Benedictine Broadband – now that’s living wittily!

Years ago now I read Esther De Waal’s book Seeking God. It is an attractively written introduction to the Rule of St Benedict and introduced me to the central values of the Rule; prayer, manual work and study, or heart, hands and head, which is shorthand for a holistic approach to daily life. Ever since the Rule of Benedict has been a source of check and balance in my own occasional life audits – but has also been a regular quiet conversation partner. Balance is another important Benedictine virtue, practised long before our post-modern overworked culture discovered the urgent need of a life-work balance. I’m still intending to do some posts on thin books – and amongst the thin books whose importance is out of all proportion to size is this introduction – to an even thinner book – the Rule of Benedict which through the great monastic movements, decisively shaped the culture and civilisation of the Christian West.

In the mid 1980’s I subscribed for some years to the Journal Cistercian Quarterly. It  contained many articles on monastic spirituality which then and since informed pastoral practice and personal maturing in Christ, and from a perspective so different from my own Evangelical viewpoint. The new monasticism is another of those eccretions emerging from the post-modern (or post-post-modern?) search into the disciplines and practices of the past – Brian Maclaren’s latest book is the latest to do this, with the usual blurb making it sound as if this is significantly NEW! Kathleen Norris, Esther De Waal, Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton have been diagnosing modern rootlessness and spiritual malnourishment going back half a century to merton’s Contemplative Prayer and Seeds of Contemplation, and prescribing a return to the practices that have been shown to shape community, instil stability, nurture Christian practice, and draw human personality towards maturity in Christ.

Among lessons learned from Cistercian Quarterly, which I took for the best part of a decade, are the following

• the significance of silence as an intentional disposition, to be encountered as both absence of external noise and presence of inner peace – an important spiritual constraint for a preacher, and talker!

• Stability as a willingness to settle in and accompany a community, so that relationships deepen, challenges are not evaded, and longevity of ministry is valued – one of the underlying principles of a life lived against pervasive short-termism.
• lectio divina as a form of reading, rooted in Scripture and branching into the great mustard tree of the Christian traditions where it is possible to find shelter and food – for a Baptist, the recognition that love of the Bible as transformative Word, is not, despite often inflated and uninformed claims, the monopoly of Evangelicals
• hospitality as an openness to people, other people and people who are other, but also hospitality as an openness to God, and to the Spirit of truth who doesn’t always leave our over-tidy minds as ordered as he finds it! – a predisposition to welcome, to greet the stranger as Christ, says most of what is essential in pastoral care.

The Cistercian Quarterly at that time was administered from Caldey Island. I still have a handwritten letter from the Brother who dealt with my subscription (and who was clearly intrigued by a Baptist minister with Benedictine tendencies), with kind words about something I had written for the Expository Times.

All of this came back to me when I read this morning that the monks of Caldey Abbey, on the Island ,have run out of patience with the slow speed of their dial-up internet connection. So they’ve installed fast-speed Broadband. The image of monks clicking impatiently, and getting into a spiritual stew about slow dial-up connection, made me smile. The image of monastic life as ascetic, pre-industrial, judiciously Luddite, sold on discomfort, is neither fair nor true. Online Lectio Divina, email as a way of maintaining silence while communicating with each other, surfing the world while enclosed in cloisters – the Lord bless them in their newfound freedoms! But the life they inhabit (by the way the use of that word as a recently introduced way of describing Christian character – “inhabiting virtues” from Alistair MacIntyre – carries rich semantic options – dwelling, dwelling place, monks clothing,) – anyway, the life they inhabit is an important witness to our overbusy, technologically addicted, fast-speed culture. And if Broadband contributes to the nurture and dissemination of such a witness to slowness, patience, and the virtues of balanced living, then Father Daniel the Abbott, may find his faith in the blessings of Broadband justified!  Benedictine Broadband – I love it! Benedictine Broadband – now that’s living wittily!