No broadband?
Instead of reading pages online, open the ones you want in quick succession. Then go offline, call them up with the "History" button (Explorer] or Ctrl+H [Netscape], and read at your leisure

Notes on the Dedicated Life Thoughts on Returning From Abroad by Clement Mullenger SSM

When I was last on leave, Kelham was still a going concern. There were plenty of people about and the chapel and refectory were still in use, the library was intact, and the spacious gardens and grounds were in full fig.

Returning now in 1977 I find marked changes. There is no Kelham and no specific theological work - at least none on a large and organised scale, just as there is no novitiate to speak of.

If it's of any value, here are some reflections on the Society in England which may have something to say about our presence in the Church and in the world generally.

My first point is that the old icon of the Society has been quite rubbed out. The over-painting, the grime, and the accretions of the first half of the 20th century have disappeared and an underlying picture is now discernible.

My second point is that SSM as I first knew it was a very rigid and compartmentalised hierarchy which was structured something like this:

• The top brass  This role seemed to be that of a presidential codifying of responsibilities among servants and brothers. Kelham in its heyday of the late 1930s had certain built-in authoritarian terrors comprising histrionic monologues, directives on notice boards, and a general atmosphere under one roof and round one holy table of a great gulf fixed between them and us.

• The "other professed", usually junior people, were regarded, and had been taught to regard themselves, as pawns in a great and grandiose game which the high-ups presumably understood, but which was far too sublime and complex to be shared with those called on to do the donkey work.

• Novices  They were many in number and were regimented and indoctrinated. Those in authority watched carefully for all the responses of outward conformity in terms of pietistic practice, time spent on knees at night after Compline, and toughness in endurance tests at occupations which were uncongenial to their individual temperament. All of this created a facade behind which a person could, at a receptive and impressionable phase of personal growth, remain basically unaffected and fundamentally unchallenged. Does this account for the enormous numbers of novices between 1935 and 1965 who soon left - or were professed and soon after left?

• Associates  I speak mainly of those who came as students to Kelham. They were the bulk of that house and made its existence possible in terms of finance (people gave subscriptions to keep them there, not us). They did the manual work - they scrubbed, polished, gardened, and cooked. Artistic achievement came from them for they sang, played musical instruments, pointed, sowed, and ran literary clubs. Without the student body the Kelham slogan "theological football" - or cricket or tennis - would have been a mere phrase. And yet, until near the very end they had no voice, no representation in the common life of Kelham. Large as the novitiate was, only a small percentage was able to see through the overlays of the Society's icon enough to want to embrace the underlying vision.

• Residents and Companions   Of these little need be said, except that until the mock Gothic splendours, and the concrete and brick audacities of Kelham were deserted, the Society was too concerned with its own satisfactoriness and permanence to think that communication with people not actually enclosed behind its hedges needed much attention. Nor was there any awareness that (apart from subscriptions) we needed anything of love, sympathy or care from them.

• Those who left In the background, referred to only with gritted teeth, was a large band of former brothers - the best ones, it has been said, who got away.

This may be an exaggerated view. It's mine. I hope it's not entirely off beam. What matters is that while I was once able to hold to it, the situation here in 1977 leaves no room for such a view.

Most basically, we have moved away from an image of "following Christ" in terms of something triumphalist, secure, rigidly structured, world fleeing, pietistic, absolutist. Adjectives could be multiplied but these must suffice.

Our Society came into being because of the Oxford Movement which, on the practical everyday level, meant following Edward Pusey [the 19th-century Tractarian leader in England]. That is, it was largely harking back to the ritual and ceremonial of the Middle Ages, to the niceties of scholasticism, and to Spartan rigours.

Our founder, Herbert Kelly, often mocked it all. "We have beans and we laugh" said Kelly. But very often in his writings, as in his life, he betrayed the pain of trying to substantiate his vision of the Society.

The crunch problem for Kelly concerned authority. Unfortunately for all, it got fobbed off, never really faced, by bitter wrangles about liturgy, and unseemly struggles by big personalities for the exercise of lordship.

It was inevitable that, since we came into being when we did, we got hooked up over religious practice and details of observance. We had, after all, to present a recognisable front to our Puseyite supporters which involved a medieval form of dress, a rigid monastic timetable, strictures about the dangerous vagaries of the human heart, and a host of minute directions on the details of daily life.

Most deleterious of all, it involved a militaristic atmosphere said to derive from Kelly's time at Sandhurst. This got pushed sometimes to fantastic extremes. I remember being enjoined (before Hitler revealed his true colours) to consider myself and the rest of us assembled for the office of Sext in the chapel as "Storm Troopers of God^". Many proposals for mitigating the military aspects of our regime were dismissed as "administratively impossible".

But it's not only the current recall to the true spirit of Jesus, that servant who suffered, which sheds a light on our past unhappiness and our present uncertainties. There is also a challenge in contemporary Christian thought to pay more serious attention to what can be said about who Jesus was. For Kelly the historian, with his huge admiration for Athanasius and of Augustine after him, the figure of Jesus was delineated in terms of the Gospel as explained by the Fathers. This figure was sealed, signed and settled once and for all at Nicaea and the other great councils of the Church.

Yet the fact is that, despite this emphasis, Kelly never wrote nor acted as though that was the end of the matter.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that we of the Society have too often spoken, written, and acted as if Jesus is to be equated with a sort of super Byzantine Emperor at whose nod the whole court of created beings trembles. Part of the confusion and uncertainty among Christians (of whom we are a tiny pocket) is that this absolute attitude has been eroded by new currents of human thought as well as by renewed insights.

The Christian message about how to follow Christ is no longer as cut-and-dried as it was in the pre-Copernican world, or when there were literally inspired Scriptures, an infallible doctrinal magisterium, a rigidly fixed liturgy, and an inviolable code of canon law to regulate faith and morals. Kelly consistently challenged an absolutist attitude to these things, as to many others of the same sort. Yet as a Society we've tended to want, for the direction of the lives we've committed to it, some kind of comparable certitude.

After the Aggiornamento of Vatican II and parallel Anglican confessions typified in recent reports and findings of commissions, such absolutism is not tenable. Yet even now we hanker after it and tend to get gloomy with confusions and conflicts and uncertainties. Traditionalists say how much better it was when everything was cut and dried. They try to put the brakes on, while progressives either exult too much in the situation or try to rush ahead too fast.

These attitudes are present, not only in Christian circles, but everywhere else in the human situation - in politics, economics, in social structures. It would be strange, unreal, we'd be like ostriches with our head in the sand, if we as a Society in this human situation felt unaffected.

What made Jesus tick, what sort of a man he was, what he was after, and what is the meaning of the way it all ended must be our basic concern if we are serious about being in "the following of Christ".

So, when thinking about a "consecrated human life" we'd do well to see how he did it from within, in terms of his own full and real humanity. Then we might feel confirmed and strengthened by the efforts now in 1977 to consecrate human life, not by threats and pontifical directives so much as by seeing the Society as a "framework" whereby the human beings involved in it grow to the full and accepted realisation of who and what they are.

For the truth is that the Society in earlier days was a sternly regimented and rather cruel organisation, a military machine intend to defend breaches in a beleaguered and threatened Anglicanism. Kelly's rather stark phrase "that in obedience we may serve", under lesser men at the helm produced a successful but basically unchristian atmosphere in which people could be bludgeoned and maneuvered out of their own selfhoods. We tended to forget that for the Society there is only one stated cause - the will of God. And we passed over the one stated end of the Society - the praise of his glory.

That period has passed away, please God, for ever. The clearer we can be now, and the simpler we can be about the way in which Christ consecrated human life, the more likely that we shall be able to go on doing it ourselves.

Our following of Christ also has been preoccupied with harshness about sex and relationships. The Society, under the influence of Pusey, paid lip service to such things as "not frequenting the company of women unless near relatives", "a room without privacy", and detailed rules about wearing the habit. All these were treated very seriously.

Meanwhile, the important issues leading to a fully integrated life and personality were neglected under a cloak of conformity. 

We did not face up, for example, to that romantic state of falling in love, that attraction of the human heart for and from another human heart. Emotional attachment, whether homosexual or heterosexual, was supposed to be so unthinkable in a member of the Society that it was unlikely to be treated with loving concern or sympathy. Instead, it was relegated to the Victorian category of "unmentionables". 

Also, by and large the old system encouraged beefy heartiness and condemned the aesthetic as unhealthy. I wonder if this was a hangover caught from those who returned from the trenches of World War I?

Certainly, love wasn't seen as a possible way, a valid way, through to glory. No help was at hand to learn to use it for that end. I now see that those old things which begrimed our Christian icon, are beginning to pass away. We seem to be beginning to respond to the promise "Behold, I make all things new".

If we reject the authoritarian, ascetic, world-renouncing, and pain-seeking characteristics of monasticism, what are we doing about the deep and true place for suffering and death we have inherited from Christian tradition?

Are we concerned about its right use as the raw material of redemption whereby the worst of human situations, whether global, communal or personal, can be transformed into the best? If we can't do this for ourselves and one another, can we hope to teach others to do so? Are we, in this regard, still far too self-enclosed, falling back on the deadly letter which says, "The conversation of the brethren should help and cheer us, but the voice of God speaks most often in silence"?

There's a lot of truth in that admonition, but it makes more contemporary sense to say something like, "Daily life and intercourse with our brothers (and that means all the people we meet) is given to us to make us hear what God is saying". We have tried hard to renew our worship together following the lead given by other Christians and the Church at large. But are we not still dogged by hesitancies about participation, spontaneity, relaxedness, and expressions of joy and sorrow?

In 1977 there are now very few novices, while members continue to die or leave the Society. Why then is there a certain hesitancy about opening up the fellowship of our Society to people hitherto kept at arms length by barriers of race, culture, and sex? How genuinely welcoming are we? What identity is it that we fear to forfeit by sharing our daily lives with Africans, artisans, women, married couples? In other words, how much "respectability" do we want to cling to?

Perhaps a broader definition of the religious life is needed to avoid the danger of making the old framework a bed of Procrustes. There is a need to appreciate diversities of gifts and temperaments in different people, so that attempts to quench the spirit or cramp the style of people as they develop is for ever a thing of the past.

We have leaned so heavily on the phrase "avoidance of singularity" that it has sometimes seemed that mediocrity is preferable in a "good religious". Sometimes it still seems possible to detect a Philistine strain in the Society - a deliberate scorn for many aspects of beauty to be enjoyed in art and lifestyle.

I dare to ask these questions and to speak of these things only because it looks so plain that we can at last put their irrelevant distractions behind us and concentrate on being what we are meant to be - truly human.

[Home] [Back]