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 I was talking to our community about this not long ago. In these two or 3 years since this vision was fairly clear, the more and more I think about it, meditate and pray about it, the more one part grows and the rest fades. This rural monastic community becomes, really, all I want to do, all I truly believe I have a real vocation to do. The other parts were good ideas maybe, and are definitely for someone, but not me. So any urban monastic community in Lexington won't be a Vine & Branches one. It won't be one started by or overseen by me. That is not to say that I am somehow devaluing urban life or the idea of an urban monastic expression. I think it's awesome. I really do. I have twinges sometimes of desire in that direction - more like twinges of thought about what a positive thing it could be (and is in some places already) - but that does not equal a calling for me to go in that direction. And the suburbs, yes the suburbs. I live there now. I'm doing that here already in that hybrid idea of a "monastic parish." And that, also, is great and can be an amazing and needed thing. If there is any part of something other than a rural monastic life that could possibly remain, in some paired down fashion, it would be this I think, I think. Maybe it's just that some folks who still live here will be connected in some way with what we do in the country - not sure about that one. We shall see. I truly believe, with no reservations, that everything that I have done, that we have done, as Vine & Branches in any form, has been leading to this, is still leading to that rural monastic reality to be. Elements of traditional cenobitic monasticism ala Benedict and his spiritual descendants? Certainly. Franciscan inspired "mountain and valley" active contemplative monasticism? Sure, maybe even a little more. A little bit of a newer notion of an integrated monastic community - men and women, married, single and celibate? Yes. Again, ask Brother Abbot John about that one. And even a slightly different twist - the idea that this will be a very small community of permanent dwellers with the addition of an unknown number of rotational live-in members who come and commit to being in community with us, living and working in that rural contemplative setting, for periods of perhaps one or two years. Many, many people may possibly be formed in some very important ways during a time like this.  I also see this place as offering hospitality and rest to many guests who may come there for retreats of shorter periods of time: a few days, a week, etc. This is, of course, in the long tradition of open hospitality called for in the Rule of St. Benedict, and ultimately in the "Rule" of Jesus Himself for all of us in our own contexts. Hopefully, this will help flesh out a bit more of what our rural monastic vision is for the not-too-distant future. We're getting there. God continues to lead us there and strengthen us as we walk with Him. What we are now and what we do, will not always be the same. But that's not a bad thing. If it's a right thing, it is ultimately very good. Father, give us Grace to be and do what you have called us to be and do. Father Francis, Father Patrick, Father Benedict, pray for us. technorati tags > neo monasticism, monasticism, monastic community, rural life Labels: community, monasticism, spiritual formation :::
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permalink ::: e-mail me ::: September 28, 2006 >> 7:30 PM what's important now? So now that there's sort of a new era inside the new era, what now? I'm not really asking what, altogether, now - more about what's important now? What have I realized, at this point, is important to me in this whole thing? I'm going to try and answer this question fairly quickly and with as much brevity as possible. I don't want to churn on it or think too much. Relationships are important. Friendships are important. The odd thing is, now what does that mean? What kind of friendships are you talking about? I'm asking too many questions. Transparent, open, honest and fear-less friendships are important, and extremely rare. Don't skim over that qualifier list either. I find that "fear-less" thing is the most rare and difficult to find or cultivate. This is mostly because of each of our individual stuff that we can't let go of. Truth is important. After going through a maze of theological rethinking and redefinition - after observing a generation of people in reaction, lost, grasping at doctrinal straws - I have come to the conclusion that a ship needs a keel in order to be stable. To draw the analogy out further, it needs a full crew, officers, crew, a navigator and a captain to run as it should. Irresponsible sailing results in dead sailors. There are charts for us to follow, rules of navigation, etc. Everything is NOT relative. We are NOT at liberty to throw the compass overboard in the middle of the ocean. Transformation is important. I mean the real live transformation of our spirits, hearts, and minds as people. It is, in fact, the point of the whole Christian thing. Not that we are happy, not that we are successful, not that we go to heaven when we die, or even that we help poor starving people. Those things are NOT the point. They may be connected to the point, but they are not it. IT is transformation of the person in Christ, by the Holy Spirit, into who and what God created us to be. Of course there is a prerequisite of recognizing the need for such a deep change. We are losing that I think and that is extremely dangerous. Community and Church are important. I say this as separate from relationships and friendships because they are not those, but a context in which those happen. We can have many relationships, friendships that aren't "community" or may not be in the context of "church." That's fine. They don't all have to be. We shouldn't expect them all to be. We may even have expectations of friendships that are inside community which are too heavy or unnecessary. You can be in intentional community with people who are not your best friends. We can "be church" with people who aren't necessarily the closest people in the world to us. And that's perfectly fine. Back to point, church, and more than that, Church, is important. Purposely stepping into the Church, being a member of the Body, doing what it does, living as it lives, praying as it prays is deeply important. There's more than that but those are a few big ones for now. Peace. technorati tags > blogging, emerging church, church, ecclesiology, reform, relationships, community, transformation, truth Labels: church, community, emerging church :::
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permalink ::: e-mail me ::: August 17, 2006 >> 7:40 AM good morning  Good morning children. Yes, school has started in Lexington and everyone gets up a little earlier around here when that happens, including me. I could look at that as a negative, seeing that I'm not naturally what you call a "morning person." I think it's a positive though. I've come to appreciate the morning more than I used to, quite a bit. I get to sit here quietly now, looking at the sun having risen a little while ago. It's doing some spectacular things behind some clouds right now. I'm in the kitchen, drinking my coffee, listening to the sounds of various insects I suppose. It still sounds like night outside - crickets mostly, probably some cicadas. And the pesky drone of interstate traffic in the background. It seems nice outside this morning, a bit cooler than it has been. Yes, those photos are "live" - I just took them. I couldn't experience this if I was still in bed.A while back, a couple of months, maybe three, ago, Liz and I started praying the Morning Office together. That was a good decision. We made a commitment to do it. We get up a little earlier and go into the study and pray, then have our coffee and sit for a minute before I have to get ready for work. That rhythm is a good thing. Sometimes (this came up during our seminar from others too) we're praying through blurry eyes and throats that aren't quite ready to cooperate yet. That's OK. It's not about it sounding just right. It's not about it being an intellectual exercise that our minds have to perfectly interact with. It's about willingly, with commitment, putting ourselves as God's disposal for a little bit, together. And also, when you have the intention of doing this for a long long time, you lay down certain skewed expectations about what it will be every day. You simply live it. It becomes a part of your fabric. Alright, that's it from me this morning. I will leave you to your feed readers now. Pax vobiscum. technorati tags > liturgical prayer, morning, sleep, community :::
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permalink ::: e-mail me ::: January 23, 2006 >> 11:01 AM commitment Is this an issue with you? I think it is for a lot of people. I'm not really talking specifically about marriage, although that would certainly be connected to all this I suppose. In this case, specifically, I'm talking and thinking about commitment to a faith community - to a "church." Have you even made a commitment to a community like this? Have you ever even thought about it? I wonder if, in our present ecclesiastical culture, we even consider it something the deserves thinking about. I have the notion that we don't. The practice of "church hopping" is rampant among protestant evangelicals and charismatics. I think it's becoming more so among Catholics - don't like Fr. Tommy over at St. Agnes? Go to Mass over at Christ the King, that Fr. Jim is much more personable. The sickness spreads. Lots of people never think one way or another about finding a "spiritual family" or "home" as such. Mostly what we seem to think about is a place to "go to church." That's where you worship God and do your duty to Him, so you find a place you "like" and go there. To think of that being your family and making a commitment to these people in this place is not on our radar for the most part I don't think. That's unfortunate. I'm not sure it was designed that way. Well, I know it wasn't but I was trying to be nice. We aren't supposed to be just floating around, never landing anywhere. We're supposed to be grounded in a Christian community. Plants don't just wander around the top of the ground from place to place, sticking their roots in a bit, taking it back out and moving along to the next patch of ground. They are PLANTED. The are planted and grow and take root in a specific piece of ground and their roots then go deep. It has to be that way or the plant will die. It would never get enough nourishment for enough time. Of course, then, there is the discussion that will naturally arise over "good ground" vs. "bad soil." Given. That is absolutely relevant and needful. But find ground, good ground, and be planted. We'll leave the discussion of how to find such a place for another time. I've recently written some things for our community, vine & branches, about these kinds of things. We've started talking about what it means to be a part of this community - what it looks like and will look like. There are different "commitment levels" and stages of entry. We've had some of this in place for a while, in writing, but haven't so much focused on it's actual implementation until now. It seemed time to move more in this direction, so I'm moving. It's a bit different, saying and talking about this kind of commitment. People aren't used to it. It causes just a little bit of turmoil in the psyche I think. It does for me on this end - the end of the one drafting the "new" stuff, putting it out there, and working through the reactions. Everything takes work though in a community. That's not unusual. If you're small, up close and personal, it all hits home faster and somewhat harder than it would in a community of 200 or even 50. Quite a different dynamic. I'll refer back to my posts on the Monastic Parish model - here and here - for some connected thought. In moving toward this in earnest, I bring into a basically "parish" community some of the more "hard core" elements of monastic community life - and staged entry and commitment are some of these. In order to really become something that is different - in a good way I think - a community which will more effectively in the long run, facilitate our collective transformation - one must move in odd directions, or what seems odd. You have to go where you see you must go and that's not going to necessarily be all the comfortable for you or everyone else. We just have to work through it. Time to move up the hill leading to that mountain pass up there, out of the calm, still valley. Time to put our coats on, it gets chilly up there. Pray for us if you think about it. technorati tags > commitment, community, church, monastic, church hopping, stability Labels: church, community, monasticism :::
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permalink ::: e-mail me ::: October 12, 2005 >> 3:44 PM straight talk I heard someone say in a meeting something like "when times get hard, it's time for straight talk." Well, I agree, but it made me think of something more. So, when is it NOT time for straight talk? When things are going well or when they're just "there," do we talk crooked? I would put my vote in for straight talk all the time. Here's the problem though. What we've gotten used to hearing and speaking is more like soft talk. OK, OK, I hear already someone thinking, "well we don't have to be mean or harsh," and I would agree since this is not what I'm talking about. See, straight talk, to us, is mean talk. To say what one means and be straightforward about things is to be harsh and unkind. This would be more a problem of understanding how we communicate. How have we been taught, acculturated to communicate? Increasingly, I think, in terms of making everybody happy. The trouble with that is, it doesn't necessarily help someone become a better person. If we are Christians with one another, especially if we are in community together, we should have a sort of constant goal of helping each other toward perfection, toward being the kind of beings we were created to be. A good bit of that is done through communication with one another in one form or another. So, our yeses should be yeses and our nos should be nos. Sound familiar? We should be trying to say what we mean - straight talk. That shouldn't mean that we are being unkind or harsh to one another. It should mean, ultimately, that we are loving one another - telling the truth, in love. If we don't do this, we help keep each other crippled. Now, I have failed in this. I've talked about it before. I hold back on things I should say. I hold back because I don't want to hurt people's feelings and perhaps because I'm afraid of them not liking me after I say it. Even if you're honest and say what you mean, you can well be misinterpreted, so these things are a distinct possibility. And different people have different sensibilities. So, if one who has "weak" sensibilities (who gets hurt easily), do we leave them in the dark so their feelings don't get hurt? Sure we should approach people with compassion and kindness, but we can't soften it past recognition. This will do no good. Again, I'm not always good at this. I'm relationally paranoid as it is and I'm frankly afraid that someone will just storm out and not like me any more. So, as I said, I hold back. Not always, but more than I ought. I've intentionally tried to be better at this and just calmly say, even in the middle of a conversation or casual talking, straight things to people. It's not always heard, but I'll keep trying. Of course all this is a matter of us trying and moving along as we stumble and get back up. Yeah, got to just keep walking. Labels: community :::
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permalink ::: e-mail me ::: April 06, 2005 >> 3:28 PM long time I said I felt another post coming on. I guess it's here. Thinking about the last couple of longer posts about expectations and vulnerability, and I mentioned this at least in one of them. I began thinking about how all these things happen, in what context they happen. I mean, there really is a massive redefining process that goes on in a shift like what we've gone through. If there hasn't been, there certainly needs to be. As I've said before, there are at least unstated problems that surface eventually, even if you don't really know where they've come from. They will arise. You will have to deal with them. I assure you. We have deeply seated notions about what is what and how "what" happens when, etc. One of the biggest is perhaps dealing with the concept of time and how it interacts with the church, spiritual development, "growth," "evangelism," and a number of other things. That question I mentioned before - you know the dreaded one: "how many people ya'll got?" Maybe they say it differently in Minnesota, but the question remains the same. Someone just told me last night of a chance encounter with someone they used to "go to church with" who asked them this question about Vine & Branches. It happens all - the - time. Anyway, that question is loaded with assumptions. "I didn't mean anything by it when I asked.." Hold on here - did I say you intentionally and with malice aforethought, asked that question? No, I just said it was full of assumptions, and it is. It has laced within it, a timeline - a definite idea of how long a church should take to reach a certain level, to become successful. Hmm, successful. Yes, there are timeliness built into your thought patterns. "How many baptisms did you have last year?" "How many new believers are you discipling now?" Again, I think these questions are laden with timeline assumptions, but in this case about "evangelism." I know the common wisdom is that "we're" bad at evangelism - we suck at it, whatever. I wonder - by who's criteria? According to what concept of evangelism? Is there more than one? I think there are. How long? How long does it take? How long does it take to "get someone saved?" I don't know. Do you? There are some very interesting theological ideas that underlie how we think on these issues. Some of us never venture outside our assumed lands of thought on these things. We might have changed how we do church but perhaps our concept of what these other things mean haven't changed at all. Are you really a failure? Do you really suck all that much at evangelism? Or are you perhaps measuring yourself by a foreign rod? How long, how long, O Lord, does it take for us to become comfortable with each other? How long!? Here's a question for you? How long are you willing to put into it? How long will it take you to get your marriage perfected and working like a well oiled machine? --- OK, mine either, but again, how long are you willing to work on it? Are you going to jump off the train if it doesn't get where you want to go in the time you want to get there? Maybe you will, I don't know. Do you have in your mind a timeline so strict that you can see no other way? Think about that for a second. Seriously - how tight is the schedule? I'm not talking about the train crashing or being blown up, just traveling. But someone, maybe all your life you wanted to take this trip (sorry for the analogy), and someone talked to you about how long it would take - you'll get on that train someday and lickity split, you'll be there, yessirree. It's just up over the hill and around the bend there. Well, maybe not dear. That train moves a little slower than you were lead to believe and the destination is much farther down the track. So, sit back and do what needs to be done on the train and don't wring your hands so much. TIME! This time thing is a big one. It runs through all the other stuff we talk and fret over. How long anything. When will I be fully transformed in the image of Christ? When will I stop hating my brother? When will I ever be patient in traffic on the way home!? When? Well, here's the deal on all of it. It takes a while. Those whiles depend on so many factors that if I tried to pretend I knew, I'd be legitimately full of shit. I do know this - a long time. It takes a long time for us to go from being one kind of creature to being another. So, it takes a long time for a community of faith to become what it should be. Relationships are a lifetime proposition. They are always developing and evolving, as are we - it's all very dynamic. These things cannot be looked at statically. "Well, you know how you should be, just be that way." "You know what do to, just do it." These are statements made out of, I believe, ignorance - ignorance of how a human person develops and changes. I think we're also ignorant in ways about how some of these other things happen, how they actually happen - like the process of transformation inside a person or the process of beginning that journey or of how we relationally invite someone to begin that journey. These things are far more complicated than we give them credit for and absolutely more complex than can be dealt with in one blog post. I think, lest I ramble like I probably already have, I'll stop here. Hopefully that's something to think about for a while. Peace to you. Labels: church, community, emerging church :::
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permalink ::: e-mail me ::: November 10, 2004 >> 10:21 AM the furnace Well I wish I had the notes I wrote yesterday. I'll just ramble I suppose. I had been feeling the need to get into some deep talking about what our community was doing and not doing and last night was it. It was a very good time of sharing about what we are doing and why, about dreams, etc. Just like a marriage, being a community takes work. Being what our intention is to be does not happen by accident. It must be intentional. And it can't only be the intention of one. It must be, as the word would suggest, a "community" effort. We talked about this - about why we're doing what we're doing as opposed to something more "normal." Because our thoughts, philosophies, and theologies have changed radically as concerns what it means to be the church and we have chosen to follow those changes - to live them out. We see it as important to be up close and personal - to be dangerously open and close to one another. We see it as vital to our real spiritual development. Some observations about this kind of community: - it's hard - it's uncomfortable - it's awesome - we love it - we hate it - it's not very fun - it's better than the alternative - we need it. In order to be what we see we need to be, we must give ourselves to it. Of course trust takes time. This whole thing takes time. It's not immediate. Again, like a marriage, it takes work. It involves significant risk. It is a furnace and the prospect of jumping in there is never very attractive. I spoke of art classes I had to take and the great analogies they imparted to me - jewelry and metalsmithing - the process of annealing metal in order to bend it and shape it involves heating the metal (not too much) in order to loosen the molecules - then after you work it for a while it hardens back up - then you have to anneal it again. And or course the crucible - melting silver to make rings and the dross that rises to the top in order to be removed - it takes heat. But if we want to be the beautiful ring we were designed to be, we must be melted in the crucible. In order to be formed into the shining censor that burns incense to our God, we must be annealed and bent and hammered. We believe strongly that this context of community that we are attempting to live out is the necessary context where these things happen. So, we jump in the furnace. We also spoke of fear. Fear looms heavy in this thing. We come into something like this with generally only an idea of what it's going to be like, and if it's the right idea, it's a scary one. We're not accustomed to putting ourselves out there to people like that. Me - I fear saying what needs to be said because of the reactions I might get. That's both personally and communally. In former paradigms, Christian leaders were trained to be political, to cater to people (yeah, well we were whether explicitly or not). It's very difficult to shed that mind-set. I must come to the full realization that as an overseer now, I have become one of the people - I am no longer above, but among. This is different. It is dangerous. It is wonderful. We all have to step away from that fear of vulnerability in order for the Spirit to be able to fully do His work in the context of community. It's a process though and we can't freak out if we don't get there overnight. We do need to pray for Grace though, and walk toward the goal. Give us giant amounts of Your Grace Father and keep our feet walking. Labels: church, community, spiritual formation :::
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