How to treat false prophets 1

Divination is a gift of God, and therefore to abuse it, ought to be a punishable imposture. Among the Scythians, where their diviners failed in the promised effect, they were laid, bound hand and foot, upon carts loaded with furze and bavins, and drawn by oxen, on which they were burned to death. Such as only meddle with things subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best they can: but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture?

Michael Montaigne (1533-1592) Essays (1575) ‘Of Cannibals’

We cannot escape the fact the Church of England as we know it came into being because of the will, whims, and cruelties of Henry Tudor, the eighth king of that name. The Church of England is not solely a product of Henry’s need for a divorce, but the gulf between the way the church was in the 1520s and the way the church was in the 1550s is stupendous: the way a church building was laid out, the way in which it was decorated, the language spoken in the church, the legal framework which compelled you to worship, the pattern of the church’s year, even the landscape of the country— all were unimaginably altered.
And this was caused by a loyal, thoughtful, conscientious Catholic: Henry VIII.

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Repent / What if this present were the world’s last night ?

Rabbi ben Eliezer used to say “Repent on the day before you die”. When his pupils asked “How do I know when that is?” he replied “You cannot know, so you’d better repent today”.

Or as Bishop Ken said:

“Redeem thy mis-spent time that’s past.
Live this day as if ‘twere thy last.”

What if this present were the world’s last night ?
Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether His countenance can thee affright.
Tears in His eyes quench the amazing light ;
Blood fills his frowns, which from His pierced head fell ;
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
Which pray’d forgiveness for His foes’ fierce spite ?
No, no ; but as in my idolatry
I said to all my profane mistresses,
Beauty of pity, foulness only is
A sign of rigour ; so I say to thee,
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign’d ;
This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.

John Donne Holy Sonnets No. XIII

Suffering Techniques

We don’t want to make suffering some sort of technique by which we are exalted.

Peter Jamieson, former curate of Charlton Kings, at a POT conference in Selly Oak, November 1995.

“The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England”

There are many myths about the origins of the Church of England, and most of them coalesce around the middle years of the sixteenth century: roughly from the time when Henry VIII began to worry whether he would ever get an air in the 1520s to when his daughter finally saw off the challenge of Presbyterianism to her new “Elizabethan Settlement” of the Church in the 1570s.

Curiously, there are two, almost entirely contradictory myths about this period.

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Loyalty and Tradition

He offers little hope for those who wish to remain loyal to the tradition [of the Church] (which is not to be confused with 19th-century innovations) and at the same time live in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Robert Nowell in the Church Times 18 April 1997 reviewing a book by an ultra conservative RC priest.

The Church and its Spirituality

The Church of England was founded as an international church, whose pervading ethos was the compassionate and humane structure of Benedictinism.

What is worship 3? : The Drawing Presence

It was a Presence, not faith, which drew Moses to the burning bush, and what happened there was a revelation, not a seminar. It was a Presence, not faith, which drew the disciples to Jesus, and what happened then was not an educational program but his revelation to them of himself as the long-promised Anointed One. Their descendants in faith have been adjusting to that change ever since, drawn into assembly by that same Presence, finding there always the troublesome upset of change in their lives of faith to which they must adjust still. Here is where their lives are regularly being constituted and reconstituted under grace.

Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York : Pueblo,c1984), p92

Benedict was a Roman nobleman who lived in the last years of the Roman imperial rule. He was born in about AD 480 and died about 70 years later, shortly after Rome was sacked and destroyed by the Gothic king Totila (546). He lived at the beginning of what used to be called the “dark ages” and what can still be called fairly, the collapse of a particular society. As a young man he had left Rome, shocked by its depravity and licentiousness. At first he lived as a hermit, but gradually his reputation for sanctity and plain good sense spread, and he was asked to become the leader of a number of small communities, who had withdrawn from the world. He eventually withdrew again from the Roman countryside and settled on the top of a steep mountain in the hills south of Rome: Mount Cassino. Here Benedict gathered a community of like-minded men around him, and he drew up a rule of life for them, which came to be known as “The Rule of St Benedict”, the foundational document for the most influential monastic order in Europe: the Benedictines.

Benedict’s character, like the character of the Benedictines themselves:

must be discovered from his Rule, and the impression given there is of a wise and mature sanctity, authoritative but fatherly, and firm but loving. It is that of a spiritual master, fitted and accustomed to rule and guide others, having himself found his peace in the acceptance of Christ.¹

The order spread swiftly throughout Europe, and soon arrived in England. The first Benedictine abbeys were founded by Wilfrid of York at Ripon and Hexham at the end of the 7th cent. The order spread rapidly. As time passed the great cathedrals of England came to be run by a chapter of Benedictine monks: the English clergy (monastic and parochial) were steeped in the ethos of Benedictinism, and even though Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell destroyed the monasteries, the ethos remained.

Rowan Williams has pointed out three key characteristics of Benedict’s ethos²: “(i) what the Rule has to say about the use and the meaning of time, (ii)what the Rule has to say about obedience, and (iii) what the Rule has to say about participation.”

Time is to be carefully structured in community, balanced between work, prayer, community time and rest. The purpose of the monastery is not to produce and neither is it to consume. The monastery is to be sustained, but that sustaining has to be, as it were, sustainable not just on economic grounds, but also to do with humanity and spirituality. We are more than our work.

Second, the monk is to live under a rule of obedience, and this is obedience for a purpose: “being ready to suspend a purely individual will or perception for the sake of discovering God’s will in the common life of the community.” We are better together.

Third, one of the abbot’s responsibilities was to make sure that everyone in the monastery worked in a way that was appropriate to their abilities and to the needs of the community. No one was to be excused boots, just because of their wishes or status: everyone had a contribution to make. We are all responsible for the health of our community.

The Rule of Benedict as lived in monasteries then and now has been called simply “Anglicanism with a structure.” Traits thought to be quintessentially Anglican, such as balance, thorough scholarship, hospitality, and an emphasis on practice rather than abstract theory, all have their origins in the Rule of St Benedict.

Anglicans are living proof that you don’t have to be a monk to be Benedictine.

1. Michael David Knowles, O.S.B. “Benedict of Nursia, Saint” Encyclopædia Britannica Online 2008. [↩]
2. Rowan Williams, ‘Benedict and the Future of Europe’ : Speech at St Anselmo in Rome, Tuesday 21 November 2006. Available online from here. [↩]

Love and Fire

The love of God was powerful enough to set light to a bush in the desert and tender enough not to damage it.

Tom Wilkie, in an article on the scientist Paul Davies, The Independent, May 1995.