rule – Notes from Bambi

Hope for the cenobites

Dear Benedict,

I usually start with one word, but this phrase caught my eye this morning. The cenobites are the chosen when it comes to your Rule. It might be argued that the Rule is hope enough, but then ….

Many people eat potatoes (if they can afford them) but few people have a diet made up entirely of mashed potato. Of course even mashed potato can be dressed up as bubble and squeak but however much you like mashed potato from time to time the urge to break out for a chip or roastie will come upon even the most dedicated mashed potato lover.

So too with cenobites. It’s not now a word in common use but it refers to those monastics who live under a rule and the leadership of an Abbot in a stable community. Your Rule is for them.

Having tried the solitary life yourself you advocated for communal life. I’m pretty sure you must have wandered about a bit too, but you advocated for the settled life. You promote a path of stability lived in common with others.

I’m not all that fond of mashed potato but I’ll eat it. This week saw the #nationalfishandchipday and that’s something I’d celebrate any day of the year (suggestions for a Saint of fish and chips welcome). I wander from one fish and chip shop to another and particularly enjoy visiting those that have won awards from Shap to Kilmarnock. But I do usually wander back again and settle in the valley and listen to the geese.

I’m not a good cenobite. But I’m getter better at being an anarchist, at least being a follower of Holy Anarchy. My friend, Graham wrote the book and talked about it on line a week ago. You can watch it here.

So why do cenobites need Holy Anarchy? Because they need a change from mashed potato. I can admire cenobites but I still need a more varied diet. Mostly I need to live with those who are committed to recovering nonheirarchical affirming and creative forms of community in which everyone can flourish, that uses language creatively, that is willing to unpack the abusive aspects of past behaviour, that isn’t bound by the ‘that will never work here’ creed, that doesn’t consider my body parts an obstacle to my calling. I’m looking forward to the #NationalFishandChipAwards and I hope you are too, you lovely cenobites.

From my remembered bible: Jesus said ‘I will show you how to fish’

Give hope to the cenobites!

From an Friend of Scholastica living in Longdendale.

Talented

Dear Benedict

Like me, you use a remembered bible. At the end of chapter 64 of your Rule you refer to a verse: Matthew 24:47 ‘God will put this one in charge of everything’.

When I looked in a printed bible for the context I saw it was part of a small story about ‘a wise and faithful slave’ who was expected to ‘oversee the other slaves of the household’. Now you must understand that we read slavery differently to the way in which it was read in 6th century Europe. Too much of history has been about the exploitation of some human beings by others in systems called slavery, none of them as benign as these few verses suggest. No master had an good business owning slaves. That slavery was part of the Roman Empire and other administrations in the ancient world such that bible writers thought it acceptable to mention this, is not a reason to be uncritical of it now.

In similar ways your Rule has been subject to criticism for its treatment of children, even though physical punishment of children would have been commonplace in your day. Unfortunately cruelty towards children is still too common in our day and age for us to make such excuses.

If there’s one thing I expect from life in Christian Community, it’s being radical. I do not expect Christian communities to uphold unfairness or endorse cultural inequalities just because they are there, and I also expect them to seed this radicality into the systems and institutions that surround them.

O root of Jesse: some radical vegetables

Last night, on British TV, a Deaf woman won a major reality TV show, one that attracts millions of viewers each week. It’s a dance show. I’ve never seen it, but it’s glamorous and glitzy. Someone the public knows and loves is offered up as a trainee dancer and dancers with a professional dance partner doing a new dance each week. This time round several taboos were broken. In the final, one couple were a same sex pair of men dancing together and in the second couple one participant was Deaf.

So you see what I mean about the need for Christian communities to sow radicality. Why was two men dancing together ever thought unreasonable? Why had there not previously been a Deaf participant?

It seems that both of these sets of dancers has challenged the British public in new ways. The numbers of would be dancers who want to dance in same sex couples at local dancing schools and clubs has increased as has the number of people interested in learning British Sign Language (BSL).

BSL is the language of the British Deaf Community. I can only use a few simplified bits of it, but I do believe it should be taught in all British schools. That would be radical and it would break down a lot of barriers for British Deaf people. The Christian community would be a good place to start this radicalisation.

Would I change history? You bet. One dance partner at a time if necessary. But more than that, the community I’m interested in is radically inclusive. In that community anyone can dance.

From the remembered bible: That One comes on a day when not expected and at an hour no one knows.

O Root of Jesse, make me radically ready.

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

Just care

Dear Benedict

Many tasks may seem impossible. We size them up, we decide they are not for us. It is true that I couldn’t have walked the End to End in 2019 without taking the first step. Indeed I was wary, and thought I might not be able to do it. But I had Bob, my husband, who had done it in 2003, to pace me from time to time when my steps were flagging. It took me 117 days but I did it.

In chapter 68 you write about impossible tasks. You seem to suggest you had a community of whingers who were forever saying ‘I can’t do that’, although I suspect you didn’t. As I look around me there are many tasks that look impossible but even the most unlikely folks embark on them. The end of Cop26 just a week ago indicates how impossible some tasks seem and how determined so many are to take on the challenges that are required.

The first function of leadership must be to act justly which in turn leads to the second function which is to just care. I’ve put the word ‘justly’ and ‘just’ in here on purpose. An unjust leader is not fit for leadership and care that is not just care is not proper care. Unfortunately we are currently surrounded by examples of the two, including amongst faith communities.

We seem to have forgotten that others will know Christ through our actions. If our communities do not run along just lines then others will turn their backs and leave us to it. So first and foremost the tasks must be assigned justly and then supervised by just care. Just as bullying is not just care so neither is an absence of care or no supervision.

Banner from the Christian Arts Festival 2021 at Nature in Art, Gloucestershire.

At the moment some of our most vital communities face a mountain of impossible tasks. I’m thinking particularly of the NHS and social care. Whilst it is good to encourage and support the marathon efforts of workers it is not good to ignore unjust leadership demanding burnout and low pay on the back of these workers whilst they line their own comfortable pockets. Impossible tasks require leaders with humility, insight and integrity just as much as they require willing workers. Have we forgotten what just leadership looks like?

From my remembered bible: Where love is, God is there.

May I live justly. May I just care.

From A friend of Scholastica and a member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Obedience

Dear Benedict,

In chapter 71 your refer to one of the things I find hardest to contextualise for 21st century people: obedience. You were operating in a hierarchical society and your Rule about being obedient to those selected to lead was not something to question. In some ways these early monastic communities were the beginning of democracy. That’s an on going project.

Our 21st century world has many different ways of understanding obedience. In some places obedience is required on pain of death. Any dissent is severely dealt with. In others situations we have moved on from corporal punishment for, for example, children to the delight of some and the annoyance of others. Others find ways of seeming obedient on the surface but get round the rules in hidden ways. In yet others, obedience is demanded from abusive leaders who blight the lives of those they should be serving. So much then for obedience. It’s no wonder people find it difficult. Some rule with an iron fist and obedience is coerced. Other rule with a soft mitten …… (decide for yourself what is the consequence of that)

Some of the gloves I used to wear when I was a school chaplain…..

In March 2020 our Prime Minister told people to stay at home, due to COVID19. Some did for the good of all. Some didn’t because they couldn’t (low wages, no sick pay for example) or wouldn’t (libertarians who wouldn’t be told what to do, for example). Now with COVID19 infection and death rates rising again in the UK, the government would seem to have spent all its currency on obedience, neither side really now being content to trust its judgement.

So it’s amazing that we have now arrived at COP26, a large international, in person gathering about the Climate Emergency in Glasgow. Only of course we haven’t all arrived. Some have never set out, either because they can’t or don’t want to. Some are still in Rome at the G20 and will doubtless arrive in Glasgow having used less environmentally friendly forms of transport to do so (I really do not understand why the two meetings could not have been scheduled sequentially in the same place).

One of the things COP26 points to is the need for a new look at obedience: for us to be obedient to each other, and most essentially to those most vulnerable to climate change. Unlike the leaders of a monastic community we did not elect these people, but we did play a part in keeping them on the margins. Being obedient to each other is the thing we need to replace unquestioning obedience with. It’s the blessing of the most vulnerable that we should look for when we are caught out in our climate exploiting games.

We keep the Rule best when we readily give up any power or privilege we have in order to have better relationships in our fragile world which will lead to the thriving of all creatures. I am not more important than the earthworm or the bee (or any invertebrate for that matter) for without them I cannot thrive. I am not more important that one who lives on a small island in a rising ocean, for I do so too, or to one who lives sustainably in a place of ice and glaciers, for without their efforts I also drown.

It doesn’t surprise me that the leaders a country that makes a lot of wealth out of the use of fossil fuels wants to alter the language of a report in order to endorse their right to continue to do so. Neither does it surprise me that large countries emitting increasing amounts of carbon don’t want to come to a summit in which they are lectured by those western governments who seem to see it as their paternal right to set the agenda.

What I don’t understand is why a teenage girl who speaks up for the climate and the action we need to take should attract so much abuse. It is those who will continue to inhabit our more and more precarious planet who we need to ask a blessing from.

Chapter 71, were I to suggest a bit of editing, would be about that. Honour the smallest, the least, the most vulnerable amongst you. Don’t expect obedience for obedience sake. No one should be ruling the roost with this Rule.

From the remembered gospel: Let the children come to me, let them speak for me.

O God open our lips.

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

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.

Endings

Dear Benedict,

When I last wrote to you about your Rule I started at the beginning, as indeed most folks might. This time I thought I’d start at the end, which is more like me.

A sign on the Trans Pennine Trail that suggests East and West are not very far apart

I’ve been trying to find out about you, but apart from your Rule no one seems to have that much to say about the real you. Every thing I read suggests you were a good chap, which in itself makes me a bit suspicious. Something I read suggested you left school at 14, probably right and proper to your time and class but no something to be congratulated on these days, unless you eventually become a rich entrepreneur. At 14 you had religious aspirations, wanted to know about your place in the universe, to learn stuff, to pray and worship God. It’s not as uncommon as you might think these days either. A recent survey found 51% of young adults said they prayed regularly. Indeed younger adults were more likely to pray than those over 55.

The article didn’t take into account the ways in which prayer changes during our lifetimes, but change it does. I’m now 62 and I do not pray in the same way as I did 40 years ago. As I put my feet on the earth, one after the other, heel to toe as I walk through the landscape, so I pray, breathing gently and carefully all the while. Forty years ago I was in too much of a hurry to pray like that.

Your final chapter is really an encouragement to keep at it; something we all need. There are many things I have neglected over lock down. I’ve not played so much music, for example and consequently my efforts to get all the right notes in the right order are hampered. I still play, mostly with headphones on so as not to inconvenience others.

But the Rule is something that can only really be practised with others, which bring me back to you writing it down. History says you wrote it down near the end of your life, and maybe you borrowed some of the ideas from a few other rules. So for about 40 years or so perhaps you were thinking about it, planning it, starting a draft or two, working it out. I wish we had your works in progress, your odd notes on the Rule. I wonder what happened to those?

Did you share your thoughts with others, ask Scholastica or other monastics what you should leave out or put in? It seems to me that a Rule like this has to be a corporate effort. So it might more rightly be called the Rule of St Benedict and the Community he was part of.

Even with the last full stop on the page, this Rule is a work in progress in as much as it is not meant to remain a document but become part of the way we live, making daily life our pilgrim path. And so I will try to put my best foot forward in faith, even if this time, I’m walking backwards.

Song (by the Goons)

I’m walking backwards for Christmas,
Across the Irish Sea,
I’m walking backwards for Christmas,
It’s the only thing for me.

Walk with me!

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

Drink up!

Dear Benedict,

Having given due consideration to food, in the following chapter (chapter 40) of your Rule you give equal thought to drink. It’s that I’m writing about today. In your time and place that drink was wine and you were happy to endorse it, in moderation , of course. Time passes, culture changes, wine ages, and here we are in the 21st century with lockdown contributing to an increase in the consumption of alcohol in Britain over the last year.

For some this will be Dry January, a thing that actually only originates from 2014, and is more popular, it seems in France, Switzerland and Britain, thought Finland had a version in 1942. Of course in this meaning ‘Dry’ means no alcohol not ‘no liquid’.

That meaning of the word has a longer history. Many small Congregational Churches (before becoming the United Reformed Church in 1972) were ‘Dry’ in that sense. Their practice had been influenced by the Temperance Movement in the 19th century. This social movement developed in response to concerns about the effects of alcohol consumption on health, family life, social cohesion and so forth. Interestingly, local leadership was often in the hands of women. In these small churches it lead to a prohibition on the use of alcohol on their premises for worship and social occasions. I grew up in such a community and have served as minister in others.

Your reflection ‘Wine makes even the wise go astray’ and your thought that God will reward those who abstain seems to accord with such practices. It seems a good time to mention that on Sunday I will preside at a ‘dry’ Eucharistic service for members of the Lay Community of St Benedict (on zoom).

From the remembered bible: Think of your stomach and take a little wine.

I’m not sure whether in the correspondence here, the emphasis was on ‘stomach’ or ‘little’ or just the fact that the water wasn’t all that clean. Chapter 40 sends with the simple suggestion: ‘Don’t whine about the wine!’

May I not whine…

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

Young and Old together!

Dear Benedict,

I’m writing to you again about your Rule, this time chapter 37. You remind us that people of all ages lived in your community and that although the Rule was meant for all, some considerations needed to be made to accommodate the needs of younger and older people living together.

You say that it is human to ‘be compassionate’ to young and old alike. I’m not so sure. Either that or like many things, attitudes have changed over the centuries. We may think we are being compassionate to those who are young or old but COVID19 has revealed a marked lack of compassion in some instances. For example, poverty, is much more likely to affect the young or the old and with many more people now falling into poverty our compassion for young and old seem to be running out.

Getting to the root of it: a tree relies on old growth and young growth working together.

Fear seems to me one of the biggest drivers of division, insecurity and hate. Of the messages I’ve read recently more and more seem to show a lack of compassion, though I wonder if that is driven by fear. If we are afraid for ourselves and our own near ones then maybe we begin to shun a wider community of need, anonymous people we don’t know. If we are alone at the moment, our connections to community may be tenuous at best, maybe that feeds into limiting our compassion for groups like young and old people. ‘If I don’t have it, why should they?’ or maybe ‘I need it so they can’t have it’.

At the moment in the Lay Community of St Benedict, we are pushing ahead with our Youth Development work (http://www.laybenedictines.org/). another organisation I have worked with, the Diana Award, is looking to recruit young people to help with its work at the moment: https://diana-award.org.uk/get-involved/become-a-diana-award-young-judge/

These are small steps to creating the kind of communities were people of all ages can thrive. But they are important ones, because unless we do so on a local scale more and more of the young and the old will become isolated and marginalised.

From the remembered bible: Your old people will dream dreams, your young people will see visions.

May I unite young and old.

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

Saints Alive!

Dear Benedict

We’re approaching All Saints and All Souls, an extended autumnal feast to remember those who have gone before us in the faith. I’m not clear how this would have worked in your day, as there were many fewer official saints. However, you consider saints important to Benedictine spirituality and mention them in chapter 14, so that’s why I’m writing to you about that now.

Saints are just one of the things that still divide Christians today. We have our different views about who are worthy to be called Saints, who can appoint them, how we should remember them and much more. One person’s Saint is not necessarily another’s.

However, it’s clear that there are many people who through the generations have kept the faith alive in many ways and who we remember for diverse different reasons. Some are associated with a place or cause, some are more like common ancestors in the faith or beloved family members. Even you get to be a Saint, Benedict! I’ve no idea how you’d receive that, except of course I’m sure it would be humbly.

One of the biggest problems with the faith is the urge in us to cart our history about with us, and when it becomes too much to carry, to set it down somewhere and continually revisit it. Sometimes this is helpful. It can inspire and enliven us, but it can also bog us down, distract us and take up too much of the energy we need for living the faith today.

Our churches and religious places are not museums. They are supposed to be beacons: a means of lighting out way. So too the Saints: people to propel us forwards.

Speaking personally, there are a vast number of people who do that faith propulsion thing for me. Some are those the Church recognises as official saints, but most are just ordinary people that I might read about or meet. I chose Scholastica as my running mate for many different reasons. As your twin she was connected to you, but like me she was female. However, in our day, very little is known about her directly and few, if any, of her actual words survive. That much of her story is familiar to the lot of many women in the early era of the Church.

What has been passed on about her was that she was feisty and ready to question you. It’s good to know that. I’d add to her name a whole list of others beginning with Julian of Norwich, Florence Nightingale and Madge Saunders. You can read a piece I wrote about Madge in the Dangerous Women Project.

So I wish you a happy feast, with which ever Saints keep you alive in the faith.

From the remembered bible: Let us run the race that is before us!

Keep me alive in my faith!

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.