Dissolution: how revolutions consume their own children

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Historical novels are not my favourite genre, as I tend to spend too much time looking for anachronisms, but C.J. Sansom seems to get around that. I first read his Winter in Madrid, set in the Spanish Civil War, and then [boo:Dominion], which is a kind of “what if” novel — what if the UK had surrendered to Germany after the fall of France in 1940?

Dissolution is set in the period of the English Reformation in the 1530s, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, and is a combination of historical novel and whodunit, a genre popularised by Umberto Eco‘s The Name of the Rose.

Ruins of an English monastery

In Dissolution Thomas Cromwell, who masterminded the English Reformation, sends a commissioner to the monastery of St Donatus at Scarnsea on the Sussex coast to arrange for its dissolution and surrender. The commissioner is murdered, so Cromwell sends another, Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer, to continue the work of the first one and also to investigate the murder.

I ought to know something about the English Reformation, but I don’t know as much as I should. When I studied church history at St Chad’s College, Durham, in the 1960s, it formed quite a large part of the syllabus, but it was not a period that particularly interested me. I was more interested in the missionary period, which, where historical novels are concerned, is covered by Melvyn Bragg‘s Credo. I suppose that’s why I became a missiologist rather than a church historian.

Reading Dissolution reminded me of why I did not much like reading about that period of history, whether church or secular history. There is no doubt that the English Church wanted reforming, but the cure was worse than the disease, and C.J. Sansom brings this out clearly in his novel. None of the characters is particularly admirable. The protagonist, Matthew Shardlake, suffers from a physical deformity, which seems to reflect a spiritual deformity as well; he is naive and ambitious. He does have a sense of justice, but when push comes to shove, it makes way for ambition and political correctness every time.

One of the things I did know about Thomas Cromwell was that he ordered the clergy to keep registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, which I have found useful for family history, among other things, but most of what he did seems to have been bad, and motivated by greed and ambition. I have little reason to suppose that C.J. Sansom got his character very wrong. So the book gives something of the flavour of the times, even if the actual events it describes are fictitious.

But like much historical writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, it also carries “the burden of the present”. George Orwell‘s Animal Farm is an allegory, a parable about how revolutions consume their own children. It is set in a differnt period, and uses different literary techniques, but the same message comes through. The dissolution in the title of the book is not merely about the dissolution of the monasteries as institutions, but the dissolution of the people whose lives are disrupted in the process, and the dissolution of the English Reformation into a cesspool of corruption and greed.

The Pilgrimage of Grace

There was a protest against the dissolution of the monasteries, called The Pilgrimage of Grace, which tunred into a rebellion. It was defeated after its leaders were given a safe conduct to travel to London to negotiate, and were then brutally murdered.

And so there is much in it that reminds me of the dissolution of South African democracy, twenty years after its inauguration, where the high ideals with which we began have dissolved into patronage, greed and corruption. Apartheid was South Africa’s Lent, 1994 was its Easter, the following 7 years were its Bright Week, and now it is winding down.

The character in the book for whom I felt most sympathy was the exiled Carthusian, Jerome, who was regarded as mad and dangerous, but retained something of the original monastic ideals, and his integrity.

For more on this, and its relevance to our times, see Notes from a Common-place Book: Philip Jenkins on the Reformation, both Protestant and Islamic

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Treasures old and new — synchroblog on new monasticism

I’ve written quite a bit about “new monasticism” over the last few years, and thought that for this synchroblog I would write about it as the history of an idea, in the sense of my personal experience of the idea.

One could write a history of the idea in general, but that would need a book, perhaps of several volumes, rather than a blog post. So I’ll concentrate on the idea of the new monasticism as I’ve encountered it, through reading, or discussion or trying to live it, or observing other people trying to live it.

The “new monasticism” of the title has gone under several names at various times, and “new monasticism” is probably the least useful, though it does seem to be the one most commonly used right now. Others I’ve heard are: Christian communities, Christian communes, intentional communities, semi-monastic communities, and there are several more.

What is common to all these is the idea of Christians living in a community wider than the family, often with a particular purpose of mission or ministry.

When I was a university student in 1964, two things got me thinking about such communities. One was getting the Catholic Worker newspaper, which had news of communities associated with the Catholic Worker movement. Another was attending an Anglican lay conference.

I was then an Anglican, and the Anglican Bishop of Natal invited people to attend an annual lay conference, held at a church school during the holidays. The conference was by invitation only, and a person was only ever invited to attend once. I had attended student conferences that ran on a similar format, but this was different. There were people of all ages, social classes and races there; not just students, but workers, teachers, housewives and others. For a few days we followed the rhythm of a community life, sleeping in school dormitories, having meals together, worshipping together. That was not unusual, but some of us began talking about the possibility of doing something like that for a longer period, of having a core community at a place where one could have courses in things like Christian non-violent action, similar to the Catholic worker communities.

It was just a dream or a vision, but it wouldn’t go away, and I kept on thinking about it. The following year I visited the Charles Johnson Memotial Hospital at Nqutu in Zululand with some friends. It was an Anglican mission hospital, and the medical superintendent, Dr Anthony Barker, showed us round. Most of the staff lived as a community, not only working, but eating and praying together as well. We were impressed. It felt like a place that would almost be nice to be sick in. There was a community dedicated to a Christian healing ministry. A few years later it was nationalised by the government, and was bureacratised and institutionised, but in the 1960s and early 1970s it was a beacon of hope because of the Christian community at its core.

Dr Maggie and Dr Anthony Barker, Charles Johnson Memorial Hospital, Nqutu, Zululand 1965

A few years later an opportunity came to put the vision into practice, and I was myself part of such an experiment in Christian communal living in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We called ourselves the Community of St Simon the Zealot, in Windhoek, Namibia.

Dr Anthony Barker was an indirect influence on this. He spoke at student conferences, and suggested that students, after they graduated, and before going on to make their fortunes, should spend a year or two using their skills to improve the lot of the poor by working in such places as church hospitals. A friend of mine, Dave de Beer, did just that. After graduating with his Bachelor of Commerce degree he went to St Mary’s Hospital at Odibo on the Namibia/Angola border as hospital secretary, getting the finances of the hospital in order. He was only there a week when the government withdrew his permit and kicked him out. He stopped in Windhoek on his way home to say goodbye to the bishop, but the bishop urged him to stay, saying that the diocese needed some help with its finances too. Dave stayed.

Over the next couple of months he became aware of the mission opportunities in a town like Windhoek, and wrote a short paper on it, The city: a mission field, in which he outlined a vision of a missional community, living together, with some working in secular jobs, and others in full-time mission service. Some would form a permanent community, but others could join them for a short time. He sent this to several friends for comment. A few months later, having been fired by the Anglican bishop of Natal, I went to join him, and we started the Community of St Simon the Zealot.

The local Anglican bishop, Colin Winter, was quite supportive to start with, and made a house available. We opened a joint building society account in the name of the Community, which we would use for living expenses. Dave worked in the diocesan office, I got a job with the department of water affairs, and after being fired from that, with the local newspaper. In the evenings and at weekends we would lead Bible study groups, services in road workers or mining camps, teach catechism classes and so on. Some students from South Africa came to join us for the summer vac. One had a vac job, and so contributed to the common fund. Two others didn’t have jobs, but helped with cleaning the house and cooking.

But a problem arose. Dave and I saw it as important that we should have daily prayers in the community. As it was an Anglican community we thought we should be doing Anglican morning and evening prayer together at the house. But the bishop wanted and expected us to attend services at the cathedral, a couple of miles away. He saw Dave and me as members of his staff, and regarded our desire to pray together as a community as “divisive” and even elitist. We thought that common prayer was essential to the life of a Christian community. The result was that Dave and I went to services at the cathedral, while the rest of the people in the house stayed in bed. It became more like a common lodging house than a community. Our community worship was reduced to agape meals that we held about once a fortnight, usually with a number of people invited from outside as well.

I won’t go into the full history of the Community of St Simon the Zealot here, but just mention that as one of the main problems, and we were not the only ones to discover it. In other circumstances too I have discovered that bishops do not understand the needs of communities or monasteries, and the relationship between a community, whether a monastery or some other form of intentional community, and the local church, whether diocese or parish, needs to be carefully worked out.

Among other things we published (together with friends in other places) a magazine called Ikon, and a newsletter, The Pink Press (it was printed on pink duplicating paper). These we exchanged with other publications worldwide through The Cosmic Circuit, which had about 60 participating publications, described as “underground, upground and overground”. It was an amazing mixture of what today would be called ‘zines, small-press publications usually dedicated to some or other vision of an alternative society. Among them was Communes, published by a neopagan community in Wales, but with news of all kinds of experiments in communal living, religious and secular.

The Community of St Simon the Zealot came to an end in 1972 when Dave de Beer and I were deported from Namibia (along with Bishop Colin Winter and another member of the community, Toni Halberstadt).

A couple of years later I came across the Children of God when I was in Durban North, in the Anglican parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields. They lived in communes which they called “colonies”, spread all over the world. They arose from the Jesus freaks of the 1960s, and were led by Dave Berg, who called himself Moses David, or just Mo.

They were fairly typical of the Jesus freaks of the early 1970s. I first encountered them when walking down a street in central Durban, where one of them handed me a copy of their publication New Nation News. He said they were living in a commune in Durban North, not far from where I lived, and so a couple of weeks later I went with a friend to see them there. There were six of them, a married couple with a baby, and four singles. Three were from the USA, the other three South Africans. One of the US ones, Shemaiah, had been at the University of California at Berkeley, where the Jesus freak movement started. They all took biblical names. They were certainly a missional community, and spent their whole time witnessing, out in the streets or on the beach, distributing literature and talking to people. They said time was precious, and though there were lots of good things one could do with one’s time, like reading the Bible, witnessing was the best use of time. They lived on donations they received.

We stayed for a meal with them, and they told us more about their life. They gave us lists of Bible verses that they memorised (from the King James version). New Nation News was a monthly publication, and they published a local version, but much of the material was common to all the “Colonies” around the world. They lived on money that was given to them as they went around witnessing. They pooled it, and used it for rent, food, clothes etc. They showed us their handbook, which was not public, but something they just used among themselves, called Revolution for Jesus — how to DO it. It was exactly the kind of thing I had dreamed of doing at the lay conference ten years previously. In addition to the public literature there were also “Mo letters” from the founder, mostly addressed to the members of the “colonies”. The members we met referred enthusiastically to the film Brother Sun, Sister Moon on the life of Francis of Assissi, which they said was what they were trying to achieve.

At the first encounter the Children of God seemed an almost idyllic community. They seemed to have achieved what we had failed to achieve in Namibia. We invited them to speak to our youth groups and Sunday School classes at St Martin’s.

But among them too things began to go wrong. Moses David became increasingly authoritarian and erratic, and as time went on, his “Mo letters” of instructions became stranger and stranger. Eventually he came up with the idea of using kinky sex to proselytise (one can hardly call it evangelism). Members of the “colonies” of the Children of God were urged to become “hookers for Jesus” and engage in what they called “flirty fishing”. But before they had reached that stage, we had moved from Durban North to Utrecht, and lost touch with them.

There were many hippie communes in that period (the late 1960s and early 1970s). Some, like the Durban colonly of the Children of God, were Christian. Others were secular, others New Age, others Neopagan. Some were Hindu in inspiration, modelled on ashrams in India. The Christian ones were very much like the communities called “new monastic” communities today.

It was also the heyday of the charismatic renewal movement, in which many manifestations of the Holy Spirit that had hitherto been more or less confined to Pentecostals began appearing in non-Pentecostal churches. This movement also gave rise to “intentional communities” of various kinds. One of the better-known ones, through their publications, was the Word of God community in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

There is an indirect Orthodox connection to these in a book written by Michael Harper, describing some of these communities. His book A new way of living is about communities that developed in an Episcopal (Anglican) parish in Texas, USA, though it appears that these communities no longer exist. Michael Harper is now an Orthodox priest in Britain, though he was not Orthodox at the time he wrote the book. The Church of the Redeemer in Houston was typical of many downtown parishes where people had moved away from the neighbourhood of the church to outlying suburbs, but continued to worship there. Poorer people moved into the neighbourhood, but the church was not reaching them. Then when the parish was affected by the charismatic renewal, people started buying houses near the church and moving back into the neighbourhood, living in intentional communities, and having an outreach to their neighbours.

It seems that charismatic intentional communities in Western churches also flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, but then died out. Does all the talk of a “new monasticism” indicate a revival of interest — or is this just old hippie nostalgia?

A related idea was that of the missiologist Ralph Winter, who spoke of two redemptive structures: the local church and the missionary band, which he called “modality” and “sodality”. Bearing in mind that for 1000 years, from about 500-1500 most Christian mission had been monastic, Winter suggested that the missionary band required a special commitment over and above the local church. When Protestants abandoned monasticism in the 16th century, they did virtually no mission, and it was only with the formation of missionary societies in the 18th century that Protestants became active in mission. The missionary societies had a degree of intentionality not found in the local church.

In addition to monks, in the Roman Catholic Church missionary orders developed. Monks devoted themselves primarily to prayer, but the missionary orders were formed for the purpose of mission. When the religious life revived among Anglicans in the 19th century, many of their religious orders too were intentionally devoted to mission. The Kelham fathers even called themselves the Society of the Sacred Mission, incorporating “mission” into their name.

In the Orthodox Church there is no equivalent of the “orders” that one finds in the Roman Catholic Church, or even among the Anglicans, with several monasteries or religious houses grouped together under a common rule and name. Each monastery is more or less independent, with its own abbot (hegumen). A monasetry may start daughter monasteries, but eventually these will become independent. But there are also Brotherhoods that gather people from different places for a particular task, and the tasks of these brotherhoods may include mission. They are not monastic, but they do reflect Ralph Winter’s “sodality” structure.

The Orthodox brotherhoods and Protestant missionary societies do not necessarily have the feature of communal living that one finds in the Christian communes or “new monasticism”, but they do share the characteristic of intentionality. People decide to join them to identify with their purposes. Community living takes the idea one stage further.

My own view is that whether one calls this urban monasticism or new monasticism or anything else, at least in the Orthodox world it needs a solid foundation in traditional Orthodox monasticism.

Would someone like Moses David have gone off the rails (and derailed the entire “Children of God” movement) if he had had an Orthodox spiritual father from a traditional monastery? The trouble was that he was trying to be “spiritual father” to hundreds of “colonies” of the Children of God thoughout the world, but he had no spiritual father of his own. In Orthodox monasticism spiritual fathers (and mothers) are not on their own. There have been some charismatic intentional communities, including some in South Africa, where the leaders have become quite abusive. Dave Berg is by no means the only one.

Eventually people in the charismatic renewal movement realised that something was missing. Some of them gave a name to it; they called it “covering”, or “discipleship”. But who was to cover the coverers, or disciple the disciplers? The maverick authoritarian leaders didn’t take too kindly to coming under authority themselves, and I suspect that that played a role in the “charismatic burn-out” of the 1980s.

But the answer has been there all along in traditional Orthodox monasticism. And some Protestants discovered this answer. Fr Jack Sparks, editor of Right on, one of the Christian underground magazines of the 1970s, published by the Christian World Liberation Front, came to Orthodoxy. Not that Orthodox monasticism is idyllic either — Fr Ephrem, a monk of Simopetra monastery on the Holy Mountain, said that more people go to hell from monasteries than from anywhere else. But at least Orthodox monasticism is aware of the dangers, and has had over a thousand years of experience, and teaches about the dangers of losing one’s nipsis (watchfulness).

So I think a new monasticism or an urban monasticism might be a good idea, but it needs to be backed by traditional monasticism is it is to develop in a healthy way.

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This post is part of a synchroblog on the new monasticism.

Here are the other contributions to this month’s synchroblog:

Phil Wyman at Square No More: SynchroBlog on Neo-Monasticism
Beth at Until Translucent
Adam Gonnerman at Igneous Quill
Jonathan Brink at JonathanBrink.com
Sally Coleman at Eternal Echoes
Bryan Riley at at Charis Shalom
Cobus van Wyngaard at My Contemplations
Mike Bursell at Mike’s Musings
David Fisher at Cosmic Collisions
Alan Knox at The Assembling of the Church
Sam Norton at Elizaphanian
Erin Word at Decompressing Faith
Sonja Andrews at Calacirian

To see what others are saying or have said about the new monasticism, click on the Technorati tag here: new monasticism.

Blessed are the foolish — foolish are the blessed

The foolishness of God is wiser than men, the weakness of God is stronger than men… For God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong (I Cor 1:25, 27).

In this chapter of the New Testament we come across one of the most countercultural aspects of Christianity. The original Greek says that the moron of God is wiser than men. For the world, for “mainstream” culture, “moron” is an insult, something undesirable. No one in their right mind wants to be moron. But St Paul turns worldly values on their head.

What the world despised, Christians regard as badges of honour. One of the taunts that the world often uses is “loser” (though, ironically, many of those who use it often spell it “looser”). But Christians follow a loser. As St Paul is at pains to point out, there is nothing that looks more like a loser than Christ crucified. For that reason, any Christian who uses the word “loser” as a taunt for others has quite simply forgotten who his Lord is.

The Beatitudes, too, show how the Christian faith turns the values of the world upside down. “Blessed are the meek”, but for the world, “Blessed are the pushy, for they shall get what they want”.

In recent years there has been a tendency for some to overlook this aspect of the Christian faith. There are some Christian groups that unashamedly appeal to the opposite tendency, going so far as to call their churches Winners Chapel, to give but one example.

In the Orthodox Church, perhaps as a reminder from God that we should not be seduced into that kind of worldly thinking, there is a whole class of saints called “Fools for Christ” (in Greek, sali, in Russian, yurodivi). Sali is one of the words that means “blessed”; and it is also the origin of the English word “silly”. The sali are blessed fools, silly fools.

In our age, “moron” is a term of abuse, as are similar terms like “loser”, “cretin” and others. In a more faith-filled age (which the secularists might call “credulous and superstitious”), however, these were often terms of awe and respect. “Cretin” is derived from the French word “chretienne”, meaning a Christian. An important part of being Christian is remembering that God chose the weak and foolish things of the world, and indeed chose to become weak and foolish himself, as unconvincing in appearance as the crucified.

The calling to be a holy fool is often found within monasticsm, which is itself a call to a countercultural life. The monk renounces much that the world regards as valuable — riches, fame and power. Yet even within monastic society, power struggles can make themselves felt, and in such a situation the holy fool can call the community back to its original vision and purpose.

One of the most revered of the holy fools is St Basil of Moscow. St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, with its fantastic domes, is an international symbol of the city. It was built, not to honour St Basil, but in honour of a victory by Tsar Ivan the Terrible over the Tatars. Basil denounced the Tsar for his bloodthirsty battles and oppressive rule as he wandered half-naked around the Kremlin, but when he died he was buried in the Cathedral, and the people went to his tomb there to seek his prayers, and eventually it became known as St Basil’s Cathdral. Jim and Nancy Forest have written a good description of St Basil and other fools for Christ.

Many of the holy fools have appeared mentally unbalanced, But Leon Bloy, a French writer, when asked about this, replied:

Balance? The devil take it! He has indeed taken it long ago! I am a Christian who accepts the full consequences of my Christianity. What happened at the Fall? The entire world, you understand, with everything in it, lost its balance. Why on earth should I be the one to keep mine? The world and mankind were balanced as long as they were held fast in the arms of the Absolute. What the average man means by balance is the most dangerous one-sidedness into which a man can fall… the renunciation of his heavenly birthright for the pottage of this sinful world (see Pilgrims of the Absolute).

The theme is also found in such things as the Fool card of the Tarot, but I have already blogged about that in more detail in Notes from underground: On Tarot Cards and also at Notes from underground: Morehead’s Musings: Symbolic Countercultures and Rituals of Opposition, so I will not say much more about that aspect of it here.

There has been some discussion about whether the fools for Christ were really mad, or were only simulating madness, to teach a lesson. Probably it was a little of both, and some were more mad than others.

John Saward, in his book Perfect fools makes a couple of interesting points. One is that the holy fools flourished in periods when the Church was comfortable and at ease. They were quite rare in times when the church was being persecuted. It seems that God called more people to holy folly in periods when the Church was in danger of being overwhelmed by respectability.

The second point is that fewer fools for Christ were recognised by the Church in the modern era. After the Enlightenment, there were far fewer fools for Christ canonised in the Orthodox Church. Perhaps this was because of modernity, which Peter the Great sought to impose on the Russian Orthodox Church by suppressing the patriarchate and controlling the Holy Synod through a Procurator appointed by himself. Whatever the reason, one of the very few fools for Christ recognised from this period in Russia was St Xenia of St Petersburg.

Perhaps one reason for this is the emaphasis modernity placed, especially in the Enlightenment period, on the importance of humnan reason. People may have had a greater horror of madness, or even the appearance of madness. Losing one’s reason was no joke. And again, perhaps postmodernity opens the way for the fool for Christ again.

Some, though not all of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyes and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

In parts of that, one can see echoes of the lives of fools for Christ, but perhaps more important, it reflects a society that might be more open to the message of the fools for Christ.

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This post is part of a synchroblog on God’s calling and choice of what is weak and foolish. Here are links to the other Synchroblog contributions on this topic:

• Fools Rush In by Sonja Andrews
• The Power of Paradox by Julie Clawson
• That Darn Ego by Jonathan Brink
• Won’t Get Fooled Again by Alan Knox
• Strength on the Margins by Igneous Quill
• Foolish Heart by Erin Word
• A Fool’s Choice by Cindy Harvey
• Quiet Now, God’s Calling by Jenelle D’Alessandro
• Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right… By Mike Bursell
• Ship of Fools by David Fisher
• Hut Burning for God by Father Gregory
• God Used This Fool by Cobus van Wyngaard
• Fool if you think its over by Paul Walker
• Blessed are the foolish — foolish are the blessed by Steve Hayes
• What A Fool I’ve Been by Reba Baskett
• My foolish calling by Lisa
• God uses foolish things Sally’s journey
• Blessed Andrew Fool for Christ by Mimi
• The holy fool by Phil Whyman
• St Xenia, Fool for Christ by Elevation Perception

Abandoned places of empire

In the Emergent Africa blog Carl Brook wonders about one of the twelve marks of a new monasticism, which is relocation to the abandoned places of empire.

What does it mean, and what does “empire” mean in that context?

I suppose the simplest thing might be to ask the people who created the “new monasticism” web site what they meant by it, and how they understood the phrase. But it might be more fun to let one’s imagination run loose, because it evokes all kinds of romantic images, for all sorts of people. For example, some people have a fascination with the abandoned places of the Soviet empire. I saw many such places in Albania a few years ago, most notably the abandoned steel works at Elbasan, and the hundreds of abandoned concrete bunkers on the hillsides, monuments to the war psychosis of Enver Hoxha, where it could be said that the Orthodox Church has indeed relocated to the abandoned places of empire.

Another image that it evokes is the book From the Holy Mountain: a journey in the shadow of Byzantium by William Dalrymple. Dalrymple is a journalist and travel writer, and his journey follows in the footsteps of two monastic pilgrims centuries earlier. Western Christians are fond of talking about “The Constantinian Era”, but often fail to realise that for many Christians the “Constantinian era” lasted less than 300 years, and ended in the 7th century. In AD 578 John Moschos and a companion set off on a similar journey, to monasteries of the Near and Middle East. Dalrymple follows them, but few of the monasteries they visited still exist. They are among the “abandoned places of empire”.

There is also a fictional recording of an attempt to relocate to the “abandoned places of empire” in Rose Macaulay’s novel The towers of Trebizond.

These are just a few of the images evoked by the phrase “abandoned places of empire”. And perhaps everyone will have their own images so that there can be many more.

When linked with monasticism, it might be given another twist, and it could be understood as being places outside the ekoumene — the wild and uninhabited places of the earth. The early monks left the cities and went to the deserts, and lived in caves and ruins, which could likewise be seen as abandoned places of empire. Could a neo-monastic community take root in the ruins of the steelworks at Elbasan?

But the phrase can also be seen to have a metaphorical sense. Abandoned places, not just in the sense of being uninhabited, but, from a Christian point of view, being culturally alienated from the Christian faith, and perhaps abandoned by the Church. At least one Christian writer sees it as referring to the inner city, which has often been abandoned by the Church. There is an example in Johannesburg, where the Orthodox Cathedral of SS Constantine and Helen (diagonally opposite the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King) has a congregation that has relocated to the outer suburbs, and commutes to the church on Sundays almost to a foreign country. Around the church are the inner-city suburbs of Joubert Park, Hillbrow, Doornfontein and Bertrams, cosmopolitan, with a high proportion of illegal immigrants, many of whom earn their living through crime, while others are poor and exploited. The church was built by immigrants of an earlier generation, whose grandchildren have prospered and moved to places of green lawns and swimming pools (and often gated communities, ghettoes surrounded by electric fences, like medieval castles).

Perhaps another book, written by another Orthodox priest (though before he was Orthodox), could give a hint of how to minister in such a situation. The book is A new way of living by Father Michael Harper, and describes how an Episcopalian parish in Houston, Texas developed urban Christian communities as members of the church began a reverse migration from the outer suburbs to the inner city to form urban communities. This too could be seen as relocating to the abandoned places of empire.

But if the Christian Church has physically abandoned geographical areas of cities, there is also a kind of cultural abandonment. A conservative blog for peace gives an example of reality TV shows, where sometimes the reality gets too real.

One of the first of these “reality” TV shows was Big Brother. There was a great deal of media hype about Big Brother before the first series here, and it struck me that the very concept was immoral. It was not “reality” — it was a public experiment on live human beings, encouraging manipulation of others for public entertainment.

I’d like to have seen the result of introducing a hesychast monk into that setup.

But even if one had applied they would probably have been rejected, because the producers of such shows are not looking for people who reject the values of the virtual reality they are trying to create for voyeurist entertainment. But why not?

In the ancient world, the equivalent of reality TV was the gladiatorial games, where gladiators fought wild animals or each other for the entertainment of the public. But they didn’t seem to object to having unarmed Christians facing the wild animals, on occasion.

Do reality TV shows create or reflect the values of our societies and cultures? And which aspects of culture constitute the abandoned places of empire?

Utopian communities – synchroblog

Utopia has been a recurring theme in literature since Thomas More, an English lawyer and statesman, wrote his book with that title in the early 16th century. He described an island with an almost perfect society of peace, justice and freedom.

Many have had such a vision of a perfect society, but acknowledge that no actual examples can be found in the everyday world. Utopian literature was revived in the 19th century, with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, a satire on nineteenth-century Britain, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia Limited, in which the inhabitants of a remote island believe that the best way to achieve perfection is to turn their country into a joint stock company on the British model. I don’t think it has been performed much since Margaret Thatcher came to power.

In the nineteenth century there were also a number of “utopian communities” — groups of people who, while recognising that a perfect society could be found nowhere on earth, nevertheless tried to criate a microcosm that would reflect this vision.

In this sense, the Christian Church has always been utopian.

In the Christian vision, the perfect society is the Kingdom of God, a kingdom that is “not of this world” in the sense that there are no borders, nowhere you can show your passport to get in. But the Church itself is to be an ikon, an image of the Kingdom.

This applies even to the Christian family, as Father Alexander Schmemann points out in his book For the life of the world. The crowns in the Orthodox marriage service are symbols that the husband and wife are to be king and queen to each other in a little kingdom that reflects the heavenly kingdom. The vision may be lost, perhaps even in a single night. But the fact remains that every Christian family is a utopian community, trying to reflect in this world something that is not of this world.

Immigrants to new countries often gather for celebrations to remember their distant homeland. In many parts of the world one finds Caledonian Societies to gather emigrant Scots, Hellenic Communities for the Greek diaspora and so on. In a way Christian Churches are like this, in that Christians gather to remember a distant homeland. The difference is that those who gather to remember earthly homelands remember a place they have come from. Christians gather to remember a place they are going to.

As Peter Abelard put it once in a hymn:

Now in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high
We for that country must yearn and must sigh
Seeking Jerusalem, dear native land
Through our long exile on Babylon’s strand.

Some Christians, however, have found that the weekly gatherings of the Christian community are not enough. The “little kingdom” of the Christian family is not enough. They have looked for a more permanent expression. And so there have been monastic communities, which are, in the sense in which we are discussing it, utopian communities par excellence, trying to live the life of the heavenly kingdom on earth. As one monk put it, monasteries are the lungs of the church. In this world we breathe the polluted air of a broken and sinful world, but in the monasteries we breathe the pure air of heaven.

Christians are essentially eccentric, and Christian communities are eccentric communities. Eccentricity is another way of expressing the idea of utopia. It is having a different centre.

In his novel Perelandra C.S. Lewis conveyed the idea of eccentricity by describing eldila (angels) as appearing to people looking at them with earthly eyes as standing at a slant. When we stand, a line from our head through our feet, if extended, points to the gravitational centre of the earth. But the eldila are aligned on a different centre, and so to earth-bound mortals they appear slanted.

The “utopian” theme of this Synchroblog was inspired by an earlier post by John Morehead: Morehead’s Musings: Searching for Utopia, and it has also been discussed a little in the Christianity and society discussion forum. John’s post is a good introduction to the theme, and he includes some examples of utopian intentional communities.

Communes or intentional communities are not necessarily utopian. Many of them have quite mundane aims. To qualify as “utopian” a community needs to have an intention not merely to live together, but to create or express a way of life that is different from that of the society around them, or at least based on different values. A utopian community must be, in some sense, countercultural — in other words, eccentric.

I’ve written about this before, then, as now, inspired by something that John Morehead wrote: Notes from underground: Morehead’s Musings: Symbolic Countercultures and Rituals of Opposition, so I won’t reiterate the whole thing here. The main point then was that the so called new monasticism needs to be supported by and linked to the old monasticism.

There have been many more dreams and visions of utopian communities than there have been actual examples. We need the dreams and visions, perhaps, but there is also the danger that Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns of in his book Life together:

Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream… He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and ernest and sacrificial.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions the visionary ideal of a community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself. Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ long before we entered into common life with them, we enter that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients.

Other synchrobloggers:

• Nudity, Innocence, and Christian Distopia at Phil Wyman’s Square No More
• Utopia Today: Living Above Consumerism at Be the Revolution
• Nowhere Will Be Here at Igneous Quill
• A This-Worldly Faith at Elizaphanian
• Bridging the Gap at Calacirian
• The Ostrich and the Utopian Myth at Decompressing Faith
• Being Content in the Present at One Hand Clapping
• Eternity in their Hearts by Tim Abbott
• Relationship – The catch-22 of the Internet Utopia at Jeremiah’s Blog
• U-topia or My-topia? at On Earth as in Heaven
• A SecondLife Utopia at Mike’s Musings
• Mrs. Brown and the Kingdom of God at Eternal Echoes
• John Morehead at John Morehead’s Musings

From communist youth to Orthodox monks

Most of us have read in the newspapers and seen graphic images on television of the violence and destruction of the Wars of the Yugoslav succession, when Yugoslavia tore itself apart (often with outside assistance) during the 1990s.

But even in the midst of the destruction, there were signs of hope, as some, at least, pursued more preaceful ideals. Among these is a new generation of Orthodox monks. They grew up under the communist system, indoctrinated at school with atheism, and now have turned to a life of prayer and repentance.

There is much talk nowadays, especially in “emerging church” circles, about a “new monasticism”, but in the former Yugoslavia the youth have opted for a restoration of the old monasticism.

And now the man who has been at the centre of the monastic revival in Serbia, His Grace Artemije, Bishop of Raska and Prizren, will be visiting South Africa, and will speak on the topic Orthodox monasticism, and the revival of the monastic life in Serbia after communism at St Thomas’s Orthodox Church, Sunninghill Park, Gauteng on Saturday 5th May 2007 at 5:00 pm. If anyone is interested in attending, you will find more information here. Anyone who is interested in Christian monasticism, new or old, is welcome to attend.

How to get there

From Johannesburg, Pretoria, East Rand, West Rand, take the N1 freeway to the Rivonia Road offramp, then turn North towards Leeukop prison. About 2km from the freeway exit the road narrows, and just before it narrows there is a turn-off to the right, and almost immediately one turns to the left, then right again, and the entrance to the church parking is just round the corner. There will be a sign that says “Church Parking” at the gate.

If you have any questions, please use the comment form below.

The vanishing hitchhiker

Phil Wyman has blogged about the vanishing hitchhiker here: Square No More: The Death of Hitchhiking, the Death of Trust?

Phil was talking mainly about the American scene, but I think the same applies here in South Africa, and in lots of other places. As I commented in Phil’s blog, I think an important reason for the death of trust is the increase in vehicle hijacking. Drivers see a hitchhiker and wonder if it is hitchhiker or a hijacker, decide to play it safe and drive on.

And like Phil, I think it’s rather sad.

In my youth I went to a Christian student conference at Modderpoort in the Free State, which must be one of the coldest places on earth (in winter). There was a priory of the Society of the Sacred Mission (an Anglican religious order) there, and one of the SSM Fathers was Victor Ransford. We were told that at one time he hitchhiked halfway round the country with a Christmas tree. One man who gave him a lift said “I wondered if you were Anglican or Roman Catholic, and then when I got close, I knew you were Anglican.”

“How could you tell?” asked Fr Victor.

“By your socks.”

At the same student conference one of the speakers was a member of another Anglican religious order, Brother Roger, of the Community of the Resurrection. He spoke on Pilgrims of the Absolute, and extolled the beat generation vision of a rucksack revolution, of the Dharma bums who would hitchhike from place to place to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out eternity.

I never really realised my ambition to be a Dharma bum, but it is sad to think that it is that much harder for anyone to realise such a vision nowadays, or at least the hitchhiking part of it. But some parts of the vision are still alive. There are people who have a vision of urban monasticism and similar things. In the mean time, let’s pray that the vanishing hitchhiker will reappear.

Notes from underground: A Youth of the Apocalypse

Several months ago I wrote about the Death to the world e-zine here Notes from underground: A Youth of the Apocalypse

Now someone has given me a new link where you can find Death to the World: the last true rebellion on line.

Since I wrote the original, there have also been some new developments in South African monasticism.

Technorati tags: Orthodox monasticism, fools for Christ, new monasticism, punx to monks, Death to the World, Youth of the Apocalypse.

Death to the world lives

Someone has just written to me with this news:

some newly-illumined brothers in USA have received the blessing of Fr Damascene to resume the publication work of DTTW. Details from the editor are shared below:

Subscriptions for Death to the World are $6 for one year. Any additional issues are $2 a piece. You can send money or some kind of Check made out to Death to the World and send it to:

DEATH TO THE WORLD
3505 Cadillac Avenue, G-3
Costa Mesa, United States, California, 92626

I look forward to seeing their own website but in the meantime contact can be made through this address.

The pilgrimage is described in the book Youth of the Apocalypse, and there is more about the Children of the burning heart, punx 2 monks and all.

the monk next door

A link to the only other person on LiveJournal who seems to be interested in urban monasticism

the monk next door

There doesn’t exactly seem to have been a rush to comment here.