as dying, yet behold, we live!

Xavier Beauvoir’s Of Gods and Men is a beautiful, extraordinary achievement. Understated at all times, highly sophisticated and understanding of its subject, beautifully scripted, it explores the life and death of the Tibhirine Trappist community in Algeria in 1996, during the civil war. The monks live a simple, self-sustaining life of prayer, kindness and service. As the political situation deteriorates, they find themselves caught in a shooting war, driven by Islamist fundamentalists. The army offers protection of a sort, but this raises other questions for the monks - questions of calling and integrity as well as a basic issue about whether life in an armed camp is actually compatible with what they believe their community should be. Do they stay or do they go?

Shrewdly, kindly observed and impeccably acted, this is a tale of tragedy and hope way beyond the scope of Hollywood blockbusters. Very few films about religion reveal as deep an understanding of their subjects as this.. Given our distribution system that gives fifteen screen multiplexes with the same film playing in 10 of them, you are unlikely now to catch the film at a proper cinema, but when it comes out on DVD in May you would be insane not to get it. Five out of five stars.
A couple of additional pieces for reflection. As he contemplated what may happen, the real Brother Christian composed in 1994 a letter to his family in case the worst should happen, that is worthy of careful reflection. Excuse my schoolboy French off the soundttrack album, but here goes:
If a day should come, and it could be today, to fall victim to the terrorism that seems to be engulfing foreigners in this country today, I would love my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and this country and also that the sole Giver of all life was no stranger to such a brutal ending. They should also associate my taking off with so many other equally violent but anonymous deaths. My life is no more valuable than any other, nor less. Anyway, it lacks the innocence of childhood. I have lived long enough to know that I myself am part of the evil which, sadly, seems to prevail in the world, even the evil that could suddenly befall me. I could not seek such a death, and I could not die happy to see these people, whom I love, indiscriminately blamed for my death. That would be too high a price to pay for what could be called the grace of martyrdom by an Algerian, whoever he may be, above all if he is motivated by what he may believe Islam to be. I know the contempt in which natives of this country are already held around the world. I also know caricatures of the kind of Islam that encourages Islamism. For me this country, and Islam, are something very different. They are body and soul. This is what I have always said publicly, as I believe it and have known and seen this theme in the gospel I learnt in my first Church, at my mother's knee. This I have practised in Algeria, and always from the start in respecting Muslim believers. My death could, plainly, give substance to the arguments of those who think I am just naive, or a starry-eyed idealist. But they need to know that this will finally liberate my most ardent curiosity, in that I may be able, God willing,to submerge my vision in that of the Father, in order to see his Muslim children just as he sees them. In this thank you letter, which says everything about my llife from now on, I want to include you all, friends of yesterday and today, and even you too, friend of my last moments, who will not understand what you are doing. Yes, even for you, I genuinely want to thank you and bid this Adieu, commendation to God, May we one day meet again, in Paradise, as happy thieves, if it pleases God, Father of us both. Amen.

Finally for contemplation, a summary of the teaching of St Paul from Richard Rohr: “Brothers and sisters, remember that your life situation will not last. It is only that which you fall through so that you can fall into your actual Life, and that Big Life ironically includes death (which is the falling).”

Equity and Faith belong together

St Wandrille in July is almost unnaturally lush, green and leafy. It seems a completely different place to the austerity of November. I greatly value these weeks away from the internet, emails, etc. — indeed I have now spent 3 months of my life here, spread over the past few years. On my first visits I used to take a pile of books, but these days everything centres naturally on the office and the Church.

One theme that has been jumping out of the psalter for me this week is “equity.” Some people talk as though justice and equality issues facing the Church were some kind of imposition from secular culture, to be treated with suspicion as a post-enlightenment racket.

The insistence of the psalter that God is a God of equity and justice, whose people should strive to reflect these qualities gazumps this whole illusion. If, quoting Michael Ramsey, “The Church exists that Christ may reign,” our life should be characterised not by weird exceptionalism, but intentional striving for equity and justice. What equity means pragmatically differs from age to age. However the challenge remains constant. God’s justice may transcend that of the world, but it has to be at east as just. And after a week praying the collect, much more elegant in Latin than Engilsh, that Christians may reject those things that do not fit with the name we claim and choose those that do, it just doesn’t make any sense to suggest that basic issues of justice and equity are marginal or secondary, or merely secular impositions. They spring, in fact, from the core of our faith, as reflected in the psalms.

Clergy numbers and deployment

I return from a period of monastic study and reflection, and meet with a group to discern a clergy apppointment. Meanwhile Doug Chaplin has been raising significant questions about local clergy deployment cuts under the challenging title “The Big question in an elderly and inward-looking Church”. This relects acute and timely ventilation of similar and significant issues by Ruth Gledhill and, especially, John Richardson. I don’t know details of the various anecdotes circling the ether, but it’s good these questions are being raised openly.

What I wonder about is the quality as well as quanitity of staff appointments and the criteria we put in parish profiles, and the way they relate to the rule.

Benedict’s criteria for job selection are clear. Relying on pragmatic knowledge of a person’s deeds revealing their character and intentions in community, people are given opportunities to prove themselves faithful, diligent and competent. They should work to the best of their ability, in an ordered way, within the fundamental balance of prayer, contemplation, work and rest, accepting radical mutual accountability to God through the community, incuding the disciplines of chapter and listening to the least voice. Discernment should be led by the abbot, shared with the community. High commitment to Conversion, stability and obedience, Gospel zeal, competence, openness to others score high. Ego, opinion, outside status and Politics score low.

Such appointments are difficult, if not impossible, if we...

• are not sufficently a community to know our people properly and what they bring to the party;
  
  
• pretend or waffle about our intentions for the job
  
  
• do not observe the highest standards of justice in our equality and diversity practices. There are indications in Jesus’ teaching we would aspire to even greater and more honest relationships with our people than, say, Marks & Spencer, but we have to treat our people at least as fairly as they would treat theirs.
  
  
• score results rather than motives, surrender awarenss of competence, balance and intentions for a vague concept like “performance.”
  
  
• allow dirty information or untested assumptions into the process, including politics in the mean sense and anecdotal based assumptions
  
  
• measure character mainly by checking for failings, rather than accounting it in positive descriptive terms as we weigh any offer to take on a job
  

Winter refreshment in Advent colours

Over 10 years, I've never stayed at Saint-Wandrille this late in the year. Winter is a wonderful time for de-fragging. This year I decided to take a complete break from the Internet and all its works. In comes all the stuff and information from the year, and, as you enter a world of marked time measured by the psalter, everything begins to float towards its own level. Monastic life is paced by Scripture, not phone and screen. The psalter, as ever, articulated and absorbs an incredible range of feelings in an immensely varied range of emotional tones. So, over a week, everything begins to decompress, anxieties are acknowledged but not absolute, and a sense of God begins to emerge from the ordering of time.

The liturgy is absolutely plain in the last week of the year — a flatland before Advent. Benedict’s line about Monastic life being a continuous Lent, something about simplicity and refreshment, comes very much into its own. That meant a week of the traditional “stir up” collect, that feels gloriously straightforward in the Latin (Excita, quaesimus, Domine tuorum fidelium voluntates, ut divine operis fructum propensius exsequentes, pietatis tua remedia maiora percipiant...). This meant an easy ride through the psalter — especially to be appreciated in the early mornings!

The Monastery itself is approaching the barest it can be in the year. I was especially struck by the stick-like desolation of a glorious avenue of limes. If you»ve seen them in July they freshen the whole Courtyard with their soft verdant leaves and goo. Now they were so many sticks, with strangely bright spiky red tips. The hillside is equally plain, relieved only by occasional confiers (I could only count two or three) and, more sinister ivy strangling one or two tree trunks up the slope. The Vine is doing well in its own house, though. There are occasional green survivals on some trees, which makes me wonder whether the house is ever entirely leafless.


As to content, even though Advent felt further away than it was, you can’t ever get away from the Incarnation in an Abbey. The purpose of Christ being formed in me, however resistant material, is foremost. I spent some extended study time in the forites of the Rule, which I haven’t done before. As a new model Terms and Conditions of Service Tsar (!), I thought it might be good to work through Benedict on competencies and accountability, around RB46. It’s a part of the rule where Benedict innovates and simplifies considerably over and above the Rule of the Master, and I came back with a pile of fresh ideas, some of which may turn out not to be silly...

Obedience: being real and responsive

A community of transformation like Magdalene, or any recovery programme stands or falls on the Benedictine virtue of obedience. People can try out all kinds of ideals and programmes, goodwill gestures and apologies, but the battle is lost or one in what actually happens, and underlying trends of habitual response to reality and other people tell the real story for good or ill. Clichés about talking talk and walking walk come to mind. Underlying any serious community of grace has to be holy pragmatism.

The roots of the idea of obedience are, as is often pointed out, not conformity but radical listening. In a sense obedience takes in the whole rule of Benedict, whose first word is “Audite...” and last “...et pervenies.” (“Listen...” “...and you will make it.”). Habits of obedience are not about what you do in itself, but what you do as an expression of attitude to everybody else. Disobedience is not naughtiness, but failure of community.

It’s not, in fact, authoritarianism, but the antidote to authoritarianism, to be part of a community to which we hold ourselves mutualy accountable. This is the mutual submission spoken of in the Scriptures.

This all takes me back to the 17th century nursery rhyme we all had to learn at school forty years ago:

A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds
And when the weeds begin to grow
It's like a garden full of snow
And when the snow begins to fall
It's like a bird upon the wall
And when the bird away does fly
It's like an eagle in the sky
And when the sky begins to roar
It's like a lion at the door
And when the door begins to crack
It's like a stick across your back
And when your back begins to smart
It's like a penknife in your heart
And when your heart begins to bleed
You're dead, and dead, and dead indeed.

This is the third of three posts about the core Benedictine virtues of Conversion, Stability and Obedience, reflected in the Magdalene Community of Nashville, TN.

Conversion: Seeing from Inside out

We see everything, even ourselves sometimes, from the outside in. God sees us from the inside out, knowing all we could be. Faith shows us ourselves from God’s point of view. Nice middle class people like me have relearned from Jade Goody that you have to see the person for all they are, and not be taken in by appearances. If she had never had Cancer, how would we have learnt to respect her? Only by questioning our own assumptions, and thinking different. Magdalene is

a two year residential and support community for women coming out of correctional facilities or off the street who have survived lives of abuse, prostitution or drug addiction. Begin in 1997 in Nashville TN, Magdalene offers women at no cost a safe, disciplined and compassionate community in which to recover and rebuild their lives.

Two things particularly interest me about this community.

1. This is not a Michael Palin “Missionary” or Lady Bountiful operation. The energy and resource come from within members themselves, released and developed in community. Thistle Farms is a business venture connected with it, but internally the strategy is not to get trained experts to engineer better outcomes, but to grow organic sustainable communities of grace, which provide a context in which members can grow and address their own particuar challenges.
2. Magdalene has taken as its model the Rule of Benedict. This doesn’t mean founding a Benedictine house, but finding a way to express the base Benedictine values of conversion, stability and obedience in an authentic but accessible way for women off the streets to use as part of the process of recovering what they could be from what is sometimes the wreckage of what they have been.

Magdalene was founed by Becca Stevens, a priest then working as a University chaplain at Vanderbilt. Now it’s run for 10 years, this work has things to teach us all about discipleship, community and personal transformation — in other words, the Gospel we profess, but realise so imperfectly. The community has boiled what they are about down into 24 basic principles, formulated in plain English and illustrated by experiences from members.

Everything begins with a willingness to see others, eventually even ourselves, differently. Doing this expresses the Benedictine Value of Conversion. The call to do this reminds me of an old poem by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

A Gentleman

“He has robbed two clubs. The judge at Salisbury
Can't give him more than he undoubtedly
Deserves. The scoundrel! Look at his photograph!
A lady-killer! Hanging's too good by half
For such as he.” So said the stranger, one
With crimes yet undiscovered or undone.
But at the inn the Gipsy dame began:
“Now he was what I call a gentleman.
He went along with Carrie, and when she
Had a baby he paid up so readily
His half a crown. Just like him. A crown'd have been
More like him. For I never knew him mean.
Oh! but he was such a nice gentleman. Oh!
Last time we met he said if me and Joe
Was anywhere near we must be sure and call.
He put his arms around our Amos all
As if he were his own son. I pray God
Save him from justice! Nicer man never trod.”

This is the first of three posts about the core Benedictine virtues of Conversion, Stability and Obedience, reflected in the Magdalene Community of Nashville, TN.
mirror photo: credit Michelle’s Photoblog

Alton Abbey in the Snow

The community here carries on in its own unpretentious way, with hope of some potential vocations. The pub landlords know us as old friends. Having been a regular at Alton with the same group regularly for 28 years, I thought I’d pretty much taken all the obvious pictures.

Add a burst of Snow, and everything changes. I keep expecting to bump into Mr Tumnus:
Snow does change everything — The shapes you thought you knew well blown up, soft and puffy, morphed, but with their inner secret better hidden, carpeted in a particular still silence.

In his wonderful book Finding Sanctuary, Abbot Christopher Jamison quotes a haiku blinked out by Abigail Witchalls, a young Catholic mother who was stabbed as she was out walking with her child and is now paralysed:

Still silent body
But within my spirit sings
Dancing in love-light.