House of All Souls: One Monk’s Heart for Building a Home

Brother Ron Fender BSG, a brother in the Brotherhood of Saint Gregory the Great (a religious order in the Episcopal Church), has been tending and washing the feet of the homeless in Chattanooga for the past seven years as his ministry.  He is a case manager at the Community Kitchen, a Chattanooga refuge for the hungry and homeless.

Inspired by such projects as the Brother Bernard Fessenden House in Yonkers and Common Ground in New York City, Brother Ron sought to build an intentional community to house homeless men in the form of a monastic community.  He discovered that many who completed recovery programs and were eventually placed into apartments as a way to rebuild their lives, quickly fell back to street life.  Fender notes that, “putting a homeless person in an isolated room or apartment without supportive services, or even furniture or household goods makes no sense whatsoever… the most successful model for ending homelessness is to create community for the homeless.”  Brother Ron is seeking to do just that.

With a grant from The Rosewood Foundation, a new house has been constructed and nearly completed in Chattanooga.  Named the ‘House of All Souls,’ this home will bring together eight homeless men along with Brother Ron, who have been screened and agree to live in this intentional community.  The men will continue in their recovery programs while offering mutual support in the form of their own community. 

At the heart of the House of All Souls is a chapel where the men will worship God and keep Christ at the center of their lives.  The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) has donated copies of The Book of Common Prayer, Hymnals, and various books on spirituality to help further this new community.  Gifts of money, liturgical goods and resources (especially an altar) are greatly needed.  Ron hopes that the Bishop of East Tennessee will be able to come and bless the new chapel.      

Brother Ron was recently featured on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition which is chronicling stories from Main Street America.  You can listen to the archived story at http://tinyurl.com/fendernpr2009.  

In Clouds Above and on Earth Below: Feasting with the Saints

"Cloud of Witnesses iii" by Ugandan artist Eria "Sane" Nsubuga, 

Mixed Media, 2007.

"For all the saints..." began the service this morning marking the Feast of All Saints' on the Kalendar.  We named the faithful departed in 2009 during the Mass and we gave thanks for the on-going witness of all the "little S-s" saints in our daily lives.  We even had a baptism today, shocking only that this parish would opt to actually follow a rubric on this topic!  Anyways, I digress.

Feasting with the Saints.  I can just imagine that now.  My grandparents, cousins, and other friends whom have died and risen in glory with Christ above, eating their fill, celebrating the goodness of God and God's creation.  I wonder, especially today, what they are saying to themselves about me.  "Oh Lord, there goes Chad again..."

One thing that I miss with newer parish churches is the lack of a parish cemetery.  In most parish churches in England, you cannot take one step without coming in contact with a memorial stone or engraving of some kind.  There's even something commemorating whenever the Sovereign comes inside!  You cannot help but notice the great cloud of witnesses in those bastions of stone and glass.  And yet in the States, we tend to want to keep our dead as far away from us as possible.  "Why would you want to clutter up a nice church yard with grave stones?"  Now to be fair, there are plenty of churches here that have cemeteries--most tend to be historic though.  Many have adopted columbaria as a method of depositing the ashes of loved ones into hermetically sealed containers in a church wall somewhere.  But I wonder why we fear the dead so much?  We don't even like to say the word "death" or "dying."  Instead, many opt for the politeness found in "passing away," and the like.  Our culture fears death, the one certain thing that we can count on that never requires its software to be updated.

For me, I've decided, I want to be cremated and scattered.  No need for a marker or stone anywhere.  "Why clutter up the earth with something that has passed away?" I had to get that one in there.  But seriously, I'm a firm believer in being "green" on this issue.  I just see it as a waste to go through the expense and hassle of it all.  Death is certain, and yet death is not the end.  Resurrection in Christ is our hope and it is what I look forward to follow.  Nothing will be left behind, all of creation is moving towards its fulfillment in the Trinity.  You can count on that.  

From Merton

I recently came across this excerpt from Thomas Merton and I wanted to share it.  As someone who continues to grow in my own monastic calling and in contemplative prayer, I deeply appreciate silence. Peace to you this day.

O my brother[s and sisters], the contemplative is [not] the [person] who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply [those] who have risked their mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say, in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist.

The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, [abides with] you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing ever found in books or heard in sermons.

The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that, if you dare to penetrate your own silence and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God through you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union, in the depths of your own heart, of God’s spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and [God] are in all truth One Spirit. I love you, in Christ.

 Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love, 157-158

Retreat to the Smokies

This past weekend, several seminarian families (with kids in tow) journeyed to the Great Smoky Mountains in Western North Carolina during our Fall Reading Break.  The autumn colors were brilliant and the views simply holy.  Above is the view from our deck at the mountain house.  We were spoiled.  All six children--all under the ages of 3--managed to be good and allow their parents some down time, not too much mind you.

There was every color imaginable on display in the mountains.  Sewanee is only now beginning to change in color.  Fall is certainly my favorite time to be here!