Totally Devoted: An Exploration of New Monasticism

By Simon Cross

This book brings together stories of new monasticism in the UK. Totally Devoted: the challenge of the New Monasticism by Simon Cross shows us communities and groups which all, in widely different ways, live as new monastics, seeking God and carrying on the traditions of their forebears in a way fitting for twenty-first century living.

The book features interviews with members of various communities, including among others: The Northumbria Community; Safespace; TOM; EarthAbbey; The Community of Aidan and Hilda; SPEAK; The Catholic Worker Movement; Betel of Britain; L'Arche; The Ashram Community; and hOme.

Author, activist and new monastic, Shane Claiborne had this to say about Totally Devoted

: Every few hundred years, it seems that the Church gets infected by the world around us and we forget who we are called to be. And every few hundred years, there are folks on the fringes of the faith who hear a whisper to leave the materialism and militarism and all the clutter of the culture... and to go to the margins, and the desert and the abandoned places to rethink what it means to be Christian. Here is another piece of evidence that there is a movement once again hearing the ancient whisper of God to repair the Church which is in ruins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authentic Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781850789260

Simon Cross

Simon Cross describes himself- I guess I am a husband, father, friend, believer, doubter, anarchist, reader, writer, listener, washer-upper, shorts-wearer, vegetarian, gardener, joker, music lover, scotland rugby fan, and occasional idiot. I live in Grimsby, where I work as a freelance writer, and consultant to people who want to do business in a more ethical way. I have a particular interest in organic cotton, and environmental and social aspects of international development, which I consider to be intrinsically linked to spirituality. I am interested in the movement which is currently known as New Monasticism and last year I wrote a book about New Monastics in the UK, among whom I dare to count myself. The book should be out in May 2010.

Book preview

TOTALLY DEVOTED

TOTALLY DEVOTED

The challenge of new monasticism

Simon Cross

Copyright © 2010 Simon Cross

16 15 14 13 12 11 10  7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First published 2010 by Authentic Media Limited

Milton Keynes

www.authenticmedia.co.uk

The right of Simon Cross to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-85078-926-0

Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New Inaternational Version Anglicized. Copyright © 1979, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, a division of Hodder Headline Ltd. All rights reserved. ‘NIV’ is a registered trademark of International Bible Society. UK trademark number 1448790

Cover Design by Philip Miles

To Kel, my anamchara, who knows the real

hardship of living in close community

Contents

Preface

PART ONE

1 Babylondon: An Introduction to the Stories of

New Monasticism

2 What’s Old is New Again: The Continuing

History of Monasticism (Part One)

3 The Empire Strikes Back: The Continuing

History of Monasticism (Part Two)

4 Kicking the Habit: Living as New Monastics

5 My Own Personal Jesus: ‘The Monk is Not

Defined by His Task, but by His Desire to

Seek God’

PART TWO

6 Celtech Part One: Fire in the North

7 Celtech Part Two: This Time it's Personal

8 Popery?

9 Emergency on Planet Earth?

10 Shelter from the Storm

11 Communities of Resistance

12 Communities of Reconciliation

13 Townies

14 Back to the Future: Jumping to Conclusions

Endnotes

Websites of Interest

Glossary

Preface

The popularity of books like The Irresistible Revolution and TV shows like The Monastery has made the concept of ‘new monasticism’ fashionable. But new monasticism is a confusing label. It has been applied to a number of groups and individuals who seem at first glance to be not very alike at all. As with all ill-defined phrases it leaves itself open to appropriation by anyone who wishes to find a useful label for their own idea.

The phrase as we use it today comes from a letter written by the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1935. It was popularized in the 1990s by John Skinner, one of the founders of the Northumbria Community. But even prior to that people had been talking about ‘modern monasticism’, ‘lay monasticism’ and other kinds of monasticism, which roughly related to ways people were choosing to live, which bore some kind of relation to the ways of life of the many monastic movements which have been going for the last couple of thousand years. I think the language is important only in so far as it gives us the means to have a conversation, and in this instance it is a conversation about new ways of living which draw upon some ancient practices and philosophies.

In this book I will try and set out some of the context for the concepts of monasticism and ‘religious life’, and then explain how some groups in the UK have been imitating the monastic and religious traditions. In truth there are lots of new monastics in the UK today, some of whom are practically invisible – these invisible ones are quietly adopting a monastic approach to prayer, spending long hours in solitude and devoting that solitude to prayer and contemplation. In adopting this form of life, these invisibles are the new hermits; they may not be in a hut on a mountain, instead they may have a family, even a job, but they are choosing to base their life around a persistent theme of prayer and devotion to God.

The people I have looked at in this book have to be those who are more visible, otherwise, divine guidance aside, I’d never have found them. So I’ve written about some of the communities and groups which exist throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which all, in widely differing ways, live as new monastics. They may be on farms, or on council estates; they may be living together, or widely dispersed; they may be of one church, or from a variety of denominations; they may have banded together around a cause, or for the single purpose of seeking God. I have deliberately attempted to include a broad-ranging selection of communities, which demonstrate something of the breadth of the new monastic movement in the UK today.

New monasticism is one way among many to live an authentic Christian life. In my zeal for my own calling, I sometimes give in to a tendency to eulogize and can make it seem as if this is the only way anyone should live. We know the truth – it isn’t the only way, it is one among many, but I believe it’s an important one. Indeed, monasticism comes into its own at times of crisis and societal upheaval – it brings renewal to the church, and provides a platform for resistance to the weakening of the faith.

It is my hope that in learning about some of the communities included here, you will find yourself encouraged and enthused about the possibility of a new monasticism, for when it is good, it can be the very embodiment of the kingdom of heaven on earth. When it goes wrong, however, we can end up with the opposite.

This book is not a theological work, nor is it an academic textbook – if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ve probably still got time to get your money back. Instead, this is an exploration, necessarily incomplete and flawed, of what is happening in the UK today, which might be described as new monasticism. I’m telling this story through my own words, and the words of others, because in my own way, I’m a tiny part of it.

One issue I feel it is useful to forewarn you of is the problem of language. In the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches there are three forms of intentional community which can conceivably be referred to using the terminology ‘new monasticism’. Firstly, there are monastic communities – these are communities which are confined to a monastery and comprise of monks or nuns. Then there are ‘religious’ communities, which are groups of brothers or sisters who have been sanctioned as an order of the church with a particular charism, or spiritual focus. And finally there are ‘lay’ communities, which are made up of unordained persons, engaged in other professions but participating in some form of religious life.

When talking in terms of new monasticism, one might easily be referring to any of the groups above, for any form of change in the monastic arena might be termed new monasticism. For the purpose of this book, though, I’ve focused mainly upon lay communities, but have also touched upon a few religious communities too. The terminology does get somewhat confused, though, with the distinction between friars (religious) and monks (monastic), for example, often getting muddled – and again by the fact that many lay communities were founded by clergymen or women and contain in their ranks a number of ordained individuals. To further add to the confusion, many of the people involved in new monasticism transcend denominational boundaries; they may be ‘Free Church Charismatics’ or ‘Pentecostal Catholics’ or even ‘emerging Anglicans’. The movement as a whole is an ecumenical one, greatly increasing the possibility of mixed-up language. I hope I haven’t added to the confusion, but perhaps it is inevitable that I have.

Some, or perhaps many, of the groups I refer to wouldn’t ‘self-identify’ as new monastic; in fact, some completely deny that it applies to them. But, as with the confusion over distinctions between monastic, religious and lay communities, it is important to recognize that labels aren’t really what are in question here. What we are really looking for is a way in which we can hear the stories of how Christians are finding inspiration in ancient ways, to enable them in the godly adventure of trying to live authentic Christian lives in today’s society.

PART

ONE

1

Babylondon: An Introduction to the

Stories of New Monasticism

Christianity is a faith based upon stories. Stories of our God, and stories of his people. This book is a story, or a collection of stories, which go together to tell an old tale in a new way. Within this story are a whole load of others which, to mix a few metaphors, we might imagine as a lot of threads being woven together in a complex tapestry of bright colours and unusual textures. Some of the threads are really fine and almost transparent, others are thick and brightly coloured; somehow, the Master Weaver has used each one to construct a magnificent picture, and he is still doing so.

Although it’s tempting to leap straight into inspirational tales of modern groups converging on inner cities, or fervent young people praying through the night, that is not where this story really begins. The first few threads we should look at are a bit older.

The new monasticism

The year is 1938, and a small boat sails through choppy seas to a rugged island off the west coast of Scotland. On board are a strange assortment of men. Some are unemployed Glaswegian dockers, made penniless by the scourge of the Great Depression. Others are Church of Scotland ministers, newly ordained, and preparing for a life in the service of God.

Among them is another man, a baronet by birth, a romantic by nature, and a visionary spiritual leader by profession. The Revd George Fielden MacLeod is on his way to the Island of Iona, a place steeped in history, to perform a God-given task. The legacy of that journey is what we are reflecting upon now, the birth and growth of a diverse movement of a new monasticism in the United Kingdom.

MacLeod’s vision and passion for social justice and spiritual renewal were inspired at least in part by the horrors he had witnessed in the First World War of 1914–18. Having served as a captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he had been awarded the Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre for his bravery in the killing fields of Europe. By the time he took this boat journey, twenty years of reflection upon the horrors he had experienced in Ypres had turned him into a committed pacifist.

Three years and some months prior to this significant sea crossing, a 29-year-old bespectacled German man, an academic and a theologian, as well as being, like MacLeod, a pacifist from a distinguished background, sat at a desk during a visit to London, reflecting prophetically on the horrors he could see in the future of his home nation.

Having lost an elder brother to the horrific violence of the previous war, he had no wish to see his nation descend once again into the nightmare of death and destruction. Alone at his desk, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his surviving brother, Karl Friedrich, that it was his belief that it would take an ‘uncompromising attitude’ of a life lived following Jesus as set out in the Sermon on the Mount, to change the way that the country and indeed the world was headed. This would be, he felt, a ‘sort of new monasticism.’¹

This was no rash use of words; Bonhoeffer had previously written to his friend Erwin Sutz that he felt theology needed to be taught again in ‘monastery-like schools’,² where the Sermon on the Mount would be ‘taken seriously’. And he would later take this thinking forward by building a ‘community of brothers’ at the seminary of Finkenwalde. Indeed, only a couple of months after writing his letter, he spent a week at the home of an English Religious Order called the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield, Yorkshire;³ he also spent time with the Society of the Sacred Mission, in Kelham, Nottinghamshire. It was the ways of life he experienced while visiting these brotherhoods that inspired him as he formed a model for the Finkenwalde community.

That same year, 1935, George MacLeod was also thinking about the training of new recruits to the clergy, and looking at monastic models. In a private paper circulated to a few friends he called for a ‘brotherhood’ within the Church of Scotland for new ministers.⁴ While MacLeod didn’t use the word ‘monastic’ it seems clear that his thoughts were along these lines. And although it was Bonhoeffer who, in this letter to his brother, first put into contemporary writing the concept of a new monasticism, he was certainly not the first to think of such a thing.

Bonhoeffer’s philosophical wrestling with the ways in which change might be effected in his afflicted nation continued until his eventual martyrdom. But while he struggled, another man lay dying.

The sophisticated Berlin-based writer turned Anabaptist missionary Eberhard Arnold would not live to see his radical community, known as the Bruderhof (The Place of Brothers), move to England; his earthly life was to end in Switzerland, although his legacy was to live on. Having founded the Bruderhof movement in 1920, again in the aftermath of the First World War, it had grown hugely from its modest beginnings as a group of student radicals.

By the mid 1930s, they had already been on the receiving end of unwelcome attention from the Nazi hierarchy. It was clear that in their attempts to live out the Sermon on the Mount, the peace-loving Bruderhof were anathema to the Gestapo.

After sending many of their young men away to Switzerland in order to prevent them being forcibly conscripted, the German community of Bruderhof members were eventually overcome by political and military pressure. In 1936, they began to evacuate the remainder of their radical pacifist group to a remote village in the Cotswolds. By 1938, three years after Eberhard Arnold’s death, the whole community had moved to England, having had their German property confiscated by the Nazis.

Some 400 years prior to the founding of the Bruderhof, the original Anabaptists were throwing a spanner in the works of Luther’s Reformation. Refusing to go along with all of his teachings, they instead adopted a more radical path of communal life and pacifism. They insisted most controversially of all, on believers’ baptism for those who had been baptized as infants. For their trouble they were persecuted, and derided by people like Luther⁵ and other reformers like Zwingli⁶ whose supporters spoke of them as the ‘new monastics’ – a label which would have hurt, given the way that monastic institutions were perceived as being the very epitome of the corrupt church at the time. In some ways, though, their detractors were right – the Anabaptists and their predecessors owed a lot to certain forms of monasticism, although Luther, himself a former Augustinian monk, was hardly one to talk.

Back to the 1930s, and specifically May of 1933, when in New York a radical young woman named Dorothy Day was engaging with the challenges of poverty and social inequality in her own way, with the launch of The Catholic Worker newspaper. The thinking behind the paper would soon give rise to a social movement, and in its own way become an important part of the landscape of new monasticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Day was a recent convert to the Catholic Church, having come through the world of radical politics and feminism. In developing a zeal for Christianity, she lost none of her radical edge, going on to engage her beliefs in social justice and equality with her Christian faith.

I think God had put something in the air that year, for in Rome, a teenager named Thomas Merton was experiencing something which would later have a dramatic effect upon his life. Still mourning the recent death of his father, Merton had embarked upon the equivalent of a backpacking trip around Europe, and upon arriving in Rome was struck by the beauty of the religious buildings, and the spirituality he found present in the great city. It was in Rome that Merton visited a Trappist monastery for the first time, and it was there that he realized that he, too, would like to live in that way.⁷

In Holland, a baby boy named Henri Nouwen was no doubt keeping his parents awake at night with the usual noises of infancy. Nobody would have been able to tell at the time that he would also go on to spend time in the quiet of a Trappist monastery, before also becoming part of the story of new monasticism.

The man who was to involve him in that story was only a few years his senior. Born in Canada in 1928, Jean Vanier was just old enough to serve in the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War. His experience at sea was somehow appropriate as he went on to set up L’Arche (the Ark), a pioneering community which would extend love and kindness to some of the most marginalized people in the world.

Inspired by Vanier’s vision of God’s love expressed through community, Nouwen would later become a member of L’Arche, living in community with a number of people – some of whom had learning disabilities – in Toronto until his death in 1996.

Back in 1945, another returning soldier, Bruce Kenrick, had returned from the war to a place at Edinburgh University where he had planned to study medicine. But his plans changed when involvement in the Christian Union persuaded