Faithfulness

It seems to me that what is going on with this Lent, for me at any rate, is all to do with surrender.

Of course I do mean surrender to the will of God, in the sense of the Lord's Prayer, and in the sense (though she is an extreme example!) of our Lady's submission to the angel's revealing God's will to her in Luke 1 - "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." What I mean particularly, though, and this has everything to do with what I was saying the other day about accepting to be who I am, is surrender to the environment God has placed me into. Fidelity, if you like.

In Silence and Honey Cakes (Lion 2003, pp. 92-3) Rowan Williams says:

The church celebrates fidelity - it blesses marriage, the most obvious sign of the pledging of bodies. But it also blesses the vows of the monastic and solitary life, equally as signs of promise and fidelity... And, quite concretely too, there is a way in which a Christian church can be a sign of fidelity, of a pledged body, in a community from which so much has fled or drained away: communities of poverty or drabness, without much to... interest the person looking for stimulus. In very unmagical settings indeed, inner cities and prisons, and remote hamlets and struggling mission plants, the church remains pledged; its pastors and people and buildings speaking of a God who is not bored or disillusioned by what he has made - and so they speak of the personal possibilities for everyone in such a situation. In short, a church that is faithful to its basic task is telling people that willingness to be who they are, and to begin to change from the point of that recognition, is fundamental to the encounter with God... Christianity encourages me to be faithful to the body that I am - a body that can be hurt, a body that is always living in the middle of limitations; it encourages me to accept unavoidable frustration in this material and accident-prone existence without anger.

For me, this is often the hardest thing, often the severest discipline. I am a dreamer, someone who longs for strange and far-off things, beauty and wonder and awe; accepting to be who I am, where I am, in the "very unmagical setting" God has placed me into, is maybe my own heart's desert. I am coming to see how I must be faithful to that. To go off hunting for the mystical mountains would not only be unfaithfulness to God and to my own community: it would be, like sexual unfaithfulness, at least as deeply harmful to me as to anyone else. Amma Syncletica (3rd-4th Century) said, "If you are living in a monastic community, do not go to another place: it will do you a great deal of harm."

This does not, of course, imply anything inimical to the life of prayer. Quite the opposite. I am coming to see that there is a particular role for the embedded pray-er, especially the embedded contemplative pray-er, that is not filled by anyone else or in any other way.

There is a huge sense of gratitude and wonder and hope in this realisation. God is faithful, and merciful, and for me to be faithful to this call, to remain where I have been placed, as much a pledged person as any hermit or monastic, is an irreplaceable virtual anchorhold from which to pray for the mercy and grace of Christ, for me and for all to whom I am pledged - Jan, my church, my community, my Order, and the body of Christ.

Now, at last, I think I am coming to see what being a Tertiary Franciscan might be for me, and how that call to prayer and contemplation and inner solitude might look for one called to that "definite discipline and vows." (The Principles, TSSF, 3)

Do pray for me! I think I'm going to need it...