While away on a short break earlier this week we went to Beauly, a small Highland town west of the Moray Firth. It was cold, windy and enough rain to make you cold within minutes of leaving the car. We were there to see the ruins of Beauly Priory, founded in 1230 by a strict offshoot of the Benedictine Order. It was one of three communities, the others in Oban and Pluscarden (which is still an active Benedictine community).
It takes a feat of imagination to feel something of what it was like to be an order committed to prayer, contemplation and Scripture in a building like this, in the 13th Century, situated in a beautiful site but subject to a full Scottish winter and the vagaries of every other season in Scotland. Imagine - no central heating; no double glazing; no electric kettle for a quick cuppa; no Berghaus wind and water proof jackets; no microwave for fast food. Indeed fast meant something else to monks when it came to food. A daily routine of early (3am) rising, sung prayers, eucharist, the hours of prayer throughout the day, and the same faces day in and day out.
I mention all this as a reflection on how hard it must have been just to get through each day, and the discipline required to keep going, to not give up, to persevere in seeking God and living with each of the brothers as if they were Christ himself, which they believed in a deep and ineradicable sense they each were to each other. All that, for a life of prayer.
Which brings me to my own easily dislodged good intentions about prayer; my awareness of minor inconveniences that nudge prayer down the to do list; the clutter and clatter of things that get in the way of quietness and commitment to paying attention to God; the contemporary obsession with connectivity which while creating the illusion of social engagement and embeddedness is a form of digital distancing and often a source of anxiety and loneliness and unhappiness that our lives aren't as interesting as 'our friends'. Add to this the focal points of contemporary spirituality, at least on the broadly evangelical circles of my own Christian walk; of worship as experience intended to revify through praise and pervasively subjective music, of mission as yet another driver of activism and programmes and goals, of Scripture as a how to book instead of a here's who you are and here's who God is kind of book, and all this against a background of competing voices in the marketplace pitching for our time, money, energy and engagement.
Prayer has never been easy, and never been more essential to spirituality and sanity. Monasteries are not the answer today, but by remembering why they came into being we are reminded of the questions we are required to ask, and answer. And the questions, the real questions are not posed by the market, the culture, our context or our life situation. These are constants, but constants that change and change us.
No. The real questions are posed by God. "I have placed before you today death and life, therefore choose life..." "Be still and know that I am God". "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." "I have come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly." "Take up your cross and follow me..." "He died that those who live should live no longer for themselves but for him who died and was raised..." These are all statements which force us to face the most significant questions in our entire lives.
So somewhere in our own times there is a need for a radical re-orientation on the scale of the monastic communities. Not a new monasticism, but a renewed sense of urgency about God, a recovered sense of our humanity as invested in the redeeming love of God in Christ. And with that, a relativising of all those important, pervasive drivers that dictate how we live our lives, and a re-setting of our attention to focus more clearly on what matters, and on what matters most. Prayer, and time made and kept for prayer, may be one of the most radical forms of mission, worship and service a Christian can offer in our digitalised, globalised, economised, pluralised and atomised world.
All of this from walking in the cold, in cloisters no longder visible, but in the place where once, in the words of T S Eliot, "prayer was valid."
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Posted by: Darryl | November 12, 2015 at 11:10 AM