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
touching, talking, and ignorance
So, I am going to be honest and give my actual pet peeves:
- People touching me! I do not shake hands (if I can avoid it), and I most certainly do not hug random people. I am not against touching, but it must be the right person at the right time. I do not do random, and I do not do forced physical contact.
- Random talkers, I do not talk for talk’s sake. I would rather sit silently than talk about the weather or the football.
- The outspoken ignorant. People who speak with authority on a subject when they are ignorant. That might be rude, and I am often so considered, but people “stay in your lane”.
access
Perhaps I have had many hard decisions to make? Not all are worth sharing, and some are very private. Also, most are painful and triggering.
But the clearest insight, and the hardest decision, is that I control who has access to me. No one has a right to me as a person or an individual. Yes, I have a duty to others, which is ultimately a duty to God, but that duty (to other people) is not my relationship with God – it is my duty to my neighbour. The call is to follow Jesus.
While the above is not a huge problem, no one has contacted me with demands for access. Yet, I feel I should be available to people more out of self-serving motives.
As I have written before, the thing that I pray for (solitary life) is also the thing I fear the most. The decision to control access, to deny access for some, is emotionally difficult and is the hardest decision I have had to make.
is contemplative life possible in the Anglican Communion?
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.
Jesus?
I was thinking this morning that I am in a little slump regarding people. I’m not sure who to trust at the moment.
So, Jesus! Perhaps that is a little strange, odd, or weird?! I am not a very good follower. And my sin is ever before me. But I try – I desire to follow Jesus. Resting in Him is my favourite past time.
Sorry is that like superweird and uber-religious?
desert?
From those choices, mountains. I live on the beach. In fact, I can see the “bay” from my porch. But during my time here, I think I have been to the beach once. So maybe the mountains are more my thing?!
Why the mountains? Because they are not the beach? Or, it would be a change for me. Hermits often live in the mountains.
Perhaps a third option is the desert. Yes, it can be hot and very cold, but the isolation! And no one would visit. Is it NBN ready?
sk
Daily writing prompt
If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?
Without a doubt Soren Kierkegaard. Perhaps in a coffee shop? I know he takes his espresso with seven sugars.
Besides the language barrier—I don’t speak Danish—I think we could have a nice conversation. Or, I could simply listen. From what I have read about him, I think we have a lot of things in common. We could talk about irony, faith, despair, or perhaps the state of the modern sermon. Of course, we could talk about Christology, one of my favourite topics, or the power of abstractions in the modern age. I would love to ask his take on social media, modern democracy, or the state of the church.
Why Kierkegaard? He has been the most interesting and insightful person since Augustine of Hippo in the last 1500 years. And he is not the “same-same” as the majority of thinkers.
bookS
I never read just one book. I have multiple books on the go at once in multiple locations. So …
In the chapel:
Common Worship: Daily Prayer and NRSV Bible. (This is not technologically true. I use a version of Common Worship that I have adjusted to my needs, but the outline is there.) I also use several different prayer books for other devotions.
In the dayroom (that is, the inner cell):
This Is Epistemology: An Introduction by J. Adam Carter and Clayton Littlejohn.
Also:
Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith
Also:
The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism by Douglas Burton-Christie
In the parlour (main room where people can visit):
The Nature of Biblical Criticism by John Barton
Also:
The Word in the Desert: Anglican and Roman catholic Reactions to Liturgical Reform by Barry Spurr
Also (and, to be honest, I like to have this book on hand to “soothe my soul”):
Anglican Papalism: A History: 1900-1960 by Michael Yelton
I am also reading a novel:
The Vinyl Detective: Written in Dead Wax by Andrew Cartmel
On my Kindle (that travels with me):
Introducing Medieval Biblical Interpretation: The Senses of Scripture in Premodern Exegesis by Ian Christopher Levy
Now that was real fun! I love talking about books.
who?
.
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?
enclosure and stability
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
- on-going conversion
- spiritual combat
- asceticism
- solitude
- stability
- enclosure
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:
- asceticism
- solitude
- stability
- enclosure
a fool and his prayer book 