I’m looking out on another wet windy day in the valley. Although Storm Eunice has now blown through the trees are still tossing about and everything seems restless, finding it hard to resettle to their place in the world.
A fallen tree in Derbyshire
Some words change their meaning or emphasis and the idea of rank from chapter 63 of your Rule is like this. To you it just meant who had arrived first, who had been in the community the longest. The rank was just the number assigned from the first to the last. Its meaning has changed to be one of superiority or greater authority. A person has greater rank when they are given authority over others, regardless of when they arrived on the scene. It does seem to be a pervasive aspect of organisations: who is boss counts. Although the other meaning, the one you used, is not without problems, and can be used by early arrivals to stall or stymie change or progress in a community.
Rank: the rings indicate the number of years in the life of a tree.
As far as the trees are concerned, storms can change rank. Some of the oldest, biggest, most precious trees can find themselves felled. Neither gone nor forgotten, they have started on their ‘nurse log’ phase by which they begin to rot back into the earth, providing nutrients and refuge for many species in the process. They make it look easy, just lying their rotting, but for human beings the change in circumstances which come with different phases in our lives can be difficult. The urge to ‘pull rank’ can be hard to overcome.
Pulling rank: my fungus is bigger than yours!
Communities change and evolve as new responsibilities are shared out. We discover new skills in others and take on new roles ourselves. At some point we may embrace the challenge of the nurse log, sheltering and nourishing others as we decline and decay. It’s a noble calling.
Cross-wise trees
From my remembered gospel: The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
May I rot creatively.
From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St 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.
Footsteps in sand….
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!
Give us a sign….
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.
In still waters…
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.
In the book Winnie the Pooh, Piglet tells us his grandfather’s name was Trespassers Will. By doing so, Piglet was celebrating his ancestors and our trespassers.
Christians may be forgiven for getting muddled here, as we pray the prayer Jesus’ Tortoise: Forgive us our trespassers as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Actually trespass is a complex thing and it is worth a moment to celebrate our trespassers, without whom, in England at least, the Right to Roam would be much curtailed. I’m referring of course to the Kinder Mass Trespass in Derbyshire on 24th April 1932.
I followed some of that route this week (not all the way up to Kinder) and back to the village of Hayfield. There are various memorial markers on the route and it makes a worthwhile pilgrimage. I did not know that the Snake Path, which goes from Hayfield to the Snake Inn, was a much older route, from 1897. Some of the original iron gates remain in use.
Hayfield, Derbyshire, from the Snake Path
Remember also that those arrested for the Kinder Mass Trespass were young men: between 20-24 years old, arrested for riot and resisting arrest amongst other things, they served prison sentences for our right to roam.
Sign remembering the Mass Trespass
It interests me when we look historically of what was formerly a criminal offence but was later recognised as a public right. Things like women getting the vote for example. Remember these matters, they are important. Roaming and voting have this in common.
And as for a Mass Trespass….
Mighty Mountain Maker,
remembering those who have gone before to win the right to roam on these hills,
we call on you, Unsleeping One,
to fill us body, mind and spirit, as you fill us with bread and wine,
to make us a vigilant people
ready to defend the vulnerable and marginalised, to create safe spaces for all your creatures
as we take this pilgrimage, in the company of the Travelling One.
Janet Lees, Hayfield in Derbyshire (for a change) 28-30th June 2021.
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.
My great aunt Olive was one of the wise ones in my family. Before I give her chair away I’d best tell you her story.
Olive was married to Len, one of the Sewell brothers. Anna Sewell of ‘Anna Sewell and sons’ was her mother in law and my great grandmother. Anna had five daughters and four sons, of which Len was the eldest, so he ran the business on a day to day basis. He was helped by George who had served as a submariner in WW2. They all lived at the fish shop in West Green Road, Tottenham, which was where I grew up.
Olive ran the multi generational household that gathered at the shop and where all family occasions were celebrated. We relied on the shop for the major part of our diet when I was very young. My mum would call in everyday before tea time and Len would give her something that was left of the fish on the counter. ‘Fish makes you brainy’ the uncles would always say and we thrived on it. I still love to eat fish above everything else.
On Saturday nights the whole family would gather at the shop. Each person was allowed to choose what they wanted for tea from the fish left that had to be used up (Sunday and Monday the shop was closed). You could choose anything but you had to ‘deal with it’ yourself, bones and all. We all learnt to fillet at an early age.
There would be stories and laughter. Uncle George would say daft things and get told off by Aunt Olive. There would be card games of rummy and cribbage with Newmarket at Christmas played with buttons from the button box rather than money.
Olive was always generous, giving things away, freecycling just as we are doing now so I know she’d approve.
In the holidays we’d go to aunt Olive’s caravan near Southend sometimes. Or she would come on holiday with us and our cousins to places on the east coast like Sea Palling, bracing! She’d read us stories and we’d play tricks on her like putting a china egg in her egg cup at breakfast.
As we got older, aunt Olive was a source of treats. She took me to the hairdresser when I was about 10 and I got a bob hair cut. She bought me a magic set for my birthday, not a practical thing but something I had dearly wanted (I can’t remember why).
Eventually Len sold the shop and everyone dispersed. Len and Olive lived in retirement in a bungalow near the east coast and we would visit quite often. When Len died it was Betty, my mum’s sister, who took time to look after Olive.
At about that time I was moving into a flat in Palmers Green in North London. Olive gave me two items of furniture for the flat: a bedside cabinet and the rocking chair. I used to sit in the window at the flat and read or sew. It was the best thing I had apart from my sewing machine. She lent me her watch for my wedding day (something borrowed).
When Olive died hers was the first funeral I conducted, on my 33rd birthday.
I remembered driving along the M40 towards Oxford, returning to college, praying ‘May the God of Peace comfort, hold and sustain you now and forever’.
It’s been a great chair.
