The Revised Anthonite Vigil Office

Revised and expanded, the Anthonite Vigil Office has been published by St. Anthony's, OPC Press.  You can order your copy today by visiting Lulu.com.

Desert Spirituality, A Lenten Class

Today at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, TN, I led an Adult Education class on desert spirituality.  Originally the class was to take place at the start of Lent, but scheduling conflicts caused me to move towards the end. Knowing that it was a big topic and time a significant factor, I plowed ahead to do the best that I could do.  

For a long time, I have wanted to teach spirituality and contemplative prayer in the Episcopal Church.  I have long felt impoverished in my own upbringing in the faith by a serious lack of Christian education in this important area for discipleship.  Needless to say, one class on a Sunday morning only begins to scratch the surface.  Alas, I was grateful for the opportunity to broach the subject.    

The basis for the class was a reading of Henri Nouwen's The Way of the Heart, a primer for contemplative prayer by gleaning from the life of the fourth century desert mothers and fathers.  Here are some of my notes.  The page numbers refer to my copy of Nouwen's book (New York: Seabury Press, 1981).    

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A Brief Overview of Desert Spirituality
The Christian life has its many trials and temptations.  We struggle in our daily lives with the temptations for better jobs, material possessions and wealth, and the ultimate pursuit of happiness.  The culture today shares this with the late Roman world of the fourth century.

With the toleration of Christianity under the Edict of Milan in 313, the narrow door that Jesus spoke of was flung far and wide, opening the gates to thousands of new Christians.  The Church no longer faced bloody persecution from Rome.  With this peace and growth came a prevailing sense that the Christian standard was deteriorating, the faith was becoming too common and lapsed, so it seemed.

Monasticism appears on the scene in the fourth century as an impulse to reform the church from the relaxed standards of the Christian life.  Subversive to the culture of material wealth and power, life for the desert fathers and mothers was a search for solitude in the wilderness of Egypt to find a deep, abiding union with God in Christ.  Their testing was to renounce the world's priorities in search of the richness of Christ founded upon a strict dedication or rule of life. 

Nouwen's The Way of the Heart  

In classic Nouwen form, The Way of the Heart presents five short chapters with straight-forward reflective insights into the spiritual tradition that grew out of the desert in the fourth century.  It is a misreading of Nouwen, here, to see the interior life and growth through silence apart from ministry within the Kingdom of God.  Nor, however, is this implying or espousing the Platonic ideals of mind/body dualism, or the Manichaeism heresy. 

Desert spirituality is quite clearly a primer for discipleship which Our Lord calls and invites us all to live.  The result of desert spirituality in practice is a well-spring of compassion, a capacity so widened by transforming silence that we are able to bear one another's crosses in solidarity with Jesus Christ. 

Class Outline

I.  Opening Silence and Prayer

II. Overview of Desert Spirituality

·       flee, be silent, and pray, the three main ideas of desert spirituality.

III. Prologue

·      What is required of us as ministers of the Gospel in our day (pg. 12)

·      Subversive Prayer, the actions of the desert fathers and mothers subverted the established culture

·      Romans 12:1-2 "I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect."

·      New kinds of martyrs, witnesses against the destructive powers of evil and witnesses for the transforming power of Christ.

IV. Solitude

·      Thomas Merton (p.21)

·      Society as molding us for seductive powers

·      Take a look at our own weekly routine in order to see our priorities

·      Two main enemies of the Spiritual life: anger and greed

·      The Furnace of Transformation

·      "My soul 'too cramped for you to enter it--widen it out." St. Augustine's Confessions

·      Jesus' Temptations in the desert

·      Matthew 9:9-13   "As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax-collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’ But when he heard this, he said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’"

·      Dying to the false self

·      Spirituality and Ministry meet in compassion

V.  Silence

·      Have words lost their power?  Is language our only ability to communicate with God?

·      What value does our culture place on silence?

·      What value does our worshipping community place on silence?

·      What would our lives look like without distractions?  What would our ministry look like?

·      "Silence is the home of the word."  Nouwen

·      "God's first language is silence, everything else is translation" Thomas Keating  

·      John 1:1-5   "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."

·      Vincent van Gogh (p.55)

VI. Prayer

·      How does silence manifest itself in prayer?

·      How does this square with community prayer and worship?

·      "Arrow Prayers" (p.80)

·      Via Negativa or the Apophatic tradition

Desert Father

In preparation for next Sunday's Adult Christian Education Class concerning desert spirituality (9:15 a.m. at St. Paul's, Chattanooga--come one, come all!), I stumbled upon James Cowan's book, Desert Father: A Journey in the Wilderness with Saint Anthony (Boston: Shambhala, 2004).  I was initially struck by the fact that something contemporary had been written on St. Anthony the Great.  Since Anthony is the patron of my Order, I was sold in wading through the book, and I'm about half-way finished.

Those familiar with Abba Anthony, as he's sometimes called, know him through St. Athanasius' biography of Anthony--of which there are numerous editions chronicling Anthony's retreat to the desert and his teachings.  Cowan's work is interesting because he is using his own spiritual journey alongside that of Anthony. Cowan leaves his academic career in Australia in order to pursue Anthony into the wilds of Egypt, whereupon he lands in one of the oldest monasteries in Christendom, the Coptic monastery of Saint Anthony.  Here at the monastery, Cowan encounters a strange new friend, a person the monks there consider to be the last solitary in the Church, a man named Lazarus who himself is an Aussie ex-pat who renounced the world.  Lazarus lives in a cave high atop Mount Colzim, the mountain where Anthony lived.  The monastery sits just below the mountain.

Here's an excerpt:

These were the questions that I brought to Lazarus's attention on my occasional climb up the mountain.  I did not make such trips often, believing that it was important to contemplate questions myself before inflicting them on my friend.  I was conscious of not imposing myself on Lazarus in a way that might interfere with his life.  He had a right to his solitude, as he had fought hard to acquire it.  As a practicing hesychast, Lazarus deserved more than to have his world examined by someone like me.

Cowan paints vividly the Roman world in which Anthony and the desert fathers and mothers fled the cities in silent rebellion.  The desert, the great metaphor for the human soul, is the background in which Anthony overcomes the temptations of the adversary.  Again, Cowan writes:

In my desire to deepen my knowledge of Anthony and the Desert Fathers, I had wandered into a cenobium of spiritual masters.  These men weren't recluses who chose the desert simply to escape Roman oppression.  They were men in possession of a vision unique to the world.  The fact that the desert was the place where they developed their knowledge was incidental.  What they had been looking for was a metaphor to enter and inhabit.  Here at the foot of Mount Colzim lay that metaphor: every stone and cave in the mountainside was testament to the life of men who had come here to test themselves in, and against, the desert.  Most of their names were anonymous, their their silence was like a chorus.  I could hear them uttering the eulogy of the solitary: 'We are the katachoi, the withdrawn, the God-possessed.' It was a eulogy of promise. 

So rather than reading some dry, arid history of a desert saint, Cowan manages to bring to life Anthony's legacy through the text.  In fact, I have learned quite a lot about Abba Anthony through Cowan, things that I missed in Athanasius' account.

Contemporary and compelling, Cowan has given us an oasis beckoning us to see where the living springs of God burst forth from the desert life.

"Swift, Lord, You Are Not"

At the young age of seventy-five, Benedictine monk Kilian McDonnell began writing poetry.  His published work entitled, Swift, Lord, You Are Not, published by St. John's University Press (Collegeville, MN) in 2003 is a collection of his poetry.  I like McDonnell's style, it feels both raw and insightful.  At his age, the wisdom of the years have instilled a sense of the genuine, authentic, and true self.  The art of crafting poetry, so it seems to McDonnell, is truly incarnational.  Take, for example, this one poem that spoke to me.  I wondered what fires are best unremembered for this monk.    

Don't Look Too Carefully

"O search me God and know my heart" Psalm 39:23

by Kilian McDonnell, OSB

What sudden senile arrogance

provoked this bid to despair?

If you knock, God, be prepared

to see what stands behind the door:

unswept floors, unmade

beds, unwashed dishes

in sink, a lone Giotto

unhung against the wall.

(I, too, have been to the Uffizi,

read Dostoevski, Yeats.)

If you turn over a stone

on my beach, what creatures scurry.

Dig in my ruins, you sift

buried rags of intent.

Uproot my elm, you pulled up

forgotten teen-age tinsel.

Poke my cinders, you stir

fires best unremembered.

Search me not, test

no more.  Take me as I am.

Beloved Dust

In the Book of Genesis we learn, "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust and to dust you shall return" (3:19, NRSV).  In liturgies throughout the Church for Ash Wednesday, this verse from Genesis intends to re-ground ourselves in the Trinitarian life.  We are created beings fashioned by God and according to God's purposes.

My theology professor, now retired, The Rev. Dr. Robert Hughes offers us another way of looking at this passage. In his recent magnum opus, Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in the Christian Life (New York: Continuum, 2008), Hughes offers us the analogy of human beings as the beloved stardust of creation.  "Human beings are best conceived by as materialistic an anthropology as possible.  I am proposing that we use the metaphor of dust, beloved dust, though by this I mean the stardust of creation, matter much as conceived by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, not merely the dust of the dustbin, though that is included" (Hughes, 7).  Hughes goes on to describe that this beloved dust is animated, spirited, estranged, and redeemed dust.  I thoroughly enjoy my copy and highly recommend this important work on the mission and theology of the Holy Spirit as a companion and guide to the spiritual life.

What I find most compelling in all this is that image of not being merely dust, but beloved dust.  Beloved of God, redeemed by Christ, and inspired by the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in our daily lives.  It is quite easy to view Ash Wednesday in terms of "woe is me."  I do not think that this approach is helpful.  If we take seriously the call to confession, then Lent becomes a deeper journey of faith where we can walk with Christ on the journey to the cross.  Woe is world, perhaps, but as beloved dust we share in that cross-bearing moment with the resurrected Christ to help re-orient the world in terms of love, justice, and mercy.

Dust yes.  Beloved dust, even more.  The markings on our forehead are visible symbols of that loving creation that we are all share in as we move towards our ultimate hope in Christ.  The Lenten journey begins and so we can prepare ourselves for not only Our Lord's resurrection, but our own too.

The Daily Office: Readings from the Early Church

One spiritual practice that I adopted some time ago, is to read a passage from Saint Benedict's Rule prior to saying Compline.  This gives me a time of reflection from something grounded in tradition, non-Biblical of course.  Recently, I accidently left my copy of The Rule at my brother's house whilst on a family trip and so I turned to my book shelf to find something suitable as a replacement.

I quickly located my copy of Bob Wright's classic, Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church (New York: Church Publishing, 1991) and his supplemental They Still Speak:  Readings for the Lesser Feasts (New York: Church Publishing, 1993).

Those who know this giant scholar, priest, and historian in The Episcopal Church know that these two volumes represent sound research, a faithful translation of the texts, and shaped according to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer Daily Office calendar.

J. Robert Wright is the Saint Mark's Church in the Bowery Professor of Ecclesiastical History at The General Theological Seminary in New York.  He was awarded the St. Augustine's Cross by the Archbishop of Canterbury for his contributions to the wider Anglican Communion.  Friends of mine who have had him as a teacher in seminary speak reverently about him.

While the publishing date may seem old to some, these texts still "speak."  The readings are arranged daily and contain sermons and writings from the early Church Mothers and Fathers.  He has included works from Dame Julian of Norwich as a move to be broader.  Wright offers in the preface his task of compiling the readings and dealing with issues of sexual inclusion in language.

A good example of how these two texts bear relevancy with the Daily Office. The Old Testaments readings for Morning Prayer, recently, have been covering the Jacob v. Esau story.  Wright paired these with a sermon by Irenaeus who brought a Christian interpretation to these texts from Genesis.  It was fascinating, for me, to have incorporated this insight from the Patristic era into my daily prayer life.  It was then that I was sold on using these texts with my Daily Office readings.

Those of my brothers and sisters who fancy The Anglican Breviary will already know of a similar incorporation of Patristic sermons and texts which are combined in the breviary.

I commend any practice of incorporating these additional non-Biblical readings from the early Church into our corporate opus dei.

New Printing of Walsingham Way

Walsingham Way: Alfred Hope Patten and the Restoration of the Shrine of Our Lady by Colin Stephenson is the latest book to come out regarding Our Lady of Walsingham and the shrine's restorer, Fr. Alfred Hope Patten. Published first in 1970, this edition by Canterbury Press (UK) became available in February of this year. You can find it available through Amazon and other book retailers on the net. There are some floating around on e-Bay too.

From the Publisher: Alfred Hope Patten was a larger than life figure, terrifying to some, but determined to realise his vision of restoring the medieval shrine in the Norfolk countryside that had been closed at the Reformation. Colin Stephenson's account of his ambitious enterprise, his successes and failures (including a failed attempt to establish religious communities of men and women at Walsingham), his penchant for flamboyant clerical dress, his love of the Roman Church but his dislike of Roman Catholics, does not claim to be the last word in historical scholarship, but is a warm, engaging and entertaining account of one the highest achievements of Anglo-Catholicism in the last century and of one of its most colourful and controversial personalities.

About the Author: COLIN STEPHENSON was Guardian of Walsingham from 1958 until his death in 1973. Walsingham Way was first published in 1970, and followed by his autobiography, Merrily On High in 1973.

I have not been able to find any reviews on this book. I'll purchase a copy soon and let you know what I think. Needless to say, most titles regarding OLW have more to do with the devotional nature of the Shrine and less objective historical analysis regarding the motives behind Patten's desire to restore the Shrine and so forth.