Category: community

Heal me!

Dear Benedict,

I write to you today about chapter 30 of your Rule, nearly about 1,400 years after your wrote it. Some say you were ahead of your time: your Rule is fairer, less austere and more balanced than other similar Rules. Times change and rules are reinterpreted. During your day, and since, many young people have been admitted to monastic communities for education. Not everyone who was admitted to a monastery wanted wholeheartedly to be there. Today’s selection processes will be rather different and due to safe guarding concerns there have been moves recently to separate the education of young people in schools attached to monasteries from the monastic community of adults.

But looking back on Chapter 30 couldn’t happen on a better day: the day Scotland has outlawed physical punishment of children and young people. No more smacking in Scotland.

There will be many different responses to this. Some with, like me, welcome it, others will see it as unnecessary, a threat to liberty and parental choice. I note that chapter 30 begins with the phrase ‘Every age and level of understanding should receive appropriate treatment’. The new Scottish law does just that. It says that it is no longer appropriate to use physical punishment towards children and young people. There’s no need to hit them and no justification either. Better and more positive options are available.

You knew that, which is why what you wrote was so revolutionary in its time. The purpose of such discipline was, you say, to heal people. Unfortunately physical reprimands rarely, if ever, achieve that. They are too often administered in anger, and so get out of control, and they usually lead to endless justifications on one side and resentments on the other. Wounds fester, mentally and spiritually as much as physically. I think you knew that too.

Whatever the wounds we each bear, whatever their origins, healing is something we all need. These difficult chapters of the Rule on discipline, show us that again. To make a community out of diverse individuals is difficult. You acknowledged this and we still do today, but we might take a different route, especially with young people.

We want to encourage. At a time when many faith communities have lost their multi-generational aspect those that still do have a cross section of ages needs to engage positively in active nurture, not just for the young but for everyone. I’ve visited too many groups in my time where children get hushed and tutted at and even openly criticised. Sometimes the excuse is ‘that wouldn’t have been allowed when we were young’. That’s not a way to heal anything, either yourself or those around you. A community that is serious about young people will be serious about everyone, recognising the healing we all need so that we grow and develop together.

A community is not a museum of the old ways, with its relics of ruler and slipper to remind us of old discipline. A community gets up in the morning to a promise that Christ makes all things new. Christ makes me new and the way I experience that is in a Christ centred community, one that explores faith and grows together, never thinking that age is the mark of spirituality maturity but that the Spirit fills young and old alike.

So that’s ‘No to Smacking’ and ‘Yes to smashing’ the limitations of our age-bound understanding.

From the remembered bible: God says ‘I will pour out my Spirit on young and old alike’.

Heal me!

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

Sleep!

Dear Benedict,

In chapter 21 you give your attention to sleep. I do so now in my letter to you. Sleep is important, vital.

In your day, ordinary people would have expected little private space, if any, in which to sleep. Families bedded down together and if you worked as a servant for a richer family, then servants would have shared sleeping space. But you say ‘each sleeps in their own bed’. An early attempt at safe-guarding? Hard to say. The concept is still a relatively new one to us even. But it’s a timely piece of advice.

Of course even today not everyone has the space to sleep alone. Homeless and on the streets, it’s warmer in a doorway with a dog and a companion or two. Under a leaking tarpaulin trying to cross Europe as a refugee, people take shelter where they can. Even in Britain today not everyone gets to sleep in their own bed.

For those who can choose, private space for sleeping has become the norm. Shared dormitories of the type you describe are much less welcome. But a small room with a closed door could be more dangerous than an open room with many beds. Our understandings of consent are challenged all of the time. We must wake up to that, at least!

But sleep is important if you are going to get up early to sing and pray the offices. Proper sleeping arrangements are therefore vital. Yet too often we, who have these basics, seek to deny them to others, pushing out those who seek asylum, for example, to sleep in places we have long since abandoned or consider inappropriate now, like disused barracks. When hotels or B and B’s are used for people claiming benefits we decry the luxury, even when the places themselves are far from luxurious. When the un-imprisoned learn prisoners have televisions in their cells they are incensed. All this seems to be the response of the fearful who live wondering if their flimsy security could be stripped away.

Patchwork bed quilt I have made with fabric reused from garments

You knew that a bed would help a person feel valued, give them a place. Well slept monastics could better serve the community to which they belonged. We could learn this too. Giving people beds is not a luxury; it just helps them sleep and wake up better able to contribute.

From the remembered bible: I lay down and sleep in safety.

Let me sleep!

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

Still awake!

Dear Benedict

Yes, I’m still awake. Of course, I understand that my version of prayer at night is not like the Night Office you describe. I rarely leave my bed let alone pick up a book. I rely on my remembered bible and psalm snippets rather than full passages of text. Each of us has a way that works and my husband tells me that, yes, he sometimes prays at night too.

One of my favourite night prayers is here with its audio version or inclusive text script and language https://www.anordinaryoffice.co.uk/nocturne

Today my friend in Korea asked me to pray, yesterday it was my friend in Kenya, a few days ago a friend in Uganda. Alongside that are many concerns of people I don’t know, particularly during this Pandemic, as well as quite a lot I don’t agree with: it’s quite a community.

One of the things I do is try to visualise the person or situation I’m praying about in order to sort of take myself there and be alongside them in solidarity. So I imagine the place or space where I saw these people or a photo of them if I can. There are psalm snippets which help me like Psalm 100: All people who live on earth. I don’t sing aloud (so as not to wake my companion) but I do sing in my head. Some nights, it’s all I can do.

From a remembered psalm: All you people living on earth, sing cheerfully to God.

I‘m still awake.

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

Move me!

Dear Benedict

I’m a wanderer. I use that word instead of gyrovague, because although I think it is a particularly super word, it’s not a 21st century one. Not using words in common use is one of the things that makes spiritual texts like the rule accessible only to initiated people, those that know and understand the language used.

So, I repeat, I am a wanderer. I have and do wander, both physically and spiritually. I was in my 20s when the local vicar, hearing my story about searching for a way in my vocation in the local reformed church, suggested I visited an Anglican Benedictine Community for women. Now you need to understand that in the reformed church of my youth, liturgy was very different as was architecture and the notion of community very different indeed. So this was a big change for me, but it was also a very welcome one. It was there that I first read your Rule and saw it lived out. Perhaps if I’d never wandered that way I wouldn’t have encountered it. But I doubt I contributed very much, if anything, to that community myself.

Later I wandered off to other communities, including one in South London and another in North Yorkshire. I can see that any community has to get a balance between welcoming wanderers and living as a community. It can’t be easy. Whilst I have not contributed much to any of those communities I have visited they have given me a great deal.

Perhaps it was like that in the community you knew: too many visitors visiting the high profile monastery to sustain community life. There has been an increase in wandering. Forward to the 21st century and we can see the patterns left by wanderers criss-crossing the globe and the unlooked for effects of all that wandering on culture, language, commerce, climate and our fellow human beings. It’s a layer of human activity that it seemed impossible to strip away until COVID19 came along. Suddenly all our plans were on hold. We were, and still are in some places, in lock down, restricted to our local community or even quarantined in one small space. With so much riding on our interconnections, some things began to grind to a halt. Fewer aeroplanes crossed the skies.

If there were some benefits to this reduction in wandering, it was soon apparent that many resented such restrictions and wanted to get back the freedom to wander. ‘We are a freedom loving people’ said the UK Prime Minister recently, about this. But surely not at any cost.

The Mobile Chapel of St Scholastica looking out to Holy Island.

In 2019 I wandered the length of Britain and once again I learnt a lot. Again I took much and gave little but can we be so sure that our presence as wanderers does give little to our hosts. How will a community practice hospitality if it doesn’t welcome visitors? How will it be open to new ideas and experiences if it doesn’t have an open door? These questions apply not only to monastics but to this whole island. Imagine a monastery that had a sort of little sub cell several hundred miles away, damp and poorly provisioned, run by another set of tired and jaded folks, where it sent unwanted visitors. It might deter people I guess, but would that be Christian welcome? Of course the idea of using Ascension Island for unwanted asylum seekers was just blue sky thinking, wasn’t it?

I’m a wanderer and I want to learn about community. So I have wandered into the Lay Community of St Benedict and I’m trying not to let my ‘will and gross appetites’ get the better of me.

From a remembered psalm: Lead me in your ways. May I follow your path.

Move me.

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

Fill me!

Dear Benedict

I get the feeling you had little time for the ‘sarabaites’. It’s not a 21st century word so I’ll call them ‘the apathetic ones’. Possibly the most judgemental paragraph in your Rule, these are the ones you feared the most. By their very existence they undermine the Rule and those living by it.

The idea that two or three people might live in an unregulated community and actually manage to follow Christ’s way didn’t seem possible to you. You judge what they do what they like: ‘anything that strikes their fancy’. I assume you mean they have abandoned the work and worship patterns of more formal monasticism. They call anything ‘holy’.

It’s difficult for me to bridge a gap between 6th and 21st centuries, however I try. There are 6th century gems I go back to time and again, like the Breastplate of St Patrick for example: ‘Christ before me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger’, but this section of your Rule is not one of them.

Apathy is common to human beings. We get worn down, frustrated, disappointed, and apathy creeps in somewhere. It’s been a common stumbling block in the Church through the ages, as has the unexplainable need to defend any sort of criticism that might uncover those very things in the Church itself and thereby might deter followers. As a Reformer yourself, you’ll know why reform continues to be needed and you must have met a few good ones.

Perhaps when you wrote this you had some specific places of apathy in mind. Maybe some you had valued chose to leave the community and set up like this. There’s certainly passion here and that only comes from personal engagement. These apathetic ones had been your friends and you felt betrayed by their decision to enter the unregulated sheepfold.

Me, I’m pretty much unregulated. After 1,500 years deregulation has continued on and on, one reform after another, some more successful than others. The branch I have previously belonged to has been dwindling for nearly a century and for all its strides forward, for example with the leadership of women, it’s a hot bed for apathy. These days I call many things holy: I walk the way trying to listen but also questioning. I do get frustrated and I have walked away from some of the more frustrating tangles. I wonder if any of those apathetic ones came back to the community of the Rule?

Even so, this paragraph has its place, witness to the struggles to build community and to dissent. There will be some more dissent later, and as a Daughter of Dissent I can only welcome that.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA: Mother and daughter walk on in 2003

From a remembered psalm: As a deer longs for water so I long for you, God.

Fill me.

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

Make community!

Dear Benedict

Let’s push onto chapter 1, it’s one of my favourites. So I missed a bit out: it is quite long you know. I may come back to it. I did wonder when you wrote it all and how long it took?

There are four kinds of monastics, you say. I doubt most people these days would think of monastics as coming in four kinds. But to get to the bottom line, you’re basically saying there are people who want to make community and people who don’t, mostly because they don’t know how. You are keen on the community makers and that’s what the rule is about.

So let’s start with that: ‘Make community’. As far as this section of chapter 1 is concerned, in the beginning was the Rule. Only of course it probably wasn’t. You had to live it first before you could write it. Community is a big word in the 21st century too. At the beginning of the COVID19 pandemic there was a lot of talk about community and how we would all support each other. Now the pandemic is still out there and interest in community has come and gone and still hangs about here and there. So too with the Rule. That there are, 1,500 years later, communities that still live by the Rule, is amazing. Just as it was informed by other earlier rules of life, so too it has also led to the development of different examples.

I grew up in a village; it was a community.

I got a job as a speech therapist: I was serving a different community.

I went to ministerial training college: we were urged to try to be a community.

I served as a minister in several places. In the first I was the unpaid community minister and in the second the group of churches were said to be particularly community orientated.

I did my PhD: it was about a community response to families of children learning to talk who were growing up in poverty (the very phrase is long enough to indicate what a meal we make of community).

I was a school chaplain: my role was to gather and nurture the school community.

I have retired and moved to a different place and a different community.

I belong to the Lay Community of St Benedict, it even has community in the title.

In the last of these (LCSB) we keep things as simple as possible. Our promise, which you can see on my t-shirt on the previous post, goes like this:

“In response to the call of Christ we seek to live

holy communion, create holy space and offer holy service.”

laybenedictines.org

For us, that is what community is. It is a Christ centred holy space in which service is offered and relationships can develop. It has no walls because we are a scattered community. We do what we do ‘as we are able/as we are enabled’.

Each community has its own pattern or flavour. Your rule tried to sort out the things that help or hinder when making a community and the fact that the Rule still does this suggests it includes a great deal of positive energy. But it won’t suit everyone. I’m not sure that it suits me completely. As we shall see later in the next bit of chapter 1, I’ve got quite a lot of characteristics of the other three types of monastics that we’ve not visited yet.

But one thing that’s clear about community is that you’re not alone. You can’t be a community of one. In a community there’s always more than one. In a scattered community it might be a challenge how to connect, but there are others on the same quest. In a gathered community, the others are closer, more apparent and may be difficult to live with, but they are there. In the 21st century, this pull and push in community is still very apparent. During COVID19 we’ve seen people get connected in many different ways and try to bridge divides and make communities. We’ve seen people left out and alone and noted how that has such negative effects on human beings. As far as the Rule goes, ‘Make community’, seems to be in line with human inclination to a certain extent. Until we reach a point, not necessarily determined in advance, where it starts to get wobbly and we want out again. Much as we want in, we may also want out.

21st century people will probably be wondering if we need a Rule to make community work or not? Other people try different ways: a constitution is popular with some, a pledge or promise does for others. Many will just think it happens on the back of culture and habit. Other may say following the Gospel is enough. As a 21st century person I’ve been collecting many kinds of spirituality during my life time. For those who haven’t tried it yet, the rule is there to explore. Monastic or not, we can try it.

From the remembered Gospel: Jesus said ‘Come to me’.

May I make community too.

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