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

In the March 1980 Review for Religious, I came across an article entitled The Past Decade by George Aschenbrennan SJ. It includes paragraphs which, it seems to me, speak particularly to our condition.

Within the one fundamental Christian spirituality, there have always been various spiritualities, rooted in different orientations to the one God. Especially since Vatican II, a most helpful clarification has stressed the distinction between monastic and apostolically active spiritualities.

Generally speaking, the monastic experience of God depends upon some physical withdrawal from the world and upon as full an involvement as possible in the liturgy both of the Eucharist and the Hours, which provides an essential regularity and a rhythm that will determine both the type of community support and the external regularity appropriate to this spirituality. 

An apostolically active experience of God, while deeply rooted in the activity of the world, requires the difficult combination of an external mobility with dependable spiritual habits, so that one may serve wherever the need for God is greatest ...

To fail to understand which of these two basic orientations one is called to can cause personal frustration and apostolic ineffectiveness.

Disregard of this distinction on the part of religious, whether in his training or in the living out of his vocation, may well produce unrealistic expectations and ineffective service. Taking seriously the difference in the two approaches need not imply the superiority of one over the other. Rather it may help the Church to be more present in the world according to its own fullness.

It could be that, when the whole story of the revival and re-establishment of the religious life in the Church of England comes to be written, those words which I have italicised could serve as an epitaph for the great majority of our communities. The dilemma for those of us who belong to active communities (that is, those that were formed to engage in the missionary work of the Church) is that we have not been content to be missionaries, but have tried to be monks as well. And in trying to be both, we have not been able to do either very well, for very long.

All the Anglican communities founded in the last century were the result of the marriage of two highly incompatible partners, who had seldom met before and have never met since: nostalgia and social concern.

Nostalgia was induced by picnics in the ruins of Fountains and Glastonbury, and social concern was provoked by walks through Shoreditch and Stepney. Men founded religious communities to do two widely different things at the same time: to restore the religious life to the Church of England, and to preach the gospel of love to the pagan hordes that swarmed in the alleys and burrows of the new industrial cities.

In order to accomplish this double aim, they borrowed all the spiritual equipment of the medieval monastery - the buildings, the uniforms, the cloistered withdrawal, the silence - and welded all this onto the missionary programme of the 19th century apostle.

The incongruities which resulted are harshly underlined in a famous letter of Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford in 1865 to the eccentric Fr Ignatius of Llanthony:

God has given you great energy, great powers of usefulness ... but the greater part of this usefulness you are flinging away. Your adoption of a dress never suited to English habits - and now pre-eminently unsuited - is a sacrifice of the kernel to the husk such as I have hardly ever seen equalled. In adopting this startling exterior, you are acting in direct opposition to the principle on which the Order you have assumed did act. For they took the dress to help the work. You mar the work to have the dress.

Bishop Wilberforce was probably right in his main point about the kernel and the husk, but wrong in his implication that it was all due to the mixed-up psychology of Fr Ignatius. The Bishop underestimated the power of the monastic ghosts. Ignatius was only doing in a bizarre and lunatic way what SSM [the Society of the Sacred Mission] and SSJE [the Society of Saint John the Evangelist] were later to do in a manly and British way. All our founders took as their guide that well-known character in The Pilgrim's Progress, "Mr Facing Both Ways."

Nor was this a particularly Anglican phenomenon. Those who read The Nun's Story will find in that book a description of the same attempt to be the complete monk and the complete missionary - only in this case the attempt was made by a Roman Catholic, a 20th century Belgian girl.

It is one of the tragedies of the revival of the religious life in the Anglican church that the founders turned, one and all, with innocence and enthusiasm, to the Roman church on the Continent as to the fountain where the religious life had flowed uninterrupted through the centuries. But, sadly, they were drinking muddied waters, very muddied indeed.

The 19th century was the nadir of liturgical life in the Church, when the Church's liturgy was largely by-passed by private devotions and private revelations.

The 19th century was, on the other hand, the hey-day of the theology of the French school, with its emphasis on the sinfulness and unworthiness of man. The Bible was for the most part neglected. There was a heavy emphasis on canon law, and an excessive reverence for all central authority as the revelation of God's will ... Victorian paternalism prevailed - Father and Mother always had all the answers.

Such was the fruitful breeding ground of so many wrong assumptions which were accepted and taught in most Roman missionary communities and, therefore, in Anglican communities as well.

For example: that the community and its members are more important than the mission they have been called to serve; that the community is the end, and the chief purpose of each member is "to live the community life." If missionary work should prove a hindrance to living the community life, and the the perfect rule-keeping which is the hallmark of that life, then missionary work is dispensable. The great virtues of the religious member are loyalty to the community, and faithfulness to the vows.

Perhaps the saddest thing which emerges from such a review is that there have arisen in the past men who have had a true vision of what a missionary community could be. The first and greatest of these is Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius founded the Jesuits "for the glory of God and the salvation of souls." He did not dismiss striving after holiness, but for him it was always a means to an end - the advantage of the neighbour. Everything must be sacrificed to the neighbour's good.

In order that his men could travel in fur traders' canoes in New France, or be smuggled into Japan, Ignatius refused to allow them to wear a habit or to have the choral office. His houses were not monasteries; they were residences where missionaries were based.

But all these changes were derivative from the central inspiration: seek your neighbour's advantage, and by seeking that you seek God's glory. Thus Ignatius drafted a community of dispersal, one that was always dispersed on the mission, bound together by companionship with Jesus, the shared task, and the single end.

In a not dissimilar way SSM's own founder, Herbert Kelly, was moved to contemplate a community of missionaries, not monks. In 1912 he wrote:

There are various ways in which it is possible to contemplate the meaning of community life. We may consider its ideals and motives as "primarily a vocation to the special cultivation of the interior spiritual life." Others have shown how in this form it meets modern religious needs with particular force. I have been asked to consider it from a different point of view, as primarily a form of service, on the grounds of its utility or even necessity ... in the care and conversion of souls.

He dedicated it to the angels, those beings sent from God's presence to carry out his orders among men. He called it The Society of the Sacred Mission, made up of missionaries, sent into the world to carry to its conclusion the mission of Jesus.

Here, then, are two clear calls for a missionary community, from two different men, in two different churches, in two different centuries. It cannot be said that the vision of either man survived intact, for their successors were soon resurrecting all the things which the founders themselves had so boldly discarded. Hence our present dilemma.

As long as the Gospel is preached, there will always be those whom it calls to separate themselves from the world for the work of love and prayer. As long as the Gospel is preached, there will always be those whom it calls to band together in order to make God's love known to men in their need.

But it is doubtful whether another generation of men and women will band together - as we did - in an attempt to combine a romantic monasticism with a peripheral mission.
___________________________________________
This article is taken from the SSM Newsletter, November, 1980
[Home] [Back]