"The Anglican Communion has no peculiar thought, practice, creed or confession of its own. It has only the Catholic Faith of the ancient Catholic Church, as preserved in the Catholic Creeds and maintained in the Catholic and Apostolic constitution of Christ's Church from the beginning."
- Geoffrey Fisher, 99th Archbishop of Canterbury
Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, martyred for Christ in 156
"O happy fault! If we weren't sinners and didn't need pardon more than bread, we'd have no way of knowing how deep God's love is."
- Louis Evely
"Avoid, like the plague, a clergyman who is also a businessman."
- St. Jerome
"Slander is worse than cannibalism."
- St. John Chrysostom
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."
- Jaroslav Pelikan
"The Jesus of Suburbia is a lie."
- Green Day
"It's true romance is dead I shot it in the chest and in the head"
- Fall Out Boy
"Don't just adore the Eucharist, enact it."
- William Cavanaugh
"If you can be talked out of your faith, you probably should be."
- Roger Ward
"Don't ever deny someone the luxury of being human or broken. That is not a luxury you yourself can afford to lose."
- Sarah Cunningham
"It is better that the United States be liquidated than that she survive by war."
- Dorothy Day
"Wherever the Psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure vanishes from the Christian Church. With its recovery will come unexpected power."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
As I finished my thesis last fall, I became increasingly convinced that the hope for renewed Christian mission in a post-Christian culture lay with a resurgence of monastic spirituality, albeit in an altered form. To regain some credibility in this culture, the proclamation of the Good News about God’s Kingdom must bring with it the evidence of transformed lives. One of the difficulties is that many of our churches have lost the stories and skillsets whereby they actually successfully apprentice people to Jesus. This is not news if you have been paying any kind of attention to the life of the church in this culture.
My concern is how we can set ourselves to be shaped by monastic culture and monastic practices outside of monasteries. In the Celtic monastic tradition, monasteries were set up not to provide havens for Christians fleeing the culture, but to be a transplanted community that provided hospitality, healing and the embodiment of the Christian story in the midst of an alien culture. The monastery walls were not present to keep the world out, but rather to provide a place of refreshment and transformation for the world “out there.” This is our concern when we speak about Saint Patrick’s Church as an “abbey.” Our central program is the Celebration of the Holy Mysteries, the Feast in which those joined to Christ in baptism eat his flesh and drink his blood and are conformed more and more to his story of victory over the world, thereby providing that world healing and transformation. The ministries of our church, therefore, are as diverse as our own membership: those sent out from the celebration are offered nurture, healing and challenge not only by the cultic meal itself, but holistic touch of the community. We celebrate and mourn together, and we teach and we heal. Every baptized person is in word and deed meant to be a teacher and healer, and our households are meant to be beachheads, little outposts of God’s healing rule wherever we happen to find ourselves.
With this in mind, we at Saint Patrick’s Church have broken ground on a monastery. We have not turned real soil with shovels, but we are shaping our hearts as Christian monastics. We will pray the Offices, listen to the Rule, and learn to bend the knee as obedient servants. Some of us will, for a time, function as a monetary without walls, cloistered not by stone but by our commitments and renunciations.
What will follow over the next several days is the plan for this movement, and the beginnings of a Rule for what we’ll call the Monastery of Saint Patrick. I wrote this document in October 2007 after finishing my thesis, and our little group has been practicing accordingly since December 2007.
Man, this is great. Thanks for posting this. I will pray for the success of this work. Will you be posting the rule?
On another note, the things which I discussed with you on Facebook have not transpired, and don't look too. It's amazing how people are enthuastic about things until you actually try to begin. Then they scatter like sheep.
Kyle, One of our local Parishes has developed a community Rule of Life. I think it is a wonderful idea, they did it as a community, and it is considered the norm of behavior for the community.
Tried to post but says: already posted? Hope this isn't duplicated. was thinking of leaving comment when passing by here before. Find your thoughts on monasticism interesting as we've an interdenominational list of about 400 members for monasticism, sopirituality and related subjects at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/monasterion. Myself a monk, hermit, for the past 40 years.
Kyle Potter, MTh (Oxon)
Catechist for Adult Formation,
Saint Patrick's Church
Missioner to Georgetown, Kentucky
Anglican Mission in the Americas E-mail me
Library Technician for Research Assistance & Cataloging
Department Liaison for Religion, Philosophy, Sociology & Theatre
Instructor of Christian Theology
Ensor LRC, Georgetown College
"The Church claims to be the most comprehensive human society there is - the new human race in embryo. And it claims this because of its belief that it is established not by any human process grounded in and limited by events, cultures and so on, but by God's activity." - Rowan Williams
5 Comments:
Man, this is great. Thanks for posting this. I will pray for the success of this work. Will you be posting the rule?
On another note, the things which I discussed with you on Facebook have not transpired, and don't look too. It's amazing how people are enthuastic about things until you actually try to begin. Then they scatter like sheep.
Bobby, I definitely understand.
Kyle,
One of our local Parishes has developed a community Rule of Life. I think it is a wonderful idea, they did it as a community, and it is considered the norm of behavior for the community.
How wonderful you are exploring this.
Tried to post but says: already posted? Hope this isn't duplicated. was thinking of leaving comment when passing by here before. Find your thoughts on monasticism interesting as we've an interdenominational list of about 400 members for monasticism, sopirituality and related subjects at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/monasterion. Myself a monk, hermit, for the past 40 years.
monk
Great post, thanks!
I love the "monastery without walls" sentiment.
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