STIR up, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy power, and come among us: that we, who put our trust and confidence in thy mercy, may speedily be delivered from all our adversities; who livest and reignest with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
A day of fasting and abstinence in the BCP.
I am somewhat obsessed with the Ember Days. In the Book of Common Prayer (1662), the Advent ember days are the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after S. Lucy Day (13 December). These are listed as days of fasting and abstinence. And:
Then the Curate shall declare unto the people what Holy-days, or Fasting-days, are in the week following to be observed. And then also (if occasion be) shall notice be given of the Communion; and Briefs, Citations, and Excommunications read.
Excommunications! Wow! That would be interesting. Anyway, here is the Collect from the Book of Divine Worship (which, I think, is also the Collect in The English Missal)::
GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God: that the coming festival of our redemption may obtain for us the comfort of thy succour in this life, and in the life to come the reward of eternal felicity; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
Every one is very willing to be a servant of Christ; but no one will consent to be His follower. And yet He says: “If any man serve me, let him follow me.” (John 12:26). Hence, he who truly serves and loves Christ, will also follow him; and he who loves Christ, will also love the example of His holy life, His humility, meekness, patience, as well as the cross, shame, and contempt which He endured, although the flesh may thereby suffer pain.
Johann Arndt
I was thinking about the table of fasts and abstinence in the 1662 Prayer Book. Since nothing like it exists in modern Prayer Books, I assume that it still stands. So, I was wondering what the Prayer Book required of me. I found these PRECEPTS OF THE CHURCH by Bishop John Cosin:
- To observe the Festivals and Holy Days appointed.
- To keep the Fasting Days with devotion and abstinence.
- To observe the ecclesiastical customs and ceremonies established, and that without frowardness or contradiction.
- To repair unto the public service of the Church for Matins and Evensong, with other holy offices at times appointed, unless there be a just and unfeigned cause to the contrary.
- To receive the Blessed Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ with frequent devotion, and three times a year at least, of which Easter to be always one. And for better preparation thereunto, as occasion is, to disburthan and quit your consciences of those sins that may grieve us, or scruples that may trouble us, to a learned and discreet priest, and from him to receive advice, and the benefit of Absolution.
It needs a little re-jigging but I think it is a workable Rule of Life. What thinkest thou?
Jesus said:
If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
Matthew 16:24 (KJV)
The way of perfection passes by way of the Cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle.
CCC, 2015
I was thinking about William of Glasshamption (aka Fr William Sirr SDC), especially a piece he wrote about the contemplative life in the Anglican Communion.
When I read the letter, I was struck by the need for contemplative life within the Anglican Communion. In a world full of action and busyness, contemplative life is a secular necessity. There is no return to the old days. Contemplative life in a social media age!
But, I wonder, is the contemplative life possible within the Anglican Communion? Is there room in the Anglican Communion for individuals who separate for “prayer and mortification”? Does it fall inside of “mission action plans”?
So, read! Reflect! Share!
Spring, 1933.
“Now there stood by the Cross of Jesus His Mother”
To our FRIENDs
THE COMPANIONS OF
BLESSED MARY AT THE CROSS.GREETINGS TO YOU ALL.
Not least among many marvellous recoveries the Anglican Communion has restoration of the made in the last hundred years is the vigorous Religious Life which had been so rudely suppressed at the Reformation. We realise not only what has already been done in this direction, but also how much more must yet be achieved ere we reach the goal set before us. But whether we consider the immediate past or the unknown future, we thank-fully take courage and press on again.
Now as we look around at this stage of the revival we find contemplative communities of women happily established in our midst. This is the highest peak we have attained in the recovery of the Religious Life. It gives promise that the men will soon follow.
We cannot, however, forget the great shock it gave Newman, those many years ago, when he first realised there were no monks and nuns in the Church of England, and we wonder whether we are sufficiently concerned to-day to find we are still left without one established community of men set apart wholly for this supreme work of prayer and mortification. Are we fully alive to the serious loss it must be for the Church to remain bereft of monks of this description?
There can be no doubt of the increasing need there is of men who will make daring adventure in the field of prayer. We mean men after the pattern of what Jacob once proved himself to be. He determined he would by prayer win a blessing from God. For this purpose he carefully sought and diligently planned to be alone, and alone he wrestled in prayer through the long watches of the night until the breaking of the day. “I will not let thee go unless thou bless me.” He declared he had seen God face to face, and as a prince, he won power with God and with men. It is true he ever afterwards bore the marks of the struggle he had gone through-but he prevailed.
It is men like that the Church needs so desperately today-men who will deliberately go apart to be with God alone, and stay. They must be men wholly surrendered, and determined with dauntless courage to follow God through every tedious and painful vicissitude, and to endure in prayer right on to the very end, whatever the cost may be. That is the way prescribed by God, and it is in that direction such men of God have always “I give myself unto prayer.”
“The help that is done upon earth, God doeth it himself.” But He deigns to ask for our co-operation as fellow-workers together with Him. God will not consent to act in loneliness.
Think—a divided Christendom has to be reunited, a distracted world has to be mended, all nations have to be brought to do Him service. These are blessings we all yearn for. And these are blessings we know God wills to give. Indeed, He is even now holding them out and waiting to bestow them upon us. without our utmost co-operation. Wherein, then, do we fail?
It is not in activities that we are in danger of falling short. In some respects our activities are excessive. It is in prayer and mortification we sorely need strengthening. And it is to monks we must look to help us to fill up this deficiency.
In our recovery of the Religious Life we have reversed the true order in which the Religious Life originally came into being. In the early days of the Church the solitaries came first, and then the monks and nuns. Men were the pioneers, and the women Then out of this monastic life of prayer and mortification sprang the various orders of active religious, raised up one after the other to meet the pressing needs of the time.
We, on the other hand, started in the revival by first recovering the active life-Sisters of Charity devoted to the poor and sick. Then came other active Sisters for the purposes of educational, preventive and rescue work. After that the men followed-mission priests and lay Brothers, communities of men for training ordinands, for the care of aged and infirm sailors, and for the ” downs and outs ” And most of these communities of men and women have spread out into the mission field.
Now we discover that, quietly and without observation, enclosed nuns have come to life, like the seed hidden and growing secretly in the earth. We find them here just as we suddenly find the flowers in full blossom in the garden, without seeing them unfold. There is yet awaited, last of all, the coming of enclosed monks as of men born out of due time. Then we shall have completely recovered.
Until the enclosed monks are born to us the power of the Church is seriously weakened. We suffer because of the absence of their lives of prayer and mortification-the two most essential implements needed in the terrific warfare for God against the world, the flesh and the devil. The Church is waiting for such lives-waiting for you, young men, because you are strong, and the Word of God abideth in you, and you have overcome the wicked one, you who can ensure that there are men as well as women always standing by night and day to praise the Lord.
Without such monks we are in grave danger of losing sight of the fact that there are some things God has set the Church to do for Him that can only be accomplished by prayer and mortification. Is it not precisely to this purpose of prayer and mortification our Lord was referring when He said to His disappointed disciples, “this kind goeth not out except by prayer and fasting”?
God’s arm is not shortened. Somewhere among us are those to whom God is waiting to impart this rare vocation. And we ask for your prayers during this centenary year, that He will graciously impart it now; and that they to whom this call shall come will fully and courageously respond to it; and that, please God, once again the desert will shoot out her blossoms and restore to the Church these specialists in prayer and mortification, monks as well as nuns, monks who will, like Moses on the mountain-top, stretch forth their hands in strong and never-failing supplications while those on the plains beneath continue their heroic activities.
Who can doubt that we, too, shall then prevail? It will be the breaking of a new day. With the help of our God, we shall leap over the wall.
God bless you.
.
He ate distasteful food; wore a hair shirt next his skin; used the discipline on his body; accepted humiliations with the eagerness of a saint; said Mass every day at four; ignored malaise and headaches; made acts of humiliation when servants touched their caps to him; and had a rule of life “always to lie down in bed, confessing that I am unworthy to lie down except in Hell, but, so praying, to lie down in the Everlasting Arms.” To look into his face was to see the light of Heaven. Thus his sermons were listened to by breathless congregations, in spite of their inordinate length and his monotonous delivery.
Anyone want to guess the saint?
Eremites, or “inhabitants of a desert,” from the Greek ἔρημος, sometimes called solitaries, recluses, or anchorites, were men and women who retired into the desert to live a spirituality of contemplative isolation. Taking their inspiration from the forty years that Israel spent wandering in the desert and the forty days that the Lord spent fasting and battling with temptation in the desolation, hermits embraced a spirituality of on-going conversion, spiritual combat, penance, and solitude.
Anchorites and anchoresses were a related form of consecrated life during the Middle Ages. These urban hermits (frequently women) lived in the solitude of an “anchorage,” or “anchor hold,” a small cell built against the wall of a church. Stability and enclosure as a means of protecting contemplative prayer are hallmarks of this form of consecrated life, much more so than in the more generic eremitic way of life. The door of the anchorage was sealed by the bishop in a liturgy resembling a funeral, signifying that the anchoress who enclosed herself therein had died to the world. A tiny window called a “squint” allowed the anchoress to listen to Mass and receive holy Communion. Another window led out to the street, enabling benefactors to deliver food and receive spiritual advice. The anchoritic way of life persisted until at least the sixteenth century, notably in England.
Hermits and Consecrated Virgins, Ancient Vocations in the Contemporary Catholic Church:
A Canonical-Pastoral Study of Canons 603 and 604 Individual Forms of Consecrated Life
So, the “marks” of the urban recluse are
I do not like the term penance in this context—I think asceticism is closer. (Penance is a part of asceticism, but not all ascetic practices are penitential.)
I think there is a sense in which 1, 2, and 3 can be summarised by the term asceticism.
So, as a starting point, these are the marks of the enclosed solitary life:
I am wondering how I could “up my game”. While searching the internet, I read the following and it makes sense:
Asceticism in Modern Spirituality
While it’s true that asceticism – like many aspects of faith and human life – was abused at times in Church history, the legacy of asceticism is that of making saints. And it still has that power today in your own spiritual life. Why should you practice asceticism? Here are some powerful reasons.1. Asceticism combats habitual sin. If you struggle to control your desire for something you tend to abuse (food, drink, sex, comfort, etc), practicing self-denial is like building your spiritual muscles against it.
2. Asceticism builds the virtue of temperance. Temperance is the virtue that balances our desires for physical goods. When our desires are out of balance (a condition of Original Sin called “concupiscence”), we need to reset the balance with self-denial.
3. Asceticism protects you against the excesses of the culture. Like the culture the early Christians lived in, our modern culture has deified entertainment, luxury, and physical pleasure. While Christians can give lip service to resisting these temptations, the truth is that we’re immersed in this culture and it’s difficult not to be transformed by it. Asceticism helps us to set our hearts on the greater goods and to resist laxity of heart and open our hearts to be transformed by grace.
4. Asceticism moves our hearts away from selfishness. We live in air-conditioned comfort, even in our cars. We get used to having entertainment literally at our fingertips. Everything in our lives is built around convenience, entertainment, and comfort. Even the largest hearts among us can become lax when we get used to being comfortable all the time. Self-sacrifice prevents our modern lifestyle from sinking too deeply into our hearts. This was the reason Saint Francis required his brothers to serve the poor by living among the poor and why Dominicans also took a vow of poverty. Monastic orders at the time lived luxuriously and religious men and women were losing the true sense of their vocation. The same principle applies to lay people living in the world.
5. Asceticism can be an act of love. Like the first Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers, we can offer our self-sacrifice as a token of dedicating our complete lives to Jesus. Asceticism can exercise the theological virtue of charity. It can be an act of love for God, and we can also offer our voluntary suffering for the salvation of souls, making it an act of Christ-like love for our neighbor.
Asceticism plays the same role for us today that it did for the early Christians after the Edict of Milan. It shapes our hearts away from concupiscence (sinful desire) towards God and selflessness. It exercises the selfless love of charity. Of course, we want to avoid the excesses and abuses that have given asceticism a bad name (think of Hollywood’s portrayal of the scrupulous Catholic whipping himself bloody with a Cat-O-Nine-Tails in front of a crucifix all night). But properly used, asceticism is an invaluable tool in our spiritual toolbox.
The Role of Asceticism in Modern Spirituality
this solitary life 