Category: community

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.