The January 26 2008 edition of the Los Angeles Times has an interesting article by Stephanie Simon titled "What chores would Jesus do?" It describes a small commune of evangelical Christians in Billings, Montana, and their efforts to live the Gospel more fully.

The group started out with two married couples, a single man, and a total of five children. They shared a two-bedroom house in a very average suburban neighborhood (the single guy slept in the basement). The community still exists after a year, though with some changes in personnel.

This group is part of the so-called New Monasticism, itself an outgrowth of the Emergent evangelical movement. Useful references to the New Monasticism can be found here and here.

For well over thirty years now I've been interested in alternative communities and monasticism, and manage to practice a form of the latter within the limits of my married, householding lifestyle. What are my reactions to this article?

• For starters, the community has no rule of life. A rule sounds restrictive at first blush, but it sets out what members owe to the community in terms of commitments of money, labor, and time. It also specifies what the members can expect from the community. Christian monasticism has a 1700-year track record in large part because it has rules (preeminently the Rule of Benedict in the West) and adheres to them consistently. Rural America is littered with the ruins of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of communes that tanked because everyone was too busy getting enlightened to take out the garbage.
• Aside from group Bible studies, there is apparently no formal public worship and no emphasis on other spiritual practices (I'd think that lectio divina would be a natural for evangelicals. But have these folks even heard of lectio divina?

On a more mundane but very practical level, these people don't have enough living space. They're on top of each other most of the time when they're not asleep, and this naturally leads to stress and conflict. There was a '60's commune in Colorado (called Red Rock, I think) where several dozen people (and their kids) lived in a big geodesic dome--with no interior partitions. They were trying to create a new society from scratch. I wonder how many of them have MBA' s by now. There's a very good reason Benedictine monasteries transitioned from open dormitories to individual cells during the middle ages.

These folks could learn a few lessons from the Old Monasticism without compromising either their evangelicalism or their status as laypeople. If you insist on reinventing the wheel, you must be prepared for a wobbly ride.

The January 13 2008 issue of New York Magazine has a substantial and well-researched article on Episcopal solitaries. "A Hermit of the Heart" by Paul O'Donnell profiles three New York Episcopalians who combine life in this quintessence of urban madness with a deep commitment to contemplative prayer. These folks have real jobs and live alongside "normal" people yet manage to spend several hours per day in meditation and other forms of prayer. They are under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and are answerable on some level to the bishop of New York, yet they are not part of a monastic community. Each is, in effect, "a contemplative order of one." Since we observed the feast of St Anthony of Egypt on January 17, this topic is especially relevant.

The article is available here. A tip of the hood to Episcope for turning me on to it.

Brendan Sweetman teaches philosophy at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He has recently published Religion: key concepts in philosophy (London and New York, Continuum, 2007). This is a very basic and useful introduction to the philosophy of religion, especially if, like me, you are somewhat philosophically challenged. The following excerpt deals with the notion of religion and secularism as worldviews. This is relevant to those of us in the mainline churches who are confronted with liberal Protestant theology, particularly the variety exemplified by the Jesus Seminar or Bishop Spong, which tends to uncritically accept the truth-claims of post-Enlightenment secularism and reinterprets the tradition to accommodate secularism. The following quote is found on pages 10-11.

It is very common in the United States, but less so in other countries, to use the term 'faith' to describe religious belief. But this term can be quite misleading. The word 'faith' has unfortunate connotations, especially today, and can be used to set up a somewhat artificial distinction between faith on the one hand and reason on the other. The term frequently carries with it the connotation that religious beliefs are outside reason, or that religious believers are not interested in the rationality of their views, or worst of all, that religious beliefs are not even reasonable. This is often how secularists use the term, but it is also sometimes used this way by religious believers themselves.

The most important sense of the term from the point of view of philosophy of religion is the cognitive or propositional sense which refers to holding a belief for which the evidence is less than 100 per cent certain or decisive. Religious beliefs involve propositions about God, about God's relationship to the world and human beings, and about morality, among many other propositions. The religious believer cannot prove these propositions to be true in the sense of giving a scientific proof, or presenting decisive evidence for them. But he can at least try to show that they are rational to believe. This is the most appropriate use of the term 'faith' in philosophy of religion and marks the best understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. A religious believer holds many things on faith, but he hopes that it is a rational faith (not an irrational faith), and the work of philosophy of religion is, among other things, an attempt to investigate the rationality of religious belief.

On this understanding of the term 'faith', it is the case that all worldviews--religious or secularist--involve faith in this cognitive sense. That is to say, all worldviews hold beliefs about the nature of reality, the nature of the human person and the nature of morality, to which the adherents of the worldview pledge their commitment, but which they cannot prove decisively. Although it may be possible to back up some of these beliefs with rational arguments and evidence, it is still necessary to commit to them, since any arguments we have will fall short of proof, because of the subject matter involved. The subject matter of worldviews, which involves the three subjects mentioned, does not admit of scientific proof. This is true for all worldviews, secularist ones as well as religious ones. So if one accepts various beliefs about the nature of reality, or the human person, or morality, this acceptance will involve a commitment to these beliefs: a movement of the will as well as of the intellect. So, in fact, a religious believer and a secularist are in the same boat in this respect, a point frequently overlooked. We are often inclined simply to accept it as true without giving much thought to the matter that it is only religious belief that involves faith, but not secularism. But now that secularism is a positive worldview in itself, and a major cultural player to boot, it is no longer appropriate to overlook the fact that it is a worldview with many controversial beliefs that are the subject of contentious debate, and that its adherents accept many of these beliefs at least partially on faith.

Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) Response to Cardinal Bellarmine

Christ said "this is my body." He did not say "this is my body in this way". We are in agreement with you as to the end; the whole controversy is as to the method. As to the "This", we hold with firm faith that it is. As to the "this is in this way", (namely by the Transubstantiation of the bread into the body), as to the method whereby it happens that it is, by means of In or With or Under or By transition there is no word expressed [in Scripture]. And because there is no word, we rightly make it not of faith; we place it perhaps among the theories of the school, but not among the articles of the faith...We believe no less than you that the presence is real. Concerning the method of the presence, we define nothing rashly, and I add, we do not anxiously inquire, any more than how the blood of Christ washes us in Baptism, any more than how the human and divine natures are united in one Person in the Incarnation of Christ.

Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882) The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent

...while I believe the consecrated elements to become, by virtue of his consecratory words, truly and really, yet spiritually and in an ineffable way, His Body and Blood, I learnt also to withhold my thoughts as to the mode of this great Mystery, but as a Mystery to adore it. With the Fathers, then, and our own great Divines...I could not but speak of the consecrated elements as being what, since He has so called them, I believe them to become His Body and Blood...

M. R. Carpenter-Garnier (The Divine Guest)

The principal underlying the Incarnation is that spirit is expressed through matter, the inward through the outward, the invisible through the visible. So God became man. So Christ entered into human life, and lived and loved as a man...It is in line with this that, when he gives to his people this divine gift, this gift of himself, he should use the same method. As once at Bethlehem he hid the divine glory through uniting with it the weakness of our nature, so now that self-same life he hides under simple material forms. It is, then, to God Incarnate that we come in Holy communion.


Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) Worship

In the Christian sacrifice, the Logos enters the time-series and is self-given under fugitive species to the creature, that by feeding on Reality the creature may be transformed: receiving by infusion the gift of charity to strengthen, purify, and at last supernaturalize his own imperfect love, and thus bring a little nearer that transfiguration of the world in Christ which is the creative goal of Christian worship.

Rowan Williams (1950- ) Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

The Eucharist demonstrates that material reality can become charged with Jesus' life, and so proclaimed hope for the whole world of matter. The material, habitually used as a means of exclusion, of violence, can become a means of communication. Matter as hoarded or dominated or exploited speaks of the distortion and ultimate severance of relationship, and as such can only be a sign of death...The matter of the Eucharist, carrying the presence of the risen Jesus, can only be a sign of life, of triumph over the death of exclusion and isolation...If the Eucharist is a sign of the ultimate Lordship of Jesus, his "freedom" to unite to himself the whole material order as a symbol of grace, it speaks of creation itself, and the place of Jesus in creation.

Marilyn McCord Adams (1943- ) Christ and Horrors

God' unitive aims in creation lead not only to the evolution of the material into the personal, but also to Incarnation, to God's expressing divine love for material creation by becoming a human being. But God loves material creation by loving us. The Inner Teacher is omnipresent and ever helpful but difficult for personal animals to recognize or pay attention to. As animals we focus easily on what is sense-perceptible, on what we can see and touch and handle, on what is concrete and locatable in space and time. To grow up and flourish as human beings, we need embodied persons to care for us, to be role models of how to be embodied persons, of how to personify matter in wholesome ways. In the Incarnation, God enters into personal intimacy with material creation, not just through His Divine nature and across the metaphysical size-gap, but through His human nature. Jesus relates to Peter, James and John, to the women suffering from hemorrhage and spinal curvature, to blind men and lepers, embodied person to embodied person...Christ's earthly career climaxing in His passion, death, and resurrection...does not bring an end to our need or the benefit to us as human beings of contacting God, embodied person to embodied person--of seeing, touching and handling God in a determinate place and time. Our need for concrete interaction is all the more urgent given that our being embodied persons in a material world such as this exposes us to horrors. To suppose that God--even God Incarnate--is aloof from horrors while we continue to be exposed to them is alienating. If we are vulnerable to God and to the world, but God is now impassible in all His natures, then God is no longer meeting us on our own level as He once did.

Wouldn't, why wouldn't, a God Who loved material creation, and who loves us as a way of loving material creation, want--in Luther's language--to continue the Incarnation by becoming really present for us in the very sacrament that rivets our attention on horrors by showing forth the Lord's death?

I've recently resumed the practice of reading a short excerpt from St Benedict's monastic Rule every day. I don't read the whole thing, just those parts I think are most relevant to a married Anglican layperson living in the so-called real world. So, for example, I skip Chapter 9, which deals with the arrangement of the Night Office (Vigils). The Book of Common Prayer makes no provision for a Night Office, and if it did, I wouldn't get up to do it anyway. But if you ever visit a monastery where it is done, by all means go to it, even if just for one time. The trauma of getting up at such a Godly hour shocks the psyche into being more receptive to the message of the psalms and canticles than it might otherwise be on a full night's sleep.

But I digress. The suggested readings below are based on the RB 1980, published in the same year by the Liturgical Press. This edition of the Rule contains the original Latin text, an excellent English translation on the facing page, and enough critical apparatus to keep a graduate student amused for years. IMHO, this is the gold standard for English-language critical editions of the Rule. The numbers in the citations refer to the versification in this edition. So, good reading and Pax et bonum.

Day 1 Prologue: 1-20

Day 2 Prologue: 21-38

Day 3 Prologue: 39-end

Day 4 Chapter 2 : 1-22

Day 5 Chapter 2 : 23-end

Day 6 Chapter 3

Day 7 Chapter 4: 1-43

Day 8 Chapter 4: 44-end

Day 9 Chapter 5

Day 10 Chapter 6

Day 11 Chapter 7 : 1-30

Day 12 Chapter 7: 31-43

Day 13 Chapter 7: 44-54

Day 14 Chapter 7: 55-end

Day 15 Chapters 19 and 20

Day 16 Chapter 27

Day 17 Chapter 31

Day 18 Chapters 33 and 34

Day 19 Chapter 36

Day 20 Chapter 48: 1-13

Day 21 Chapter 48: 14-end

Day 22 Chapter 49

Day 23 Chapter 52

Day 24 Chapter 53

Day 25 Chapter 57

Day 26 Chapter 58

Day 27 Chapter 62

Day 28 Chapter 68

Day 29 Chapter 71

Day 30 Chapter 72

Day 31 Chapter 73

Ignatius lived from 1807 to 1867. He was born into a noble landowning Russian family. After study at a military academy at St Petersburg he received a commission in the Tsar's army as an engineer. A few years later he resigned due to illness, and after recovering his health became a monk. He was soon recognized for his piety and became abbot of a monastery near St Petersburg when he was only 26. At the age of 50 he was consecrated a bishop but quite sensibly resigned his bishopric after only four years to become a hermit (Anglican bishops take note). He spent the remainder of his life as a spiritual father, often guiding his directees by means of letter-writing. He was canonized by the Russian Church in 1988. Here are two of his comments on the Jesus Prayer:

The name of our Lord Jesus Christ is a divine name. The power and effect of that name are divine, omnipotent and salvific, and transcend our ability to comprehend it. With faith therefore, with confidence and sincerity, and with great piety and fear ought we proceed to the doing of the great work which God has entrusted to us: to train ourselves in prayer by using the name of our Lord Jesus Christ...

Novices need more time in order to train themselves in prayer. It is impossible to teach this supreme virtue shortly after entering the monastery of following the first few steps in asceticism. Asceticism needs both time and gradual progress, so that the ascetic can mature for prayer in every respect. In order that a flower might bloom or the fruit grow on a tree, the tree must first be planted and left to develop; thus also does prayer grow out of the soil of the other virtues and nowhere else. The monk will not quickly gain mastery of his mind, nor will he in a short time accustom it to abide in the words of the prayer as if enclosed in a prison. Pulled hither and thither by its acquired predilections, impressions, memories and worries, the novice's mind constantly breaks its salvific chains and strays from the narrow to the wide path. It prefers to wander freely...to stray aimlessly and mindlessly over great expanses, though this be damaging to him and cause him great loss. The passions, those moral infirmities of human nature, are the principal cause of inattentiveness and absentmindedness in prayer...The passions are brought under control and mortified little by little by means of true obedience, as well as by self-reproach and humility--these are the virtues upon which successful prayer is built. Concentration, which is accessible to man, is granted by God in good time to every struggler in piety and asceticism who by persistence and ardor proves the sincerity of his desire to acquire prayer.

Here are some excerpts from a great post published today by Christopher on his site at http://thanksgivinginallthings.blogspot.com/. The title is "Creation laughs back: animals, theology and animal saints".

I now know what others must feel, after having been laughed at for mentioning animal theology in a conversation. I have long heard others talk about derisive and dismissive encounters with "serious" theologians and scholars when the topic of animal theology is mentioned.

Considering animals in relationship to God is not something extra or foreign to Christianity. In my opinion, a serious doctrine of Creation cannot ignore the rest of the living world and the Creation as a whole and finally be Christian. Even rocks glorify God. And frankly, neither can a complete doctrine of Redemption or Sanctification. Indeed, to set up one's "serious" theology in such a way that one can ignore, dismiss, or deride creatures great and small, organic and inorganic, is a sign of the Fall and the effects of sin, alienation, and division. The rest of Creation pays dearly and regularly for our lack of relational recognition and failures in thankfulness...

When I'm driving and I notice a dead deer, raccoon, seagull, squirrel, or the like, I offer a prayer of thanks to God for the life of this creature and that God will greet him or her in His Kingdom...

I am part of a strand of tradition, the Benedictine, that honors this connection to the rest of Creation and is not threatened by the suggestion that God cares for each creature. A raven, after all, is God's messenger to Abba Benedict in his early monastic life and is often shown in iconography as friend and companion. We may not know the name of that raven, but given the desert penchant to understand that Christian life was to be lived in return to the Garden, I can imagine that Abba Benedict gave the raven a name. And as the icon shows, I'm certainly within tradition to imagine that not only Abba Benedict, but also the raven is raised up, is a saint.