A random ramble with Colonel Blimp

A few miles south of Hadrian’s Wall, and at the eastern end of Northumberland, I am making use of a cottage generously offered by benefactors for the purpose of breaking the back of a short dissertation. The best laid plans of mice and monks, of course… it is breaking me.

It is perhaps not totally effective, or even healthy, to attempt to overcome the incessant distractions of pervious months and seek a near complete solitude for 10 days in order to form one’s reading and thinking into a coherent pattern, transcribe it to computer and expect a satisfying result. There have been periods of waxing and of waning in the operations of the intellect, and yesterday proved to be quite frustrating and indeed disheartening. The downside of solitude is that there is no one, apart from God and his heavenly court, to unload onto. And the heavenly ones, of course, do not usually respond immediately or audibly.

Vocations, New Evangelization and such like

Happy new year, belated though the greeting might be.

The past year has seen a lot of talk, using both ink and air, about vocations, and the culture of vocation, as the Church in this sceptred but Godless isle seeks to repair the damage of the last few decades that has been visited upon the priestly and religious life. For a long time I have been one of those happy to talk of religious and priestly callings as being just two among many possible vocations, such as marriage or single life, or even more narrowly to a range of what are more traditionally termed careers. Some have noted the danger of reducing vocation to career-choice and have changed the rhetoric to centre on vocation as state in life: celibate priest or religious, married, consecrated virginity or the single life. (Yet some die-hards, yea heretics, still hold to vocation being a call away from the normative state of life for humanity as elaborated in Genesis, namely marriage and the raising of a family: marriage is hard-wired into human nature, not a call external to it. Yes – I am a heretic now.)

This rhetorical shift was satisfyingly sensible: job and vocation are not synonyms. Yet still something indeterminate and indistinct gnawed away at satisfaction. Partly it was empirical: all the talk and preaching on vocation, all the initiatives initiated and courses run, the literature and websites produced, the psychology and affective skills employed seemed impressive in scope. Yet if one stopped to look at results, they were meagre. There has been a growth in vocations in the traditional sense, yet it seems to have been almost in spite of the vocations industry than because of it. So many of the vocations that have emerged have come from the more traditional sources, or been inspired by the example and teaching of recent popes. All this feverish promotion of the traditional vocations, situated with an avowed egalitarianism among other states of life now also called vocations, seemed remarkably fruitless.

Perhaps, one thought, the promotion of the New Evangelization was missing link. To promote a culture of faith leading into mission, employing the latest media and insights, going out into the marketplace, and making evangelization (hitherto not a common Catholic word if I remember rightly) a mission, even a ministry, shared by the laity as well as clergy and religious. The implication, and sometimes the assertion, was that this mission flowed from our Baptism, and now it is time to revive it.

However, troublingly, it was easy to detect the emergence of what has all the markings of yet another industry. The industrialization and democratization of vocation and evangelization seems to meet the needs of our 21st century world with its new media, more literate and technologically-savvy laity, especially youth and a revived urge to be doing something.

And here comes my heresy. I just do not see it working, either thus far or in the near future. There is immense goodwill and fervent desire to be righting the listing ship. Yet these positive energies are being directed into what is all too often mere activity. There comes to mind the old tag-line (or was it a poster?): Jesus is coming. Look busy. Busy we are, to what appears no good result.

If we survey the history of the Church, we see readily enough that it had its periods of decline and resurgence, its vigour waxed and waned. At the risk of gross simplification, it seems that most of the decline coincided with the blurring of the necessary distinction between Church and world, with the decay of Christian identity leading to Christians being in the world and all too clearly of the world. Resurgence coincided with the emergence of individuals, men and women, whose initiatives and insights did not emerge primarily from the progress of secular knowledge and its insights. They had a common, unifying thread: a radical, uncompromising return to the Gospel which is ever present in the Church but its lustre too easily tarnished by her members. To put it another way, and to employ the idiom of the Second Vatican Council, it was about the universal (and we must say also, perpetual) call to holiness, of the integrity that comes when the movement of our lips matches the movement of our lives.

All our striving for vocations and for evangelization will mean nothing if they exist merely as techniques and strategies which are effectively the focus of a relentless activism. There is need for relentless activism, but first and foremost it needs to be directed towards prayer, sacraments, the works of charity and of mercy, walking the extra mile, turning the other cheek, offering both our shirts and our cloaks – and these not on some impersonal, macro level. Our Christian living begins on the micro level, wherever we find ourselves, and with whomever: the troublesome relative, the annoying confrere, that hateful colleague, the needy friend, the homeless man sleeping on a busy city street. We are not called to change the world, but we are called to change our hearts by concrete acts empowered by our prayer. This prayer need not be the prayer of the professional religious, or the mystic, but the common, and too often scorned, recitation of set prayers or frequent offering of interior words and aspirations to the God who is ever at our side, or the lighting of a candle, or the tingle in our heart as we read holy scripture.

The more meagre our prayer and our sacramental nourishment, the more tepid our faith, the more anemic our living, the more soulless our activity. Too many like this, and we find our Church in decline, and so too vocations and evangelization. And no amount of talking and self-examination will solve the problem unless they lead to real holiness. Vocations and witness to the faith emerge from a healthy Church, a Church healthy in her members most of all. Too much of our vocations work and evangelization and mission is focused on what are actually symptoms, not causes.

So, most likely, until we rediscover what it is to be Christian both in word and in deed, to be devout in our worship and prayer and brave in our charity and compassion, to be in the world but never one with the world, to value our faith and our sacramental life as more than a conscience salve we compress and cram into an hour before Sunday lunch (or Saturday night on the town) – unless our lives as members of the Church conform more truly to the Gospel call and to the grace ever offered us (and too often ignored by us), then none of these initiatives for vocation or evangelization will ever bear much lasting fruit. At best they may occasionally strike lucky. But is that good enough? Read Matthew 6:33, and think about it a little.

One should never write late at night. The purple passages abound, and perhaps a little perspective is lost. But really, the only activity that God really needs of us now is that daily commitment to conversion that bears fruit in our living, a turning from self to God and to others that ultimately is the gift of God himself. Let us pray that we do not receive the gift in vain. Let us rend our hearts, not our garments. (Cf Joel 2:13)

I do begin to see that perhaps this is what Pope Francis is on about.

Jesus is coming. Be holy.

Re-visiting “One does not get down from the cross”

Now that Benedict’s abdication has taken effect, and as the cardinals gather to prepare for the conclave, the murmuring of those critical of Benedict’s decision are getting a little louder. Cardinal Pell voiced the fears of many that an abdication might place future popes under unprecedented pressure to abdicate in the face of loud secular or even curial opposition. There is more from the rumour mill that the cardinals are resolving to insist that the new pope undertake never to resign. Cardinal Dziwisz’s comments on Bl John Paul II’s reigning till death even when illness had made him a mere shell of the man he had been – “One does not come down from the Cross” – have been mischievously construed by the press as an attack on Benedict.

Benedict XVI seems himself to have been conscious of Dziwisz’s words and of Bl John Paul II’s example. In his final audience last Wednesday he said,

 I do not return to private life, to a life of travel, meetings, receptions, conferences, and so on. I am not abandoning the cross, but remaining in a new way at the side of the crucified Lord.

Bl John Paul II was a unique man, and Benedict XVI knows this better than anyone else. Benedict knows he cannot be another JP II. Benedict XVI is himself a unique man. He recognizes his own gifts and weaknesses and acts accordingly. Part of the reason why JP II was able to carry the Church and the world with him in those anguished last years if his pontificate was that he had been pope for the best part of a generation. His extrovert, warm personality and his gift for commanding the world stage as a personality to be reckoned with, meant that we could only feel sympathy for him as he battled on valiantly. Our sympathy was not dimmed by the knowledge of many of us that aspects of the governance of the Church were suffering even as JP II gave wonderful witness of the value of human life and human suffering as a sharing in the Cross of Christ.

What Benedict is teaching us is that there are many ways of sharing the Cross of Christ, of keeping it at the centre of our Christian lives. We are called to carry the Cross at some stage(s) of our lives. JP II felt himself to be called to be on the Cross himself, as it were. But not all of us are called to that way of anchoring the Cross in our lives. JP II’s witness was a very particular and special identification with Christ.

Benedict proposes another rich identification we can make with regard to the Cross. He sees his life now not as being on the Cross with Christ, but standing by the Cross, at the feet of Christ. In this he seems to identify with Mary and the Beloved Disciple. who stood by the Cross after most had abandoned him.

 When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. John 19:26-27

Here one fruit of the Cross is highlighted: from the Cross Christ gives us a home, with his mother, a motherhood that is exercised by the Church. Benedict’s teaching to us is that by being in the Church we have begun to make the Cross the cornerstone (to mix images) of our lives. Benedict feels himself too old and unfit to the immense task of guiding the Church in such demanding times, which is itself a sharing in the Cross. Instead he is embracing the Cross in a more contemplative, less active way, standing by it and gazing upon it, attentive to its message.

Benedict XVI has chosen to be cloistered with the Cross for the rest of his days. He reminds us that whether we feel ourselves to be in the Cross with Christ, or simply standing in its shadow, always the Cross is central to the life of a Christian. In fact, without the Cross there is no Christianity, and there is no Church. We are all called to shoulder the Cross, like Simon of Cyrene, at some stage of our lives. We are also all called to keep our gaze firmly fixed on the Cross, as we stand in its shadow.

To be in the Church is to abide in the shadow of the Cross. Benedict XVI has not strength enough now to carry the Cross as he formerly did. It is enough for him to remain in its shadow, his eyes undistractedly fixed on the Cross in the cloister of Golgotha. That too is a gift to the Church. Maybe, just maybe, as one has suggested to me, Benedict’s example might inspire more young men and women to embrace the contemplation of the Cross in the cloisters of the Church’s monasteries. What rich fruit that would be indeed.

 

Benedictine Vocations Today

This week the quadrennial Congress of Benedictine Abbots concluded in Rome. Not much has filtered back to us in the ranks thus far, other than that the Abbot Primate, Notker Wolf, was re-elected to serve a third term in office.

The Catholic News Service has produced a short video made during the congress. It deals with vocations to the order, highlighting the attraction that tradition has for the young men today who are discerning vocation. Though not a Benedictine in the sense of being a black monk, Michael Casey, a wise Australian monk and spiritual guide from the Trappist Cistercian abbey of Tarrawarra, who also follow the Rule of St Benedict, offers some insightful reflection  on today’s vocation discerners.

Fr Michael baulks at the label “conservative” usually attached to them (among some more barbed ones!). Instead he says that this generation is not as conservative as many make them out to be. He calls them “adventurous”, people who are “looking for something which they weren’t finding in the world that the previous generation constructed”. They have, he says, “gone up into the attic” and “discovered new ways of doing things”, such as Eucharistic devotion, pilgrimages, confession, things which are “very exciting for them, and they think they have discovered them” (said with a wry smile). All this, he says, does not reflect “a kind of grim return to the past … but a very light and joyful discovery that here’s something that’s been lying, gathering the dust for so many years, and it still has a value to us”.

He seems to have read the signs of the times, and he highlights that far from being a generation of “young fogeys”, the discerners of today have made the wonderful discovery that what satisfies their souls and their ideals was to be found all the time in the treasury of the Church’s tradition and teaching. Thank God they have found it; forgive us, Lord, that we have allowed it to be hidden for so long. The vocations prayer of any monastery, indeed any congregation or diocese, should seek not only new vocations to be sent to them, but that they might deserve those vocations.

Almighty God, who called St Benedict from the midst of an inconstant world to hold fast to You in the school of Your service through prayer and work; mercifully grant that we might be worthy to welcome more young men and women to learn, under St Benedict’s instruction, to prefer nothing to the work of God in the service of the Church, that You might be glorified and the world sanctified. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

————————————

A prayer for vocations

Please join us in praying for more vocations, and also in praying that the monastery will be a place where men can find a worthy place to answer God’s call. You might like to use the prayer below. If you have another monastery to pray for, you could always replace the reference to Douai with its name.

Almighty Father, who called St Benedict from the midst of an inconstant world to hold fast to you in the school of your service through prayer and work, call now more men to Douai Abbey to learn, by St Benedict’s instruction, to prefer nothing to the work of God, that you might be glorified and the world sanctified. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

You can read a little about the First Profession last year of Brothers Damian and Gabriel, and also about our latest novice, Br Anselm. If it takes your fancy, you can also read about the abbey’s patron, St Edmund, and the meaning of our motto, which is also the title of this blog. Lastly, if you are still discerning a vocation yourself, you might like to read (or re-read) Blessed John Henry Newman’s meditation on vocation.

Pax!