journey – Page 2 – Notes from Bambi

Ignorance

Dear Benedict

Most folks know how to open a door, you’d think. But seeing it as particularly important you dedicate chapter 66 of your Rule to this vital task. It’s not just any old door. It’s the door to the community, after all.

The door to Bromfield Gatehouse, Shropshire, which was one the gateway to a Benedictine community.

This week, walking in Suffolk, I saw lots of doors and I heard or read about others. The way we open our doors says a great deal about who we are and who we follow. I find it particularly interesting when the door officer (you call them Porter) charged with the initial hospitality of the community, are those who were previously welcomed in and who now slam similar doors in the faces of others. That’s not the Rule, and indeed there’s no excuse for ignorance, as you point out.

Door, from the beach at Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

Another thing that happened this week was the leader of the Lay Community said how much I reminded him of Frank Skinner. In fact he sent me a copy of Frank’s book .

Now Frank I and do have things in common. We both make jokes about Wolverhampton. But he supports West Brom and I support Spurs (in the nostalgic way one does remembering the glory days of the early 1960s). We also both pray and that’s what he writes about in his book.

He’s not the first comic from the Midlands I’ve been said to resemble. I was 18 when some other A Level students said I reminded them of Jasper Carrot (other comedians are available). I’ve always had an admiration for stand up and want to try it myself, up to a point. I do a brilliant one woman show that my husband is the one man audience for. But mostly I just keep walking.

Frank’s book reminded me of the many many ways we pray. I love Frank’s way of doing it. Some prayers are long and others are short but I think they are all honest. He says he prays like parking ‘You get as close as you can’. It’s a good aim; I’m not great at parking either. The book had me bubbling with laughter. I like to think God reacts to my prayers like that: the wordy ones with the wacky metaphors and the silent ones with the awesome views.

Prayer is a door thing. It’s about opening and for that we are each our own door opener, though one or more assistants may have been provided to get us started. Once we’re off it’s up to us. Like me, Frank uses a remembered bible. He returns to some bits more than once, like most remembered bible users, turning them over again, examining our own ignorance.

He considers the line ‘Hallowed be your name’ a few times. It is a puzzling one, well padded with ignorance. I look into the night sky and I’m humbled by all the names I don’t know. I imagine anyone who attempts any name for God in whatever circumstances scores at least a point for trying, even if it doesn’t seem so promising a start to the Prayer Police. Like Frank, the God I pray with is open to offers; friendship, love…

And so back to the door to the community. On the news a woman in Aberdeen gave a home to a family from Afghanistan. She opened the door and they went in. I wept and I’m sure many others did too. Of course there will be other people needing houses in Aberdeen. But this open door is just a start. Consider who you are and who you follow. Just open the flipping door.

From my remembered bible: I stand at the door…

Help me to open doors.

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

Inside out

Dear Benedict

You’ll not be familiar with social media, a way to chat with people world wide at the click of a button without meeting them. It receives a mixed press these days but I do it, although I only use the one account in one form. This morning it was revealed to me by one of my correspondents that they have two different accounts. It made me smile.

I love my Twitter correspondent who has helped me a great deal, but we’ve never met. Such are the ways of much social media. If I was surprised at the alter ego they had also adopted then I know better than to comment but it did give me cause to think about chapter 67 of your Rule.

A few years ago bought an old campervan called Bambi. Aged 34 she has travelled 57,000 miles in her lifetime. I rededicated her as the Mobile Chapel of St Scholastica and took her on my Lay Benedictine travels. Yet chapter 67 is all about not going out.

Well that’s the main difference between monastics and Lay Benedictines. Being a Lay Benedictine you live inside out. I suspect there are many out there who don’t know they know a Lay Benedictine, a bit like having two social media accounts. And I’d have to say that it’s usually Bambi who attracts more attention rather than ‘What’s a Lay Benedictine?’

A Lay Benedictine is an enthusiast who would like to introduce more people to the inside-out life. Those who use social media often use it as a platform to share their views on life the universe and everything. There’s Anglican Twitter (I follow a few though I’m no Anglican) and Fungi Twitter (I’ve learnt a lot from them too). But most people just want to admire my van.

Perhaps this is why you didn’t want your monastics talking about what happened outside. You thought they’d be attracted to the outside life again. Me, I can’t get enough of it. Partly because I think it’s the life for me. I don’t mean night clubs and stuff, of motor shows, or concerts. All very nice in their way I’m sure. I mean the slow old routes from county to county, joining up the dots across Britain, where I am distracted by trees, fungi and other wild things.

So if you see an old Bambi out on the road, remember to give us a toot! We’ll be trying to live the inside-out life somewhere in Britain. Meanwhile we might meet on social media.

A traditional prayer: May the road rise to meet you.

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

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.

Cross culture

The Nunburnholme Cross is a piece of carved, broken and mended Saxon stone housed in the Parish church of Nunburnhome near Pocklington in East Yorkshire. It’s unremarkable except for being there.

It’s not as well carved as the Ruthwell Cross, but it has a similar message. That message is in several layers. First the stone: the oldest part. Then the carvings: the age old story of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Then the destruction: torn down, buried and forgotten. Then the resurrection….

The Ruthwell Cross (from my End to End 2019)

This cross belongs to no one, just as the cross story cannot be claimed to belong to any one sect or group. I don’t know then it was damaged but I do know that Nunburnholme was damaged, by the decree of a deranged king, Henry VIII. In 1539 the monasteries were suppressed and least amongst these was a very small, some say the smallest, group of Benedictine Sisters living under the Rule of St Benedict in Nunburnholme.

Remains of the Nunburnholme Cross, Saxon, possibly 9th century.

I am linked to them. I am a Lay Benedictine and this blog is about living the Rule of St Benedict in the 21st century. Not that I’m very good at it. I’m like the damaged cross, rough and still here. I’m like the suppressed sisters: surplus to requirements.

1539 was a time of high culture wars when the establishment decided that ordinary people would toe the line and give up the rules and rituals they had tried to live by. Much of the country side was trampled as walls were knocked down, treasures were stolen and Religious paid off. So is that English enough for the new Culture Secretary, I wonder. It seems to me the current culture wars are, of course, very selective.

There are bits we like. Let’s keep those. There are bits we don’t like. Let’s hide, forget or destroy those. Only it doesn’t work like that. The bits you want rid of always come back and bite you on the bum. The Ruthwell Cross and the Nunburnholme Cross are witnesses to that.

There is a story, that goes back 2 thousand years in these islands, which has been interpreted in stone and on paper and in lives throughout that time. The basic story is still there, in the landscape, as people have tried to make sense of it and live it all of that time. It has welcomed and embraced people from countless different cultures from across the globe and is the better for it. There are still bits that are rough and rankle, at least with me. A recent post I read on Twitter lamented the lack of female deacons in the Catholic Church. Read on dear reader…

In the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church there are and always have been female deacons. It’s just some branches of that One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church don’t recognise them. Just like the story of the small group of Benedictine sisters at Nunburnholme has been forgotten, so have they. Just as too many good servants have been made surplus to requirements, so have they.

But just like those bits of unremarkable stone, they still exist and are still exercising their ministries in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. During the first lockdown in 2021 I read a book about female ministers of European origin finding new holy places on routes across North America in the 19th century. Surplus to requirements in one place they found space in another.

I am still finding a space, for holy service and holy communion. I have found the Lay Community of St Benedict is a good space in which to explore that. In my Bambi, the Mobile Chapel of St Scholastica, I celebrate, the forgotten sisters of Nunburnholme and I sing a song of high revolt to the interpretations that exclude and damage and destroy those who would follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

So do we need a Rule for that? Maybe. I’m still working on that, as this blog will no doubt demonstrate.

Janet Lees, a friend of St Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict, after wandering through East Yorkshire. 19.09.2021.

Note: ‘One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’ are words used in the service of ordination in the United Reformed Church.

Anniversary!

Dear Benedict,

I’m writing this on the eve of the second anniversary of my End to End walk in 2019. I started at Land’s End on 2nd April and finished at John O’Groats on 12th August of that year: 1110 miles in 117 days. It is the anniversary of my full profession as a walker.

It had taken me 60 years as a novice to fully embrace the walking way. My End to End (also called LEJOG) had been proceeded by many other walks both long and short, some alone, some in company. I’d been working up to it for sometime. I’d supported Bob and Hannah when they walked their LEJOGs, in 2003 and 2012. A sort of mini walking community: The Community of the Good Traveller.

Holy Week is a good time to remember that travelling community, it’s origins and experiences. As we remember, this is my body, I remember what it feels like to walk more than you think you can. For others ‘This is my body’ will recall other physical experiences. None of us are disembodied cells and neither was Jesus.

From tomorrow I’m going to leave off writing to you for a while, but I couldn’t go without remembering this anniversary of profession. Not quite what monastics mean, I know, but I think of you and your embodied lay community (Rowan Williams reminded us about them being a lay community in his recent talk) and all the different professions that contributed to it. So too our Lay Community has discovered many different gifts and skills during this lock down year.

During my adult lifetime I’ve discovered many gifts myself and my contribution to the Community of the Good Traveller has changed over time, and will change again I’m sure. At the moment I’m an admirer of nature, recording my local wildlife sightings, making every step count.

If I don’t write for a while, I’ll not have forgotten you. I’ll take my remembered Rule with me and reflect on it. As a result of our correspondence there’s more I remember this year than last. There’s also those bits I’ve left out so far, still pondering them, particularly those sections on leadership. I’m not alone in still wondering what kind of leaders we need now. Ones of truth and integrity maybe obvious, but it’s clearly not as straightforward as that.

When thinking about leadership, too often we look to the Great Men, and now even occasionally to the Great Women of the faith. It’s good to know they’re there, members of the Community of the Good Traveller. But I’m looking for the more ordinary, dusty road traveller, hot cross bun eater.

I remember Margaret and Brian with love: their hospitality, affection, creativity and friendship. When we returned from South Africa in 1994, Margaret gently said, in response to our enthusiasm, ‘Not everyone can go so far, you know’, and six month later they were staffing the library of a theological college in Zimbabwe. It was a change from Twickenham High Street, but just as hot and holy.

But she was right, stay local if you can. We’ve stayed local all through the winter lock down, and hope to begin some further journeys later this month. But local is good, even in Royston Vasey (which, in case you’re not sure is the alternative name for the village where we live).

Recalling the opening titles of a certain ‘League of Gentlemen’

Meanwhile, I’ll ‘Walk on‘ and hopefully ‘Be back soon‘ (two travelling songs I sometimes sing).

From the remembered bible: Jesus said ‘Follow me’.

LEJOG Anniversary Declaration

I inhabit a space made by the Creator, lived in by the Son and animated by the Spirit.

That space is around me and within me.

I commit myself anew to The Community of the Good Traveller,

staying local where I can, treading gently on the earth, making each step count, ready to salute the species around me, and celebrate our place in the universe.

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

Holy Ground!

Dear Benedict

Today I went on a walk as usual, a short journey from home and back again. I was not going for or for a long time and I’d be back for lunch. It was as described in chapter 51 of your Rule.

Bob dropped me off at Torrside Crossing on the Transpennine Trail (TPT) and I set off towards home. I’d hardly gone any distance at all when I saw that the very waterlogged ground of the trail on the bridleway side had been churned up by a heavy vehicle. I could hear it up ahead and soon saw it and the path it had taken as it flailed its way along the small trees and bushes that lined the path.

A bit further along and a different vehicle blocked the footpath. The driver soon moved it. I introduced myself and asked about the work. It was part of a large maintenance plan, I was assured. But that in itself left me with many questions. The path has been torn up before, I’m afraid and each time there are promises to reinstate it, which usually just means ‘wait for nature to get back to work’.

I was disturbed by the use of flailing to trim the hedges and trees as I’d heard this were not a good idea. Spring is advancing and timing did not seem great. I walked on a bit further looking for the TPT contact information on my phone. I love this trail and have walked the whole thing coast to coast. I was not expecting to find this happening on my doorstep but it was a pressing matter as you mention in chapter 51 and needed attending to.

Further information from my smartphone confirmed that hedges and trees should not be trimmed or cut between 1st March and 1st September, according to the RSPB website amongst others. I was therefore puzzled as to why this work was going on at this time.

Then I saw the frogspawn. I’ve been searching for it recently and have seen several other patches on the trail. This was not a patch I’d seen before but it was right in the path of the work if the hedge flailing machine carried straight on. It was holy ground.

Now what to do? I fired off several tweets to the TPT. I spoke to a few other walkers coming by. I walked back to the driver and spoke to him about the frogspawn, showing him the place it occupied in the path. He was polite and listened. Are driver’s trained to spot frogspawn I wondered? How would they see it from their vehicle?

Amphibians are amongst the fastest declining groups of wild animals in Britain. Yes, we can make garden ponds, but they already have their own holy ground and return to the same places year after year to breed.

A frog seen on the TPT almost exactly a year ago.

Once I’d returned home, and eaten my delayed lunch, I emailed TPT about the work and restated my questions. My social media has been replete with too many examples of natural destruction this month already. I don’t live near the route of HS2 but the environmental damage that is being done there without any regard for the current inhabitants appals me.

We must learn to reverence the earth, to treat these places as holy ground. I want to share the TPT with other creatures, especially those that hop.

From my remembered bible: God’s voice came from the bush saying ‘You are standing on Holy Ground’.

West African Proverb: Tread gently on the earth.

I’m hopping, Holy One.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a 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.

The year of the vulture

The clock ticks only forwards

As we fall into the year,

The ups and downs and straight bits

In the hills round here.

A great bird came to visit

And seemed willing just to stay

As people came and watched it

More and more each day.

But as the days got shorter

And things began to spike,

The vulture headed homewards:

It would be quite a hike.

Oh dear and brilliant creature

We’re glad you came our way,

And wish you flying Eastwards

A safe and happy day.

JAL: 21.09.2020 in Longdendale.

Moving back

I’m humming a song as I sort things out: We are moving in the light of God. It’s a traditional song from South Africa and much of the stuff I’m sorting through is connected to my time in South Africa.
I first went in 1984 and the last time was 1994 so my visits span the last decade of Apartheid. I learnt more there than why we didn’t eat South African apples back then. We were witnesses to the end of Apartheid in 1994.
I’ve unearthed photos, art, poetry, fabric, letters, diaries. All moving stuff. Now to decide where to move it to? I’ve given some away: poetry and pictures. What will I write about from all of this. The journey from naive 20 something to mother of a 3 month old daughter, these were some of the most influential years of my life, shaping, molding and changing me. Of course something didn’t change: I was still a white European woman. But there were things that carried me through every day of my ministry. One was Desmond Tutu speaking to the Eloff Commission in the 1980s with words Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome centuries before.
‘Nothing can separate us from the Love of God in Jesus Christ‘.
I have said it at every funeral I have conducted, remembered it and prayed it in many more circumstances on many days.
I am moving in the light of God, and in the love of Jesus Christ.
In our life and our believing

The love of God

JAL 30.01.2019