The necessity of Incarnation

Reflecting with the usual five friends on the last year’s joys, follies, grunts and frustrations, ecstatic and ordinary, long term trends emerge. We’ve been doing this together in this monastery at this time of year for almost thirty years, and someone noticed the way in which our conversation is less entirely than it was driven by ideals and the impossibility of bringing them to pass. We seem to have developed far greater acceptance of human realities over the past ten years or so. Rationalising this indicates that ideals, even good ones, need to take flesh or they don’t mean a thing. Cue D. H. Lawrence:

Demiurge

They say that reality exists only in the spirit
that corporeal existence is a kind of death
that pure being is bodiless
that the idea of the form precedes the idea substantial.

But what nonsense it is!
as if any Mind could have imagined a lobster
dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!

Even the mind of God can only imagine
those things that have become themselves:
bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation
even if it is only a lobster on tiptoe.

Religion knows better than philosophy.
Religion knows that Jesus was never Jesus
till he was born from a womb, and ate soup and bread
and grew up, and became, in the wonder of creation, Jesus,
with a body and with needs, and a lovely spirit.

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.

Another way of seeing — icons

The World is full of Icons — buildings, people, and moments:
Icons are a powerful part of everyday reality — our desktops are covered with them.

When people who don’t often go to galleries see a painting, the first question they ask is “What is that supposed to be?” The only answer for any half decent work of art is “a load of stuff.” Things stand for other things, tell stories and enrich the whole picture. You can, of course, always do a Dawkins and say “it's only canvas, wood and paint. There’s nothing else to it ultimately.” Doing that’s stupid, but it explains everything to its own satisfaction, and it's always an option.

Human beings create icons all the time from significant events. King Charles II, after the Battle of Worcester, hid in an oak tree. The actual tree probably fell over years ago, but it birthed various realities, intentionally and unintentionally, including hundreds of pubs, a suburb of Detroit, and a World War II Battleship sinking:
The battleship picture is historically telling rather than photographically accurate, from a Belgian fascist comic (honestly!) of 1939.

The glory of Alton Abbey for me, increasingly, is the great contemporary Icon in the Church, of Christ and the patrons (Our Lady, John the Evangelist and Benedict), written by Dom Anselm Shobrook OSB. I've been getting to know it, year by year, over many years. When I first met it, I was amazed to discover that real icon writing is still alive, with its own language. It draws you into a way of praying that books don’t. Some Christians have banned icons because of their fear about turning them into idols. One answer to something abused is to ban it and accept the impoverishment— another is to learn how to use it properly. The majority view has developed among Christians that if Jesus took real flesh in every way, finding him visually can be as authentic as through the printed word.

This icon centres on the Mystery of the Incarnation — Christ born among us and in us. Saint John the beloved disciple proclaims that love is the medium through which the word comes to us and happens in us. Benedict (with his rule) brings a holding framework of order and stability. His staff represents hard pastoral care, engaging with real need without deception or pretending. The whole vision is literally based on the sequence of four panels along the bottom of the icon, expressing the process of the word coming to Our Lady and Saint John, and being worked out in their lives.

What’s distinctive, though, about this or any real icon, is that the more you pray with it, the more doors it opens. A real icon doesn’t reduce what it’s about, it captures something bigger than itself, and expands it. The more time you give it, the more there is to explore...

Open and Apostolic Living

I'm more than grateful to Alton Abbey for the community’s generous hospitality, friendship and understanding to my friends and me this week. Community in itself is a slippery one. Politicians use it as a warm fuzzy buzzword. In fact community is real human beings sharing their lives together — an unsentimental thing, a way of life.
The Rule of Benedict says real hospitality is a key part of discipleship. Chapter 53 requires religious to receive others as Christ who said “I was a stranger and you took me in.” It’s all about recognising Christ in others as they are — something that has to be worked at; something intentional, not just a matter of luck or happenstance. This rather flies in the face of the modern habit of referring to any group of people who share any cultural background or sociological characteristic, whether they acknowledge it or not, as a “community” (“The Gay Community” “The Muslim Community” — what gay community? what Muslim community do people actually mean?) That habit, in itself runs a risk of cheapening and impoverishing real community.
Perhaps, in the spirit of the blessed Forrest Gump, community is as community does. One reflection from this year at Alton, and experiencing true community, warts and all, is to see how important generous hospitality is to the whole Christian enterprise — a radical and intentional acceptance of diversity in the face of a homogenizing and uncaring world. This kind of living offers future hope, not only for religious houses, but for the whole world.

Six Go Mad in Hampshire

I'm on the blink a bit (blogwise) at Alton Abbey for four days' annual review/retreat. Once described by Ruth Gledhill as "the best kept secret in the Church of England" the Community of Our Lady and St John is a brilliant place for a thorough annual MOT (UK compulsory auto checkup). I go to Alton every year with the same group of six. We rented a cottage in 1980 and 1981. By 1982 we discovered it was easier to go somewhere others did the shopping. Alton had a gatehouse, which we used to take over. About 10 years ago everything moved into the house. This is our 26th year here, because in 2000 we went to Lindisfarne instead - Alton were doing up the building.

We've developed a regular routine. We begin with the community mass. We have three 4/5 hour major sessions in the week, about the past year personally, the past year in ministry, and how the future looks, respectively. Afternoons are spent out or exploring resources and ideas from the year. The evening is spent in, er, discursive reflection (aka The Sun at Bentowrth)

We've found it pays to give this process quality time, to stick with a group you trust, who have heard it all before, and really know you. It helps massively to set the whole thing in the context of a religious community who understand unpretentious prayer and generous hospitality.

Et voilà! After 28 years, any group of old gits does get a bit like some grisly Alan Alda midlife crisis movie, but we've been through a lot together. This doesn't involve dropping out, like a silent retreat, but internet connections are decidedly ropey/ precarious, so expect extremely intermittent blog supply until Friday. Then Revelations?