Goat explanation here: