The season of wandering is nearly over for this year. We are back on Greenwhich Mean Time and the evenings are now darker as the light part of the day shortens. I’m back to my thoughts about wandering.
I think you took against it because by the time you came to found the community for the Rule that bears you name, you’d done your bit of it and were happy to settle down. God help the rest of them. You wanted them to experience stability and that’s all very well but it can be stultifying.
A goose in Longdendale
Of course I understand that wandering has its downside too. No roots, shallower relationships, a whole host of questions. But maybe this was just what your community needed. I’m back in the valley after my final wanderings of the season and I’m full of observations, questions and feelings of being unsettled. Maybe that does make it harder to re-integrate into a solid settled community. I can imagine the whispering: ‘Who do they think they are, coming back here with all those ideas?’
Of course most of our communities are not that settled these days. Poverty and inequality, for example, are unsettling. Newcomers need attention and understanding. What should we tackle first?
More soup
I settle back to the tasks I’ve taken on; a bit of soup making, reusing and recycling unwanted items, and observing the changes that the seasons bring to the valley. About now many more geese are on the move, from their summer to their winter nesting round. Hundreds at a time fly high overhead to find the right place to spend the winter.
I will spend the winter here. It’s my winter nesting ground. I’ll walk and write and pray in this valley for a few months. I think about the observations and questions that came from wandering. This week I think of the souls and the saints, old and new, their stories of wandering and stability, their homecoming. May they rest in peace and rise in glory.
And more soup
From my remembered bible: I will walk through the valley without fear.
I am thankful for all the saints, even the most unlikely ones.
From a Friend of Scholastica living in Longdendale, 3rd November 2023
In chapter 6 of your Rule you commend silence and even go as far as to say that ‘good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence.’
If you have a mouth, what next?
I’ve made it clear before that there are many kinds of silence. As a speech therapist I’m familiar with some. Imposed silence, silence that seeks to silence others with whom we disagree or that we have abused is not the kind of silence anyone should commend. Of course you were probably not doing that in chapter 6. You, and many other monastics, think that silence freely chosen and followed with care and joy, is at the heart of the life of a faithful community. It was probably a valuable idea when you advanced it and many in such orders value it now.
That was before
enforced silence became the trademark of domination and abuse in many
denominations and in secular contexts too numerous to list. That was
before language chosen by dominant groups to silence some and divide
communities became such sharp weapons.
This week we are
once again faced with the use of divisive and corrosive language.
Once again it is in respect of immigration, an area in which language
has played a crucial dividing role for a century of more. An area, in
which I would argue, any Good-enough Benedictine cannot be silent.
One of the other
hallmarks of Benedictine spirituality is hospitality. All are
welcome. I wonder what you think we should do when two parts of the
Rule come into conflict with each other. Is there are order of
precedence?
If we, as a society, are to be welcoming to the most vulnerable should we keep silent about the language used to demonise such people? The answer surely has to be no. Whatever our role in a community, from the least well known to the celebratory we need to register our opposition to lies and exaggeration that lead to negativity and hate being directed towards those who seek refuge. The roles of ‘teacher’ and ‘disciple’ do not work in such a context.
Small boats in Longdendale
Listening remains vital. We must listen especially to the weakest and quietest voices. We must understand the unspoken hierarchy of silencing. When a person sees their role as the silencing of others, that’s a dangerous route. Anyone who needs to tell someone else to ‘be quiet’ or to ‘give them a good talking to’ in order to keep them quiet should be questioned. Why does the breaking of silence seem threatening?
When a disabled person first gets a voice through an electronic communication aid they should not be told to ‘stop playing with your toy.’ When an abused person finally gets enough courage to name their abuser they should not find their testimony tied up in red tape. When a survivor finds the words to sing of their salvation we should all cry Magnificat!
And when politicians show sings of forgetting the pattern of history by which people were ‘othered’, demonised, segregated and taken away only half a continent from here, they should listen not to their own voices but to the voices of those raised on behalf of the weakest and most vulnerable. It is not Benedictine to keep silent in the face of oppression.
Lighthouse
From my remembered
bible: Your speech has the power to cut people dead or give them
life. Use it wisely.
May my voice be used to support the most vulnerable.
Written in Longdendale by a Friend of Scholastica. 10.03.2023
Back from our long Spring/Summer Walk I think I better get back to writing to you, about your Rule and living with it in the 21st century. Two human beings many centuries apart, I wonder what we would make of each others lives? You a monastic, me a lay Benedictine in a very different world, both of us wondering about how to be human in community.
Human?
At the moment our society is going through a very divisive phase. There are many different attempts to glorify ‘us’ and demonise ‘them’ when in fact of course we’re all members of one race: the human race. Such attempts have been ongoing throughout history. Each Empire has given rise to folks who think they are in some ways superior to another set of people. Within each set rules have developed that segregate, exclude and disadvantage some on the grounds of specific characteristics: for example sex, race, ability, sexuality, gender and income.
Walking seems like a simple thing. The majority of the population can do it and it’s a form of movement seen us defining human evolution, until of course you can’t do it or not very well when all sort of obstacles and challenges appear and you are no longer in the mainstream. At that point discrimination steps in and all the ‘non-walkers’ or ‘poor-walkers’ are excluded from quite large parts of life because of their lack of bipedal motion or their difficulty with it. It’s just one example. One that from a position of current privilege (I can walk) I have experienced the world recently having walked to London and back.
A Camino: walking to London and back….
Along the way I meet many other folks and interacting with them found of course that I had more in common with some than others. It was ever thus. Religion is one thing that currently gets bad press. ‘I’m not religious’ countless people tell me. Some add a story of having fallen out of the church or feeling they got pushed out. Mostly religion comes out of it poorly. It was experienced as a set of dogmatic rules and a straight jacket to behaviour that was applied without care or concern by a hierarchy of leaders who were later found, too often, to be suspect at least and dangerous at worst. So much for religion then.
But religious or not, many people share stories and embedded in most of these is a thorny issue of identity. ‘I used to be…’ is a commonly encountered beginning. The one thing we still are, and cannot relegate to the past, is human. So what is it to be human and be united by our attempts to find identity in humanity?
Your Rule offers a group of human who want to live in community a way of living together to discover more about this. But it wouldn’t suit everyone of the humans I know. The idea of rules is coming into question everyday. What is legal or illegal? Can a person legally be illegal? I wonder what it is we don’t like about ourselves that means we want to define people like this.
In a week of weeks this business of being human came up in many forms. A small group of people, whether legal or not, were to be put on a plane, whether they wanted to be on it or not, and taken to another country, whether they wanted to go there or not because another group of people, human like them but not subject to the same rules, had decided, without asking even more people, that it was a good idea, whether legal or not.
Some of the other people who said they didn’t support it were religious leaders. It lead to a further ramping up of the debate about whether being religious and political was tenable or not. Now you need to know that some significant aspects of my faith formation happened in South Africa between 1984 and 1994, a time when the religious and political things was a major issue in that country. Religious leaders had said that discrimination on the grounds of race (and more specifically a way of governing called Apartheid) was morally repugnant and could not be defended on religious grounds. That it had been so defended by a white minority for a long time is a matter of record. It was, to some extent, down to the way people interpreted the bible, a religious things, but it was mostly about being human.
Earlier in the year, one of the leading opponents of that struggle against Apartheid died (I wrote about him then). ‘The Arch’, Desmond Tutu was quite a human but as a religious man he didn’t shy away from the link between religion and politics, and neither do I. ‘When White people came to Africa’, he, a Black African, used to say, ‘They had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land’.
More walking…
It was my time in South Africa that influenced my interpretation of the bible the most. It has been living in Britain in the 21st century that has challenged me to use those interpretative skills the most, including amongst my religious siblings in an out of community. Our shared humanity is not negotiable when it comes to being religious. At the centre of it is One Human who I choose to follow. On the walk someone asked me about that.
A fellow traveller, he described himself as a Pagan and told me he’d been very moved by the companionship and community he’d experienced when taking part in the Camino, that 800 kms centuries old walk across the north of Spain known as the Way of St James. I was walking a few hundred kms on a route of canal towpaths and disused railways in England at the time, but it was my Camino. He asked me what I thought the essence of Christian faith was. For me that comes from me remembered bible: Jesus said ‘Love one another’. He also ‘Follow me’.
He told me he could understand the first but he wasn’t sure about the second point. Why follow? On a towpath or disused railway line this may seem redundant advice. The path has one direction and away we go. But life is not all canal towpaths or disused railway lines, as this week has amply illustrated. How we will decide our direction? What will be our moral compass?
Will it be the further accumulation of wealth and status? Will it be how to bend to rules to suit ourselves and disadvantage some other people? How could it be arranged that my direction is inclusive and encouraging to others such that we travel as fellow humans, thriving in each others company whoever we are.
Wobbly walking…
Some say it’s like that on the Camino. I’ve never been so I can’t comment. But I have been End to End and on a lot of other paths. I have considered how to stop planes from taking off and what to do about food poverty in a rich country. I have though about other human beings, both known and unknown and whilst I’ve not always made the right decision I’m still following the Human One. I’m grateful to all those who keep me company, religious or not.
From my remembered gospel: Jesus said ‘Follow me’.
I journey this day in the name of the Human One
From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.
Maybe stranger things have happened than Jesus rising from the dead, but for me that’s the new beginning. We celebrated together as a Lay Community this weekend and we said a lot of Alleluias.
Easter fire, 2022.
It was a strange time to celebrate. It seems that the Easter message is still misunderstood even in the UK which claims a long back story with Christianity (it was probably brought here by the Romans in the first century). But this Easter the usual nonsense was rolled out to deter Christians from living life in community according to the faith we share. Foremost amongst these is the nonsense that Christians should not be political.
I’ve no idea what the dominant view was in the 5th and 6th centuries when you were just getting started. But there’s no doubt that the Rule you are remembered for is a political document as is the bible we share. The heart of the Rule is that ‘All guests should be welcomed as Christ’ for ‘When I was a stranger you welcomed me’ (chapter 53). It is this strange business of being a stranger that we stumbled over again this Easter.
A stranger is just someone we don’t know yet. A stranger is a person, a human being just like us. Unfortunately we have developed the unpleasant tendency of ‘othering’ the stranger, ostracising and excluding anyone ‘not like us’. We seem to be at our most vicious when it comes to strangers who arrive in boats and lorries unexpectedly. Aspects of our media and politics have developed very hostile narratives around such strangers.
Strangers on the shore?
In all my travels I have never found myself treated in this way, however unexpectedly I’ve turned up. I have sometimes been told my interpretation of Christianity is ‘too political’ sometimes in the oddest of circumstances. This usually means the hearer disagrees with my interpretation. I don’t think I’ve ever accused anyone of an interpretation that was either ‘too political’ or conversely, ‘not political enough’.
Some of you will be rolling your eyes and saying ‘Yes, but…’ Not buts here. Of course the community could get filled up with strangers, who would then not be strangers. What is it that we can’t share?
Later this week I shall be experimenting with stranger status again as I set off with Bob on another long walk. This one was postponed since 2020 and will take us down to London and back. I will be a gyrovague once more, a rootless stranger looking for a welcome of sorts. Now you are fairly unhappy about gyrovagues in your Rule as I’ve mentioned before, partly to counteract the tendency for people just to roam about. You liked your settled community and wanted others to both enjoy and commit to it as well. But sometimes life causes us to roam and when that happens we desperately need not censure or exclusion, not resettlement camps in far flung places, but welcome.
To London, but not starting from here….
From my remembered bible I was a stranger and you welcomed me.
Welcome us all.
From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.
The blog of the walk will be found here from 22nd April 2022, instead of the usual letters to 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.
Geese in Longdendale
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.
Geese words…..
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.
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.
