community – Page 4 – Notes from Bambi

Work!

Dear Benedict,

Chapter 48 is one in which you give a detailed account of the sort of daily labour generally expected in community. Once again you are thorough with hours marked out for all to understand. From bringing in their own harvest to quiet reading, everything is covered. Perhaps detail was important for this experiment in communal living.

Now nearly a year after the first COVID19 Lockdown in England, Lockdown fatigue is a real thing. It’s hard to maintain a timetable after all this time, even with a lot of encouragement. Emotions may be running high or low, apathy or anger may emerge in response to injustice. I always thought the third lockdown would be harder, due to the knock on effects of the previous two as well as seasonal factors and the looming anniversary.

Even so, we can become too obsessed with timetables and continued lockdown does give us some opportunities to see the way our time is often colonised by unnecessary activities as well. In pre-lockdown times it appeared too challenging to rein in the proliferation of meetings. Some role expectations ramped up and up. Leisure became a competitive industry.

In these days, simple things can help us reset ourselves: bake a loaf or a cake if possible, take a short walk, listen to some music.

Take time to make a tart: the Yorkshire rhubarb season is very short.

We are more than our work and life is not meant to be all work. Inequality plays a big part and survival might depend on it amongst the poorest. This week we’ve seen once again how inequality is promoted as a means of social control. This is directly contrary to your Rule, which was meant to ensure equal participation and responsibility.

Whilst it may seem harsh that those who neglect their duties, whether manual labour or reading time, should be punished it was consistent with your earlier sections and at the time added up to an honest attempt to create a harmonious whole. What of us now? It’s not just Lockdown that has put work and play out of kilter but it may give us opportunity to review and amend it. One things for sure, we desperately need to undo the bad work that inequality is contributing to communal distress. A leadership that lies and cheats is not going to create fairness and harmony, only more resentment and fear. In the last line of chapter 48 you have words we really need to hear. As for the sick or weak, the leadership ‘must take their infirmities into account’.

From the remembered bible: There is a time to work and a time to play.

In my apathy or anger, take me fairly into account.

From a Friend on 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.

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:

Time to eat!

Dear Benedict

In setting down a time to eat you were concerned that people ate enough and in company and that the time together was also an important part of communal life (chapter 41). The community was governed by the natural order of day and night and being in the northern hemisphere, the way it changed during the year, so you made allowances for this. Furthermore, people worked in daylight so food needed to be available to fuel that work. It all makes good sense.

In our day time is a different thing. It rushes past or drags us down. We may have company or we may not. We may have work, too much too little or none. Thinking about a chapter like this, there are so many ways in which it addresses our lives. A rhythm to daily/yearly life is important. A good one can keep us healthy and in communion with each other.

Lockdown is not like that so it’s not surprising if some folks want to bend the regulations or use their own judgement. A TV interview with a person from China about Lockdown recently revealed the view that ‘We are used to doing what we are told, you are not’. It’s certainly food for thought.

I have found different patterns developing in Lockdown even in our small community of two.

There’s a time to walk and a time to be still, a time to work and a time to rest, a time to eat and a time to prepare for eating, a time to think and a time to pray, a time to sleep and a time to wake up. There’s a time for everything in Lockdown.

From time to time, there’s also a time to worry. This doesn’t seem to have a schedule but arrives out of nowhere almost and sows its own chaos. It may change the times we had set up for something else. It can scramble up our thinking, doing and being. Having a timetable can help with getting back on track. Each thing has it’s time and place, each activity makes a space for us to enjoy that one thing.

The local shopkeeper told me that when he first got a shop it played havoc with his eating times: he’d eat all sorts of stuff any time. I took it to indicate that the new shop was a stressful experience. I remember my great uncles, who ran the fish shop when I was a child, had strict times for eating, each one coming up for his meal at the specified time, to keep a sensible rhythm, to keep healthy habits.

The communal habit of eating in local lunch clubs is something I know some older people have missed. The rhythm of the day and time and the company was helpful and nourishing as much as the food. It’s a part of old normal that we need to rethink for new normal.

Where possible, it’s sensible to have a time to eat. If we can’t do that or it seems to elude us sometimes, we need to think why that might be and see about getting back on track if we can. We need to help each other to stay healthy clearly announcing when it’s time to eat or offering opportunities for shared eating times where possible.

From the remembered bible: There’s a time for everything under heaven.

Help me to stay healthy.

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

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.

Cook, eat, repeat!

Dear Benedict,

We all have to eat and in any community, even a small one, the logistics of this will need managing somehow. You turn your attention to this in chapter 35 of your Rule.

From this is gather that feeding people is a central part of community life, begins and is sustained with prayer, and is passed onto others in a continuous stream by the same means. Everyone gets a chance to serve in this way, whatever their abilities. Each person’s service is dedicated through prayer and upheld through the prayers of the community. By prayer too, so the tasks are passed onto the next team of servers. So a seamless round of gospel based serving and being served is inaugurated.

I enjoy both roles. I love to be be part of the serving team, getting the meal together and presenting it, and I love to be amongst those served, enjoying what is being offered.

There’s a proliferation of cooking programmes on the TV. Some are more communal than others with the rounding up of tasters and the served. Some are more solitary; the server and the taster are essentially the same person. These reflect the range of eating options in our society today. Some serve and eat in a group, others do so alone.

Creative ways of making a community of servers are being explored in lock down. One of our preferred ways of socialising is with food. How to say ‘pass the sauce’ or ‘anyone for seconds’ in a zoom meal requires some thought, but this is true of our whole lives. Thinking about who we serve by our social distancing and mask wearing, or how we are served by those who keep the local down rules is a challenge every bit as much as actually keeping them ourselves.

There’s a lot of talk about doing Christmas differently, which mostly means the eating thing. It’s interesting how central a role this seems to play in the lives of so many. Needing to recreate Christmases past has always seemed rather odd to me, even though I do try to humour my 89 year old father on this one, largely because I’d hate for him to be lonely. But change can be good and help us to think afresh. After all we don’t require all Christian women to give birth in stables, do we.

The main things about eating together at any time of year seem to be to be:

Is it fair? If not what can you do about it?

Are we grateful? If not what can you do about that?

From the remembered bible: God come quickly and help us.

From the remembered gospel: Jesus said ‘I am just another server here’.

Help me to be fair enough, to be grateful enough.

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

In Tandem!

Dear Benedict,

My husband and I used to ride a tandem together. Unfortunately I was unable to find a photo of us and want to assure you this was not us!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA: Not us on a tandem!

However, Chapter 34 of your Rule did remind me of our tandeming days. A tandem is a very just form of transport. Each puts in what they can and receives what they need as a result. Unfortunately our country doesn’t seem to run like a tandem. Too often the one on the front is putting in all the effort whilst the one at the back lays back and enjoys the ride.

‘Each one according to their need’ you write and it’s a good Rule. Only too often we inflate our need because of greed rooted in fear. ‘But what if we couldn’t have that?’ we wonder and as a result we order some more or take something that someone else really needs, or reduce our aid budget or …

One of the things that has been obvious to me during the COVID19 lock down is I don’t really need very much. I may have got used to having a lot and it may be challenging to reduce my consumption, but do I really need all these things? It seems not.

In your Rule you really challenge the grumblers too. Whoa! I’d love to see you on Twitter. Today I learnt what some people thought about a young woman, stripped of British citizenship, who is currently trying to return to the UK from Syria. She left UK after being groomed and radicalised on line when a child. One person wrote ‘I wouldn’t want to be her neighbour’. So I thought of this…

When I was young, being radicalised, were you there, were you there?

When I was young, being radicalised, were you there?

And the creed and the colour and the name won’t matter, were you there?

(Borrowed from Sydney Carter)

You might want to add your own verses: abused, groomed, trafficked, and so on. Where were we for children and young people like these? Where are we now? Living next door?

From the remembered gospel: Jesus said ‘which one was the neighbour??’

Help me live the life of a true neighbour.

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

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Not me on the back either, but my daughter wearing my trousers!

Not mine!

Dear Benedict,

Yesterday I was walking through one of the short strips of woodland in the valley. Woodland like that is one of my preferred walking places whatever the season, and I was thinking, as I had been for a few days, about chapter 33 of your Rule. It’s another one of the short chapters, I noted, this time about personal possessions.

Now the one thing I’m quite clear about is I don’t own that stretch of woodland. Occasionally I do come across places that are labelled as ‘Private Property, Keep Out’ but fortunately not very often round here where a lot of the land is signed ‘Open Access’. And although I’ve sometimes seen ‘Woodland for Sale’ notices, I’ve not bought any because I don’t have that sort of money or the need to ‘own’ woodland. Provided the community can have access to it, as a shared resource, that seems to me the more natural order of things. It is after all, the natural world. I realise someone does have to care for it, which is why I favour the community ownership option.

And I think you would too. Like many people, I surely have too much stuff: a house full in fact, as I’ve already noted. But for this chapter I also need to think about what belongs to us communally and how we treat such stuff.

The natural world is not mine, but neither is the NHS. It’s a shared resource, something I have contributed to but I don’t have more rights to it than anyone else. Most people would get that even if they don’t understand that passing on COVID19 to people who in turn need hospitalising is a way of life that is not mindful of the communal nature of the NHS. Just because you won’t need it, doesn’t mean it’s OK to indulge in behaviour that might mean someone else does.

So too, other resources we hold in common, often referred to as ‘tax payers’ money’, though in fact much more than that. It continues to astonish me how many people think it’s OK to find a way not to contribute their fair share of taxes, as if they didn’t want a share of the communal things these fund and in addition encourage the hounding of the poor for their need to rely on such communally funded resources, like Universal Credit, as if they were the criminals. Unfortunately when the leadership of our society seems to include those that encourage the misuse of communal resources, it seems likely we are not in the presence of the kind of leadership that Chapter 33 describes as being able to allocate resources according to need.

From the remembered gospel: Jesus said ‘There was a man who had 3 servants and before he went on a journey he asked them to look after his money. To one he gave £1,000, to another £500 and to a third £10. When he came back…..’

Call me back, remind me: not everything belongs to me!

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

Fair shares!

Dear Benedict,

We live in an unequal world. It’s my first thought when reading chapter 31 of your Rule. Of course that was true when you wrote it and throughout human history. But that doesn’t mean we stop working for fair shares.

Each community should have a least one person in it who makes sure everyone gets a fair share, you say. Today, in our world, that concern needs to be more universal. Every person a Benedictine Cellarer, the name you gave to the sharer-outer, or maybe the quarter-master or mistress.

It can be difficult not to hoard or even just tuck something away for another day when we fear lean times. Poverty instils anxiety and so we keep a little back, or a lot depending on our access to resources. No one wants to go hungry.

In recent developments a footballer bought up in poverty who is now very well known has, I’m glad to say, managed to extract another U-turn from the government on the issue of child food poverty. And he has done so very humbly, sharing the appreciation he received with all involved.

So it is possible, even in a very unequal world. May we pursue such possibilities and feast together in hope of a more equal kindom.

From the remembered gospel: Jesus told them to collect up what had been left over. There were 12 baskets full.

Give us this day our daily bread.

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