Retreating...

Off to Hilfield Friary tomorrow for our TSSF Area Team Retreat; I’ll be back on Friday sometime…

I am so fond of Hilfield – set deep in the skirts of the Dorset Downs, it really does feel like A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, in Ursula le Guin’s words.

We’ll be staying in Bernard House,

the loveliest of the guest houses, I think.

It will be good just to be part of the rhythm of Friary life, to settle into these ancient patterns that are new every time, and to renew my acquaintance with Olive the Cat. More when I get back…

A Name and a waiting...

A candle of the Lord is the soul of man, but the soul can become a holocaust, a fury, a rage. The only cure is to discover that, over and above the anonymous stillness in the world, there is a Name and a waiting. Many people suffer from a fear of the self. They do not feel at home in their own selves. The inner life is a place of dereliction, a no-man's-land, inconsolate, weird. The self has become a place from which to flee.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, with thanks to  inward/outward

Faithfulness is consecration in overalls. It is the steady acceptance and performance of the common duty and immediate task without any reference to personal preferences--because it is there to be done, and so is a manifestation of the Will of God... The fruits of the Spirit get less and less showy as we go on. Faithfulness means continuing quietly with the job we have been given, in the situation where we have been placed; not yielding to the restless desire for change. It means tending the lamp quietly for God without wondering how much longer it has got to go on. Steady, unsensational driving, taking good care of the car. A lot of the road to heaven has to be taken at 30 miles per hour.

Evelyn Underhill, The Fruits of the Spirit.

People should not worry as much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.

Meister Eckhart, with thanks to  inward/outward

Sorry for the silence since Connect 2010. I've been trying to make sense of my own feelings. Nearly a week of being so close with my sisters and brothers in Christ, of worship and prayer and talking, of just being church, is not easy to put into words. It might sound trite to some to call it a glimpse of Heaven, of the Kingdom to which our Lord is betrothed, but honestly that's how it was.

Things are not going to be the same, even if there is not another Connect in next or subsequent years, even if those who were there try to forget what they saw, and heard, and felt. The Church (deliberate big 'C') in the Isle of Purbeck knows now, very practically and simply, that it is one, that our different ways of doing things, our different comfort zones in worship and in the minor application of doctrine, are pretty irrelevant beside the great love our Lord has put into our hearts one for another...

"By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13:35)

We are in a state of waiting. The Kingdom is here,  and yet it has not yet come. (Mark 1:15; Luke 11:2; 11:20; 12:31) And yet we are not alone, far from it. Our waiting lives within the Name of Jesus; all we are is in his wounded hands. What shall we fear? (Romans 8:28-39)

Tomorrow, I'm off to Hilfield Friary, for the Caring for Creation in a World of Crisis weekend. More when I get back, I hope...

Home again, home again...

Solitude greeting solitude, that's what community is all about. Community is not the place where we are no longer alone but the place where we respect, protect, and reverently greet one another's aloneness. When we allow our aloneness to lead us into solitude, our solitude will enable us to rejoice in the solitude of others. Our solitude roots us in our own hearts. Instead of making us yearn for company that will offer us immediate satisfaction, solitude makes us claim our centre and empowers us to call others to claim theirs. Our various solitudes are like strong, straight pillars that hold up the roof of our communal house. Thus, solitude always strengthens community.

(from Henri J.M. Nouwen's Bread for the Journey )

Back from Hilfield, things are becoming clearer. It's in many ways wonderful to be back in my own church community, from the very different community that is the Friary. It's strange, but loner that in so many ways I am, I just love living in community. I was thinking this morning about how to express this seeming paradox, when I found this quote from Henri Nouwen that summed it up perfectly.

It's obvious that I need both discipline and simplicity to follow the deepening call to prayer and service that seems to have overtaken me. Discipline in the sense of living according to a framework of time, just as a religious community does, with its hours, its times of work and meals and recreation. Simplicity in the sense of trimming away what I am not called to do, and giving myself wholeheartedly that those things that I am. It sounds obvious, but I find that when I examine, mindfully, the patterns of my own life, there are far too many things that just get in the way, and I shall have to see what I would be better off without!

Over the next few weeks, I shall be making a few changes to my online life, too. I think I shall have to abandon Facebook and Twitter. They are good things in themselves, but they are a fierce waste of time unless you actually need them for the way you work. I shall also have to go on a geek diet, probably. I waste loads of time mucking around researching things I don't need to research, playing with software I've no practical need for, and many more things like that. It's got to stop. God has more use for me than that, strange as it may seem - especially to me!

This blog is good and important, though, and I shall continue to write here, perhaps in rather more depth than I often have. The old place is looking a bit tired and scruffy, too, so I'll try and smarten things up a bit...

Huge thanks, by the way, to all who prayed for me on this trip. Your prayers were answered, and then some, as I'll hope to explain here over the next few posts...

Seeing…

Spirituality is about seeing. It’s not about earning or achieving. It’s about relationship rather than results or requirements.

Once you see correctly, the rest follows.  Mary Oliver, the poet, puts it so well. It is like “seeing through a veil, secretly, joyfully clearly!”

You don’t need to push the river, because you are in it. The life is lived within us, and we learn how to say yes to that life.

If we exist on a level where we can see how “everything belongs,” we can trust the flow and trust the life, The Life so large and deep and spacious that it even includes its opposite, death.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Everything Belongs, pp. 33-34

Our minds are always active. We analyze, reflect, daydream, or dream. There is not a moment during the day or night when we are not thinking. You might say our thinking is “unceasing.” Sometimes we wish that we could stop thinking for a while; that would save us from many worries, guilt feelings, and fears. Our ability to think is our greatest gift, but it is also the source of our greatest pain. Do we have to become victims of our unceasing thoughts? No, we can convert our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer by making our inner monologue into a continuing dialogue with our God, who is the source of all love.

Let’s break out of our isolation and realize that Someone who dwells in the centre of our beings wants to listen with love to all that occupies and preoccupies our minds.

from Henri J.M. Nouwen’s Bread for the Journey.

Being at various kinds of crossroads at the moment, I’m going off to Hilfield for a few days—back next week. If you’ve a moment spare, please do pray that my eyes will be opened to the depth of the grace and mercy of Christ, and that God’s will for the next stage of my life will become clear, and strong in my heart: that I will have the courage to step in faith into all that he has prepared for me. (Ephesians 2:21)

More Francistide fun…

I'm just off to our Francistide Area Day at Hilfield Friary in a few minutes, so, damp chilly autumn though it is, my heart's singing with anticipation! I do love my sisters and brothers in the Third Order more than I can say—more, somehow, than I can properly explain to myself…

[picture courtesy of Ship of Fools]

Picking up the worms…

We’ve got to give the material world back its power, its importance, its soul, and its sacredness.  This whole earth is indeed a “land of enchantment” as we here call New Mexico.  St. Francis would not step on a little worm knowingly, but would pick it up and place it by the side of the road.

Francis of Assisi is the first known Christian to openly address creatures with the relational titles of “brother” and “sister.”  Animals, sun, moon, plants and the very air were soulful and mutual subjects for him and not just objects for his use.  One cannot overemphasize the importance of this to a world that severely suffers from what Richard Louv calls NDD, “nature deficit disorder.”  We forgot how to read and reverence the first Bible of God.

Such reverential seeing will lead to the beginnings of true enlightenment, love for that tree, joy in that animal, awareness in that breeze, God in that pain.  Soon you yourself wonder what this communion is that is passing back and forth between you and everything else.  I will tell you.  It is the largest and the very best “communion of saints.”

Richard Rohr, adapted from the Medicine and Ministry conference (out of print)

It seems to me that this is the basis for all we do as Franciscans in relation to the creation in which we find ourselves. It contains no easy answers, nor pre-packaged solutions, to questions about vegetarianism, sustainable agriculture, or environmental renewal—but it does give us room to think, to try things out, with God’s word his lamp to our feet, his light for our path. Truly God has not left us all alone in the world. The blind watchmaker is just a nightmare. The creation in which we live may be broken and wounded since its very beginning, just as we ourselves are, but by the cosmic healing of the Cross (Colossians 1:20), we who are redeemed become floodgates through which God’s love, and his mercy, can flow into the world (Romans 8:18-25).

I find myself thinking yet again of the Hilfield Project: it is tiny, sometimes messy, always hard work and always joyful. By itself, it is next to nothing compared with the huge acreages of commercial agriculture, and the endless harm of the petrochemical industry—and yet it is of far greater significance than its surface appearance. It is God’s little laboratory in the Dorset hills—a place where we can see what might happen when his mercy extends to our life on the land and in the world.

Loving the little things…

If we dishonour the so-called inferior or unworthy members of creation, we finally destroy ourselves, too.  We cannot dismiss, pollute, or misuse animals, the earth, the trees, and the waters and pretend to love the Creator of all these things, or even to love ourselves in the midst of them.

St. Paul says “if one part is hurt, all parts are hurt with it. If one part is given special honour, all parts enjoy it … and it is precisely the parts of the body that seem to be the weakest which are the indispensable ones, and it is the least honourable parts of the body that we must clothe with the greatest care.” (I Corinthians 12:26, 22-23).

For some sad reason we humans thought that we were the only creatures that mattered, as if all of the rest of creation was just an arbitrary and throwaway part of God’s plan.  We took our narcissism to a cosmic level, it seems, and did not love and protect the weakest parts of the “Body of God,” nor did we “clothe them with the greatest care.”  Now we all “hurt” together, just as Paul predicted.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Hope Against Darkness, p.138

On this we must base the rest of our lives on this planet, we humans, if we are to survive. Perhaps we are just beginning to glimpse where we might have gone wrong?

I do encourage you to visit the Hilfield Project website. As the community states in their introduction:

Francis of Assisi, in his living the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the full, gives us an example of three ecologies:

• an environmental ecology, living in harmony with creation
• a social ecology, knowing all people as brothers and sisters
• a spiritual ecology, in praise of God as Father and Creator of all things

The Hilfield Peace and Environment Project seeks to express and share this ‘integrated ecology’ for the sake of and out of love for the world.