Benedictine Roots, Christlike fruits

Canterbury Cathedral has deep Benedictine roots; Communities following the rule established and nurtured it, and the present management explicitly avow Benedictine principles of Christ-centredness and hospitality. This spirit has certainly come acrosss to many of us sharing their hospitality these two days. It’s been a joy to meet up with other bishops nurtured and inspired in the rule.

In a throwaway coment this morning Rowan described bishops’ calling to be “Christlike strangers.” Apostles, he suggested, are people on the road, needing to listen and be real about where they are, but never taking on the entirety of anywhere particular, for the sake of sustaining the greater journey. They need developing stereophonic hearing — one ear for the Word and one, my phrase not his, for the world. I found myself asking Benedict’s prime question: “how, then do I prefer nothing to Christ?” Benedict shows us, from his rich experience of community life, the futility and destructiveness of egotism, faction, malicious talk, and the primacy of conversion, stability and obedience (Rule cap. 58).

So here’s my lightbulb moment of the afternoon: To be doing the work of God, we need the kind of radical obedience that is willing to become the kind of community of people God calls us to be. So we are formed in Christ as a community, and Christ in us, that the world may believe...