October 2021 – Notes from Bambi

Obedience

Dear Benedict,

In chapter 71 your refer to one of the things I find hardest to contextualise for 21st century people: obedience. You were operating in a hierarchical society and your Rule about being obedient to those selected to lead was not something to question. In some ways these early monastic communities were the beginning of democracy. That’s an on going project.

Our 21st century world has many different ways of understanding obedience. In some places obedience is required on pain of death. Any dissent is severely dealt with. In others situations we have moved on from corporal punishment for, for example, children to the delight of some and the annoyance of others. Others find ways of seeming obedient on the surface but get round the rules in hidden ways. In yet others, obedience is demanded from abusive leaders who blight the lives of those they should be serving. So much then for obedience. It’s no wonder people find it difficult. Some rule with an iron fist and obedience is coerced. Other rule with a soft mitten …… (decide for yourself what is the consequence of that)

Some of the gloves I used to wear when I was a school chaplain…..

In March 2020 our Prime Minister told people to stay at home, due to COVID19. Some did for the good of all. Some didn’t because they couldn’t (low wages, no sick pay for example) or wouldn’t (libertarians who wouldn’t be told what to do, for example). Now with COVID19 infection and death rates rising again in the UK, the government would seem to have spent all its currency on obedience, neither side really now being content to trust its judgement.

So it’s amazing that we have now arrived at COP26, a large international, in person gathering about the Climate Emergency in Glasgow. Only of course we haven’t all arrived. Some have never set out, either because they can’t or don’t want to. Some are still in Rome at the G20 and will doubtless arrive in Glasgow having used less environmentally friendly forms of transport to do so (I really do not understand why the two meetings could not have been scheduled sequentially in the same place).

One of the things COP26 points to is the need for a new look at obedience: for us to be obedient to each other, and most essentially to those most vulnerable to climate change. Unlike the leaders of a monastic community we did not elect these people, but we did play a part in keeping them on the margins. Being obedient to each other is the thing we need to replace unquestioning obedience with. It’s the blessing of the most vulnerable that we should look for when we are caught out in our climate exploiting games.

We keep the Rule best when we readily give up any power or privilege we have in order to have better relationships in our fragile world which will lead to the thriving of all creatures. I am not more important than the earthworm or the bee (or any invertebrate for that matter) for without them I cannot thrive. I am not more important that one who lives on a small island in a rising ocean, for I do so too, or to one who lives sustainably in a place of ice and glaciers, for without their efforts I also drown.

It doesn’t surprise me that the leaders a country that makes a lot of wealth out of the use of fossil fuels wants to alter the language of a report in order to endorse their right to continue to do so. Neither does it surprise me that large countries emitting increasing amounts of carbon don’t want to come to a summit in which they are lectured by those western governments who seem to see it as their paternal right to set the agenda.

What I don’t understand is why a teenage girl who speaks up for the climate and the action we need to take should attract so much abuse. It is those who will continue to inhabit our more and more precarious planet who we need to ask a blessing from.

Chapter 71, were I to suggest a bit of editing, would be about that. Honour the smallest, the least, the most vulnerable amongst you. Don’t expect obedience for obedience sake. No one should be ruling the roost with this Rule.

From the remembered gospel: Let the children come to me, let them speak for me.

O God open our lips.

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

Ancestor?

Dear Benedict,

It seems my idea to start at the end of your Rule and work backwards wasn’t as novel as I’d thought. Of course not! Someone else had already thought of it (Terence G Kardong). Oh well, still plodding backwards through your Rule anyway.

I say plodding but then I do a lot of walking. I was reading an extract of a podcast of a conversation between Bruce Springsteen and Barak Obama which may seem odd but then I’m still not really into podcasts much. It was about their fathers, which is also odd as I’m not really into them either, being no fan of the Rule of the Fathers. Which may seem even odder when you think about reading your Rule, as you are also known in our times as Father Benedict. Anyway, enough oddness for now…

These two men compared stories and found much in common. At the end Bruce offers Barak the advice to walk with his late father ‘not as a ghost but an ancestor’. It’s that I’d like to write to you about today.

It’s partly why I was reading the Rule backwards. I wondered if by doing that I might catch a glimpse of the real Benedict in my rear view mirror. In all the commentaries on the Rule I’d read, I’d found it hard to find the real Benedict. Now I’ve not read Kardong’s backwards book but it seems he thinks we see more of you in the final chapters of your Rule than in the initial ones (an insight provided by another Lay Benedictine). Maybe you were getting more into it.

Any lengthy project can be like that. It’s on the final stretch of the End to End that you seem to have got the hang of it and don’t really want to stop. I tried to make the last mile last a whole day!

Maybe, by the end of your Rule you were coming across more as an ancestor and less as a ghost.

As you might imagine, I chose my affiliation to your sister purposefully. How I wish we had Scholastica’s Rule. As it is we know even less about the real Scholastica. I’m pretty sure she prayed though. I often list my sisters in the faith as my ancestors and there’s no doubt that I benefited from their company on the End to End and most days since. What I look for in an ancestor is someone with whom I have some common ground, so that the struggles are acknowledged not brushed away, but also enough challenges to create a dialogue. That common ground needs to include understanding being marginalised, excluded and finding a voice. It needs to include empathy. Is that in your Rule?

However, I also find there the sort of hierarchical statements about obedience in ways that sit uncomfortably with what we know today about the distortions of life in community, including faith communities. It’s no longer possible for me to contemplate an unquestioning obedience in systems that have not proved to be safe. Neither do I have a test that allows me to completely know what might be safe and what might not. If I reveal things about my identity and find myself abused and made more vulnerable by others in that space, it clearly wasn’t holy to begin with. But how was I to know if I came with my bright niave enthusiasm? Which ancestors should I trust?

‘Look to Christ’, you urge me. Sure, but when others claim, to the vulnerable, that they have Christ’s characteristics how do you know you’re not plodding on with a charlatan? It’s the biggest question out there for faith communities at the moment. More and more people tell me they’re ‘not religious’ but they continue to be ‘spiritual’ in some way. Leaving off the old dead labels on a search for some other ancestors. How about recasting the old label and make ‘religion’ something much more liberating.

When Jesus visited the pool of Siloam some of those present got too bogged down in religious rules, side tracked by conventions and constrained by ghosts, to see what God was doing. It’s hard not to make the same mistake, reject the ‘religious’ without exploring how much more of God there is to be discovered.

So I’ll keep walking backwards through the Rule, looking for the footsteps of holy enough ancestors, for wisdom to step out to.

From my remembered bible: The Shepherding One leads me by still waters.

Restore my soul.

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

Zeal

Dear Benedict

I’m still working backwards through your Rule and that has bought me to zeal. Like other words and concepts in the Rule, it’s not all that commonly used now. I remember zeal, it sort of rhymes with congeal, from a song in my childhood – but that all I remember about the song.

Zeal is a word for religious or spiritual enthusiasm, or commitment to a cause. You distinguish between good and bad zeal, but I think there’s probably also lukewarm zeal and fluctuating zeal, or at least there is in my experience. I expect you’d have them on the bad side of the zeal continuum but their presence is a sign that zeal is not clear cut, not one thing or the other but like most of our motivations, wanders about a bit.

I’m familiar with fluctuating zeal having moved from being highly zealous to indifferent and exhausted. In my experience, my mental health has a significant effect on my zeal. Tiredness also always decreases my zeal.

In your Rule, zeal should be directed towards love and service of others. In a community this can create a web of good zeal that holds everyone together. When a community becomes dysfunctional then the connections made by good zeal begin to fray and come apart. Some members may still be practising good zeal but not everyone. Gradually those members will find their good zeal drains away and as that happens the less good zeal builds up resentments, apathy and so on. These take over and it’s no longer a community, just a bunch of people who have lost their zeal.

At the moment the autumn migrants are coming into the valley: geese, swans and redwings amongst others. A local group alert me to their sightings each day. I walk along the local paths where a lot of fungus are now bursting out. The migrant birds hold together in their zeal. One by one they pass the leadership of the group onto the next bird who swings on ahead to guide them all on the next leg of their very long journey. Occasionally I see one of two birds fall off the back or sideways, tired and looking to rest.

May it be so with us, each taking a turn at guiding and encouraging, and may we live together in zeal in the valley of hope and love.

From my remembered bible: Look at the birds of the air.

The zeal of the Holy One will do this…….

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