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Bishop William Crean

31 July 2024

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Koinonia Cloyne is a two-year in-person course for adults who wish to explore questions of theology, liturgy, spirituality and pastoral ministry.

Participants grow in their understanding of the Catholic faith and become more capable participants in their local parish.

Adult Faith, Fellowship & Formation

The programme takes its inspiration from the “Jerusalem spring” of the early Church (Acts of the Apostles 2:42-47). Having received the Good News, the first Christians met regularly to pray, to reflect on the teaching of the apostles, and to share their talents. Over time, their generous Koinωnía (communion) with the Lord and each other became a sign of hope that many others would follow.

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11 August 2024 - Mysterium Fidei

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Words on the Word - Coram Fratribus

19. Sunday B

1 Kings 19.4-8: I have had enough!
Ephesians 4.30-5.2: Never lose your temper.
John 6.41-51: They will be taught by God.
A disarming, sometimes perplexing feature of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures is the way in which they refuse to mask or prettify human Read More

Words on the Word - Coram Fratribus

Olsok

Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross and follow me.
In her last book Marilynne Robinson, a shrewd observer of society, writes that, ‘for Read More

Words on the Word - Coram Fratribus

Vigil of Olsok

2 Kings 4.42-44: A man came from Baal-Shalishah.
Eph 4.1-6: Lead a life worthy of your vocation.
John 6.1-15: He said this to test him.
Our two readings from the Book of Kings and from the Gospel speak of the same: a Read More

Words on the Word - Coram Fratribus

Requiem for my Father

Isaiah 7.1-9: Do not let your hearts be faint.
Matthew 11.20-24: The day of judgement.
The passage we have read from Isaiah concerns King Ahaz, who ruled in Judah from 732 BC as the thirteenth king of the line of David. Six Read More

Words on the Word - Coram Fratribus

St Benedict

Proverbs 2.1-9: The Lord gives wisdom.
Colossians 3.12-17: Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.
Matthew 19.27-29: Lo, we have left everything.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, still going strong at 95, famously concluded After Virtue, one of the twentieth century’s seminal Read More

Words on the Word - Coram Fratribus

19. Sunday B 1 Kings 19.4-8: I have had enough!
Ephesians 4.30-5.2: Never lose your temper.
John 6.41-51: They will be taught by God.
A disarming, sometimes perplexing feature of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures is the way in which they refuse to mask or prettify human character. The Bible’s patriarchs and prophets, apostles and preachers are presented as subject to familiar anxieties, pitfalls, and tensions. No one is idealised. All make mistakes, and are invited to learn from them, having tasted their consequence.
For this reason even the greatest heroes turn out to be approachable. We find that they touch us where we are. Therefore they can credibly invite us to aspire to the heights that, by grace, they have reached.
In our first reading we hear Elijah, chief among prophets, herald of the New Testament, declare: ‘I’ve had enough!’ By the time this incident occurs, he has, true, been through a lot. He has multiplied food and raised the dead. He has taken Israel’s false prophets to task and slain the 450 prophets of Baal. He has staunchly resisted the pressures of Ahab, Judah’s king, and his odious Phoenician queen Jezebel. After all that, it would have been nice with a little recognition, a pat on the back, a prophetic sabbatical, perhaps. Instead he finds himself alone, under hostile attack, relegated to the wilderness. Elijah feels undervalued and overburdened, sick of always having to bear the brunt of everyone else’s wickedness and stupidity. ‘Lord, I’ve had enough!’
There’s determination in that outcry. I dare say there’s a fair share of anger as well.
Most of us will recognise this attitude. There will have been times when we have felt unfairly treated, unseen, exploited. Our evaluation may have been correct. Perhaps we were victims of injustice. In principle injustice should be righted, of course; we should address its causes, alleviate its effects. But the fact remains: the world in which we now live, wounded by sin, just isn’t a just world.
Sometimes there are loads to be carried. Someone’s got to roll up their sleeves and say, ‘Alright, I’ll carry this for a while’. This can happen even in societies firmly committed to corporate high ideals. St Benedict, in his Rule, tells us upfront that even monks may have to put up with false brethren. It may happen that we are wrongly accused of things, suffer unmerited hardship, etc. This isn’t necessarily because the community is evil or because a cabal of wicked enemies is out to get me, poor me. It is because even a monastery exists within a world in which redemption is still being perfected and ancient curses are at work complicating relationships, darkening perspectives.
This is our reality while we await the coming of a new earth where innocence will shine like the dawn, justice like the noonday sun. There isn’t always a quick fix to circumstances. What we can always change, though, is the way we receive them.
St Benedict warns us against nursing grudges. In Gilead, the Rev’d John Ames remarks in this regard: ‘I have always liked the phrase “nursing a grudge”, because many people are tender of their resentments, as of the thing nearest to their hearts.’ How true. And how pathetic. No human attitude is more utterly unproductive of good.
Consider how God deals with Elijah self-pityingly pulling the duvet over his head after pouring forth his grievances. God neither cajoles nor caresses; he doesn’t invite Elijah to tell his whole story from the beginning; nor does he try to explain. He simply, by the hand of an angel, touches him (there is kindness in that touch), gives him a scone, of all things, and tells him, ‘Get up and eat’, reminding him that he still has far to go.
We sense that God does not find Elijah’s outburst worthy of address because it is not worthy of Elijah. Instead he recalls him to his task, affirms him in his commission, implicitly saying: ‘Look, I’ve entrusted this business to you; I trust you to complete it’. That is all Elijah needs to put away childish things and rise to full stature. In fact, this episode leads into a great contemplative grace, as if the point of it were to evacuate a residue of human resistance standing in the way of vision.
This Biblical story makes me think of a passage in Tito Colliander’s memoirs, describing one of the ancient monks of New Valamo. Colliander had gone to see this monk in his cell. The monk suffered numerous ailments, was in real pain. Huddled in his bed he lamented and groaned, struck down by weakness, reduced, it would seem, to an articulate repository of suffering, helplessly at its mercy. Then the church bell began to ring for vespers. Colliander recounts the transformation that took place before his eyes. The old man, who a moment ago had resembled an infant, switched, as it were, to another dimension of consciousness awakened by the bell. Colliander heard him mumble to himself: ‘But I am a monk!’ Laboriously he sat up, pulled on his boots. He then rose, put on his habit, his cross, got his staff. Suddenly he stood there with dignity, upright, turned to Colliander and said: ‘I’m going’. Then went to acquit himself of his duty.
‘Arise, you still have a long way to go’.
By learning to live on these terms we shall begin to grow up as Christians, learning little by little what a Eucharistic existence amounts to. ‘Stop complaining!’, Jesus tells us in the Gospel. He then promises, ‘They will all be taught by God’. Our God went up to Jerusalem, with all that that entailed. Let us follow him there freely and maturely, singing.
Amen.
Photograph from New Valamo.
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Words on the Word - Coram Fratribus

Olsok Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross and follow me.
In her last book Marilynne Robinson, a shrewd observer of society, writes that, ‘for us moderns there is a kind of safety in finding a taint of factionalism and self-interest in anything human beings have done’. She contends that our attitude to history, art, and faith is marked by a hermeneutic of suspicion. We take it for granted that when a fellow speaks up for a given cause or maintains an idea, there’s skulduggery involved. And no one, damn it, is to suspect us of being blue-eyed or bother us with tiresome ‘ideals’ that in any case, surely, are superfluous in our enlightened times?
Much woke hysteria is traceable to this tendency. We fancy that out there, beyond our own undoubted decency, there are hostile powers that, by challenging our self-understanding and self-righteousness, are out to deceive us.
The hermeneutic of suspicion finds obvious expression in the way our nation relates to the heritage of St Olav. Not that the majority of our contemporaries walk about thinking of him of their own accord in daily life; but with the approach of our so-called national jubilee, no one can entirely elude this personage from our historic patrimony.
After all, it isn’t Norway than turns a thousand in 2030; it is the legacy of Olav
It has become fashionable to portray Olav as an avaricious, sensual bully who first sailed up and down Europe in search of gold and lovely maidens in order, thereafter, to impose his might on the peace-loving peasants who, up in these parts north of Dovre, reverently worshiped Mother Earth. He is said to have been awful. Even the webpage of Nidarosdomen explains Olav’s death at Stiklestad by saying, quite simply, that ‘his brutality made him unpopular’.
It’s funny: in what has become the received version of the story about Olav, there seems to be nothing attractive about him.
But then we are faced with this inexplicable fact: the cult that promptly arose after his death, as people pilgrimaged to places bound up with his life. Those who turned up were not hard-nosed influencers stuffed with Catholic propaganda, papally indoctrinated to promote a subversive mythology of kingship. No, they were the poor, the lame, the blind, and the mad, that unrhythmic band that tends to appear as pioneers wherever God’s Kingdom, not the might of man is manifest.
Had there not arisen, within the year following Olav’s death, strong, credible rumours that he was a holy man, the Danish king would hardly have permitted Olav’s body to be exhumed in his own august presence and that of his talkative mother, under the direction of Bishop Grimketel, friend to the people, and a host of grandees.
Olav’s incorrupt body, a well-attested phenomenon, was one sign of favour before God. Another aspect is conveyed by popular traditions consistently stressing Olav’s friendliness. Snorre tells us that this trait become more explicit the older Olav got. He was wont to be ‘joyful and talkative’ a ‘source of gladness to those who approached him’. While he was alive people high and low encountered Olav as a friend. One simply doesn’t hear that sort of thing said about Djenghis Kahn or Henry VIII, to whom Norwegian state departements seem to want to compare him. And let us not fall into the trap of thinking people in the eleventh century more gullible than we are today.
Permit me to point out that the category of friendship occurs in the very first paragraph of the code of Norwegian legislation that Olav introduced at Moster in 1024: ‘This is the foundation of our laws, that we are to bow towards the East and pray to Christ, the Holy One, for a good year and for peace, that we may keep our land upbuilt and our king healthy. May he be our friend and we his; and may God be a friend to us all.’ This explicitly Christian code of law was one of Olav’s greatest accomplishments. It enjoined equality before the law, marriage as a covenant of equals, infants’ right to life, the notion of the people, not just one’s kin, as a fellowship of obligations. These were literally revolutionary ideas, turning society upside-down.
And this is where antipathy to Olav has its source. Not that he himself was a ready-made paragon of virtue. Olav was conditioned by the world in which he had grown up. He was possessed of rawness, could be raunchy, arrogant, and proud. All of us have it in us to be those things. We see that if we perform even a half-hearted examination of conscience, or simply take a good look at ourselves in the bathroom mirror. In Olav’s youth, his natural tendencies were given free rein. It was not always a pretty sight. But then he reached the reasoned conviction that Christianity, received in baptism, nurtured through reconciliation and the Eucharist, was real. He came to accept a notion of society as a human expression of the principle of Omnipotence embracing powerlessness in order to give strength to the weary, of a God who says to mankind, ‘I call you friends’, then, ‘Serve and love one another’.
It took a long time for Olav to realise these ideals in his own life. Now and again his pre-Christian nature resurfaced. He did not, however, resign himself to this. He did not say, as we are prone to saying, ‘Oh, this is just the way I am’. He measured himself afresh in terms of the ideal, and let himself be converted. That way grace could work. Little by little, Olav became a new man, able to surrender himself to God defenceless, ready to give his life for his friends. This, I suspect, is what irritates our times, our country: Olav reminds us that is is possible to fight against our vices, to form our nature, to overcome conditioning in order to let Christ be formed in us, to make us bearers of his blessing.
‘He who would follow after me’, says the Lord, ‘must renounce what is his own, take up his cross, and follow me’. That which is properly our own, ours alone, is our sin, that in us which is still untransformed by grace; our ‘cross’ is ourselves, above all, the particular burden constituted by our history, our genes, our woundedness and our ability. Christ can change that burden from a heavy thing into a carrying reality, from darkness to life. Olav exemplifies the noble battle of the Christian, which the confrontation at Stiklestad enacted. Remember that when Olav is portrayed in art with a serpent underfoot, the serpent often carries his own features. He remained steadfast in battle against that in himself that was at enmity with Christ.
Thus he became, as we read in Geisli, Einarr Skúlason’s wondrous poem first recited here in this church in 1153, a friend of Christ. When Olav had come to see who Christ is, no other covenant, no other relationship, be it in an ecstasy of eroticism or power, could satisfy him. No other friendship could measure up to this, or be ultimately worthy of him.
When we turn to Olav in prayer as our example, intercessor, and protector, it is in the hope of being grafted into this transformative friendship with Christ that is the goal of existence, of the universe. The story of St Olav shows us that – Alleluia! – this goal can be reached. There is a stanza right towards the end of Geisli that spells out our deep aspiration:
With power the people is
given a share in Olav’s strength,
his Godward desire and honour;
I have made manifest his worth.
Let his compatriots bow low
before this pure member of Christ’s Body,
transported to heaven; blessed is the one
who gains his friendship.
In the name of Christ!
Amen
An icon of St Olav painted by Solrunn Nes, now in Preveza, Greece.
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Words on the Word - Coram Fratribus

Vigil of Olsok 2 Kings 4.42-44: A man came from Baal-Shalishah.
Eph 4.1-6: Lead a life worthy of your vocation.
John 6.1-15: He said this to test him.
Our two readings from the Book of Kings and from the Gospel speak of the same: a miracle in the wilderness. In both cases a large crowd eats its fill on food that at the outset was manifestly insufficient. The story of Elisha points forward to the scene at Lake Galilee. The Fathers considered it prophetic on the basis of a general notion of Elisha (who got a double share of Elijah’s spirit, healed lepers, and raised the dead) as a type of Christ. We read these texts reverently, but at the same time with a sense of distance.
For, honestly, who expects to witness a resurrection or to see one packed lunch feed thousands?
There’s a risk that we believers create for ourselves a schizophrenic universe. One pole is represented by the religious dimension of life with sublime notions of God, providence, creation and redemption; the other pole represents concrete daily life marked by political worry, rising prices, relational conflicts, and dreams of looking swell in a swimsuit. And so we live our lives in zigzag like a metal ball in an old-fashioned pinball game, confusedly and hopelessly drawn by opposite magnetic fields.
Thank God we have the Church! The Church is for us so much more than an institution, so much more than a place of coming and going. The Church is an existential dimension, a sacramental universe in which contradictions cease, in which two can become one. Spirit and matter are joined. Life as a whole becomes possible. Paulina Mariadotter liked to speak of the vocation each of us shares to become ‘entirely healed, whole, holy’. The sacraments give us the strength and nourishment we need along the way. The saints show us, in wonderful multiplicity, how such a universal process is enacted in specific conditions, in the experience of individuals.
Perhaps on these terms our readings can convey a concrete message after all? In both cases the context is the same. People have come together spontaneously; the encounter goes on; they get hungry. God’s blessing is upon the assembly. The Lord’s representative (first his prophet, then his Son) feels responsible for provision. What is he to do? The God of the Bible, the God in whom we believe, is all-powerful. He has the ability, unique to himself, to create something out of nothing. He could surely provide all that was needed by a majestic exclamation of ‘Let there be!’ as he did ‘in the beginning’? Of course. But that is not his preferred approach. He will rather manifest and develop the potential of what already is.
For Elisha the matter in hand amounts to twenty barley loaves and some fresh grain brought by a man from Baal-Shalisha. In the case of the assembly around our Lord, a boy holds forth five barley leaves and two fish. In both cases sensible observers notice ridiculous disproportion: ‘What’s this trifle for such a crowd?’ Indeed, it looks hopeless — though that’s probably not the right word, given that judgement is made by pure calculation, on the basis of the realism our time loves so much; hope has no part in it. Yet it is hope that trumps the game through love, in faith. By blessing and sharing what appeared insufficient (just enough for me and perhaps my closest friend) the bounds of the possible are extended. Communion comes about on the basis of something that was someone’s fully given over to all.
In this we discern a pattern of universal application. All of us have intimate needs, more or less visible or secret. All of us think at times: ‘I can stretch this far, but no farther’. It is prudent to be aware of one’s own limitation; it is blessed to know when it it is right to go beyond prudence and give all so that others may thrive. The feedings in the wilderness suggest and foreshadow the reality of martyrdom, the sustaining imperative of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice.
Here at Stiklestad, where St Olav was murdered on 29 July 1030, this motif touches us deeply. What is one life in the battle for a whole people’s conversion and unification in righteousness? If calculation is all we have to go on, the relation seems absurd. Yet we who receive the Body of Christ in this place, where Olav’s body fell to the earth like a grain of wheat, know that something decisive happened here, something by which we still live, by whose standard we are called.
I dare say we all know from experience the strength of perfect dedication, the joy and peace that flow from a dedicated life, transcending boundaries of time and space. Perhaps we also know the sadness lack of dedication can bring, an intended ‘yes’ that has never moved beyond the stage of a qualified ‘perhaps’?
Let us, then, ask ourselves immediately: ‘Lord, what du you call me to give?’ Then, let us listen carefully. What beatitude to be able to cry out with David: Laetus tibi obtuli omnia, ‘Lord, with gladness I have given you everything.’
Who knows what such a seed may render possible. Perhaps it will remain hidden; then again, perhaps not.
Let me end with a little story. In Mount Melleray, an abbey of my order in Ireland, there is an old trough measuring 3 x 1.5 metres. In the nineteenth century, the monks kept their flour in it. During the terrible Irish famine of 1840, hungry farmers came to the monks begging for bread. The monks themselves were poor (there’s next to no arable land in the place); but the abbot, who had to set out on a long journey, ordered that no one was to be sent away empty-handed. During his three-month absence 100 monks and 70 poor people were fed daily on bread baked from flower in the trough, which no one had resources to replenish, but which was never exhausted. I have known monks who knew monks who knew monks who were eye-witnesses to this.
If we live in Christ, we live within a reality that is in its essence boundless, allowing us to gauge what the word ‘eternal’ means. May God grant us grace to be readied, in generosity and faith, for eternal life and thereby to discover the only measure that is worthy of a human being.
Amen.

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Words on the Word - Coram Fratribus

Requiem for my Father Isaiah 7.1-9: Do not let your hearts be faint.
Matthew 11.20-24: The day of judgement.
The passage we have read from Isaiah concerns King Ahaz, who ruled in Judah from 732 BC as the thirteenth king of the line of David. Six kings followed him, then Judah ceased to exist. Ahaz was a bad ruler. He did deplorable things. Then again, he lived under great pressure. Judah’s neighbours sought to annihilate the nation. People go far, and don’t always act rationally, in self-defence.
In any case, we chiefly remember Ahaz neither for his idolatries nor for his manoeuvres; we remember him for what happens in the continuation of Isaiah’s narrative. The prophet gives the king a sign of future comfort. Even if everything here and now seems unclear and hopeless, God has a plan for the house of David. The sign is the immense one about the Virgin that will bear a Son and name him Emmanuel. There is little to indicate that Ahaz grasped the meaning of the sign or even took it very seriously. Yet he received it and passed it on. In this way he paradoxically became the bearer of a hope he did not recognise.
This perspective fills me with wonder and gratitude as today we celebrate a Requiem for my father. Faith was for him like a continent he could place on the map, past which he had often sailed, in which he could discern features of loveliness; but which he hardly ever felt the need or desire to explore on foot. He was not hostile — hostility was not in his nature, which remained gracious and cheerful to the end, even wrapt in the mist of dementia; he was simply distanced in a way not untypical of his time. He, born in 1937, lived serenely in a state of metaphysical relativism. Of his own accord, he would not have been much affected by ecclesiastical structures, had he not been brought relentlessly into their proximity by both ancestry and progeny. To the end it remained a mystery to him, I think, that he was the son of a Lutheran pastor and the father of a Catholic monk.
Metaphysical relativism did not keep from having moral notions that were crystal clear. My father encountered the conflict between good and evil early in life. He knew that the battle for good could be costly. He was seven when my grandfather was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Grini. Had my grandmother not hidden a pile of papers related to his work for the Resistance in a pile of ironing (no man would think of looking there, she thought, and was proven right), he would have been sent straight to Germany, with everything that entailed. That sort of thing leaves an impression on a boy. My father remained principled and generous throughout his life. The only times I have seen him lose his temper were in confrontation with injustice and meanness.
When in the seventies my parents late at night saw a farm in the neighbourhood on fire, they immediately went to help. As the local veterinarian, my father tried to bring the animals to safety. The farmed did, too. Lives were lost. When the conflagration was brought under control well into the night and people went saddened away, a huddle of three people was left in the farmyard: two orphaned children and their grandmother. For my mother and father, who had three children of their own, it was a matter of course to bring them home. They stayed with us until they had built a new home. The granny, a native of our village, became my first language teacher, for she knew wonderful words and expression that everyone else had forgotten.
My father used to say he became vet by happenstance. The idea presented itself. He thought, ‘Why ever not?’, and went for it, quite unsentimentally. He was content in his profession, valued by both colleagues and clients. The life of a country vet retained a Herriotesque character throughout his career. He, no churchgoer, had a veritable pastoral ministry out in the country: a peacemaker in conflicts, a comforter in grief, a counsellor in perplexity. He was able to express diverse aspects of his personality. I think of an episode he himself enjoyed telling. One day he was busy examining a dog that had been injured. True to habit, he whistled while working — the same tune over and over again. Some of the piety of his childhood home had stuck: this particular day he was whistling a hymn. When the dog suddenly snarled, a swearword escaped him. The farmer, a devout man, observed the scene pensively, then remarked with a grin: ‘I hear your fiddle is tuned in several registers!’ Yes, it was; and he played it humanely and well, unmusical though he was.
My parents complemented one another wonderfully. I have never heard them raise their voices to each other. There was never a need. Both worked hard. They also knew how to have fun. They were unostentatiously very close. When my father started losing his ability to speak, my mother was an invaluable interpreter: she could read him unarticulated. Their leave-taking, when my father, sisters, and I were gathered round her deathbed, was deeply moving in a characteristically quiet way. In the wake of my mother’s death, my father’s condition deteriorated fast. It was painful for him to realise that he couldn’t manage on his own. The transfer to a care home was hard, but he soon settled in, carried and sustained by the kindness of the staff and of faithful friends. He carried on his peaceful life; and remained a source of peace for others.
It is striking that my father, who throughout life sat, so to speak, on the church fence, should have left this life on the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul. In a perspective of faith, I am unable to regard this as mere coincidence. He, too, a righteous man, carried a hope unknown, which will have found its own way of working. Now it is fulfilled. The Gospel speaks to us of judgement. Origen says somewhere that at judgement we shall all pass through fire; and that in us which is fireproof will remain. My father carried much that is fireproof. Confident in God’s providence, which encounters us as mercy, we pray that he may now enjoy fullness of vision and understand fully, even as he will be fully understood (cf. 1 Cor 13.12).
Gracious Lord Jesus, receive your servant graciously! Grant him your joy!
May Sven Åge Varden rest in peace.
Tantus labor non sit cassus.
Bjørg (RIP 13.ix.2020) and Sven Åge (RIP 29.vj.2024) Varden
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Words on the Word - Coram Fratribus

St Benedict Proverbs 2.1-9: The Lord gives wisdom.
Colossians 3.12-17: Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.
Matthew 19.27-29: Lo, we have left everything.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, still going strong at 95, famously concluded After Virtue, one of the twentieth century’s seminal books, with the remark: ‘We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St Benedict.’ Much ink has been spilt in attempts to work out what this statement means. Entire societal options have been deduced from it. This latter enterprise is not so plausible, perhaps, given that St Benedict does not much appear in the rest of MacIntyre’s work. We are not dealing with a recurring motif in his writing. What is more, MacIntyre warns against historical analogies. It is not, he says, helpful to think of the present time as equivalent to that of the declining Roman Empire, the context for St Benedict’s career.
Yet he concedes that ‘certain parallels there are’. Then as now, political structures that had long been thought bearers of civility are no longer regarded with confidence. Not only that, people have largely lost interest in them. Demagogues can carp on about making this or that country or institution ‘great again’; but since ‘greatness’ in such cases is usually a matter of seeking confirmation for delusional self-regard, the proposition is unlikely to inspire effort over time beyond roars at rallies before the beers are popped. Few are minded to invest their strength, not to mention their lives, in the propping up of other people’s egos.
In Late Antiquity, writes MacIntyre, men and women disillusioned with empire, neither believing in nor especially wanting its resurgence, sought instead to achieve ‘new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness’. He posits that we are on the threshold of a like development. Indeed, he sees the process of descent into civilisational twilight as being already well advanced. The only reason we fail to notice, he adds, is because ‘the barbarians are not’, now, ‘waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time’. MacIntyre wrote that in 1981. How one would love to be able to say that he has since been proven wrong.
So does this mean that Benedictines are about to enjoy their providential moment of glory? That they must again step forward as dependable guardians of ‘morality and civility’ while the secular, purposeless West goes to the dogs? It is right that we should face these questions here, in this monastery, on the feast of our holy Father St Benedict.
Let us be cautious, though, with regard to easy answers! If we cast our mind back to the crumbling of Rome’s empire, then, yes, it is true that monasteries emerged as bearers of culture, microcosms of charitable order in a global setting of breakdown. This happy circumstance was not, though, the finality of the Benedictine quest, but a corollary.
St Benedict was neither a political scientist nor a social reformer. When as a youth he spent time in Rome, rife with activisms, his response was to get out as quickly as he could. He exchanged debates in the taverna for a solitary, narrow cave at Subiaco, a cleft in the rock like that of the dove in the Song of Songs. There he implored God’s mercy on himself and on the world. There he sought the Lord’s face. There he learnt the transforming impact of Christ’s saving sacrifice, an experience summed up in a principle he later inculcated insistently: ‘Prefer nothing to Christ’s love’ (RB, IV.21).
The life-giving radiance of monasticism in the so-called Dark Ages erupted from fidelity to this injunction. What shapes and renews the world, now as ‘in the beginning’, is not ultimately the brilliance of human notions broadcast in floods of words. What shapes and renews the world is the Word in Person. We shall be instruments of renewal in so far as the Word not only gives us a prod now and again, but dwells in us – and ‘richly’, as Paul says. For that to happen, we must make space inwardly and outwardly. We have heard Peter exclaim, ‘Lo, we’ve left everything and followed you’. This profession challenges us.
Have I left everything in order for Christ to be my life? Or am I still lugging my own accumulated overweight — dreams of greatness, perhaps, or at any rate of significance.
St Benedict was an indefatigable builder and a fruitful father. Yet he knew that mere enterprise is short-lived. Not all that long after settling on Monte Cassino, he saw in a vision that the monastery would be destroyed after his death. This did not keep him from labouring on, for he knew that the community’s life would survive the destruction of its walls. Where Christ is present indeed, where lives are utterly given in union with his, death has lost its sting. Eternity is already present. I sometimes worry that the Church in our time has lost faith in this fundamental truth, so seeks to justify herself to herself by espousing a range of subsidiary causes, fine in themselves, but transitory. For prophecies will pass, and tongues, and knowledge, and rallies. Love only remains. Being its own end, love will not let itself be instrumentalised. Our beneficial contribution to our weird times will be in proportion to our surrender, in Christ, to love.
Such a contribution may be unspectacular; that is not to say it will be ineffective. I was recently reminded of the last few lines of Middlemarch, where George Eliot contemplates the wholeness of the destiny of her heroine Dorothea, a name that means ‘God’s Gift’:
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
That is a statement of Benedictine purpose as good as any. Individuals’ commitment to it in oblation will determine whether a society withers and dies or lives and flourishes.
The monastic cemetery at Quarr Abbey.
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Today is the feast day of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. He was a Polish Conventual Franciscan friar and a martyr in the German death camp of Auschwitz during World War II.
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