"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
The establishment of priories in the life of Saint Patrick’s Church must be understood as a work of common life grounded in the spirituality of the broad Christian tradition, with particular attention given to the appropriation of Benedictine values and monastic spirituality. The key words for this shall be stability, conversion, obedience, mission and hospitality.
A “priory” is a smaller monastic house, connected to a larger monastery or abbey.
As a people who believe that God is saving the world through Jesus, and that the Church is called and empowered to participate in the drama of salvation, we wish for our lives to manifest his Reign as we participate in his mission, inviting others to be reconciled to him in the fellowship of his Church.
Conversion. We realize that the holistic and holy work of bringing our lives into conformity with the life of God given us at baptism is never done. To this end, participants will adopt individual expressions of a general rule of life that corresponds to the 4 Practices of Saint Patrick’s Church, and includes both individual and corporate prayer of the Psalter, the reading of Scripture, and participation in the public liturgy of the Church. Justification is a gift, but lived holiness is a process, and we look to those ancient practices by which faithful Christians through the centuries have found themselves conformed to the image of Christ.
We don’t become more transformed into the likeness of Christ by sitting around on our hands. We look to cooperate with God’s healing power in our lives, and this is what it’s going to look like – working the process. This past September, Saint Patrick’s Church as a whole adopted the skeleton of a monastic Rule of life. Each member was asked to consider and commit to particular practices that are variations upon 4 central practices of the Catholic Church: worship, community life, Christian formation, and mission. Most of the congregation wrote up plans and made promises. The present monastic enterprise will add certain specifics to this, especially praying the Divine Office as a way of Christian formation.
Obedience. We believe that our mystical and concrete integration into Christ’s Body is a key component of God’s saving work on our lives, and that our cooperation in this entails submission to one another as we share our lives. So this will not be artificial and unhealthy, it consists in becoming ‘reference points’ for one another – people who share life in natural ways. Even as we deny that we are defined by our consumer choices, productivity or symbols of success, we profess that we are constituted by our participation in Christ’s church as it begins in baptism and is actualized through the Eucharist. We will learn vulnerability to and care for one another as part of being shaped in discipleship to Jesus and learn to stick with one another.
If you’ve read Avery Dulles’ Models of the Church, you’ll recognize my affinity for what the Cardinal calls a “mystical communion” model. I’ve always loved how Alan Creech describes it: the Church is a “vehicle for our transformation.” It’s not about signing the right piece of paper so that we have eternal fire insurance or “get to go to heaven when we die,” but rather being part of a community where by God’s grace we receive and mediate to one another the love and power that’s going to heal us into people that are more like Jesus.
Too often obedience is imagined to be an artificial and destructive thing as such, which is why so many American Christians are pleased to buck authority and commitment under the guise of consumer choice – which is the real religious value that influences so many decisions. At the root of our obedience is our willingness to listen to one another by virtue of our friendships. And we are friends not because we have so much in common (necessarily) but because Jesus has called us his own friends, a relationship that is actualized and strengthened in the Eucharistic feast.
"we wish for our lives to manifest his Reign as we participate in his mission, inviting others to be reconciled to him in the fellowship of his Church."
Rock and roll! Without mission it loses its life blood.
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
2 Comments:
Good stuff man. Exciting stuff. And damn! I made the cut! Me and Avery Dulles in the same paragraph, holy crap. :)
"we wish for our lives to manifest his Reign as we participate in his mission, inviting others to be reconciled to him in the fellowship of his Church."
Rock and roll! Without mission it loses its life blood.
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