The Crucifix of San Damiano: Conversion and the story of St Francis This is the first of three talks given for a St Francis Day retreat this year at the Church of the Resurrection, Mount Macedon. One day sometime during the period 1205-1206 a young Italian man in his mid-twenties, tired physically and mentally, recovering from malaria and imprisonment, disillusioned with life, full of desire and longing, but confused and feeling wretched, sat before a large Romanesque rood crucifix in an abandoned church in the Umbrian region of Italy. He cried out: ‘Oh Lord, Most High, enlighten the darkness of my heart that I may carry out Your holy and true command.’ And, quite unexpectedly, he heard the response: ’Francis, go and repair my house, which as you see is falling completely into ruin.’ These words of St Francis have come down to us today known as the Prayer Before the Crucifix: Most High glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my heart. Give me right faith, sure hope and perfect charity. Fill me with understanding and knowledge that I may fulfil your command." When I began to write these three talks for today, I confess that I actually knew very little about St Francis. Here was a saint whose identity I’d grown up with, but I’d never properly considered or taken seriously. I had also assumed that our knowledge of him would be scarce and only via secondary sources. I was wrong. Almost immediately after his death people began to write about St Francis; he was canonised just two years after his death. Francis himself was educated, he could read and write in his native dialect, and Latin. He wrote two rules of the Franciscan Order. In the weeks preceding his death in 1226, he dictated a Testament of his life to one of his closest companions. He wrote letters to the clergy, to Saint Anthony, to the Brothers in his Order. He also wrote prayers. And it’s three of these prayers that I wish to ponder upon today, and use as a lens into the story of his life. As I read about the story of the life of Francis Bernadone, I encountered a man very different to the one I expected. Where I anticipated reading about someone with a high sense of ideals, gentle, perhaps a bit rash, I encountered a person who was strong-minded, who could rally men to battle, who could be stubborn, but who could also act as dramatically and impulsively, and courageously as St Peter. Here was a man who never acted by half measure. As a youth this man we call ‘saint’ was the party boy of Assisi who harboured longings to be a knight; as an adult he was prepared to be seen to do sudden very rash and foolish things for the love of God. He took risks, he learned the power of living symbolically, and he struggled continually: with illness, with desire, and in his relationship with God. At the turn of the thirteenth century, Assisi was a fortress town which rivalled other towns, in particular Perugia. Assisi also had its own political internal struggles between the merchant and the noble classes. Francis’ father was a flourishing merchant. He was part of a rising class that sought a more democratic rule and rebelled against heavy taxes. He routinely travelled to France to buy and sell linens. Francis was born when his father was away and his mother named him Giovanni, after John the Baptist. But when his father returned, he changed his name to Francesco, ‘the French one.’ As a youth Francis had enjoyed fine clothes, an easy-going life and mucking about with friends. He cut something of a romantic figure, popular and unprepossessing. The reality of the violent rivalry between Perugia and Assisi must have come home to him after his participation in a battle with Perugia. He was taken a prisoner of war, and for nearly a year was locked up in a squalid dungeon in Perugia. Somewhere around 1203-04 Francis’ father paid for his release and when he returned home Francis was a changed man. It took him over a year to recover and the malarial parasites in his body and the exposure to tuberculosis plagued him for the rest of his life. He began to work in his father’s shop, but he was restless, depressed and agitated. The call to join papal forces fighting in Apulia reawakened his desire to be a knight. He had a dream in which he saw the great hall of a castle; on the walls hung many shields and a voice assured him that these belonged to Francis and his knights. Having been blessed by the bishop near the Cathedral of San Rufino in Assisi, he set out of the city gates accompanied by companions and big dreams. However, soon after arriving in Spoleto, fifteen miles from Assisi, his malarial fever returned. But he also had another dream. There was again the castle and the shields, but this time another voice said: ‘Francis, who is better to serve? The Lord or the servant?’ ‘Why the Lord of course?’ replied Francis. ‘Then why are you serving the servant? Go now, return to Assisi where it will be shown you what to do.’ So returning home, to the dismay of his father and confusion of his mother, he became once more despondent and restless. Contemporary Franciscan priest and writer, Murray Bodo writes that for a period of time, Francis now felt shame. He was in darkness, he ‘walked and waited, prayed and wept, and thought he would go mad.’ (Francis and Jesus, Murray Bodo, Franciscan Media, 2012, p9) I wonder if the passion that drove Francis when he was very young to carouse with friends throughout the night, inspired him to fight in the war with Perugia and later head towards Apulia, was the same searching energy that later brought him before the crucifix in San Damiano? Passion and dreaming, combined with longing for meaning needs to find fulfilment. Although upon return from Spoleto Francis went back to partying with his mates late into the night, gradually he lessened his ties with them and with his family. At around the age of 22 or 23 Francis started retreating regularly into caves around Mount Subasio and he spent time praying and what we would call ‘working himself out’. We are told that usually a close friend would accompany him and wait outside the cave. It’s difficult to know clearly the nature of his struggles at this time. Love? Temptations of the flesh? Family and social expectations? Certainly desire for understanding God. In his later Testament he refers to this time as one when he was ‘still in sin’ and ‘doing ‘penance.’ (Francis and Jesus, Murray Bodo, Franciscan Media, 2012, p38). The movement away from being a playboy of Assisi to the celibate monk would be quite a journey for anyone. However, in 1206, Francis Bernadone dramatically confronted something inside himself. This had to with the nature of the body. He tells us in his Testament that as he was returning home on his horse one day the path took him past one of a number of leper hospitals in the valley of Assisi. His repulsion of lepers was not uncommon. Lepers were separated from society and had to rattle a bell on a stick to let others know they were there. Like many others Francis would cover his nose if he had to pass by them. ‘The sight of lepers nauseated me beyond measure’ he wrote in his Testament. But this one day he stopped when he heard the sound of the leper rattling his bell. He wrote: ‘God inspired me.’ He dismounted, hesitated, then ran over to the leper and fully embraced him. In that moment his life turned upside down. (A Mended and Broken Heart, Wendy Murray, Basic Books, 2008, p50) It was shortly after this episode, a period when he was still working for his father, yet frequenting caves to pray, that he passed a dilapidated Benedictine church - abandoned except for the presence of an elderly Benedictine priest. Francis stopped and went in to pray. Inside was an old wooden Byzantine image of the cross. Painted on linen covering walnut wood, this icon dated from the 12th century and was written by an unknown Umbrian artist. It stands just over two metres high and one metre wide. Francis prayed: ‘Oh Lord, Most High, enlighten the darkness of my heart that I may carry out Your holy and true command.’ And he clearly heard the response: ’Francis, go and repair my house, which as you see is falling completely into ruin.’ This was a moment of conversion for St Francis. With great gusto and energy, he dashed out of the church, ran home, grabbed some fine linen from his father’s shop, and rode off on his father’s horse. He sold both and offered the money to the old priest at the church. The priest refused to take it, but Francis left the money intended to repair the dilapidated church with him. His father, Pietro Bernadone, was not happy. But Francis had now started out on a new path in life. The Prayer Before the Cross as St Francis’ words came to be called, was initially written in Francis’ own Umbrian dialect and then quickly translated into Latin so others could read it. It obviously caught something of the longing experienced by many people at this time because it became popular very quickly. Francis himself recited a number of different variations of this prayer. So this gives us a clue that the meaning and intent of the prayer is more important than the actual words themselves. We could spend more than a whole Quiet Day contemplating the icon of San Damiano and the meaning of the figures and angels surrounding Christ. But I’d like to ponder instead what this experience of conversion for St Francis was like. I want to ask the question: what can ‘conversion’ possibly look like for us today? What shape can it take - this turning around of the whole self towards God? Not here so much the implications for our subsequent living out of such an experience, but how can we know such an experience and trust it? St Francis would have come to know the Rule of St Benedict, who placed a lot of emphasis on conversatio morum - cultivating that disposition which turns our hearts and minds towards God. I recently heard a quote from Calvin (of all people) who believed that ‘people need teachable hearts.’ Teachable hearts are open hearts, and open hearts are free to hear God speaking in whatever word or form that takes. They are hearts open to discerning the will of God. A God whose will is an affirming source of my identity, who strengthens and nourishes me; who is not a power of coercion, nor a willed governance of regulations. I have four suggestions about my understanding of conversion which are reflected in the story of St Francis. My first suggestion is that it isn’t the same for everyone - conversion is both particular and personal. We could sit before the same crucifix of San Damiano and have no sense of Christ speaking to us at all. God reaches into our hearts and speaks to each one of us, where we are at. Not where we would like to think of ourselves as at. And not where our neighbour is at. And though hearing God’s word may not be as dramatic for us as this moment for St Francis before the San Damiano crucifix, our task is to stay open. In a sermon at St Peter’s Eastern Hill a few weeks ago, our theological student Colleen Clayton talked about how conversion is not always a comfortable experience. CS Lewis, the English 20th century Christian writer said he felt hunted by God: You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. (Surprised By Joy, C.S. Lewis, p266) CS Lewis claimed that his conversion was logical and rational, not emotional, but like St Francis, at some level before his conversion he stayed open to the approach of Him. How often I find it very easy to be cynical of even the possibility that God or Christ could ever want to speak to me. I keep my eyes shut and ears closed. This inner movement of turning towards God may involve questions and wrestling, but we also need to stay open to God’s response. God is not only personal to the saints or others. But God invites you, us, me even, into a personal relationship. Secondly, what happened before the cross for St Francis didn’t just happen in a vacuum. It was one of a series of responses in a relationship which God had already set up. Soon after becoming the ‘most reluctant convert in all England’ CS Lewis also describes another moment. With a friend he travelled to a zoo in London: “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." (The Pilgrim's Regress, CS Lewis) Like St Francis, moments of conversion are part of a continuum. Some of these conversion moments can certainly have major ramifications in terms of the trajectory for our lives from that time forward. But for both CS Lewis and St Francis, motions that have already been happening in the heart play a part. For St Francis, his own story: his earlier extravagant, indulged lifestyle, the longing to be a knight, the period of time spent in a dungeon, the embrace of a leper, his frequent visits to the caves - all these informed in some way, this moment before the crucifix. And this moment went on to inform future struggles and encounters. And thirdly, coming out of this, the story of St Francis shows us how we need to, as Rowan Williams phrases it, give credibility to the taking of time. It is tempting to pin St Francis to a fixed identity and actually forget that he grew and changed throughout his life as any one of us do. I like to nail saints down: St Anthony - patron saint of lost things, St Christopher - patron saint of travellers, St Francis - patron saint of animals. One of my favourite phrases about faith had been said by Franciscan Richard Rohr: ‘we get it, and we lose it, and we get it, and we lose it.’ We like to think St Francis always ‘got it.’ But his life story shows us that he didn’t always ‘get it.’ As he travelled later with his brothers and set up his Order, he had to continue discerning what he believed the will of God to be. Conversion for him was an ongoing process. So, conversion isn’t about suddenly getting God, like acquiring a new house. We don’t remain in a fixed permanent state of ‘fully converted.’ The movement toward God is inner, and anything to do with what is happening inside us takes time to germinate and grow. By letting God be God, by entrusting ourselves into the bigness of God, not wrapping God up in a package, we can find ourselves growing in all sorts of unexpected creative ways. We risk making God too small; a designer God to suit our desires. There is a strong desire in our contemporary culture for neatly planned lives: packaged holiday deals, retirement plans. But the life and teachings of Jesus, even by coming to us in four very different Gospel voices, is neither neat nor clear-cut. Currently, I’m part of an online reading group and we are focusing on a work called: We Make the Road by Walking. (We Make the Road by Walking Brian McLaren Jericho Books 2014) Sometimes I wish that God’s Highway was set before me and all I am called to do is just walk it. But walking in God’s ways is much harder than this: the road itself only happens each step of the way as we encounter what happens to us, each day, what decisions we make, and live with the consequences of these decisions. St Francis didn’t know the contours of his own road of life before he walked it. This took reflection and discernment and the taking of time. Real conversion is a lifelong ongoing process. And fourthly, conversion involves an understanding that God doesn’t speak to us literally, but through hints and guesses, through story, through the Gospels, through other people, through art and music…… I think that it doesn’t take a lot of study of the stories even in the Old Testament to recognise that God often does not speak literally to a person, a community or a nation. Sometimes for the Old Testament prophets, there were sudden moments of clear connection with God. But most often the message of the prophets to the people of Israel was a reminder about how important it was to remain faithful to God’s ways. For them it was a call to see through the illusion of the god Baal, for us it’s a call to recognise the hold that money and transactional interpersonal dynamics can take hold of our hearts, and turn back to the law of Love. This story of St Francis before the Crucifix is not telling us to find a cross, sit before it and wait for it to speak to us. This may happen, or it may not. But essentially to me it’s a story about how God speaks to us where we’re at. And God’s word, like Christ in the Gospel stories, is most especially found more often than not, when and where we least expect, in the broken and ordinary. Perhaps especially in the broken and ordinary and overlooked. What better metaphor for us today, a crumbling ruined church? So, Francis came very slowly to understand that conversion in a person’s life happens slowly, haltingly, and by letting God be God. Walking the road of life means being energised, passionate, alive to the senses, and free to make choices and decisions. Conversion means becoming more who we are, and who we want to be, in a deeply true way. It’s not about willed control. Conversion also means being fully alive in the present moment, with our five senses, and attuned to all of life’s ambiguity, complexity, pain and delight. It means stepping forward in faith, with courage, but also a preparedness to be wrong. To make mistakes. Conversion means developing habits of the heart, practising patterns of speech, realigning our actions day by day. And by practising tuning into God, we very gradually develop a relational way of being not only in God, but with one another.

This is a question, being a believer, not really for me to answer. But it’s one I come back to again and again since I first wrote the review of Graeme and Jonathon Rutherford’s book Beloved Father, Beloved Son, 3 years ago. And nearly everyone I mix with outside the church these days seems to call themselves an Atheist - with a capital 'A'. The word itself derives from the ancient Greek and first meant Godless or ungodly or impious, used for many centuries in a pejorative sense: a (without) theos (God). Karen Armstrong tells us that it wasn’t until late 18th century Europe that the word began to mean disavowal of a monotheistic Abrahamic God. And then not until 20th century does it come to mean disbelief in all gods. Another good books on the topic, of relevance here, include Keith Ward’s The Evidence for God. But I am not going to attempt to engage in this debate. However, I do have two personal reflections. Atheists can take up very strong, loudly pronounced positions. And it seems much more trendy in early 21st century to be an Atheist, than a believer, let alone a Christian. I'm on the outer. I am increasingly interested, though, to find with my Atheist friends that when they are in a situation of extremis - facing raw bereavement or serious diagnosis of an illness - they can be really happy when I offer to light a candle for them in church. One avowed Atheist relative, even requested two candles. Nowadays to be a Christian seems to have become counter cultural (always a place I more at home with than mainstream) though many Christians do give very poor coverage of such faith. ‘Atheists’ can often feel Christian faith is an easy thing to have, a kind of unthought through, dumbing down of existence. It's 'eye ball rolling' territory. Not only does God not add up logically, but faith itself is seen to be a shoring up of wishful dreams and ideals so that the real world doesn’t have to be faced up to. As though ‘believers’ have somehow or other not quite yet realised just how serious life is, or how truly painful it can be. Believers haven't grown up yet. But, apart from the critical thinking and deep reflection I have done, it actually takes some courage on my part to offer to light a candle for someone whom I know to be just such an Atheist. It seems to me also that courage is at the heart of faith. Courage to walk in the dark. Living by not-knowing but believing is not a comfortable place at all to be. But it’s only by walking in the dark that you can experience the chains that bind you, loosen and set free. My second reflection is this. And it’s a very general one. Though particular to the movements of life that I engage in with friends and family, day after day, here in Melbourne. I think there are very few genuine Atheists. Language is a great barrier, and prejudice and abuse of words gets in the way again and again. After Richard Dawkins had a stroke in February this year, I read an avowed Atheist write that he would not be found praying for Dawkins or doing anything religious that weekend - as though that were blasphemous - but would simply sit down and read one of Dawkin’s books. And that’s when I thought - but that’s faith. That’s what I would call an act of accompaniment, of being alongside another person. A showing of an act of love for someone. That’s Christian faith. As simple, and as costly, as that. In The Go Between God, John V Taylor writes that the first apostles were people who had seen for themselves ‘not merely in the sense of having been physically present at the crucial events, but as those upon whom the meaning of the events had burst as a revelation.’ p70. The speech and writing of the Apostles then becomes alive with this revealed insight that they have both heard and seen. They break open the Greek and Hebrew language to help articulate what they have witnessed. We have become so used today to sound bites and slogans, to hiring professional communicators, we are too often complacent with a limited vocabulary that diminishes subtlety of thought, and yet simultaneously we have a heightened suspicion of any words that are potentially tinged with insincerity. Perhaps the best question to ask an Atheist - who genuinely wants to talk with you about what it means to be an Atheist - is, What sort of God do you not believe in? Start with his or her language about what ‘without God’ means, and listen. Even simply let silence speak. And respect. In the same chapter Taylor writes that what makes a prophet is not eloquence but vision, ‘not getting the message across but getting the message.’ p69 This is because when you get the message, even the most hardened self-proclaimed Atheist can be heard and recognised as a child of God. ‘Getting the message’ is not about going on an aggressive crusade of conversion. Something is at work in the ground of our being that will voice itself personally from this inner space that Christians call being in God. Something behind language, something that connects each one of us to what it means to be human. And to what it means to be connected to one another.

‘There was a man who had a plot of land; but it got neglected and turned into waste ground full of weeds and brambles. So he said to his son, “Go and weed the ground.” The son went off to weed it, saw all the brambles and despaired. He said to himself, “how long will it take before I have uprooted and reclaimed all that?” So he lay down and went to sleep for several days. His father came to see how he was getting on and found that he had done nothing at all. “Why have you done nothing?”he said. The son replied, “Father when I started to look at this and saw how many weeds and brambles there were, I was so depressed that I could do nothing but lie down on the ground.” His father said, “Child, just go over the surface of the plot every day and you will make some progress.” So he did, and before long the whole plot was weeded.’ A story from the tradition of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. We are now just one month after Victoria was declared to be in a State of Emergency and then gradual lock down because of Coronavirus. Many people are beginning to say that the days of the week are becoming confusing, time a bit of a blur. Each morning reading the world news, the national news, the local news we are confronted with a reality that continues to be very difficult to comprehend. It’s very tempting still to deny this reality, to long for it to be over or give into an increasingly sluggish sense not just for several days sleep, but months even. This has me ponder the nature of time. Is time an idea? An abstract concept we attribute meaning to? Or, is time something we understand to be like a utility - something we use to measure our progression through life, from childhood to maturity, to being of more senior years? Or do we understand time as a commodity - how much is this time costing us? Do we objectify time, comparing this period to a previous historical event when others suffered pandemic or war? Is time a noun, or is it possible to imagine time as a verb? Is time a block of stone or the invitation into a dance? A dance into the present moment. One of the set lectionary readings this week is the ever favourite Luke’s Walk to Emmaus, which happens, I was surprised to realise afresh, on the same day as the resurrection of Christ. Jesus’ crucifixion left the apostles reeling. And now on the afternoon of the third day after there is wider talk of his resurrection. Time seems to have ruptured and the Emmaus walk episode pauses us right here in this rupture. Cleopas and his friend are confounded by the events that have happened. And Jesus, unrecognised to them but shown to us, comes to them on the walk and teaches them. And Jesus remains with them for however long it takes for Cleopas and friend to adjust their vision, to accustom themselves and understand a little better this new reality and its deeper meaning in their own life. More alive than ever it feels, Christ blesses and breaks bread with them, all the time inside this Great Pause. Great Pause has been used by various writers to also describe this period of Coronavirus we find ourselves in. This pause too can also be a learning time, a re-orienting time, a relationship deepening time. And like the father speaking to the son in this story of the Desert Fathers, (which is really about acedia, that terrible sense of low spiritedness bordering on being depressed) when this road of Coronavirus feels so overwhelming, very tiring and confusing, then even if we can’t see Christ, can we have faith that he is alongside us - encouraging us to stay awake and take only the one necessary step at a time? Time is not a block of stone. Let’s not think of time in the abstract, a utility, a commodity, but the precious embodying gift that it is. Time, closer than our heartbeat, is an intimate invitation for each of us to be fully alive in this present moment. Delving into the mysteries of this pause-time, let’s not be too hasty to yearn to pick up where we left off a month ago. But own here this invitation, not to be in possession of the musical score itself, but to learn the new dance it notates, each step here is like the moving note in a different composition. ......................................................... Story from the Desert Fathers and Mothers is taken from: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, Oxford/Kalamzoo: A.R.Mowbray/Cistercian Publications, 1975; revised ed 1984 Anonymous Series 76 For an article on the Great Pause: https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0

I first encountered The Rule at the beginning of the 1990s when Esther de Waal came to Australia and offered a seven-day Benedictine Experience or Retreat here in Melbourne. This involved a group of very disparate people coming together for a week and living out, in as faithful way as possible for a group of 20th century Christian non-monastics, the Rule of St Benedict, at the Santa Maria Convent in Northcote. We kept most of the hours, though not in the middle of the night, and we maintained the Great Silence. During some of these prayer times, Esther included short addresses and reflections on the life of Benedict, or the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Over lunch, she read to us sections from Henri Nouwen’s Genesee Diary. That the 24-hour day can be structured seems obvious. But before this time I had never reflected on this as a way to live a flourishing life. This little Rule, ‘mimimam inchoationis regulam’ (little Rule for beginners), designed to ‘set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome’ (RB P.46) was received from an earlier Rule of the Master, then breathed into with new life by an Abbot psychologically astute and very sensitively to attuned human foibles and fallibilities. The Rule of Benedict is a third in its size to the Rule of the Master, but there are some significant differences in its 73 brief chapters. These variations seem not so much to do with how a monk ought to structure his day, but the sort of communal culture that is fostered in his community. Both Rules know the importance of apportioning time so a human being can live amongst others and have all essential needs, personal and corporate met. Both Rules recognise the variations inherent in each season of the year and the church year. But it’s Benedict who understands community life in a much more down to earth, humanistic way. This understanding about how to shape our movements through time each day, like learning the steps of a dance, was new to me. The Rule came at a time in my life when I was moving out of a crisis period. I’d had my own powerful experience of God’s love a few years before, the consequences of which instead of enhancing my life, had completely upended it and shattered me. The structures of work, the pressures of study, the responsibilities of marriage, all those artificial external rubrics which can hold together a person’s life including mine, were gone. At this point, I was in painful limbo. In this brief Benedictine life of seven days, I learned what the primary building blocks for a human life journeying on this earth are. I experienced moving through time in a regulated gentle balanced way; a way which is a framework that held me no matter my emotional state. The spirit of this rhythm of life wasn’t drawn so taut as to fracture if you fell out of step; nor was it so loose that you could choose to dance only to your own heart’s content. The rhythm involved being attuned to persons around you as they danced as well. Here was a balanced life where no part was exaggerated or out of proportion to another. For me, the monastic hours are like the Grand Staff and the five lines ruled out on sheet music. They set the tempo, the bars, the repeats. They give sense, shape the space and offer a holding place. The key this piece is played in and the notes set down, are put in place by the vows. The vows are “not a profession formula, but rather a rubric.” (https://www.idahomonks.org/sect805.htm) They are not separate, but rather integral to each other. They are like the fine music giving artistry and meaning to the interplay of melody lines through life. The vows give coherency and strength; they recognise there is a reason for this rhythm. Journeying through the hours, these three inner commitments keep us attuned to our inner spiritual life so that even when we may be derailed, we find renewal and new ways ‘to run on the road of God’s good words’ (trans. Wilson Hartgrove p 6) with ‘our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.’ (RB P.49) There are three images from the Rule which speak to me about what it means to be human; human living alongside and rubbing shoulders with others. Towards the end of the Rule, St Benedict spells out some of the different roles in the monastery. In chapter 66 he writes about The Porter of the Monastery. The actual Latin word is ‘ostiariis’, from which we get the word - ostiary. And an ostiary is the mouth of a river, but also more pertinent here, one who keeps the door, especially the door of a church. This role of the ‘porter’ is very specific. The doorway referred to here is the portal which stands between the ordered self-sufficient world inside the monastery where ‘all necessary things such as water, mill, garden and various crafts may be within the enclosure’ and the much wider life outside which in Benedict’s time was unsettled, strife ridden 6th century Italy. The Porter is at the door ‘so that the monks may not be compelled to wander outside it, for that is not at all expedient for their souls.’ The doorway to the monastery is a powerful place to situate someone. Benedict tells us: Place there ‘a wise old man’ or ‘a sensible old man.’ A man who is mature and not himself tempted to wander off. He must also be a man of ‘fervent charity.’ He is to welcome strangers with a blessing. As always, keenly understanding the requirements of the job, Benedict makes sure that the porter is to be provided with a room near the door, and perhaps a younger brother to help him out. In John’s Gospel 10 we are told that Jesus is the ‘gate for the sheep,’ and that those who come in or go out, find pasture. I heard recently Dorothy Lee talking about this image of the shepherd in John, as one who is both called to keep the sheep secure, as well as provide an environment for them in which to flourish. This echoes to me about the nature of the porter’s role here in Chapter 66. The doorway of the monastery to the outside world is a place of crossing over and of transition. The inner environment is to be protected, but also not overly stifled or totally removed from the influence of outside environs. This leads me to ask a more psychological question: what or who in me, do I place, do I choose to stand at my doorway; that interface or portal between my inner world and external environment? What inner space are we called to protect, yet at the same time not stifle to the point where we become invulnerable to the knocking call of the stranger outside? Of the three Benedictine vows, the one which I gravitate to and yet increasingly find the most challenging, is the pledge to undergo inner renewal -‘amendment of manners’, ‘fidelity to monastic life’, ‘conversion of his life’: conversatione morum. (RB 58.17) ‘The monastic profession is a way of life which involves conversation, communication, between the monk and God, the monk and the abbot, the monk and other monks, the monk and the surrounding world, a conversation that is prayer or prayerful,’ writes Oblate Catherine Mary Magdalene Haynes, Oblate O.S.B. (https://www.idahomonks.org/sect805.htm) If I translate this into my own life, which is not monastic but hopefully a few stumblings on the spiritual path, then here there is recognition that the practice of awareness in conversing is one I am asked to cultivate. Stay awake, consciously unselfconscious in my own conversation with others, with God, with Scripture. We need to keep the doors of our ears open and listening, but also give time to take time to return to our inner room in which we each converse with Christ. This space inside us is a touchstone, a spring from which habits of the heart are fashioned. Here is the place for new life. Equally so, if we leave it uncultivated or fill it up only with our own ego-driven agenda, this inner place stultifies, at worst distorts us towards coercive action. So, the porter is an image of standing at the gateway: willing to embrace the unknown stranger, welcome in, greet with the blessing of Christ; but, also to hold back, protect the inner ground that has already been prepared over and precious. There’s a boundary between that which is self-contained and self-sufficient, has integrity; but not so fenced off from an openness that allows the foreigner, the itinerant, to offer change. This is not about becoming resilient or impervious to outside influence; but about being discerning, prepared to be vulnerable because that’s the place where Christ as shepherd also stands. And it’s the steadfast love of Christ who holds us there. This vow of ‘conversatione morum’ is a radical vow in our world today; it’s counter-cultural because of its refusal to take sides. It consciously recognises that standing here in this tension between what you protect and what you let in requires wisdom, and potentially it is the place which can offer a community, as well as a person, deep inner growth. My second image, is really two images but they complement one another in the Rule. They are places where the community regularly gather together. The oratory and the refectory, or literally ‘mensa’, ’the common table.’ The value of and high regard for these two gathering spaces is very apparent in the Rule. When a monk takes his vows he does so in the oratory, in the presence of all and before God and the saints. (RB 58.17). Sometimes Benedict speaks about the behaviour of monks in oratory and at ‘the common table’ in the same chapter. The oratory and the refectory are two places which enable monks to cultivate and enjoy their second vow, stability. The etiquette of behaviour in both these places is highly regulated. The Rule, by our standards, seems meticulously to set out how the ritual of the hours are conducted in the oratory: which readings apply, psalms sung and in what order. These vary according to the seasons of nature and the church year. The oratory is a place set apart for only prayer - ‘Nothing else is to be done or stored there.’ (RB 53.1). Such demarcations of place and definitions of monks’ roles are very important in the Rule. There are strictures about arriving late to these communal gatherings - all monks must strive to arrive on time - a lesson too in learning to live with the unfinished. A late monk is never to stay outside the oratory or go back to bed. He must sit in a place in the oratory set aside by the abbot for such offenders, a place apart from the other other monks to ‘shame’ them in to amending.’ (RB 43) Repeated throughout the Rule is the phrase - ‘subject to the discipline of the Rule’ - ‘disciplinae regulari subjaceat.’ There are a number of references to punishments for different offences. The process of this discipline often seems to involve the separation of a monk from the close and active engagement within the common life of the whole community, in particular exclusion or ‘excommunication’ from joining others in the oratory or the refectory for a period of time. In Chapter 24 of the Rule Benedict makes it clear that anyone who is guilty of a lesser fault is to be excluded from the common table and eat at different times. This also includes the monk not being able to lead any readings or psalms in the oratory (RB 24.4). If the fault is even more serious he will be excluded from both the common table and the oratory. (RB 25) The oratory and refectory are two places that gather everyone in and in so doing remind them of their corporate identity. They are places which anchor the monks communally in place and time. The strictness of keeping rules is for the sake of the whole group. Good practices on the part of each member in the community enables the good functioning of corporate life for all. ‘The good of all concerned….may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and safeguard love.’ (Prologue 47). But these regulations are premised on mutual respect and love. (RB 71) As we read further along the Rule more and more concessions seem to be given for the particular needs and frailties of the brothers. The opening Psalm 94 at Vigils is to be said ‘slowly and deliberately’ (RB 43.4), with the implication that the community needs to give their brothers extended time to arrive. Benedict writes that for Sunday vigils, if ‘God forbid, the monks happen to arise too late…(then) the readings or responsories will have to be shortened.’ (RB 11.11) Adjustments have to be made when events go haywire. And monks must be sensitive to the needs of their brothers; when departing the oratory monks are instructed to leave in silence, ‘so that a brother who wishes to pray alone will not be disturbed by the insensitivity of another.’ (RB 52.3) Likewise, the timetables for meals and the amounts of food consumed at the table are regulated. But again these may vary seasonally and concession is given for more food during times of hard labour (RB 39:6). Weekly kitchen service is mandatory, unless you are sick or otherwise engaged in important business. (RB 35.1) Those who are not strong are given help, and all kitchen servers are to be given extra portions of food and drink before they serve meals to their brothers so they should not be tempted to grumble. (RB 35.12-13) And in Chapter 40: ‘The Proper Amount of Drink,’ Benedict seems to all (but not quite) completely crumple before what seems even then the Italian cultural mores of daily imbibing wine. He writes: ’We read that monks should not drink wine at all - but since the monks of our day cannot be convinced of this, let us at least agree to drink moderately and not to excess.’ (RB 40.6) He finishes the chapter by admonishing grumbling brothers in other monasteries where drinking wine is subject to tighter regulations, monks ‘there should bless God and not grumble. Above all else we admonish them to refrain from grumbling.’ (RB 40.9) In all this, discernment and leadership as to when to exercise strictness or be lenient is a decision undertaken by the abbot. The abbot, like all leaders in a Christian community, is seen to ‘hold the place of Christ’ (RB 63.13). He himself is to stand in awe of Christ and be subject to the Rule. He is a ‘steward’ whose ‘goal must be profit for the monks not preeminence for himself.’ (RB 64.8) For the community to be stable, the abbot must be grounded and integrated in Christ. Much explanation is given to the role of the abbot at the beginning and the end of the Rule. ‘Goodness of life and wisdom in teaching must be the criteria for choosing the one to be made abbot.’ (RB 63.2). He is a physician of souls, and called to move with or discipline the monks in a way that 'use prudence, avoid extremes’ (RB 64.12). When I was young, stability meant that when you ‘grew up’ you were materially well off, had permanent employment and family relationships were strong and secure. I was taught that stability had nothing to do with having an inner life. If one followed conscience as directed by the Catholic church teachings, the catechism, one’s spiritual life would be taken care of. To experience psychological or emotional health issues was to be weak. Concessions were morally judged. To be stable in mind, meant one had firm opinions that were based on some immutable truth that was seemingly shared, obvious to some (not me) and leading to strong unquestioned convictions. Again, not me. Stability meant one could be totally self-reliant and effortlessly take action in the world. It would give one a sense of permanence, a moral rightness, a definition. To me stability spelled only one word - LONELINESS. This is not the understanding of ‘stability’ that I encounter in Benedict’s Rule. Reading the Rule now, I have this strong sense that real stability comes out of a recognition of the need to cultivate a healthy inner life which can flourish in a community of imperfect human togetherness, made perfect only in Christ. It’s akin to the African ubuntu: I am because you are. A community founded on the love of Christ is about establishing ‘peace for all members’ (RB 34.5) In ‘Holy Living’ (p34) Rowan Williams writes in his Chapter on St Benedict: we have to grow in ‘steady unselfconsciousness about the steady environment of others.’ That’s stability. This is a gathering of persons who intentionally attempt to foster that sense of each person being loved and cherished by God, and who are also called to serve one another. This doesn’t mean I must not live alone. Most of us move in a number of different environments of all sorts of variations each day. Driving in traffic even though girded with steel like some knight encumbered by armour, is another environment I’m called to move ‘steady’ in amongst others for a short space of time. In many different spaces as I rub shoulders with other bodies, I draw from the Rule’s understanding that to be stable is to recognise that you are part of a group of persons of all different types and talents and human frailties. We also help steady one another. Often in the Rule we read how modelling is very important: the older, more experienced mentor the young. The Rule’s own occasional contradictions highlight the reality of human imperfection. It’s willingness to give concessions, reveal the importance of taking place and context into consideration when making regulations. The sick and the elderly are given extra support. The wayward, are treated by the Abbot as if by a physician and given much time and patience to come to recognise where their error lies. My third image is ‘possessions’. In one evening session with Esther de Waal during the Seven-Day Experience she asked us to practise looking at objects around us, there in the convent and when we went home, and say: ‘this is on loan to me from God.’ In other words, these materials around me have been received by me, but paradoxically, if I wish to truly have them then I must give them back. By acknowledging my material possessions are not simply mine own to accrue and then dispose of as I wish, loosens my hold on them. And it frees me also from their grip on me. This practice reminds me as a Christian that as valuable and lovely as objects can be, to be treasured for many reasons, there is still something even more valuable. There is something even more real. Esther de Waal’s practice is about developing right relationship with the tangible world. How do we enter into this right relationship with our material world? Before becoming part of the community, the Rule of Benedict states that a brother must give away all his possessions to the poor or formally donate them to the monastery ( RB 58.24). He must be ‘well aware’ beforehand that from the day he becomes a member ‘he will not even have his own body at his disposal’ (RB 58.25). In the oratory before the community he is stripped of everything that he is wearing ‘and clothed in what belongs to the monastery.’ (RB 58.26). The Rule is unequivocal in its strictness that monks have no possessions. ‘…without an order from the abbot no-one may presume to give, receive, or retain anything as his own, nothing at all..’ (RB 33.2) Relatives are not allowed to give personal gifts to a brother; they must be for the whole community. (RB 59) Beds are to be inspected frequently by the abbot ‘lest private possessions be found there.’ (RB 55.16) ‘In order that the vice of private ownership may be completely uprooted, the abbot is to provide all things necessary’ (RB 55.18) But note again, this is checked with a concession: ‘The abbot, however, must always bear in mind what is said in the Acts of the Apostles: Distribution was made to each one as he had need (Acts 4:35). In this way the abbot will take into account the weaknesses of the needy, not the evil will of the envious; yet in all his judgments he must bear in mind God’s retribution.’ (RB 55:20-22) A short time after the Benedictine Experience I visited St Mark’s Priory as it was known then, in Camperdown. Joan Chittister’s ‘Wisdom Distilled from the Daily’ had just been released and Dom Michael was encouraging visitors to read it. At the end of her reflections on the Benedictine way of life, Chittister tells the story: ‘Once upon a time a preacher ran through the streets of a city shouting, “We must put God into our lives. We must put God into our lives.” And hearing him, an old monastic rose up in the city plaza to say: “No, sir, you are wrong. You see, God is already in our lives. Our task is to simply recognise that.’ P 207. In an address exploring human identity, Rowan Williams says that a person can only fully be a person when he or she recognises that they are part of a network of relation. And this involves an acknowledgement that we are dependent. He goes on to say: ‘…for the Christian believer that dependence is ultimately a dependence on ….a comprehending and comprehensive gaze. We are held in a look, a divine look, a divine contemplation of us; which leaving nothing out, judging and rejecting nothing of us, holds us. A comprehending - that is, an empathetic and interior awareness; a comprehensive - an inclusive vision of who we are.’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVx8dfMIR7k) This is our identity in Christ and this is the gaze of God, and God’s contemplation of the world God has made. The monk’s relationship with the material world as set out in the Rule, I want to suggest, is not simply about sacrifice or denial, giving up personal possessions, but rather more importantly a new taking on. He puts on the new clothes of the monastery. The call to obedience, which is the third vow, draws on the primary recognition that he is always and in all places seen by God: ‘let him recall that he is always seen by God in heaven, that his actions everywhere are in God’s sight’ (RB 7:13) Everything in a monk’s life becomes occupied with this turning towards God’s gaze on him. For him to turn this gaze onto personal possessions, can only be a distraction. Obedience to Christ is about continual tuning in to God’s ‘comprehending and comprehensive gaze.’ Our task is to recognise that God is already in our lives. In Chapter 7 of the Rule, the first step on the ladder of humility involves quoting Psalm 35, that a ‘man keeps the fear of God always before his eyes.’ If we understand the intention of the Rule to facilitate the life of a person who flourishes in community, and that the divine gaze of God is one of contemplation of His creatures in love, then fear, or ‘timorem’ here can’t mean that the monk or we are to experience the type of terror a school yard bully could elicit or the paranoia a 24-hour surveillance camera in a work place can evoke. The fear is much more akin to overwhelming ‘awe’. It’s there on the first rung of the humility ladder because this is the primary ground where we recognise that we are the clay and dust God has chosen to breathe life into. And God is still breathing life into this body. And, as much as we would have liked to, or sometimes even think otherwise, we didn’t make ourselves. There is a much more common sense reason too, in the Rule, for having no possessions. In Chapt 33 Benedict quotes Acts 4:32, ‘All things should be the common possession of all…so that no-one presumes to call anything his own.’ This is a life founded on recognising Christ moving amongst them all; it’s about learning to share material possessions as adults. Obedience isn’t simply my private arrangement with Christ, but a recognition of Christ moving amongst us. We are each held in and move under God’s gaze. As I am precious, so too are you. Being in a Benedictine community here is about sharing all the resources we have - holding nothing back from one another. Esther de Waal spent many years living in the confines of Canterbury Cathedral. In ‘Living with Contradiction’ she writes about the vault of the nave built in the Middle Ages. ‘Stand beneath that triumph of late Gothic building and you find pillar and arch, rib and vault, all brought together in one great harmonious unity, each separate and individual part linked both with the other elements and with the whole.’ p 40. And so this is an apt image for what the Rule aspires to in terms of how we engage with one another each day. How to live consciously-unselfconsciously each day with rubbing shoulders amongst different people and in increasingly diverse communities. A community is a workshop, a place where mistakes are made, where we practise how to live a Christian way of life. A way that involves crossings and bridges, of connecting and interconnectedness; giving and in turn receiving. The three vows and the setting out of the rhythm of the hours of the day in the Benedictine Rule are the rubrics for how to remain open to change and surprise, but equally, how to live stable, knowingly held in time and place. And in this workshop, the tools which assist the monks learn to become obedient, are the same tools which ‘hasten them (and us) onwards to our heavenly home.’ (RB 73.8) References Wisdom Distilled From the Daily: Living the Rule of St Benedict Today By Joan Chittister, OSB Harper San Francisco, 1991 The Rule of Benedict: In Latin and English Trans & edited by Abbot Justin MCann OSB Burns Oates, 1952 The Rule of Saint Benedict: St Benedict of Nursia Paraphrase and Introduction by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove Paraclete Press, 2012 Benedict Backwards: Reading the Rule in the 21st Century By Terrence G. Kardong Liturgical Press, 2017 RB 1980: The Rule of St Benedict in English Editor: Timothy Fry, OSB Liturgical Press 1982 The Rule of Saint Benedict Translated with an Introduction by Abbot Gasuet Chatto and Windus, Publishers London, 1909

Naming God: who we are before God This is the second of three talks given for a St Francis Day retreat this year at the Church of the Resurrection, Mount Macedon. Praises of God 1. you are holy, the only God who does wonder 2. you are strong 3. you are great 4. you are the most high 5. are all-powerful 6. you holy father, king of heaven and earth 7. you are three and one, Lord God of gods 8. you are the good, all good, supreme good, Lord God living and true 9. you are love 10. you are wisdom 11. you are humility 12. you are patience 13. you are beauty 14. you are meekness 15. you are security 16. you are quietude 17. you are joy and gladness 18. you are our hope 19. you are justice 20. you are temperance 21. you are all our riches at sufficiency 22. you are beauty 23. you are meekness 24. you are the protector 25. you are the guardian and the defender 26. you are our strength 27. you are our refuge 28. you are our hope 29. you are our faith 30. you are our charity 31. you are our sweetness 32. you are our eternal life 33. Great and wondrous Lord God almighty merciful saviour The Praises of God, or chartula as Br Leo (a close Brother of St Francis) called it, was written on a piece of goat skin parchment about 10cm wide by 13.5cm high. This poem is in halting Latin with dark brown ink and laid out over sixteen lines. On the other side again in Caroline minuscule script is the rendering of a blessing from the Book of Numbers: May the Lord bless you and guard you, May he show you his face and have mercy on you, May he turn his countenance to you and give you peace. The blessing is addressed to Br Leo and signed with the Tau cross - a cross in the form of a T - by Francis who regularly signed this way. In addition on the parchment, in red ink and a different hand, are lines by Br Leo, who identifies himself and explains how the poem came to be written by Francis. The chartula has been folded twice and forms a small rectangle. St Francis wrote this prayer, The Praises of God, while on a 40-day retreat from August 15th (Feast of the Assumption) to September 29th (feast of St Michael and All Angels) in 1224 at La Vergna. Some hagiographers believed that he wrote the praises to comfort Br Leo in response to a spiritual crisis that he was experiencing, but Br Leo writes that the words were written by Francis in gratitude for the vision of an Angel and the impression of Christ’s stigmata on his body. Br Leo kept this parchment till his death around 1271. (For a more detailed and fascinating explanation of the Chartula see: The Autographs of Brother Francis, Jean-Francois Godet-Calogeras in The Writings of Francis of Assisi, Letters and Prayers, Ed by Blastic, Hammond & Hellman, 2011, Franciscan Institute Publications P52-81) Rather than choosing one or two of these names of God to reflect on, this prayer invites me to ponder the plurality of names given to God and qualities ascribed to God. For me it prompts the question: what place can a person - and here in particular, a saint - go to where the nature of God is understood and praised in such a varied way and yet remain one God? Soon after his conversion before the crucifix Francis begged the old Benedictine priest living in that church that he be able to ‘stay for the Lord’s sake.’ (A Mended and Broken Heart, Wendy Murray, Basic Books, 2008, p58) The priest relented. So, in 1206 Francis Bernadone became an oblate under the protection of the church, and at that time was thereby subject to its jurisdiction, rather than the civil one. But dad, Pietro di Bernadone, continued to demand return of his money from Francis. He now pursued Francis using the authority of the Church and brought down legal action. A trial was subsequently held before Bishop Guido. Amongst the early documents about this trial are these words addressed to Francis from the Bishop: “Your father is infuriated and extremely scandalised. If you wish to serve God, return him the money you have, because God does not want you to spend your money unjustly acquired on the work of the church. (Your father’s) anger will abate when he gets the money back. My son, have confidence in the Lord and act courageously…” St Francis acted courageously, but in a different way from expected. He responded: ‘My Lord, I will gladly give back not only the money acquired from his things, but even all my clothes.' And going to one of the bishop’s rooms, he took off all his clothes, and, putting the money on top of them, came out naked before the bishop, his father, and all the bystanders, and said: 'Listen to me, all of you, and understand. Until now I have called Pietro di Bernadone my father. But, because I have proposed to serve God, I return to him the money on account of which he was so upset, and also all the clothing which is his, wanting to say from now on: “Our Father who is in heaven,” and not “My father, Pietro di Bernadone.”' (A Mended and Broken Heart, Wendy Murray, Basic Books, 2008, p64) Is Francis here simply substituting one father figure for another? His biological one for a spiritual one? Perhaps, on one level yes. But here was a Father ‘in heaven’ who did not encumber him with the obligation to be a well-bred, happily married and successful son of a merchant. Here was a Father who released love in his heart and furthered for him a path that made sense for him personally. St Francis has often been described as a Holy Fool: someone so single-minded in pursuit of sharing the love of God with others that she or he is oblivious to social boundaries and norms that the rest of us take for granted. Holy Fools are prepared to act in ways that make them vulnerable to ridicule and derision. But with St Francis these actions were startling in their symbolic meaning. By stripping himself naked and proclaiming his Father now to be ‘my Father who art in heaven’ and no longer Pietro di Bernadone, he was externalising an inner reality that he had already come to terms with. The words of this poem about St Francis by Clive Sansom, written in 1981, illustrate something of this quality in St Francis: God’s Troubadours by Clive Sansom Brothers! We are the Troubadours of God, Wandering, singing his praises to the world. Our theme is love: we sing our love of him And all that he created, from the Sun To the lowliest earthworm, tunnelling from the Sun. Our theme is love: we sing God’s love for us - For Man, this tarnished sun, this glorious worm Who is redeemed by Christ. Our theme is love: Our song is to the cities of the plain, To vines and olive-groves, until God willing, We send it hurtling through the courts of Heaven! We are his jongleurs too - jesters and jugglers, Mountebanks of God! - Not saints for whom The world turned upside down. It turns for us Because we turn. We leap and somersault, Head-over-heals in love. So, in our eyes, The world has turned: its values are inverted. Our poverty is wealth, obedience Is freedom, giving is receiving, and This topsy-turveydom is Christendom: Our song made visible. Brothers, we are Minstrels and tumblers to our Lord and King! (From Francis of Assisi, Clive Sansom, Cat & Fiddle Press, Hobart, 1981) To live in the way of St Francis is to begin to see that the processes of Love invert the values of the world. The world becomes a ‘topsy turveydom’ - ‘poverty is wealth’ and ‘giving is receiving’. Richard Rohr asserts that ‘In Francis as in Jesus the turnaround consciousness was complete: the enemy of the small self became a friend of the soul, and he who lost his small life could find his Great Life. Only such a new person can take on social illnesses of our time, or any time, and not be destroyed by cynicism.’ (Eager to Love, Richard Rohr, Franciscan Media, 2014, P158) For St Francis the Gospel message most importantly was not a ‘head thing’ but had to be embodied. Francis wrote The Praises of God prayer sometime after he had briefly befriended the Sultan Malek Kemel. Francis lived in a period of great crusades and he could see that the Papal forces were doomed. Finding his advice ignored Francis, with a few brothers, stowed away on a ship and paid a visit to the Sultan in a spirit of reconciliation. It was an audacious act and at personal cost. Initially affronted, the Sultan was quickly won over by Francis’ wit and desire for peace. Francis himself was open to learning about the Muslim faith. This prayer of Praise itself has been composed in Islamic form. The prayer itself would have helped both Br Leo and St Francis focus their thoughts on the many different faces of God, and reminded them how our Christian God finds ways to speak into even the most acute suffering. God meets our needs through thick and thin, and God can also choose to speak to us even through other religions. But what was the lifelong source for St Francis which nourished such a turned around consciousness? Where did St Francis go to re-source himself and can we possibly go there in our own times? There are clues in his letters to his brothers and the Rule for his Order. His first rule, sometimes known as the ‘primitive rule’ we no longer have. Towards the end of his life in 1221 when some of the intentions of the earlier version were difficult to maintain in the Order because of rapidly growing numbers, and also Francis felt that many brothers were beginning to lose their way, he wrote the Rule of the Order of Penance, or the Third Order. It picked up on the intentions of the first rule but broadened them. The intention of the Rule was to live life in imitation of Christ. ‘Francis does not really provide many systematic answers to theological questions as much as he is a living answer to those who are asking the right questions.’ (Eager to Love, Richard Rohr, Franciscan Media, 2014, P164) With a small group of Brothers, Francis wandered helping the poor and offering work in exchange for food, and also spent solitary time in the hills fasting and praying. They owned nothing and travelled far. Obedience was very important. And for St Francis, unlike some other Rules, obedience meant, first and foremost, to Christ in our hearts, not obedience to an abbot. By choosing a life of radical poverty, St Francis was laying his life bare in its needs before God. The God of Love was central to this poverty, not self, not social norms. The brothers built hermitages, on land they did not own. Francis taught the life of ‘littleness’, being ‘lesser brothers’ within a larger church. The hermitage communities were small, each monk having his own hermitage, and three or four hermitages at most were to be grouped together. The balance between silence and proper speech, between solitariness and community, was maintained by the rhythm of the saying of the offices and coming together at mealtimes. Initially this small group of radicals were derided, but over time gained respect and admiration. They gained more and more followers. Though the guidelines were minimal, Francis was quick, to correct any idleness in contemplatives, and warned then against the abuses of ‘holy poverty’ - ‘the friars should always wander as pilgrims in the cloister of the world within the cell of their bodies.’ He himself not only continued to struggle with his health, later receiving hot cauterising treatment for incipient blindness, but increasingly he struggled with the overwhelming growth of his order and the challenges that this brought about. He resigned from being head of the Order in 1220. I want to slightly change gear here for a moment. In a lecture on Faith and Human Flourishing (See online - Faith and Human Flourishing: Religious Beliefs and Ideals and Maturity? - Humanitas: Visiting Professorships at the University of Oxford and Cambridge 2013-14), Rowan Williams spoke about the tension in our lives between dependence and autonomy. We are all in varying degrees, dependent on one another, as on God. Yet, we also seek autonomy, we desire self-sufficiency. To talk about our dependence and our autonomy is vastly different when we grow into the divine life compared to how they can be measured in terms of power and will in human relationships. Life lived in God is not constricted to processes of passions and instinct, or coercion and control. As Christians, Rowan Williams says, we live in response to an ‘authority that comes about from yielding not to an alien will, but an affirming source.’ What St Francis discovers I think is this,‘transforming power of acknowledging dependence on an unconditional source of affirmation.’ It’s also a power which transforms suffering. The more Francis let go, entered into the depths of Christ’s suffering, the more he discovered the deeply unconditional nature and profound nurture of God’s love. From this sprung joy. His stigmata was symbolically the kinaesthetic marks of God’s love pouring into the suffering of the world. St Francis channelled peace. He became the sign of a God whose well of love is endless, a God who could be named and praised even in the greatest suffering. Perhaps something next to impossible for us today to get our head and hearts around. Recently, at the Second Hand Book Fair held at St Peter’s, I picked up Following Francis: The Franciscan Way for Everyone by Susan Pitchford (Morehouse Publishing 2006), a Franciscan Tertiary. Sometimes I think St Francis in our Church gets pressed into a very sentimental depiction. He is a popular saint for children. We’re about to have a family of animals visit us at St Peter’s Eastern Hill this Sunday. There’ll be blessing of pets and St Francis medallions given out. The good thing about this is that it highlights our interconnectedness with creatures and all creation, which is very Franciscan in spirit. However, if this is the only image of St Francis that we have I think it can distort an even deeper message. Susan Pitchford visited Ghana in the early 2000s. Hers was a desire to witness and contemplate the historical suffering of human trafficking along the ‘Slave Coast’, a string of castles and forts along the Ghana coastline. Here is the infamous Cape Coast Castle, which housed thousands of slaves from as early as the 17th century who were shipped off to places around the world, including America. Barack Obama visited here in 2009. It’s a kind of ‘pilgrimage site’ for what’s become known as ‘dark tourism’, that is visiting a place where human atrocities have been committed. Susan Pitchford writes: The tour started in the men’s dungeon. This was right under the Anglican Church - a nice touch, I thought…….The guide pointed to a mark on the wall about two and a half feet off the floor. He explained that when the dungeon was excavated from the floor to this mark was a mixture of old chains, and shackles and solidified human excrement….the guide took us into the women’s dungeon and pointed out that there were places in the corners where the captives were meant to ‘ease themselves’ but that after their forced march of one to nine hundred kilometres from the interior, most were too weak to do anything but relieve themselves where they were……Periodically the women would be paraded naked before the governor of the castle. When he’d made his selection, the soldiers would clean her up and give her enough food to keep her form passing out. Then they’d send her to the governor’s quarters; she’d be returned to the dungeon afterward. Women who resisted the sexual advance of any authorities were put into special cells, and subjected to even worse conditions than before. Men who resisted captivity were placed into the cell of the condemned, where they were left without food, water or ventilation until the last one was dead. Only then would it be considered safe for the guards to go in and remove the bodies. When they reached the Dutch Reformed Church Pitchford tells us that the “tour guide joked how the Europeans thought that since they kept their God in this room, he wouldn’t see what was going on outside.” And it was at this point that an Italian tourist demanded to know ‘Where was God when all this was going on?’ The guide shrugged but he was not to be deterred and kept asking in ever angrier tones, ‘Where was God?’ Pitchford writes: I wanted to tell him that God was here, in this place, being raped and branded and shackled, forced to lie on bricks covered with excrement and vomit and blood, that God wept and agonised with every single soul who passed through this place, and that he subjected himself to the full weight of mankind’s brutality because of his immense, immeasurable love….but I don’t know how to say them in Italian. I wonder if he would have heard then if I had? But I wonder also if Susan Pitchford herself believed these words at that moment? At the end of the chapter she asks: “How am I to respond to suffering? How do I respond in a way that is faithful to the all of Christ and the way of St Francis …. How can I take action that will really help, not just soothe my own conscience? How can God love me when I live in luxury while others suffer so horribly? Have I been deluding myself? I can’t go for a little spiritual joyride and just ignore the questions that are pressing on me so heavily, but I don’t know how to answer them. So I pray about them….” She begins to “understand that whenever we witness the suffering of another in an attitude of radical openness - of compassio, not turning away but allowing ourselves to feel something of that suffering - we enter into Christ’s own heart. Just as when we suffer for him, we share something of his cross.’ She concludes the chapter with these words: “My tears don’t redeem men: I cannot redeem myself. But to the degree that they signal my openness - to the suffering of others, to the truth about myself, and to whatever action God may command - they are a place to begin.” (Following Francis: The Franciscan Way for Everyone by Susan Pitchford Morehouse Publishing 2006, p98-99) St Francis learned to look at suffering without flinching. The most powerful image that struck me here in Pitchford’s account is the nakedness of the women taken away to be raped by the governor. This is a very different nakedness to one of St Francis before his father. Now here is a nakedness of objectification, of violence, of obscenity, of endorsed rape. Not one of chosen vulnerability and letting go into God’s love and care. What’s been sanctioned here is a system based on abuse of power, and ego gone rampant. For punishment men were locked up until they were dead. There was systemic evil at work here; and the churches were complicit. Susan Pitchford knew she was privileged to see it from distance and time, and her own place of luxury. And she knows too that it’s impossible in human terms to ever fully enter the deep trenches of another’s suffering. Only Christ in God can do that. But, this is the place of empathy that Francis, like Jesus, directs us to try and head toward. And it’s precisely in the prayer praising God with all God’s different faces, that we can start to do this. When we begin to try and look at suffering unflinching, when we don’t turn our gaze away from historical atrocities in places such as Ghana. Still in Ghana today homosexuality is outlawed - men and women liable to imprisonment. Owning the injustice of the treatment of Indigenous Australians, or refugees kept in detention centres, or the suffering of those in my own home or workplace, or even more radically choose to visit the suffering taking place in our own souls - to begin to look at this suffering with a gaze unflinching, is to begin to recognise what kind of atrocities we as human beings are capable of doing. However, when this gaze also includes empathy, shaped through the lens of Christ on the cross and the Word of God in the Gospels, we also recognise that this lens can be the only way in which God can redeem us. Suffering remains real, but the unutterable quality of God’s own compassion and love can begin to be named in a new way. And if God can be glimpsed even here, then God can be praised. Light can exist without darkness, but darkness can never exist without the light. When we are truly poor before God we begin to see our world a little from Love’s place. We glimpse the world from a perspective that starts to make sense. All this from a God with at least 33 names, who is an unconditional source of affirmation loosening our ties from the world and setting our hearts free. With St Francis we enter the ‘topsy turveydom,’ Not saints for whom The world turned upside down. It turns for us Because we turn.

Fr Hugh put together a Lenten Series this year: Friends and Companions - Books that have Shaped our Theology and asked four ordained and two lay leaders at St Peter's to preach each Sunday then lead a discussion group. This sermon I preached at the 9.30am Service on the First Sunday, 18th February. Genesis: 9:8-15 1Peter: 3:18-22 Mark 1: 12-15 Theopemptus was a self-confident monk whose counsel, we are told, had depressed others. One day, Macarius, an elderly Desert Father, paid him a visit: ……. Macarius asked, ‘How are things going with you?’ Theopemptus replied, ‘Thanks to your prayers, all is well.’ The old man asked, ‘Do you not have to battle with your fantasies?’ He answered, ‘No, up to now all is well.’ He was afraid to admit anything. But the old man said to him, ‘I have lived for many years as an ascetic and everyone sings my praises, but despite my age, I still have trouble with sexual fantasies.’ Theopemptus said, ‘Well, it is the same with me, to tell the truth.’ And the old man went on admitting, one by one, all the other fantasies that caused him to struggle, until he had brought Theopemptus to admit all of them himself. Then he said, ‘What do you do about fasting?’ ‘Nothing till the ninth hour,’ Theopemptus replied. ‘Fast till evening and take some exercise,’ said Macarius. ‘Go over the words of the gospel and the rest of Scripture. And if an alien thought arises within you, don’t look down but up: the Lord will come to your help.’ This is one of a number of the stories coming out of the Desert Father and Mother tradition, that Rowan Williams relates in Silence and Honeycakes. The book itself is based on a series of addresses he gave for the John Main Seminar in 2001 about these early Christian hermits, men and women, who lived in the deserts of Egypt, mainly in the 4th and 5th centuries of the Common Era. Rowan Williams writes: ‘Your life is with your neighbour and so you must withdraw from everything that helps to imprison the neighbour, which entails looking very hard at what you say to or about your neighbour. The vocation of each is personal and distinctive, so each must have room to grow as God, not you, would have them do.’ Some of you, if you grew up in like me, or lived through the 1970s, may remember that transition from black and white to colour TV. ‘March first into colour’ was the slogan in Australia, and for me that first lighting up of a TV screen into full colour is one of those remembered moments in my childhood. Imagine, after all the unending rainfall and sloppiness, the feeling Noah would have experienced, in our first reading today, at the sight of light suddenly pouring through a dispersion of water droplets high in the air and bending a vivid spectrum of colour over the earth. That rainbow celebrated life in a new way, a new beginning, linking heaven and earth, rekindling hope, a promise. The world before the flood was not forgotten; the humanity of Noah and his family not denied, but God’s first covenant with God’s people after flooding the earth with months of unending grey dullness, is a full colour extravaganza. Rowan Williams helps me see that being alongside someone else, rubbing shoulders day to day, involves this constant movement from a black and white perception, to a spectrum filled coloured one. I see in black and white, Christ constantly calls me to re-see in colour. Theopemptus lurks in each one of us: his counsel depressed everyone because he was self-satisfied, judging, enchained by his own fantasies of himself and suspect to crippling analysis of other people’s failings. My own counsel, my self-satisfaction, my pre-managed image of who you are, shrinks and limits both of us. But how can I even begin to see with the subtlety of colour? How can I be with you as a person in relationship, rather than my fabricated fantasy of who you are? In today’s Gospel, Mark tells us that Jesus was ‘driven’ into the desert by the Holy Spirit after he was baptised by John. Unlike the word ‘led’ used by Luke and Matthew, Mark chooses a NT Greek word that implies he goes ‘under a force he cannot resist.’ He had to go. And, strangely, this action happens right after his baptism by John and a voice from Heaven affirms the vocation of both these men: ‘You are my son and with you I am well pleased…’ You’d think that Jesus would want to get straight on with his mission in Gallilee rather than go tearing off into the desert. He certainly had nothing to prove to God by going out there away from everyone except wild beasts and ministering angels. Recently, I’ve been watching on Netflix with Bridie, my 15 year old daughter, a series called Stranger Things - some of you may know it. A young teenage girl named Eleven escapes from a secret National Laboratory in Hawkins, a fictional country town in the United States. As an infant she had been abducted and experimented upon in this laboratory. Set in the early 1980s, it’s a Stephen King nightmarish world with some very Steven Speilberg moments. The Gate from the Upside Down, an alternate parallel world, a kind of foggy colourless hell littered with dead biological matter, has been opened. Now dark destructive evil in the form of primal canine-triffid headed predators called Demagorgons, are threatening to devour all life on Earth. The girl Eleven, upon escaping, is alone, incredibly vulnerable, barely articulate, deeply harmed and carries a huge amount of pain. She also has psychokenitic, or supernatural powers: a force inside her can, under certain states of intense emotion, bend and shape the material world to her will - people can be flung against walls, or rooms smashed apart. Her will is shown to be something she cannot always control. And, whenever Eleven does exercise this power, a drop of blood seeps out of her nose. The series explores the experience of extreme pain and loss, and how that can be redeemed in a young adult’s world. Three High School ‘nerds’, not so cool but brainy boys, shelter Eleven when she first escapes from Hawkins Laboratory. But it’s in Illinois city that she comes to learn there is something much more valid in life than supernatural power; it’s the act of mercy. When confronted by the choice to kill a man who harmed her long ago, she remembered those small but powerful acts of love that had been shown to her by her nerdy friends, and she suddenly and unexpectedly experiences compassion. She is able to step outside her own situation and see life in a new way. And most importantly, she experiences compassion for herself; this changes everything. She becomes empowered and breaks free of the cycle of victimhood. Even with superhuman powers you can remain trapped in a black and white vision of the world, a shrunken world captive to violence, charmed by power. But with the recognition of mercy in truth your eyes can open to frequencies never even glimpsed before. Why Jesus goes to the desert and what happens there is the subject of much theology, with much better thinking than mine. But the desert is given to us as the only place where Jesus, as Incarnation, can encounter within himself those very characteristics that that try to block him from being human, the offering of supernatural powers; yet actually paradoxically also make him very human - given our own temptations at times to want to be superhuman. I wonder if the temptations aren’t so much about Jesus and Satan, but about Jesus’ relationship with us. What Satan offers Jesus is a false version of what’s real. As Rowan Williams puts it: ‘all the temptations of Jesus seem to be about resorting to magic instead of working with the fabric of the real world…..Satan wants Jesus to join him in a world where cause and effect don’t matter; a world of magic; Jesus refuses, determined to stay in the desert with its hunger and boredom, to stay in the human world with its conflict and risk.’ He pledges himself there. The subsequent miracles of Jesus amongst the community when he leaves the wilderness, whatever we make of them are - as Fr Hugh and Fr Philip have pointed out these last two Sundays - never acts of magic substituting the ‘bodily cost of love.’ They are manifestations of God’s self-emptying into the world unique to Jesus. Jesus pledges himself to us. Satan’s temptations are designed to tear Jesus apart from Love, separate him from humanity and his own humanity. But by experiencing these temptations and saying ‘no’ to them, Jesus exercises his own full uniqueness. Again, paradoxically it’s only by going into the desert, seemingly being driven away from people, that he can then enter into the fullness of his ministry to be close to each person he encounters when he moves into his mission around Gallilee. To be close to your neighbour then, the desert mothers and fathers recognised this need for withdrawal. This isn’t a turning away from, but towards. It sounds glib to say, ‘turning towards God’ but the full cost of doing this, TS Eliot inimitably put in a bracketed aside in his poem, Little Gidding: ‘costing not less than everything.’ The desert fathers and mothers called this continual practice of turning towards God, ‘dying to the neighbour.’ So when Fr Marcarius talks to Br Theopemptus, he does so with the full recognition that those very failings other people have been so exasperated with in Theopemptus are failings also within himself. Seeing through his own disguise, Marcarius chooses the path of dispossession and defencelessness; he lets down his barriers, like Christ makes himself totally vulnerable. Dying to the flesh to live in the spirit as St Peter talks about in the Second Lesson today, is this continued practice of self-awareness and giving-for the relationship. As Eleven, in Stranger Things realised, it’s not a dying to the neighbour in order to perpetuate victimhood or stand there as a passive bystander. But the recognition that there is a well that is more life giving than the exercise of supernatural powers. A well that energises the spirit, gives room to grow in personhood as God would have each of us do. And as Macarius reminds us, which is also good advice for all us as we go about our own Lenten practices these next few weeks, don’t look down, but up, and something is given; we are set free and the heart expands.

‘In the call of God the whole fabric of one’s life is woven.’ Of Martyrs, Monks and Mystics p 142 A little while ago I found myself saying to our Vicar, Fr Hugh, I don’t work in the Bookroom at St Peter’s, I work in the Bookroom contained within St Peter’s. This difference may seem subtle, but the more I have thought about it, the more it makes sense. Let me try to explain. We are a bookshop that primarily sells religious books and church supplies. But, in the course of any day a person will come in and ask for food or money. What time is the breakfast programme open? There are people who need restitution from seeing their specialist across the road at the 'Eye and Ear Hospital', others simply need to talk because they are lonely and live alone. Sometimes I need to contact the Vicar because a person wishes for a medal to be blessed, or asks to speak with a priest. Or they need to know where the Parish Office is to make a hall booking, discuss parish matters with Kosta, our Parish Administrator. People also seek to know if the church is open, or why does the entrance seem to be at the back of the church, or ask the date of the next Institute for Spiritual Studies seminar, what times are the church services. People like to tell us things: did we know that we are hanging our flag upside down from the church. So this becomes a discussion about the martyrdom of St Peter. Generations of grandparents and great-grandparents have been married at St Peter’s. Colin Holden’s history of the church is invaluable to show them; but mostly people just want someone on site to know that recent family research revealed that great-grandfather Arthur went to school here. Or, Great Aunt Matilda acted in the Pilgrim Theatre when it was operating in Maynard House. In May this year someone from Roadworks Victoria wanted to know if there were any weddings coming up because there were some very noisy roadwork the workmen needed to undertake. Supplies from Officeworks or boxes of paper towels or Altar wine are often delivered to the shop when the parish office is closed. After 2pm we are the only port of call for visitors on the premises. The office has a message bank so people can leave phone messages direct when they need to. David, our Verger who lives on site, is usually around so I can call him if someone comes in to the shop to let me know that there is a person behaving inappropriately in the church. I call David too if there is a person behaving aggressively in the shop. David swears to me he has never read a book in his life, so he knows that when I ring to let him know a book he has ordered has come in, it’s because there’s a situation unfolding in the shop I don’t feel I can manage. It’s coded language. I haven’t had to use it much. The first time I used it unfortunately I hadn’t told him that it was code - but I was so desperate to surreptitiously communicate that I needed help in the shop that it was all I could think of. I knew it would work because he would come over just to check out that I hadn’t gone crazy. I can ring Fr Hugh too, who also lives on site, but he is often out and about and will get back to me if he is unable to pick up. Of course, neither of the above two paragraphs refer to what I am actually employed to do in the shop. I order the stock, find new suppliers, search out books for customers, work out pricing, enter the stock in the system when it arrives, produce information for eLists and pewsheets, pay bills, collect or sort through second hand books, work on the website, do a daily FB entry, maintain the bookwork each month and report to the Bookroom Committee and Parish Bookkeeper, pack-up and sell books at conferences……all the routine small business work. I don’t do it alone. Thank God. The work of the volunteers is truly an enormous support. The shop wouldn't be without them. What I have come to discover though, is that the most engaging, and the most challenging work, is that which involves connecting with visitors and customers. People come in to the Bookroom with all sorts of expectations, sometimes totally unexpected. This can be challenging because their needs can seem irrelevant to the apparent purpose of the shop. And that’s the heart of the matter. What is the purpose of the shop? St Peter’s Bookroom is one ministry in the complex web of the busy life of an inner city Melbourne Anglican Parish. It’s a Christian community that contains a number of ministries, all of them centred on one proposition: God is Love. To live from this faith, I find, is an impossibly tall order. And we are human beings, not cardboard cut-outs. But we are not called to be perfect in a worldly way, but authentic in the life of God. And though I fall short of this again and again, it doesn’t matter so much what I am paid to do, what matters most is that each person who visits or phones or emails is conversed with as a person whom we are asked to listen to, and to care for, as Love cares for each one of us. And the volunteers are really good at reaching out to others. Here, we are not working for an institution. We are part of a community that sets its face towards a God of compassion who asks us to care for and help one another, not just our small group, but everyone - known and not known - with whom we come in contact.

This is the second of three addresses by Carol O’Connor given at a Quiet Day, directed by Carol and musician and spiritual director Cath Connelly, for the Institute for Spiritual Studies. The title of the Quiet Day comes from Psalm 72: ‘Put your ear to the ground and listen.’ The Day was held at St James Anglican Church, Point Lonsdale, on Saturday the 25th of March 2017. A hedge of trees surrounds me, a blackbird’s lay sighs to me, praise I shall not conceal, Above my lined book the trilling of the birds sings to me. A clear-voiced cuckoo sings to me in a gray cloak from the tops of bushes, May the Lord save me from Judgment; well do I write under the greenwood. This is one of the earliest extant Irish poems. (Davies 259-60) In this second address, I want to focus more on our being earthed in God, and on the action of stretching down. The large Celtic stone crosses of Ireland are held steadfast upon the land on stone plinths. This tells us something about being held secure in God. Likewise, God himself has come down to us on earth in the Incarnation and walked amongst us as a person. God knows what it’s like to be one of us. And, like the well the Samaritan woman stood beside when she met Jesus, ours is a faith that we can go down into, to draw up God’s life. This being earthed and being able to go down inside ourselves and draw up, requires a real listening out for God’s presence at work in our lives and in the world. And for the Celtic Christians it meant also a faith that wherever we are on this Earth the Trinity is there encircling us: The path I walk, Christ walks it. May the land in which I am, be without sorrow. May the Trinity protect me wherever I stay, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Bright angels walk with me - dear Presence - in every dealing. From a Prayer Book in the late 8th century (Davies 300) LISTENING TO THE WORD OF GOD Rowan Williams speaks about listening in Spirit in the Desert. In Sydney, in 2001, he gave a series of address on the Desert Fathers and Mothers for the John Main Seminar. These addresses became the basis of his book Silence and Honey Cakes. I have chosen to cite his spoken words from the actual address because the language here I find more visual, poetic and direct. It is worth noting, though, that when he makes this same this point in Silence and Honey Cakes he reflects that here he is borrowing an image of God that comes from ancient Hindu texts. In the address he says: God speaks into darkness the word of creation and the word that God speaks sets up the endless harmonics of sounds in the world. And as we speak, or try to speak truthfully, perhaps what are doing is far less having to hang labels around the things of the world than to try and find these harmonics, to try and speak in tune with that world first spoken into silence and darkness. The image often comes to me of creation is of first God makes a great cave and then reaches into it, speaks into it a Word. And from the cave the echoes come back - differently pitched, differently aimed, a world of Word. And we find our place in that .…by listening for the harmonics, trying to speak in tune with them. Not to speak from our will and our passions to control, but almost as if to speak as if we want to join in what an earlier generation would have called the music of the spheres. There’s a resonance here I think in Williams description of the relationship between Word and harmonics, with the Celtic Christian understanding of our own relationship with God - in scripture and in Jesus in whom, we are called to listen. ‘My song is Love Unknown’ opens Samuel Crossman’s 17th century Passiontide hymn. Jesus is the song of love and with him and in him we can listen out for the dissonances and harmonies and silences of our own life and our lives together every day. LISTENING IN THE WORLD Listening to the music of the spheres here implies a willingness to develop a more finely attuned appreciation of our environment. And for the early Celtic Christians local environment or place was very important. Our bodies belong in a geographical landscape. In putting our ear to the ground and listening, we become aware of all sorts of nuances not perhaps even noticed before. Language itself has edges. In the act of listening there’s a drawing back of self, a holding back of thoughts and feelings, so that another sense can become attuned. There is withdrawal so something else is invited into the space. The Celtic Christians were so naturally at home in this type of attunement with their environment. Sensitivities to the world meant that edges and boundaries were as credible to them as any materiality; this is their inheritance from the nomadic Celts. These were a people familiar with the world not seen, at home in the blurry and the obscure. They knew that these liminal spaces were deeply creative places to be. Here, all sorts of crossovers and connections could be made. This depth of understanding about the Celtic Christian tradition is written about particularly well by John O’Donohue; the importance of paying attention to the not visible, hearing in the silence, is an ongoing theme in his work. This is the place where prayer is born. Its natural movement is downwards. In his book Anam Cara O’Donohue says, ‘If there were a spiritual journey it would only be a ¼ inch long, though many miles deep. It would be a swerve into rhythm with your deeper nature and presence ...You do not have to go away outside yourself to come into real conversation with your soul and with the mysteries of the spiritual world. The eternal is at home - within you.’ (O’Donohue 120) This echoes to me of something Carl Jung in his seventies said to a student: ‘My journey has been to climb down 10 000 ladders so that now at the end of my life I can reach out the hand of friendship to this little clod of earth that I am.’ Conversations within the human soul happen in a very deep silent space. Anam Cara is the only book I know where the author in the prologue confesses to a ‘silent hidden seventh chapter which embraces the ancient namelessness at the heart of the human self.’ After the sixth chapter which is on Death, there is no chapter 7 because it is silent and hidden deep within ourselves. Silence also has very real healing properties, not often acknowledged even today. It gives us the gap of reflection. THE IMPORTANCE OF SILENCE “This was a time of transition for the Church, and life was not easy within the community on Lindisfarne. There were dangers of continued divisions and factions over the Celtic and Roman usages. Cuthbert had to be a great diplomat and steer a very careful path. The rule of life that he introduced at this stage was a mixture of the best of both worlds, the Celtic and the Benedictine. If arguments amongst the monks over the old and new ways became too heated, Cuthbert would calmly arise from his chair and leave the room, thus dissolving the chapter. He would return the next day as though the wrangling had never happened, and the brethren would be given a chance to sort out their differences peaceably. If they again resorted to heated argument, again Cuthbert would dissolve the meeting. This would continue until a more peaceful settlement was found. Amid frequent and great difficulties, Cuthbert remained calm and cheerful. His humour was something that often helped to win the day.” (Adam 62) These words aren’t only about St Cuthbert’s cheerful, calm, humourous temperament. They tell us something about a wise human temperament. Cuthbert knows how to handle disputes and arguments. When things get hot and impasse happens, we all need cooling off times. Cuthbert knows the hidden grace of silence. We all need this wisdom to know when to let go and let the spirit come in. The monks on Lindisfarne needed time together to air their differences. But they also needed time apart. How much time before a peaceful decision could be made? Cuthbert didn’t know. He trusted the process and knew that these periods were imperative to the finding of a truthful outcome for the community. For all his qualities of calmness, letting go of his own agenda, having a sense of humour, and listening widely and seeing more deeply, he recognised that he was not in charge, God was. At the same time, Cuthbert’s leadership needed to be dynamic and vital. In a recent sermon given by Bp Graeme Rutherford, I liked his inversion of the well-known expression from Let Go and Let God, to it actually needing to be: Let God and Get Going. We all need to be energised and engaged in the day-to-day rhythm of our lives; and, at the same time, pay due honour to the need for gaps, for silence. Let God and Get Going is a recognition that whilst God is overseer of the journey of life itself, we too need to fulfil our role as participatory and engaged. GIVING SILENCE TO ONE ANOTHER Cuthbert is teaching us here about the value of time for engagement, and of time for silence. So much of our speech today (my speech) is quick and impulse-driven; we’re often in the pursuit of a rapid outcome. We fail to offer the gift of silence to one another. Or, the benefit of revisiting a conversation in a changed way, after time of reflection. Completing a list of tasks so easily becomes our only agenda. Even in conversation someone may tell us a personal problem and we feel it’s up to us to solve it now. Misunderstandings can abound because we fail to take the necessary time to be silent and listen, to reflect upon the words we use; the possibilities concerning what other people are hearing; properly hearing what they are telling us; and even our own felt responses. Being caught up in the impetus of the next task, or driven by unquestioned assumptions, we fail to be mindful to one another. We forget to mind the gap, to mind the holy silence between one another. TRUSTING THE SILENCE AND GETTING GOING St Bridget is a saint who is shown to have this type of holy silence about her, in a very earthy way. The figure St Bridget predates Christianity. The Celts honoured Bride, goddess of poetry and the hearth. Bride was also one of the Dagda’s daughters. In the Christian tradition she becomes a midwife to Jesus; full of light, ‘woman ever excellent, golden, radiant, flame’ leading us to the eternal kingdom, the brilliant, dazzling sun.’ In the different lives written about Bridget in the 7th & 8th century she is depicted as a saint who not only performs many miracles, but possesses a profound listening gaze on the world. One day holy Bridget needed to attend a gathering of the people for a compelling practical reason, and she sat in her chariot, which was drawn by two horses. As she sat in the vehicle, she practiced on earth the life of heaven, as was her custom, by contemplative meditation, and prayed to her Lord. As they came down a slope, the second horse reared in fear and, out of all control, it wrenched itself free of the harness and took off in terror across the plain. But the hand of the Lord held up the yoke and prevented it from falling. She remained praying in her chariot, drawn by just a single horse, and, in full view of the crowd who had followed her after this sign of divine strength, she arrived unhurriedly and unharmed at the assembly of the people. Here she exhorted the people with teaching words of salvation seasoned with divine salt, which were amply confirmed by these signs and miracles. (Davies 128) For Bridget, God is in the driver’s seat, and she has only to remain constantly mindful of this. She too is both, letting God and getting going. Like Cuthbert, she shows us that God is present right here even in the chaotic charging forward of life, and our task is to stay grounded in Him. Whatever is going on around her, she can stay present in this relational space with God. It’s from this place of listening meditation that she can subsequently teach and speak words of salvation to others. Many of the works of Celtic Christians teach us about the importance of tuning in to God alone to help us navigate the known and the not known. They help us see that what we think are straight lines actually can be our own very bent human-driven agendas. They call us to see those dependencies we have that take us away from grounding our lives in God. On the same Easter Sunday there came to her a certain leper who was losing his limbs, and asked for a cow: ‘For God’s sake, Bridget, give me a cow.’ ‘Leave me alone,’ said Bridget. ‘I would not let you alone even for a single day,’ he said. ‘My son, let us await the hand of God,’ said Bridget. ‘I will go away,’ said the leper. ‘I will get a cow from somewhere else.’ Bridget said: ‘…and if we were to pray to God for the removal of your leprosy, would you like that?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I get more this way than if I were clean.’ ‘It is better,’ said Bridget, ‘…and you shall take a blessing and be cleansed.’ ‘All right then,’ he said, ‘for I am in much pain.’ ‘How will this man be cleansed?’ Bridget asked her virgins. ‘Nun, this is not a difficult question. You should bless a cup of water, and the leper would be washed in it.’ This is what they did, and the leper was completely cured. ‘I shall not leave the cup that has healed me,’ he said. ‘I shall be your servant and your woodman.’ And that is what happened. (Davies 146) Initially, the leper would prefer to stay diseased, not because it brings life, but because he has learned how to make this dysfunction work for him. He would prefer to stay trapped in his cycle of dependent need. The risk of this cycle being broken is something that threatens his security and he doesn’t have the inner imaginative vision to understand this. Bridget has faith in God, and though she doesn’t know how it works or how the situation will play out, she just knows it works: healing will happen, and such healing will make this man’s life more worthwhile. So when she asks the leper and his answer is no, he doesn’t want healing, Bridget uses plain speech and tells him actually, he does want to be healed. His hearing of this and acceptance of it as the truth is actually the real miracle. Until this moment he didn’t know it. And once he is healed he immediately wishes to be St Bridget’s servant and woodcutter. So, now, why does the leper stay on as woodcutter servant? SOUL FRIENDSHIP - JESUS Perhaps, for the first time ever, he had found himself a soul friend, an anam cara. Suffering, particularly in terms of our emotions, is often referred to by us, till today, as a feeling that brings us downward: feeling low, depressed, down in the dumps. John O’Donohue’s book Anam Cara is about the gift of a soul friend who by their listening presence can help us experience inner healing. It is a friendship that enables us to draw up healing from the depths of our soul. In everyone’s life, there is great need for an anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of acquaintance fall away. You can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul … The anam cara is God’s gift. Friendship is the nature of God. The Christian concept of God as Trinity is the most sublime articulation of Otherness and intimacy, an eternal interflow of friendship. This perspective discloses the beautiful fulfilment of our immortal longings in the words of Jesus who said: ‘I call you friends.’ Jesus as the Son of God is the first Other in the universe; he is the prism of all difference. He is the secret anam cara of every individual. In friendship with him we enter the tender beauty and affection of the Trinity. In the embrace of this eternal friendship, we dare to be free. (O’Donohue 36-37) For me, such soul friends are essential. Also I can be nothing if I don’t have the sense of the anam cara of Jesus walking beside me. I am not referring here to a sentimental or domesticated Incarnation, utilised for my own purposes. But a presence who encourages me to see the love in others; a soul friend who recognises long before I do, the fruits of the spirit in myself and in others. Jesus: a song whose love is unknown because it wells up out of unfathomable mystery. And there is nowhere I can go, we can go, no depths where Love Incarnate has not been. And there’s something about when I experience the deep listening truth of this, I also experience inner healing. SOUL FRIENDSHIP - GOD IN THE WORLD In the Carmina Gadelica, those orally collected prayers and blessings gathered by Alexander Carmichael from the Highlands, the Islands of Scotland and the Outer Hebrides, there are many blessings which give us a sense of God’s soul friendship with us and in the world: May the King shield you in the valleys, May Christ aid you on the mountains, May Spirit bathe you on the slopes, In hollow, on hill, on plain, Mountain, valley and plain. And another, final verse of Columba’s Herding (Davies 58) The peace of Columba be yours in the grazing, The peace of Brigit be yours in the grazing, The peace of Mary be yours in the grazing, And may you return home safe-guarded RELATIONAL NATURE OF GOD The poetry, the illuminations, the art work of the Celtic Christians reveal a faith that possesses an innate understanding of the world as God centred and yet also as a variety of interdependencies. There is nothing that cannot be in some way relational with God and in friendship with Jesus and the saints. Not only is God up in Heaven, but is right down here on earth moving amongst us all in a very personal way - in the friendship of Jesus, in the Spirit moving through the valleys and the mountains. The Trinity, the saints of God, are interested and involved each moment of the day in our lives. Like the base of the cross, which sits on its plinth, we too can base our lives on this faith, drawing upward the energy of God in the earth to our centre of stillness. When we sit in silence we can hear all sorts of things: our fears, our desires, the list of things we need to do. But deeper than this, in stillness, is the contemplative space. The Word is the sound breathed by God into our world from which all other sounds are an echo. We are asked to listen to the Word, and pitch our own sound in resonance with it. We are invited to be one melody in a whole song. Like all melodies, the tune takes time to develop, it has its own tempo, it is open to variations and transcriptions, and needs silence to give space for other melodies. And like all melodies, it comes from our very depths. Here now is that consciously spent time when a monk sits under the greenwood with his writing book and is suddenly able to really hear, as if for the first time, the tune of the blackbird and the cuckoo. Just as sitting listening in the stillness enables us to hear the music in Cath’s playing. In listening stillness, the very reason why we hear the plucked notes is because we are attuned to the space between each note. A listening presence invites a humble break in our own agenda-driven thoughts. Empty spaces can steady us, make real our life in action. And if this sitting in silence becomes a daily habit, then there is the real possibility for grace in our life, and those around us. Here is another very early Irish poem: A hedge of trees surrounds me, a blackbird’s lay sighs to me, praise I shall not conceal, Above my lined book the trilling of the birds sings to me. A clear-voiced cuckoo sings to me in a gray cloak from the tops of bushes, May the Lord save me from Judgment; well do I write under the greenwood. (Davies 259-60) Sources Adam, David. Fire of the North: The illustrated life of St Cuthbert, with photographs and drawing by Jean Freer. SPCK, 1993 Davies, Oliver. Celtic spirituality. (Classics of Western Spirituality) Paulist Press, 1999 O’Donohue, John. Anam cara : spiritual wisdom from the Celtic world. Bantam, 1997 Williams, Rowan. Spirit in the Desert. Medio Media 2001 #CelticChristianity #StCuthbert #DavidAdam #AnamCara #StBridget #Silence #RowanWilliams

Dear Lord, As we walk with our halting and faltering steps seeking to live faithfully into Your world, Help us bind closer into our-self all the goodness that Your creation offers us. May our feet tread lightly upon our shared home; May our eyes see more clearly the gifts of Your world. May we appreciate the uniqueness and respect the integrity of of each living species. May we grow in a balanced grace between living in solitude, and coming together as Your people. May distance from one another show us only how inter-connected we are as children in the garden of life. May those who experience loneliness, distress, suffering at this time be knitted closer into the restful embrace of Your loving Spirit. May Your Peace be the voice of our togetherness. Thank You for our lives and the full-some earth You have given us to be our home. Thank You for one another, for plants, animals, water, air, fire: may we act wisely in taking care of our home and one another. Amen

Faith It starts with an ache, with the asking, with a small pile of ash. For some, it comes by questioning, for others, by suffering, still others, it's like a hard shell that cracks. It becomes a belief that needs to find belief. Sitting Waiting Watching For how long? The ruach hums through the body: I Am. Amidst the music, faith grows in the grace of walking toward Easter.

It’s been an unexpected and extraordinary Lent which has brought us to this Good Friday. Even though the COVID-19 curve appears to be flattening in Australia, this Holy Week road has still felt a lonely and anxious time for many. For those of us in the church the physical togetherness we are used to, in attending the many church services which makes this season so special, has been taken away from us. During this time we’ve seen the least palatable side of our humanity, in terms of fear bringing out human stockpiling instincts to the disregard of the needs of others and the flagrant ignoring by some people for the self distancing measures required of us at this time. We’ve also seen the very best of human motivation and action as nurses, doctors caregivers’ work untold hours to save lives, others pack bags of groceries for those most vulnerable and forced to self isolate, and still others offer their gift and talents to free online cultural sessions. At the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens wrote: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…… For churches, and church services in particular, the pandemic has led to an emergence of creative responses. Unexpectedly many of us have gained a new respect for social platforms; they’ve been an aid to continue in celebrating our services at this time. In fact I could say for the first time in my life I celebrated Palm Sunday at St James Piccadilly in London, whilst simultaneously staying at home in Melbourne. Christian Services have been zooming and YouTubing around the world all Lent - never before have we been able able to celebrate different liturgies inside so many different churches. That there is only a priest and a cantor or one or two others are present inside the churches or sacred spaces, are stark reminders to us that this isolation we experience is a globally shared one. The COVID-19 Pandemic discriminates against no-one and surges through all the continents of the earth. But so too, as more congregational services go online, and those of us privileged to have access to this invisible complicated web structure around our planet, so too are connections being made between many different Christian communities around our planet. The deep message of Christianity about God’s love also doesn’t discriminate; the message of Christ, whose love is so great as to be able to enter this time of desolation and suffering is one we participate in most poignantly of Good Friday. This message too is alive across continents. I have found it very moving to be invited into a live Youtube of a church service in another congregation on the other side of our planet and to read, during the time of Gift of Peace at this service, the scrolling comments down the right hand side of the screen, comments by named parishioners to other named parishioners, hoping they are each okay, not too lonely, getting the provisions they need - generally checking up each is okay. We have used social media to connect with our own parishioners at this time, but we’ve also unwittingly been able to share something of our corporate faith life, our hospitality and our humanity with many strangers beyond our local community and day to day life. In opening up in this way, our own congregations have offered a real hospitality to Christians and others all around the world. This is one of the hidden unforeseen blessings of our Lenten journey this year. Social media has opened us up to other places and people, but a solid sense of our own home is always the place we start. There is a traditional liturgy today, Good Friday, which happens in many Christian churches and ours here at St Peter’s Eastern Hill only on this day. It’s called the Veneration of the Cross. It begins with the clergy processing in solemn silence into the church. The night before, at the end of the Maundy Thursday service, the altar has been stripped bare, and so much that we hold sacramentally dear to us in our church - the embroidered altar cloths, the elaborately wrought candle sticks and candles, the reserved sacrament has been taken from the tabernacle on the altar and is now housed in the side chapel. The side chapel has been filled with flowers to represent the night spent by Christ with his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. In many Christian churches parishioners have spent an hour or two in vigil over during that night, keeping watch with Christ, to enter a little that time of inner desolation. And on Good Friday, when the priest with two other ordained ministers enter the church, they process down the aisle and when they reach the now denuded altar they lay down and prostrate themselves for some minutes before the empty tabernacle. Effectively now they are laying themselves bare before nothing. It’s a powerful moment. Symbolically it’s an action that takes us back right to the beginning of Lent: Ash Wednesday, when each of us is daubed with a smudge of ash (those palm crosses now burnt to ash from last year) on our forehead. And, we are reminded that essentially this is who we are, where we’ve come from and where we go - ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This year, when we are unable to gather to commemorate the passion, the trial and crucifixion of Jesus in this way because of the COVID-19 pandemic, remembering this action of prostrating before an empty tabernacle seems to be even more poignant. Because of the restrictions that are placed upon us to stay at home, we are geographically and physically removed from one another, but can even feel one more step further away from that place, that Garden of beautiful flowers in the small chapel in our church which housed overnight the sacrament that we long to be so close to. The sense of desolation before the cross can only be felt more acutely. This action on Good Friday of a person in prostration before emptiness is not an act of self annihilation or surrender to despair. We may be made of clay and ash but there is something more going on. This prostration is not an action that diminishes us human beings, but conversely frees each person to be even more human. For it is an act of acknowledgement that we ourselves are not God, an acknowledgement that we are human and part of being human means there are times when we are subject to forces and mysteries outside our control. This act relieves us of the burden to be super-human. There is a bigger Spirit at work in all our lives. And in life itself we each of us walk with feet of clay. Good Friday is one part of a whole season. Today we really touch the desolation and pain of Jesus on his road to the cross. In so doing we move a little closer in empathy to each other and each others pain. For many it will feel like Easter Day won’t come until we next get to sit down again to a meal with our wider family and friends. For others Easter Day won’t come at all again in this earthly life. We started our Lenten season nearly 6 weeks ago. But, it doesn’t really end even on Easter Sunday. There will be another linking church cycle after Easter, then Pentecost and so on. Next year, there will another Lent, another Easter. Just as the early Church Mothers and Fathers understood, we lay ourselves down, and we are raised up - again and again and again. It isn’t so much about the destination as the way we live and move and have our being in our journey. So, in this time and space of whatever church community we find ourselves drawn to today, it is good to ponder how utterly extraordinary the nature of God’s Love for each of us is. In every sense of Charles Dickens’ words, these are the best of times and the worst of times. Drawing together in compassion we find a new closeness with one another and with strangers, an awe for the amazing gifts and talents others are sharing. The worst is the death toll, an added brutal pain being visited upon the homeless and those in refugee camps, housed in circumstances of domestic violence, the unemployment, the psychological, emotional and economic toll is enormous. But who is it that ultimately supports us in our pain and yearning? It is Good Friday that tells us that even here is a place that has been entered into and fully known God. For even here is a place of creative birth, a place that has ongoing potential for a new deeper relationship with our God, who is Love, and who is Christ moving often unseen and unheard amongst us all.

Epiphany 2018 That You will not let us go, though in our going stay with us, and not reproachful nor alarmed but listening, watchful even with us in human form and divine, then I have courage. That You will not let us go, though it may be so that we ourselves turn and stray, alone under the too hot sun or shivering under the night sky, then I have hope. That You will not let us go, we who wander off perpetually perplexed and tired, cynical as some who cannot even trace Your language in our vast creation’s grace, then I have faith. You who will not let us go: help us pray, who cannot pray, and stay with us though we go away. #epiphany #poetry #Faith #God #Prayer