remembered bible – Notes from Bambi

Burden

Dear Benedict,

When I think about putting your rule into practice today, it sometimes seems too complicated. All 73 chapters are about how to live in community. It’s a daunting prospect. Would you suggest a top ten perhaps? Most days I barely scratch the beginning and end: ‘Listen’ and ‘try not to be discouraged’ (my remembered versions).

This is partly because my usual companion is the remembered bible, rather than the remembered rule. The bit I’m thinking of today is about bearing each other’s burdens. We developed some strange ideas in the 21st century and one of them that has caught hold and will not seem to let go, is that as we age we become a burden.

We don’t. We are never that. We need a major reboot here.

What becomes tough, daunting, frustrating, can be re-balanced if we can only think of sharing the load, standing by each other, giving a hand. Of course the complexity of our lives has made that harder. Everyone needs to work, and often at several jobs, to maintain the expected multi-holiday, big car, comfortable house, lifestyle that is advertised in our celebrity endorsing, selfie-society.

I haven’t seen a dentist in over five years. There are no NHS dentists in the area where I live or in many other parts of the country. Is this because the NHS has failed. No, it’s more complicated than that. The best dental service I ever received was from the students at the dental hospital (that was years ago now). Yet, even then it was clear that one of the motivating factors for some students was the high salaries they believed they could and should command.

Too many of the people not now able to afford dentistry are now in the grip of the worst post-war poverty epidemic we have yet seen in this country. There’s a two child limit on family financial help via child allowance and too many families are having to rely on food banks.

My first profession was as a speech therapist in the NHS. Even then it was hard to find speech therapists, and sometimes waiting lists were very long. Once again you could look to pay for private speech therapy but it’s not a part of the profession I ever went into. I learnt at a young age to give stuff away and most of all to give away my time. I didn’t get my first paid job until I was 18 and that was as an au-pair. During my adulthood I’ve often worked for nothing, volunteered for stuff, had unpaid roles one way or another. I don’t have a large income, because I’m a woman born in the 1950s so I don’t get my pension until I’m 66. But I still have enough to give my time and efforts to other people, make soup, sew up things, visit people.

I’m fortunate that is the case but it does puzzle me what multi-millionaires think they will need all that money for….Or even why ordinary people get hooked into the must have this or that culture. Later today, I hope I will put my walking boots on and walk up the valley. I’ll see some birds, plants and maybe something unexpected. It will cost me nothing.

If you want to live with the Risen Christ, think about how you can take life beyond the restrictions and false attractions of a culture that promises much but delivers so little. Think about how you can be part of a community that ‘shares each others burdens’. It seems to be a somewhat counter cultural way of life now in a context in which everything costs more and the fear of having nothing dominates the richest, while the poor have to scrap by on several low paid jobs and a bag of free groceries.

Bob carrying Hannah and Sally Bunny, sometime ago.

If there’s a rule it should be ‘Let no one go without what they need to thrive’.

From my remembered bible: ‘Jesus said ‘I have come so you might have the fullest life possible’.

Show us how to bear each others burdens.

Janet lees, Friend of Scholastica, living in Longdendale. Easter Sunday 2024.

Struggle

At times I find it a struggle to read the Rule. It’s long (even the short bits) or at least longer than my attention allows, and boring. It’s easier to go out into the valley and look for fungi or geese or something unexpected.

I know that Benedict’s Rule is followed by a lot of people and at its most basic level I follow it too. I stick to the bits I remember and come back time and again to ‘Listen’. The rest of it I dip into now and again but sometimes I just leave it.

A table prepared in Roughfields, Longdendale

I first encountered people who did Liberation Theology in South Africa in the 1980s. I was visiting my brother, a mining engineer in the Transvaal. I went to see some people in Gaborone, Botswana, and they gave me the Kairos Document, a landmark in the opposition of the churches to Apartheid. I was hooked. My wishy-washy white liberal theology couldn’t stand the onslaught of the argument. It wasn’t just a case of not eating their apples, I found a much more political and justice orientated faith in South Africa, and I went back for more several times.

Eventually, after 1994 (we were there for the first democratic elections) I came back to UK determined to use my understanding in ministry. I practised contextual bible study using the remembered bible here for over 20 years, despite of vocal opposition and, more commonly, apathy. I wrote about my encounters with people using the remembered bible. I got on with the struggle.

These days my journey is gentler. I’m not so busy but I am still frustrated and angry with churches and church people who seem to think justice is optional, which is why these days I avoid them more. Justice is a still a fundamental aspect of my faith, and these days that means justice for those forced to live in poverty, for women and for those working to limit climate change. So, can you find this sort of stuff in the Rule of St Benedict?

I’ve not studied it as long as some people so I’m not an expert. I’m an ordinary person when it comes to the Rule but one with a background in Biblical Studies and Theology so I know something about critical questioning and interpretation. Even so, I’d say it’s not easy.

Benedict was writing in the 6th century for what were essentially self-sustaining local communities living together. Most of the time he’s concerned about what psalms to sing day and night and not about carbon footprints. Most monastic communities would have used local supply chains or grown their own produce. This was a pre-industrial age so no one was exploiting oil or discarding plastic willy-nilly. So of course, he couldn’t have written about that specifically.

The idea that a community should be self-supporting and engaged locally is now more popular again. So that does seem relevant even if other parts of the Rule are less easy to apply. Excommunication may mean something different now (say some) but it’s never meant much to me. Other say that they are able to apply the Rule to both men and women, but again it’s a struggle to see it in feminist terms. But it is particularly the lack of referents to justice that erk me. Leadership under the Rule is considered largely benign. It doesn’t self-promote, grasp, lie or abuse or do any of the negative things we equate with leadership failures today in both Church and State. Unrealistic you might think but then remember, this was the age of the saints. Benedict is writing about ideals. Everyone has a beam in their own eye.

Now we know that leadership easily opts for the self-promoting way and abuse of many kinds is a common coin across many contexts. This makes it impossible for some to engage with faith based communities at all.

In our own village, people from different churches and faith groups co-operate on a local level to support their neighbours with food, warmth, company and such like. This has been the winter of Warm Space in which a small bunch of those who are not economically active support other who are less economically viable by using free or reduce price produce from supermarkets owned by billionaires to make meals that our neighbours couldn’t afford to buy or cook for themselves.

There are those who ask me if this is real. Are their really people who can’t afford to live on basics, heat their homes and so on? Are they not just taking advantage of our generosity? When that happens I invite them to visit this village, just one small place in NW Derbyshire. I also suggest they try to get to know they people they live alongside better.

For me the Rule is not my basic document when it comes to my response to issues like this. I’m a biblical scholar and my go to faith resource is the bible. ‘When I was hungry you fed me’. I’m not saying Benedict wouldn’t do this too, although you might have had to wait outside for a few days before you got let in. Benedict often quotes the bible in the Rule, but he’s not a critical bible user. He’s not concerned about who wrote it, when and with what agenda. Psalms are for worship not political propaganda as far as he’s concerned.

Even so, it’s at a practical level we co-operate across faith divides in our village. We can serve bread with our soup but some wouldn’t take it from my hands if I blessed it and called it the body of Christ. Around the communal table everyone present agrees they don’t support this divide and want an end to it. What do I make of that? Why is the continuing authority of a few denying food to the majority, in both Church and State?

This morning I made some more soup. It was from left over stuff billionaires could afford to pass on. The struggle is still in me, the struggle for justice I mean. Will the Rule help me sustain it? I’m still not sure about all of it but I will go back to basics and ‘Listen’.

From my remembered bible: This is what God requires: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.

May everyone be fed.

Janet Lees in Longdendale, 04.03.2023

Marys

Four Christmas cards……

From Nazareth

The cold, still, starry nights remind me of Bethlehem. Glory to God in the highest. See you in Jerusalem for Passover.

Love from Mary of Nazareth.

From Magdala

The cold, still, starry nights remind me of our journey through Galilee. Give us this day our daily bread. See you in Jerusalem for Passover.

Love from Mary of Magdala.

From Bethany

The cold, still starry nights remind me of the waiting when Lazarus died. Only the grave is more silent. See you in Jerusalem for Passover.

Love from Mary of Bethany.

From Emmaus

The cold, still starry nights remind me of everything we shared. When I bake bread I remember. See you in Jerusalem for Passover.

Love from Mary of Emmaus.

The Love of God comes close where stands an open door

Janet Lees in Longdendale: 14.12.2022

I’ve got a little list

Dear Benedict, sorry to confuse you but I’m writing about something else, although being the Patron Saint of Europe I think you’ll find it interesting.

Last night I watched a film called Schindler’s List. It’s not about the sort of seasonal list that occupies the Christmas adverts. It’s about an altogether different sort of list and many readers may already have seen the film. I’d not seen it and we decided to watch it last night.

It’s a harrowing film, shot in black and white, except for one child in a faded red coat. It’s a chaotic film with crowds and crowds of people moving here and there, at one point I thought I don’t understand what’s happening even though I sort of knew the story. It’s an anonymous film, with only a few main characters, like Schindler, Isaak, Otto and Helena having names that stayed in my memory. All of the others were a huge anonymous mass. It’s a long film, at over 3 hours we’ve still to watch the last hour tonight.

In the film Schindler is not a sympathetic character. He is abrupt, appears not to listen, is dismissive at times and seems corrupt. Maybe that’s what it took to hide in plain sight. I understand he was arrested several times.

The list doesn’t feature until fairly late on. It’s a list of names of ordinary people. Schindler pays to keep these people safe. As he does this, all around him, Europe is in chaos and hundreds of thousands of others are being carted off to the death camps from which he is saving the people on the list.

It’s a film about racism in Europe eighty years ago. A time when racism was so acceptable that millions of Jews, Roma, disabled people and LGBT people were murdered. This mass murder, called the Holocaust, was the product of an ideology called Nazism and at the moment those on the political Right want us, ordinary people, to forget it ever happened.

I will not forget.

I will make my own list. I will remember the hate. I will call out racism, however ‘casual’ you may think it is. I will remember the camps and the cruelty. I will remember the ordinary people. I will continue to hope.

From the remembered bible: Pray at all times, give thanks in all circumstances. This is what God wants from you in Jesus Christ.

Even so, come then Lord Jesus.

Father Benedict, pray for us.

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

Note that St Benedict is remembered as the Patron Saint of Europe.

A Christmas Story for 2020

And in those days a decree was issued that put most people into tier 3, so Mary and Joseph couldn’t travel to their home town until they’d had two negative COVID tests five days apart. By the time the results had come through the transport system was heaving and social distancing was as far from reality it’s possible to get. The NHS was teetering on the
edge of collapse and they were lucky to find a vet and a barn on a celebrity farm, and Mary bought forth her first born son and laid him in a manger because the hospitality sector was still not fully open.

And there were some shepherds, keeping watch in the fields, still hoping a no deal Brexit could be avoided, and lo an angel of the Lord came down and said ‘Do not be afraid, for the good news is there will be a network of lorry parks in Kent. And this will be a sign to you, just off the M20, you will find the child lying in a manger.’

And suddenly the heavenly host were streaming ‘Glory to God in the High Street, peas in the food bank, and global goodwill to all.
Janet Lees, December 2020

A short break from letters to Benedict to bring you a seasonal story.

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.

Let’s dance!

Dear Benedict,

Me again, still on chapters 23-30 I’m afraid. I’m not sure what you make of this but I’m encouraged by those who have been in touch with me about this blog and the comments and thoughts they have shared.

When writing about the pattern of work and worship I said something about it being like a dance: together, apart, together apart. So now I’m thinking about this section on discipline and it seemed to me that the dance goes on here too. It’s a slightly different dance, with a graver tune perhaps.

I’m wondering what sort of faults put your monastics in need of discipline? In my calling as a minister I have sometimes been gifted the most amazing stories. I’m mindful of the personal cost to people who share their inner most thoughts and experiences with another person. I’m also aware how complex such episodes can be and how they reveal the depths of community life. We don’t really have that sort of detail about the communities you were writing for in the 6th century, which is one of the things that makes it difficult to understand your discipline process.

We have other stories of discipline, personal experiences or community observations. Each has their own context: part of a dance somewhere else. As I write this I think of a woman who experienced torture under Pinochet’s Regime in Chile, 2 women who came here from East Africa, one who got leave to remain and one who didn’t, of my personal observations of racism and sexism in the church and wider community and so on. Each one has it’s own backstory, each one is part of a dance.

I’m concerned we behave like adults which is difficult when our experiences of discipline begin and childhood and are often stuck there. These things lodge inside us, body, mind and spirit, and influence our steps in the dance. Some of what you write about discipline doesn’t sit well with adulting as I attempt it, and indeed time spent inside the church can sometimes reveal a tendency to infantalise and long for a nostalgic return to childhood. I am mindful that the words discipline and disciple share a common route. So too our understanding of the former depends on our experience of the latter.

I’m not a good dancer. I enjoy dancing but don’t practice enough to be confident. If I get it wrong the worst that might happen would be no one would ask me to partner them in the next dance. But I can imagine that sitting out dance after dance on the sidelines could be hurtful and lead to further alienation. Even so, the community can be damage by one, or more, who dance merry hell over everybody and everything inside the community.

I write as one who loves to sing and one of my favourite morning songs from my time as school chaplain was the hymn Lord of the Dance by Sidney Carter. You can here it sung from a church in Leeds here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04zd4kg

It’s a song I love: Jesus dances with us through his life and ours. I taught it to my Sunday School class when I was in my late teens, in Essex. One Elder told me it was heretical, because there was no mention of Jesus dancing in the bible. There is in mine and it’s an image of life in community, right or wrong, that I’ll dance with.

Together, apart, together, apart: let’s dance. Try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5b15lTnGm0

From the remembered bible: Listen, wisdom is calling in the streets – and dancing too!

Dance with me, Jesus.

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

Pray, but keep it short!

Dear Benedict,

This isn’t a long letter. This is to commend you for your advice in Chapter 20 to keep our prayers ‘short and pure’.

I’m in favour of that. I’ve sat through far too many long and tedious prayers in my time, designed, it would appear to make the pray-er look good rather than anything else.

Of course, sometimes, in anguish or anxiety, our prayers may become stretched out. God sits with us.

We may wonder what short prayers could accomplish but remember we are not trying to ‘change God’s mind’ as much as join God’s team. Joining for a short time whenever we may gives God joy: the Holy One is happy to see us show up.

As for pure; just pray. Try not to get it mixed up with other stuff; and make it wholehearted.

From the remembered gospel: Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God!

Here I am, wholeheartedly!

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

Anger

Something St Paul never wrote…

So what if I can say anything I want, like other people, good and bad, do everyday? If I cannot express my anger, what am I but a hollow dried out gourd, a deflated tyre. I might put all the right words and sentiments together in the right order, I may share bright thoughts and new insights, what I say may cause the earth to change, but if anger remains repressed, what’s the point in that? I may donate everything I own, even my body parts, but what’s the point if my anger, such a key part of me, remains un-noticed?

Anger burns, slowly or quickly and engulfs everything; it blurts out, slaps down, flares up; it ferments, seethes, grows and as a result smothers a lot else; it feeds on injustice, real or presumed, it boils away leaving a painful crust, a life long scar. It’s always there, however faithful, hopeful or loving you try to be.

Anger is powerful and our failure to acknowledge this or give it space strengthens its power. What may have been a positive force for change is demonised and negated and becomes a many headed monster. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, if you do not give voice to anger then it will erupt violently somehow. Ignore it and it may pass, but it will be back.

To some, anger seems childish; part of a repertoire we should have left behind. As adults we are told we don’t need anger, but what if injustice continues? We struggle to understand our current experiences: how will we become whole unless we acknowledge the place of anger? God knows me and God knows anger.

If there are things that remain, like faith, hope and love, so much the better, but you shouldn’t ignore anger.

Janet Lees, 04.06.2020 in Longdendale.

My best friend, my Lazarus

Four days since I heard he was ill. Four days of knotting my stomach, of a disconnected head and a pounding heart. Four days of measuring each breath I take, hoping only that he is still taking them too. Four days of dry mouthed fear and crawling skin. Four days, four days.

Four days since I got the message that Lazarus was ill. Four days hoping, praying, wandering, waking in the night, sweating. Four days of indecision. Too far away to do anything.

Four days of uncertainty: should I stay, should I go. Four days with my hands shaking and no will to eat. Each night I call for peace but there is no peace.

Now I stand outside, my cheeks wet, my body trembling, my head a void. Martha worries about the smell. I am anxious about far more than that. Four days, four days.

The stale air reaches my nostrils. I scream into the abyss. ‘Come out, my best friend, my Lazarus’.

JAL 29.03.2020 during the COVID 19 Pandemic, when the lectionary remembering was the Rising of Lazarus.