By Lauren R. Stanley

I’ve been having long conversations with the Apostle Paul of late due to some long-term writing assignments in which I am engaged, and the more I talk with Paul, the more I realize, we don’t always know what he meant.

Some of his statements are hurtful. Can you imagine being one of those new followers of the Way in Galatia, hearing Paul call you “foolish” because he doesn’t agree with how you are living your new life in Christ? How about being one of those Corinthians, listening as Paul – who was no longer in your midst – castigated you for re-interpreting what he had taught?

Some of his statements are so uplifting they make your soul climb right into heaven: “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” “The Spirit helps us in our weakness … (and) intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” “If God is for us, who is against us?”

And then there is Paul’s incredibly beautiful statement on love: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” What could be more beautiful than that?

When I am in my most generous moods, I love what Paul has to say. It may not be clear, but through his words, I can catch glimpses of heaven.

When I am in my less generous moods, I rant and rage at Paul: How dare you say that women are to be silent in church? How dare you say slaves have to obey their masters? (Slaves!? Slaves?!?!)

But the deepest conversations come from when I can’t figure out what Paul is trying to say. Lord knows, he’s quoted all the time by anyone and everyone who wants to make a point on any and every subject. And Lord knows, people claim to understand exactly what Paul means, especially on the most controversial of current issues, sexuality.

But me? I think even Paul wasn’t certain what he exactly meant. After all, this is the man who admitted, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been known.”

So when I get to heaven (by God’s grace alone, of that I am certain), I want to sit down with Paul. I want to ask him: What did you mean? Did you know how your statements would be used? Did you think you had the last word? Or did you know, or think, or believe, that our understanding of your words would develop as time went by, and people changed and grew, and whole new cultures were discovered? Which things that you said were immutable to you, and which were to grow in the Spirit of which you speak so frequently, so eloquently?

There are times when I think I understand Paul. And there are times when I know I don’t have the foggiest idea what he means. And there are times, too, which I think, “OK, that was then, this is now.”

But I won’t know the answers to these questions until I get to heaven. Because there, I am convinced, all things will indeed be mediated by God on high, and hopefully, I won’t have to ask any questions, because then I will know fully, as I am fully known.

In the meantime, I struggle with Paul, the Church’s first theologian, who in the immediacy of the moment said some things that he felt simply had to be said, but who might have a different take now, 2,000 years later. I don’t know that – it’s simply what I believe.

I think that Paul must be upset at how his words are used to hurt and exclude people. I think Paul must be pacing up and down in anger some days, as he must have been when he wrote that letter to the Galatians, fuming that we simply don’t get what he meant, and by God, not only does he need to explain it again, we need to listen again, and again, and again, until we finally do get it. And while he is pacing in frustration, I am convinced that he simply must be weeping in frustration and pain, just as God weeps when something awful happens to us, that Paul suffers with us as God suffers with us.

When I am struggling the most, I fall back on the one statement that I know to the depths of my being is true, for it rings not of Paul but of God, in all of God’s glory: “And now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” I think Paul knew that in the end, the inexplicable mystery of God’s love is more important than anything else, that love itself is the greatest gift of God and is the only thing that holds us together, even when we disagree with each other.

In the meantime, my conversations with Paul continue, sometimes in complete understanding, sometimes without the foggiest idea of what I am doing or what Paul means. Because by staying in conversation, even without the deep understanding of each other, we are building up the relationship, and that, more than anything else, deepens the love.

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley is an Appointed Missionary of the Episcopal Church serving in the Diocese of Renk, Sudan. She is a lecturer at the Renk Theological College, teaching Theology, Liturgy and English, and serves as chaplain for the students.

By Derek Olsen

A New Gesture: As a liturgy geek with Anglo-Catholic leanings, I’ve seen and done more liturgical gestures than can easily be numbered. Yet, in the past few months I’ve discovered another. Since it is—to the best of my knowledge—unclassified, I’ll give it a name: the oscular cross. It’s a rather peculiar gesture that involves making the sign of the cross with the first two fingers of the right hand while simultaneously sucking the right thumb. While I’ve not seen it in Ritual Notes or any other liturgical guide, I have an extraordinarily good vantage for observing it; it’s the sign my newly-five-year old daughter makes as she leans her head on my shoulder while I hold her during the Eucharistic prayer. At the various points in the prayer when I lean my head down and whisper “Cross yourself…’ she’ll obediently perform the oscular cross.

It’s also been spotted at bed-time. As we begin the Song of Simeon (the Nunc Dimittis), the oscular cross once again makes an appearance. I have yet to determine if it is a characteristic gesture of a certain age-set, but I’m not yet sure; rather than the oscular cross, my two-year old daughter makes a motion—thumb free from mouth—that resembles swatting a cloud of mosquitoes that have descended all over her upper body.

The appearance of the oscular cross has led me to consider the faith of children, formation, and the Anglican way of being. Let me hasten to add that I’m no child psychologist, no decades-tested Christian educator, and I’m producing no glossy-covered book guaranteeing simple steps to producing a Christ-centered child. But I am a daddy. I do care deeply and passionately about my little girls, and about the ways they think, feel, and live. I have found hope, joy, and solace in my faith—I want nothing less for them. So I present no answers, but more a random assemblage of field-notes on raising up Anglicans.

On Bed-Time Prayers: A common part of Christian family culture is the bedtime prayer ritual. I remember caring for a clergy couple’s children a few years ago, and the look of shock and horror on the young faces when I forgot bedtime prayers. My elder was still non-verbal at that time, but the episode jolted me to an awareness that it was time to consider the concept in earnest! Raised Presbyterian and Lutheran respectively, my wife and I grew up with prayers, but our household spirituality is very much shaped by the disciplines of fixed prayer and the rhythms of the Anglican Daily Office, disciplines we’d like to instill in our children as well. If only there were a trial-size version of the Daily Office, suitable for children and others with short attention spans! …And it turns out, there is. The “Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families” begins on page 136 of your BCP; prayers “At the Close of Day” can be found on page 140. These quickly became our standard prayers.

I’ve seen other options—we’ve got other options on our children’s shelves: books with little prayers helpfully illustrated by picture of cute little sheep and all. We opted out of those for two main reasons. First, the theology of many was rather questionable. If I don’t like a prayer’s theology, why would I teach it to my children? Second, I have a predisposed bias against worship dumbed-down. Prayer, worship, is formational. What we say, how we pray, shapes how we think about and feel towards God. It forms us into Christian patterns of being. I had initial fears that perhaps the prayers were “too advanced” but I felt confirmed in our approach when, at the age of three, our eldest could repeat the entire office from memory—and would often insist on chanting parts of it as well!

Does she understand what everything means? No, not yet—but it’s fascinating to see flashes of insight when an epiphany occurs, one made possible by her memorization. We were driving in the car one day and prompted by both the church service we’d left and the Linkin Park lyrics on the radio, she asked, “Daddy, what’s ‘mercy’?” After I’d finished choking on my coffee, I tried to give her a short answer to a big concept and found assistance by referring to those prayers that she already knew. Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw a flash of insight in her eyes that would have been impossible without her prayer formation.

On Kids in Church: My wife and I believe that, generally, kids understand the messages we adults send and are taught about us and our world by what they see us do. The practice of Children’s Church is a contested topic in our house. We can see some utility for it, but, at the end of the day I believe it communicates to children that the adults don’t want them in their service. If we teach them we don’t want them there—they’ll learn it and may never come back. As a result, we’ve had a policy of having our eldest daughter in church since she was born.

Since my wife is priest, that means that I’ve had the role of dealing with our elder daughter, trying to keep her focused—or at least quiet—in the service since she was born. I focus on quiet because children can be disruptive to the rest of the congregation, and that needs to be taken seriously. At the same time, a quietly cooing and giggling baby is not an offense in my book. The only way to learn how to behave in church is to be there. However, I always sat with an eye to the quick escape where I could remove her if she got truly disruptive.

A few Atlanta congregations remember me as the guy who stood at the back of the church swinging a baby carrier like a censer to lull the little one back to sleep. As she got older, she’d let me know what she wanted. Sometimes during a sermon (or even after the first lesson) she’d simply get up, head out of the pew, and take off for the back of the church to wander around outside. I quickly learned to follow along; the alternative was a messy meltdown.

Now that she’s older still and a newly-minted five-year old, I again choose our seating with care. Now we sit as close to the front as practically possible so she can see what’s going on, often in the first couple of pews. I formerly fretted about the time she spent doodling on pew cards, flipping through books, or coloring sheets rather than “paying attention” but time has taught me to not be concerned. Once after a game of “church” (oh yes, she gathers her mother, sister, and a flock of invisible friends for church complete with hymns, a sermon, and Eucharist) my wife came to me with wonder in her eyes. “She knows the Eucharistic prayer! Not word for word, but just now, she went through virtually the whole thing.” Let’s just say: she didn’t pick it up from Children’s Church…

You may have noticed, however, a certain silence about my younger daughter… That’s because currently while her elder sister comes with me, the younger goes to the nursery. I feel a little bit badly about that, like I’m letting her down, but I know the alternative. I’m just one man and the two sisters together inspire far more mayhem than the two sisters apart. It might be different if my wife were next to me rather than up front, but on the occasions we’ve had a chance to try it—the results weren’t pretty. I’d end up taking the younger out to wander the narthex anyway. Every once in a while, as she matures, we give it a try. Maybe in a few more months (or another year) it’ll be more possible. Until then, for the elder’s sake, for my sake, for the congregation’s sake, it’s the nursery for her.

On Providing Examples: Children learn things that we teach them, but even more than that, they absorb things from their environment—and I don’t just mean a church service environment. They learn our values by gauging what activities they see us do and not do. Once our younger daughter was “helping” us clean up our room by moving a pile of belongings to wherever she thought they belonged. I was both amazed and gratified when she toddled over to me, said: “Daddy book!” and thrust my Daily Office book into my hands. She sees me with it. Maybe not every day, maybe not as constantly as I’d wish, but she knows it’s a part of who I am and what I do.

I’ve seen studies and heard research about attendance patterns in kids. One of the things that I keep hearing is that the children who tend to stay in church during and after high school, during and after college, are those who come from households where the father goes to church. It’s well-known anecdotally that more women go to church than men, and what I take away from this is that it’s families that are engaged in the faith that have the best shot at raising faithful children. Families these days are complicated. Shape, size, format, we recognize that many configurations exist besides the 1950’s nuclear family. When children can see their family—no matter its structure—taking faith seriously, they will learn that it is something to take seriously.

Call for Help: So what do you do? What have you tried? How are your experiences partially—or maybe completely—different from mine? As I’ve said before, I know for sure that I’m no expert, but I’d like to start a conversation about children and faith and more particularly, children and the Anglican way of learning Christ. What do your field-notes look like? Let’s compare!

Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.

By Kathleen Staudt

Our church is celebrating a 50th anniversary and launching a capital stewardship campaign this year. In 1958, no one wondered whether building churches was a good idea; having a church was part of being whole as people and as families.

But people of my own generation have questions: some left church and came back when they had children; some are hovering on the edges of congregational life, wanting a sense of belonging, unsure about commitment. As buildings cry out for major maintenance, and the financial responsibility gets passed from one generation to the next, we “boomers” are emerging as the new elders, whether we like it or not. Raised in the counter-cultural, anti-institutional world of the 1960’s and 70’s, we now have to ask ourselves. “Do we think there should be churches for the next generation? Because if we don’t think so, churches as we know them will become far rarer. It depends on us. And yes, it has to do with money, among other things.

So I’ve been asking myself: Why do I think should there should be a church, a congregation worshipping in this space? Why should I, for example, continue to set aside a percentage of take-home pay for the maintenance of an institution (working toward a tithe, as the campaign encourages us to do). Why should I be encouraging others to do the same, and to give “sacrificially” to a capital campaign centered on building improvements? What does any of this have to do with Christian discipleship?

Asking around at church, I find that the elders who built this church are nervous about how we can possibly raise this kind of money, especially in these economic times. It is clear that it would take more bazaars and fundraisers than anyone can imagine launching now. And they don’t know any other way. Tithing and proportional giving were not part of the stewardship teaching in their time (though I believe this approach to stewardship, grounded in Scripture, will be necessary as we move into the future). In my generation, on the other hand, many –including committed tithers-- will only continue giving to the church if our budget also sets aside a substantial portion for outreach ministries. We understand that the building is for something besides our gathered congregation at worship, and we want capital improvements that will serve mission and outreach.

Reflecting on a vision for what a churches is “for”, I’m remembering dinner at the house of some Carmelite brothers who were students in my seminary class. They proudly showed me their well-appointed, modern house, where they lived and ate together, including the beautiful chapel. When I asked them how they spent their days they reported that most of the brothers spent their days working in the community, mostly among the poor and those suffering from AIDS. They came back to the house to pray together and to be together. Their community life sustained their ministries.

This radical community life is not what most of us expect or are called to commit to in our churches. We have many demands on our resources, depending on our callings in life, and including the needs of family and often other worthy service to the poor and dispossessed in the world. But the monastic model helps me to understand what I rely on my local church for. Church is where I go to worship weekly, and where the preaching, singing, Eucharist, and worship refocus and reorient my commitment to Christian discipleship. I do sometimes encounter contention and controversy there – often over issues related to our common life. It is hard work, dealing with conflict, like the work of a family or, I am told, a monastic community. But it is also part of how church life forms me for Christian discipleship. This church building has been “my Place” for prayer and growth over the years, the place where I have both found and offered support in times of crisis, where I have prayed over and buried good friends, where we have been reminded of the persistent presence of God among us at all turning points in life.

I’ve come to see that being part of the same congregation all this time has formed me in that old-fashioned Benedictine virtue of “stability”: the commitment to stay together as best we can, even in times of contention, and to let our common life form and shape us, because of a shared faith -- whether it is in adapting to changes in worship, or welcoming people different from ourselves, or reaching some kind of agreement about how to replace the dying HVAC system. As I step into “emerging elder” status, I also see that the practice of financial stewardship sustains us in this virtue of stability. In a consumer culture oriented toward “getting what we pay for,” this is an important and counter-cultural part of our formation for discipleship, and one that we need to embrace.

Churches as we know them are bound to change. But a mission-centered church of the future will continue to need an infrastructure, and the money to support that will have to come from committed people who are willing to give back a portion, out of our abundance, trusting that the church has a future, and committing ourselves to discerning the shape of that future. This is not an appeal from the pulpit, but a view from the pew. People – if we think there should be churches, it is up to us.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt (Kathy) keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area, and teaches courses in literature, theology and writing at Virginia Theological Seminary and the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

By Luiz Coelho

As a steward for the Lambeth Conference, my days have been filled with all sorts of random activities. I have carried luggage for bishops and their spouses. I have riden a bicycle around campus carrying conference materials from building to building. I even led a workshop on art and prayer in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral. The experience has been more than a day filled with work, however, including a “garden party” with the Queen of the United Kingdom (not that she spent much time with us) and the opportunity to meet in person so many men and women of God, which has given me much hope for the future, in spite of our current controversies and divisions.

However, I would say that the high moments for me were the worship services. They varied in range, scope and organization from happy clappy evening prayers at the “Big Top”, to an intimate Anglo-Catholic Mass organized by the stewards in the Cathedral's crypt. It is impossible to forget the magnificent Sunday morning Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral (which had a procession of hundreds of bishops and officially opened the Conference), and the simple daily night prayers in the chapel with the chaplaincy team comprised of religious from around the Communion.

The second Sunday of the conference was the one which marked me the most, though. It was an ordinary Sunday Eucharist at Canterbury Cathedral (if anything in that fantastic church can be considered ordinary). That day I had to wake up extremely early, since I was one of the people invited to read the Intercessions for the BBC-broadcasted service at St. Dunstan's. Nevertheless, I decided to go to the cathedral Eucharist afterwards, as some other stewards did. We arrived very early, so we spent some time walking around that magnificent building, and then went back to our seats. Next to us was a man who looked familiar. He smiled to us and said “Good morning”. Something deep inside me told me I knew him. However, it was only after the service actually started that I realized who he was.

This man is one of the leading conservative media writers. His thoughts and writings represent, in fact, many of the offensive values that I oppose in the Church. I frequently use his news group as an example of what I understand to be an unchristian way of communicating (and please do not misunderstand me; I recognize that there are progressive media writers in our church who unfortunatley share his same unchristian rhetoric in their own communications, so I am not singling him out because he is on the far right.) Still, he was there, next to me – as vulnerable as he could be – taking part of the same liturgy I was.

Several thoughts crossed my mind. What would I do when it was time to give a sign of peace? Should I make myself known and tell him how much I abhor his style of communicating? Should I point out how evil I believe his news group is? Should I make a statement by refusing to be in communion with a person that has hurt me – and many of my brothers and sisters – several times, through his vitriolic style of writing?

But I knew that I could not make any of those choices, because none were faithful choices for a follower of the Prince of Peace. So, I decided to exchange the peace with him. After all, in spite of our disagreements on some issues and methods, I knew he was just one more child of God – made in His image and likeness; and, I realized that we did share some things in common, like the creeds and our common desire to love Jesus. Not sharing the peace with him would represent a dinigration of the Good News in Christ that I to proclaim: that the Church is for all, that all can repent and change their lives, that the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ preserves us in everlasting life, that we must seek Christ in every human being... So, I decided to do what I believe we are supposed to do if we are faithful to the Great Commandment. He smiled – totally unaware of who I was – and shook my hand.

I do not know if anything changed in his heart. I do not even know if he received communion, or just a blessing. Most likely he was not radically changed at all after that service, and many of you readers will keep “fighting the good fight” against his oppressive rhetoric in his writing. But maybe... maybe that moment changed him, even just a tiny bit. Even if it did not, it changed me; as for me, it changed everything.

The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you, and remain with you always.

This blessing has always been one of my favorite ones and is one of the reasons I am so fond of the Book of Common Prayer. Through my experience last Sunday the Holy Spirit once again offered me a glimpse of what that “peace which passes understanding” means. As we exchanged Christ’s mysterious gift of peace, I felt an immense relief in my heart, and a renewed sense of hope for our Church. I understood a bit of the essence of Jesus' teaching to love and pray for those who persecute you. It is a liberating love, by which Christ empties us from all hatred and prejudice, and fills us with an everlasting peace. Amen.

Luiz Coelho, a seminarian from the Diocese of Rio de Janero, spends part of the year in the BFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His Web site includes his art and his blog, Wandering Christian, on which he examines "Christianity in the third millennium, from a progressive, Latin American and Anglican point of view."

By Greg Jones

Last Sunday, the Lord gave us quite a bundle of sayings about the Kingdom of Heaven. What do they mean? What is Jesus saying in these parables?

Consider, He says the Kingdom of Heaven is like:
- A tiny mustard seed: Something very small, yet very powerful, which went planted grows immensely, offering its branches in service to other creatures;
- Or a bit of yeast: Able to transform the entire substance in which it has been mixed, turning dough into risen bread;
- Or a treasure: Found and cherished after being long ignored or disregarded.
- Or a pearl; A beautiful gem created by an unbeautiful creature which the Law of Moses declares abominable.

These are powerful parables, which describe the Kingdom of Heaven as treasure of great power which grows out of surprising places, effecting all around it. These are fairly easy to grasp too, when Jesus asks, "Do you understand," it's not that hard to say, "Yes."

But what about the last parable today? The hard saying? The one where the Kingdom of Heaven is like a net filled with every kind of fish, of which those judged good will be kept, and those judged bad will be destroyed? What do you do with a parable like that?

Do you ignore it? Do you decide to keep the four 'good' ones and toss away the one 'bad' one? Do you presume to judge the teachings of Jesus this way?

No. But what?

A wise priest once said that interpreting the Scripture is like eating a trout. Some bites are fleshy and fall right off the bone, easy to eat and tasty. Others are spiny and hard to swallow, the small bones sticking in your throat.

This fellows says, "as with the Bible, go for the easy parts first, and when you've learned how good they are, and how good fish is, then go after the hard bites." It's a mistake to go after the hard spiny parts first - for once they stick in your throat - you may never learn to appreciate the whole.

Of course, the earliest Christian symbol for Jesus Christ is the fish. The first letters of the Greek phrase - "Jesus Christ Son of God Savior" form an acronym - ICTHYS - which of course also means 'fish.' And isn't it true that the Gospel of this Son of God can be a hard fish to eat sometimes? Especially because of the spiny parts - the hard parts - the parts which affront and confuse our sense of things?

As with today's parables, the Gospel is not always easy to hear, learn, swallow and inwardly digest. However, the strategy of the wise priest is the way to go. Begin with the fleshy, easy bites of the Gospel - the easier to swallow sayings of Christ - in order to form the trust that these teachings are good, precious and life-giving food. And when you are coming to believe that this fish is worth eating - entirely - then tackle the harder parts.

If you have learned to trust in Christ - with Paul in Romans 8 - that Christ has come to you, for you, and with you, and loves you so much that you cannot fathom the depths of his loyalty to you - then maybe you will be able to trust also that this hard parable of judgement is also trustworthy, good and necessary. For by trusting that the good fish, Jesus Christ the Son of God Savior, is the powerful seed which will transform the world around it into a treasure coming from a surprising place, then you will then have the confidence that you want and need the hard parts, the spine, the piercing truth of the Gospel: hard wood, nails and all.

After all, it is by the hard wood of the cross, and the piercing truth of Christ's love, and His resurrection from the grave, that Christ reassures us that God's kingdom will prevail in the world in which it has been planted, and sin and death will not, and those who enter into the kingdom will be changed.

Yes, the dangerous part of the Gospel is the implication of all these parables today that once the Kingdom of Heaven is planted (in a person, in a people) it cannot be stopped from ultimately taking over the whole of it - such that only the Kingdom will remain, and all else will fall away.

This is a dangerous message, because it threatens everything about us that is not of God. For though we are all made in God's image, the scary news is that we have also remade ourselves by choices not in God's image.

To some extent or another, these choices begin to define who we think we are. Yes, the Gospel is that God loves all people, but He doesn't love all our choices.

The work of the disciple of Christ is to make choices which please the Lord, and which will spread the Gospel like a tiny seed, like leaven, like treasure, like a net - so that all may enter the Kingdom in joy.

The Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones ("Greg") was educated at the University of North Carolina and the General Theological Seminary, where he is on the Board. he is the author of Beyond Da Vinci (Seabury Books, 2004), and blogs at fatherjones.com.

By W. Nicholas Knisely

A few years ago, not long after the events of General Convention in 2003, the sexton in the parish I served came to tell me that he was being yelled at as he worked in the front yard on the parish. Apparently there were kids driving by regularly, who when they saw him or anyone else out front, would roll down the window of the car and yell “Gay Church!” or “You’re going to Hell!”. The sexton didn’t like being yelled at, but his real concern was that these folks would start vandalizing the building. I suggested we let the local police know. He rolled his eyes.

I didn’t understand what was with the eye-rolling until a few months later when our secretary buzzed me in my office to tell me there were some police officers here. I’d better come out to her office, *now* was what she said as I recall.

We were well known in the community for a Soup Kitchen that served food daily to whoever showed up at the parish at lunchtime. That ministry had been going on for a long time due to the work of a number of committed laypeople and the extraordinary Deacon Liz. The rule in the kitchen was that if you were hungry, we would feed you, no questions asked. Sometimes we had some unsavory types coming in to eat, but as long as they were hungry and didn’t cause trouble, they were welcome to eat with the rest. The police knew this and would occasionally stop by looking for someone for whom they had an arrest warrant. We generally asked them to keep a distance, and talk to the staff first before they went in. I thought this was one of those situations when I was called to the office that particular morning.

Turns out it was something totally different. A police officer was there. But instead of a warrant, he was there with a bag of sandwiches. Someone had apparently made them for the officers on duty that day and they couldn’t use them all. So he decided to bring them by the church to give them to the soup kitchen to see if we could hand them out for them. It was a lovely gesture.

But what brought me up short was what the officer said when he gave me the bag. “I don’t agree with you folks. I’m not even sure you’re a real church. But you’re doing good work feeding these people. I figured this might help.”

Somewhat taken aback, I thanked him, we shook hands and he left and I took the sandwiches inside.

It was later on that I remembered the conversation I’d had with our sexton about letting the police know about the verbal taunting. I think I understood the look the sexton gave me.

But more importantly, I recognized that something was now different too. An important bridge had been built in passing over the food from the officer to the people who needed it. The person who brought the food to us didn’t agree with us - but he was willing to cooperate with us on acts of mercy. Our relationship changed, a bit anyway, in that simple act of giving. There was no great climatic moment of reconciliation. There wasn’t any sudden dropping of scales from his or my eyes. But there was a mutual recognition that something good was happening and that we were going to try to find a way to work together - to fan a small ember at least - to see what might happen as a result.

I’ve been thinking lately about that moment and how it changed a relationship. It seems to me that there are some pretty obvious parallels between it and what is going on in the Anglican Communion at the moment. We have people who disagree. We have people who are not sure that they can recognize Jesus in each other. We have people who are in broken relationships with each other because of actions that one group or the other have taken.

What I’m pretty certain about is that explaining patiently and in great detail why the other side is wrong isn’t going to get us anywhere. It hasn’t as yet, and I’m pretty confident that we can project the present success rate well into the future.

So what should we do?

When I was the President of Diocesan Council in Pittsburgh, and Alden Hathaway and Bob Duncan were our bishops, we had the same sorts of conflicts in the diocese that we now have writ large in the Anglican Communion. And it was pretty clear then and there as it is now and here that talking wasn’t going to get us out of our bind. So we didn’t try that.

What we did try was to find the sorts of mission things that we could agree on, And then we did them. We made sandwiches and delivered them to people sleeping under the bridges in the city. We worked together with partnership dioceses in Africa, and in Uganda particularly. We reached out to the developing countries in Central and South America. The point was to find something we could agree upon and then to do it with each other as best we could. It helped a bit.

It didn’t fix everything. In fact looking at the division in that diocese now I can say that it could be argued that it didn’t fix anything. But it was worth trying then. I think it’s worth trying now. Jesus calls us to be reconciled with each other. Even when groups are unwilling to reconcile, Jesus doesn’t seem to give the option of not trying. According to the prayerbook, reconciliation between God and creation is the central mission of Christ’s church in the world.

I guess that this same impulse of trying to find a way to be reconciled to each other is at the heart of what I saw happening in Canterbury at the Lambeth Conference this weekend. The bishops of the Anglican Communion are not of one mind. They are trying to find ways to be reconciled with each other. They are trying to do that by starting with the simple steps of building relationships marching in the streets with each other and in conversations formally and informally with each other.

Will this solve the problems in the Communion? Probably not. Our disagreements are multi-layered things and our bishops are not the only parties involved.

But it’s a start. It’s like those sandwiches the police officer handed me. It’s a recognition that even if I don’t agree with you, I respect you - at least in part. And perhaps out of that small flame, we can grow a deeper respect that can, someday, be the driving force behind a deep and real reconciliation of voices striving for justice and holiness in the Church.

And for that small start I’m grateful.

The Very Rev. W. Nicholas Knisely is Dean of Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix Ariz. He serves as Chair of the Standing Commission on Episcopal Church Communication and was originally trained as an astronomer. His blog is Entangled States.

By R. William Carroll

Those of us who are not bishops have little choice but to watch the torrent of news coming out of the Lambeth Conference, and much of it is discouraging. Rowan Williams continues to support the general direction of the Windsor Report, including the call for an Anglican Covenant, an idea that many of us consider to be a terrible one, one which would jettison the freedom and decentralized structures at the heart of historic, normative Anglicanism. In addition, the rumors of a Faith and Order Commission, which some have rightly equated to the Holy Office (of the Inquisition) point us in a similarly depressing direction.

The usual calls to resist giving in to our anxieties and to "trust the process" are well taken. For what it's worth, with the single exception of the shameful exclusion of Gene Robinson (I still maintain that were I a bishop, I wouldn't attend under those conditions), I think that the process at Lambeth has been exceptional. The decision to go forward without resolutions (which may see attempts at sabotage) was simply a stroke of genius. The focus on anti-poverty work and the environmental crisis is also welcomed. Despite the absence of resolutions, I hope the bishops will find a way to issue a strong statement about wars of aggression and torture.

It is not mere anxiety, however, to have substantive concerns about the direction in which the Anglican Communion, under the questionable leadership of Rowan Williams, seems to be headed. Indeed, too many let themselves be bullied by those who insist that everything would go to hell in a handbasket if we didn't give in to the radical innovations advocated by the Windsor Report. (Or at least head fake, a la B033 that we might be willing so to do. No one seems to believe this ruse, and I take comfort in that.) This seems to be a solution that only a power hungry primate or bureaucrat could love, and despite the hype it will do little to advance God's mission. What the bishops of the Episcopal Church need to understand (some of them no doubt do), is that backing down on our commitment to the full inclusion and ministries of all the baptized would be (in Michael Hopkins phrase) "evangelical suicide." I trust that LGBT bishops and allies have communicated this to the other bishops at Lambeth.

Centralized structures may for the moment serve the perceived needs of evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics, as well as churches in parts of the world that retain cultural opposition to same sex relationships. They will choke and kill the Church's mission in our context, where we really need alternatives to the theocratic religious right.

It is up to us, who value historic, normative Anglicanism to push back against these developments with all our strength. The strategy of appeasement, embodied in B033, was never a good idea. If we buy our "place at the table," by sacrificing the principles of the Baptismal Covenant, it is too high a price.

In the months and years to come, we will all face choices. These choices are framed by our baptismal vows. At present, the Lambeth Conference doesn't have any more power than we give it. We need to keep this in mind. In the aftermath of the Conference, we should all do our best to make it clear that, if forced to choose between our Baptismal ecclesiology and the ecclesiology of quasi-papal centralization, we will choose the former every time.

God is indeed still in charge. While there is much to be concerned about, we should never be anxious. In our polity, bishops cannot make any decisions without the House of Deputies. Not even General Convention can stop God from loving God's LGBT children or keep the Kingdom from coming. Jesus Christ is our guarantee. But if General Convention does not pay attention to the Baptismal Covenant, it can make a huge mess of the Church. It is up to each one of us, once these conversations return to their proper venue in Anaheim, to do all in our power to keep the Episcopal Church as close as we can to God's dream of a table at which all are welcome.

Ultimately, the only process we can trust without qualification is God's process. And in that process at least, each one of us is welcomed with open arms.

The Rev. Dr. R. William Carroll serves as rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio (Diocese of Southern Ohio). He received his Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He co-edits The Covenant Journal with Lane Denson.

by Richard Helmer

On Friday, July 11th, I rose early with designs on the AT&T store in San Rafael. It was the day the new improved iPhone was hitting the stores, and Apple had done what it always does best – generated fanatical demand for their newest, latest, coolest product. Sure enough, I got to the cellular store at 6:45, credit card and drivers license in my pocket, to find a line of nearly forty people already waiting there. They were stretched out around the block, Starbucks cups in hand, waiting outside the door to be among the first to have the new iPhone launching at 8:00 sharp. There was laughter, a bit of embarrassment, a few quarters for the parking meter, and then I was in line, too, feeling smug that I had beaten the clock as more and more people filed behind me.

Apple had created in me and a million other people a rather expensive iPhone-shaped hole. We were bound and determined to get one to fill that little void. What made it truly silly was that I already have one, and it’s only a year old. It’s just not as fast as the new one, just not as snazzy. So I’d been pining away for the new model for weeks, fed by a steady stream of advertising and commentary online, the happy sales pitch of a guy with glasses in a plain black sweater telling me how convenient, compact, productive, efficient, and cool my life would be with the shiny new piece of plastic with a glass screen and a computer chip inside my pocket.

For about an hour, I enjoyed talking with the people around me in line. There was the lady behind me with two dogs. I wondered if they needed iPhones, too. She was having a lively chat with her son about whether or not they could upgrade based on their current cellular plan, and whether the new data plan was worth the cost. The father and his son in front of me talked about all the new programs that could now be downloaded to the gadget. The lady in front of them was sitting on the sidewalk, furiously scribbling down all the phone numbers from her old iPhone’s contacts application. She’d dropped hers in water a few weeks earlier. It didn’t turn off any more, and she couldn’t synchronize it with her computer, so she had to turn to the archaic mode of pen and paper or she’d lose all her important data when she upgraded.

I was starting to feel a little sorry for her when sales people from the store came out to chat with us in line: to make sure we understood all that was required of us to get our hands on the new gadget; to make sure we understood our choices; to make change for the parking meters. They counted heads and assured us there was enough stock to sell us all an iPhone that morning. Their aim was good business: to make us as comfortable as possible as we desperately waited for their generous hospitality in the shiny, clean store – generous hospitality offered so that they could take our money and help us sign our lives away through a new two-year contract for the shiny, black (or white, if you want it) beastie.

I assuaged any feelings of guilt by working on my sermon while standing in line, but I couldn’t quite get the question out of my mind: Why was I really there? At 8:00 the doors opened, and AT&T began processing the new iPhone customers five at a time, promising an average of ten minutes per customer. I timed things out in my head but remained in denial about the conclusion I was forced to draw. At 8:15 the line, already slow, slowed further. At 8:30, it had ground almost to a halt.

The rolling launch of the new iPhone around the world was clogging up Apple’s systems, the computers had stopped talking to one another, and people were looking down the gauntlet of waiting for countless hours in line to get the device. Everybody else was calling work or home to cancel appointments and moving the day’s schedule around so they could stay in line. Thing was, I couldn’t. At 8:45 I had to return to the church. Morning Prayer was on the agenda as well as a memorial service. I had to print my sermon for the memorial, and there was much to be done in the office.

Suddenly I was heartsick. I would not be getting the new iPhone that day. And didn’t I deserve one? My love for gadgets is almost legendary in the community where I serve. It gets so bad at times that my wife has resorted to declaring computing-free (and that means iPhone-free) zones in our apartment.

“For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit,” Paul writes the Church in Rome in this past Sunday’s Epistle. For Paul, “flesh” is a technical theological term, one that appears to encompass all in our nature that opposes or ignores the life that God offers us. “Flesh” means our addiction to all that is not God, to our quixotic pursuit of more with the insistence of scarcity biting at our heels, chasing us into selfish ambitions.

Living in America too frequently cannot be defined as a state of being. It might better be defined as a “state of consuming.” And with the economy, the housing market, the stock market, the consumer market all down for a time, we’re all suffering some symptoms of consumption withdrawal, withdrawal from living “according to the flesh.” Yet our sufferings are nothing compared with much of the world’s population as food prices soar and resources become scarcer.

As I left the line last Friday, I said goodbye to the people I had gotten to know a little in that hour-and-a-half. “Sorry,” said one man to me, with a look of true pity that I had to go to work, and I wouldn’t be getting my hands on the new gadget that morning. “Yeah,” I said, “me too.” But on the way home, glancing at my older iPhone model on the dash, I realized the little empty iPhone-shaped hole in me was an entry point for God, and through that grace I began to wake up.

I could see more clearly now that I was headed home to lead a memorial service for parishioner who, as a pediatrician, had given her lifetime so that countless children could have healthy lives in our community. How could I forget the blessings that I had received, that the fields all around are rich with the grain planted by our God, nourished by a creation that doesn’t toil in assembly lines or work out market strategies or weigh the cost of every action or every individual?

Ours is a God who explodes our human notions of value, and our theories of supply and demand with the simple formula of grace: the supply of God’s love for us and for all Creation is infinite and unbounded. Perhaps the silver lining of this economic downturn is that it can become for many of us a reality check, a graceful opportunity to get back in touch with what is truly important. This time is an opportunity to really help those who are truly in need, and to stop pursuing illusion and vanities. To learn again how to tend our wayward hearts and our deepest longings for a God who loves us.

Christian economics works this way:

We call a small portion of bread and a sip of wine God – Christ’s flesh and blood – spiritual things to which we are called. And we consume them. Because we know deep down we become what we consume. We consume them so we may return to being made in God’s image, become more Christ-like, more imbued with grace for a world in true need. And around this tiny sacrifice, worth not even pennies to the great economic and governmental powers of our day, is built the compassion and love that truly nourishes our lives.

That satisfies me in a way that no shiny new iPhone ever could. That calls me to give it up for greater things. And that is what God and I at last agreed on the way back from San Rafael, Highway 101 the path, the draw of true human life and real needs back at home guiding the turns of the wheel.

It took God a while to break through all the hype, but God finally did. God always does.

The Rev. Richard E. Helmer serves as rector of Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, Calif. He has served in interfaith, ecumenical, diocesan, and national church organizations, including Episcopal Asiamerica Ministries , stewardship, and ethnic and multicultural church settings. He blogs regularly about spirituality, ministry, Anglicanism, and church politics at Caught by the Light.

By Jane Carol Redmont

My brother’s grandchildren look at me from the photos I have just received, fresh from the internet. They are at the beach, smiling under their cloth hats, cheeks round and dark eyes sparkling, the five-year-old boy and seven-month-old girl.

I wish I were there with them and their parents, my elder nephew and his wife. But the beach is in Portugal, where they live, thousands of miles away.

I have not yet met the baby. My plans to visit this summer have been scuttled by a combination of work and financial constraints. Family togetherness is expensive. Our immediate kin – my parents, their two children, and two more generations – are spread out over four countries.

We remain close. My brother and I exchange e-mails when he has just awakened in Italy and I am closing down the computer for the night in the U.S. My mother calls from Boston to ask about plans for a visit later in the summer and speaks of an old friend whose health is failing, of the presidential campaign, of her small garden plot, a raised bed which she tends at nearly ninety years of age.

A few days ago I spent the day at a small retreat center here in North Carolina, writing, resting, praying. After the afternoon thunderstorm, I walked the outdoor labyrinth on a path of pine needles bounded by large round stones. The air was full of birdsong. It was still humid, less thick than in the heat of the day but with a muggy texture that makes me miss the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for a decade before moving East three years ago.

At the entrance to the labyrinth is a stone birdbath. Or perhaps it is a holy water font – or both. It holds both soil at the bottom and fresh fallen rain. I am a Christian; I touch the water, make the sign of the cross. Walking the labyrinth, step by step, slowly, with no agenda or question in my mind, I follow the path. Images come to me of my family’s children, of the land where they live. I move back to the present, returning my attention to my steps, watching my feet, noticing thick tarpaulin where the bed of pine needles has thinned, walking. In my steps are the steps of my ancestors who came here as immigrants, mostly poor, some more privileged, all leaving their homes, never seeing their parents again. I walk, feeling this land, carrying other lands inside me.

I walk and remember the migrants and immigrants I met in Oregon eight summers ago, during a week-long walk for justice with labor and religious activists. For some, Spanish is a second language; they speak Mixteca and Zapoteca. In their bodies are layers of exile. I think of today’s migrants in Sudan, displaced by war and stalked by violence and hunger. My life is a palace compared to theirs.

Still, we share displacement and rebuilding, the tug toward and separation from family, the experience of communal bonds, accidental or intentional, that go beyond the kinship of blood. We take steps on foreign land.

On the same July 4 weekend as the children’s photos arrive, I hear from a high school friend from Paris. We have renewed contact after three decades, picking up where we left off, writing short, affectionate notes, celebrating a reunion with two other friends last fall. He writes a few lines from southeast France, where his parents have retired. The mere name of the town fills me with memories: stone houses, cobblestones, the smell of lavender and herbs in the surrounding countryside.

Later in the day, I attend a potluck party at the home of a couple of men who are friends from church and professional colleagues. We often spend holidays together: Easter dinner, Thanksgiving, sometimes our birthdays. We see each other more often than we see our families. We sing together at church, roll our eyes at stories from work, share news of our parents’ health. Today, on the Fourth of July, the house is full. Some of the guests have lived most of their lives here in the southern U.S. Others, like me, are recent transplants.

This land is not my land nor the land my body loves. It is not the place of my birth. In other ways it is becoming home, not least because of the church. These simultaneous truths speak to me as I walk, step by step, on a quiet summer evening in a labyrinth bounded with stone.

In the city of my birth, which will always be home, I am now also a stranger: I always return to visit, but have not lived there, by the Seine, since the year I turned twenty-one. In the city I miss, by the Pacific, where the air is soft and where I spent ten years, I could not live today. There is no work for me there.

Where is my land? Who are my people?

As a citizen of one nation raised in another, these questions used to haunt me, especially during my adolescent and young adult years. Later they mattered less, or mattered differently.

In some ways those of us who have lived astride cultures are a nation of our own. My family has and is its own culture. I have come to accept this.

In other ways my life has schooled me for the church, for broad belonging, for holding many people – and peoples – in my heart at once. It is no accident that theologies of the communion of saints and of the body of Christ are among those I treasure most and find most sustaining.

I still think a great deal about place, and belonging, and what it means to be a people or belong to a land. I think about home and exile.

With formative communities and loved ones in more than one culture, I am at home in several places. I also always miss someone or someplace – even when, adapting to a new location or tending to my present life, I may suppress for weeks on end the feelings of longing.

Paradoxically, it is in the taking of slow, mindful steps on the land where I now live that I can return fully to the memory of the other lands I love and of the people who live there.

My path may not be as unusual as it seems. Even those who have less migration and fewer cultures in their recent past carry the footsteps of their ancestors with them, learn and relearn a sense of place, discover the shape and meaning of kinship and friendship as they walk through life.

Jane Carol Redmont is theologian for the deacon formation program of the Diocese of North Carolina and chairs the diocesan Anti-Racism Committee. She teaches religious studies and women’s studies at Guilford College. Her book When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life will be published in a new edition by Ave Maria Press in October.

This is the fourth of a series, 7 Dates and Why They Matter for the Anglican Faith. Links to previous installments are here.)

By Derek Olsen

Towards the middle of the fourth century, the desert of southern Egypt bore strange fruit. Dwellings and communities flowered in the harsh wastes—peopling the wilderness as one contemporary writer said. But these planters of communities were no colonists or pioneers, striking out to expand the frontiers of the Empire; instead, they saw themselves as militants, soldiers, carrying the fight to the enemy’s heartland—for where better than the demon-haunted wastes to find and conquer demons? Some went singly into the deserts to wrestle with demons within and without while others went in pairs or aligned themselves in communities. Indeed, in the writings they left they conceived themselves as a spiritual twin of the armies of Rome: Christ, their commander; the abbas and ammas, field commanders; monastics, the shield-walled battle line with the hermits striding before as champions to taunt, confuse, and discourage the milling enemy lines of the demonic horde. It was here in the sands of Egypt that Christian monasticism was born. This tradition, especially as mediated through a single book, was to have an great impact of Christianity on a whole and the Anglican tradition in particular.

As the days of Roman persecution came to an end and as Christianity found official favor, thousands flocked to Christian fonts. Some came who had feared persecution and death before, others, came newly convicted by its message of salvation. And, of course, as the religion’s status rose, those who sought status realized that a profession of Christianity could be quite an asset to their political profession. Where before being a Christian could get you killed, now it could get you promoted; Constantine had, in effect, created the nominal Christian. Monasticism was, in part, a reaction against this laxity and to maintain the urgency and discipline required to hold the faith in the days of martyrdom. Rather than seeking the minimum required to acquire the title, the hermits and monastics sought to embody the maximum: to live the life enjoined in the Scriptures—to give their goods freely, to embrace the path of the cross, to pray without ceasing. For them this was no “above and beyond”; it was nothing less than the requirements for being a Christian.

The legends of Antony, the father of the eremtical life (hermits and other solitaries), and Pachomias, father of the coenobitic life (monastics—both monks and nuns who live in communities), spread quickly through the Greek-speaking East. Their wisdom was simple, unconcerned with the heights of theological speculation but focused on the pastoral and the pragmatic—recognizing the temptations of sin and avoiding them through the cultivation of virtue. Their lack of studied sophistication and ignorance of classical (pagan) learning was heralded by their biographers (who were often highly educated and sophisticated themselves…) Indeed, Athanasius wrote that Antony was illiterate; his massive biblical learning depended not upon what he had read, but what he had memorized from what he heard. As the legends spread, the way of life spread with it: monastic communities sprang up in Palestine, Syria, Cappadocia (modern-day Turkey); the wisdom of the desert which had been passed down in stories and maxims was collected and organized by teachers like Basil the Great and Evagrius of Pontus.

The Latinate literati of Jerusalem—Jerome, Rufinius, and others—translated many of the Greek texts into Latin for the benefit of the church in the West, but the character of western monasticism was indelibly marked by the efforts of John Cassian. As a young man John Cassian and his companion Germanicus dwelt briefly as monks in Palestine but, unsatisfied by what they found there, headed to the Egyptian deserts themselves. Circling through Northern Egypt, they saw Egyptian rigor with their own eyes and sat at the feet of celebrated abbas—questioning, probing, and learning. Cassian returned to the West, rubbing shoulders with the great and powerful as he went (he was ordained to the diaconate by St John Chrysostom himself) and founded two monasteries in Marseille. In this setting, he penned his magnum opus in two works, the Institutes and Conferences. Taken together, these works represent a watershed moment in the history of the Western Church. Most of the writings from this period are occasional, topical, or homiletical; Cassian’s was the first work in the Christian West that strove to be complete. When we moderns think of Christian works that strive to be complete, we think of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica or Karl Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik but Cassian’s was not a systematic theology. True to the monastic ways, it was intended as a comprehensive Christian spirituality.

Monasticism took root in the West in a variety of forms. Fertilized by the rich traditions of Egypt, Syria, and the Western stands of Cassian, Caesarius of Arles, and Augustine of Hippo, it ranged from the exuberant asceticism of the Irish to the intellectualism of Cassiodorus’s Vivarium. As it matured over centuries, two rules—or sets of instructions for living the monastic life—came to the fore and of these one was eventually recognized as the finest expression of the monastic spirit in the West: the Rule of Saint Benedict. (The runner-up was the Irish Rule of Columbanus.) True to the monastic spirit of humility, obedience, and of patient transmission of received tradition over innovative originality, not much is known of Benedict, the circumstances of the Rule’s writing or even when exactly it was written. The Dialogues of Pope Gregory written some half a century after Benedict’s death is the only record of his life and, like the other lives of the monastic masters, is a theological and spiritual treatise in biographical form rather than a modern historical account of dates and deeds. Nevertheless, the Rule itself exudes a character and spirit of a piece with the individual descried by Gregory, one at home alongside Antony, Pachomius, and Cassian.

Sometime around the year 525 Benedict, working with and adapting earlier monastic material, created a deft epitome of Cassian’s work—capturing in a fraction of the space the heart of Cassian’s vision. At the same time, the Rule itself becomes a lens to read Cassian and the rest of the monastic tradition highlighting by its emphases themes and motifs explicit or latent in the earlier works. In this Rule, Benedict bequeaths four great gifts to the Western Church all of which—to one degree or another—have become embodied in the Anglican tradition.

The first is moderation. The child of a tradition that could be extreme and imprudent, Benedict counseled moderation in the pursuit of asceticism. You will find here no tales of hours-long prayer-sessions, standing with arms outstretching, while frigid sea water lapped around necks (as in Irish monastic traditions). Rather Benedict understood excess as, more often than not, a sign of initial exuberance likely to flare fast and hot—then burn out—not a temperament conducive to an entire way of life. Within communal life too, Benedict cautioned against one set of strictures for all in favor of a toleration that would accommodate the very old, the very young, the sick, and the weak. The strong should rejoice in their strength and ability to endure rigors, but not at the expense of the rest. Asceticism is intended to train the body and soul—not destroy them. The via media, the path of moderation, is upheld as the superior path.

The second great gift is Benedict’s ordering of prayer. “Pray without ceasing”, Paul commands, and the early monastics took him quite seriously. Their prayers of choice were the Psalms and various traditions utilized them in various ways. Benedict, again following the path of moderation reminds his readers that if the great monks of old could recite all 150 psalms each day, the least his readers could do would be to pray through them each week. Establishing an order by means of the seven day prayer offices and the night office through which the whole Psalter could be prayed each week, Benedict helped solidify the liturgical tradition of the West that ordered its day around these eight hours of prayer. Although reduced in number to two services of prayer (four in our current prayer book) the Anglican tradition inherited its liturgical rhythm from Benedict and also its love for the Psalms which still today form the heart of the Anglican services of morning and evening prayer.

The third great gift is Benedict’s pragmatism. The monastic tradition generally rejected obscure theological speculation in favor of serious introspection. The profound unflinching gaze into the eyes of the soul is much more uncomfortable than theological speculation; cataloging personal failings with an eye to their amendment and correction is more humiliating than solving great scholastic dilemmas. What mattered to the monks from Egypt and beyond is that they gathered in common for prayer, and eagerly sought a common salvation. While they neither (knowingly) sheltered nor excused heresy, their focus was elsewhere. The bulk of Benedict’s rule is taken up with mundane directions—who helps cook the food; how servers are selected and when they get to eat if their serving during mealtime; who keeps he door; how is discipline administered. And, in the midst of it all, these orderings and arrangements are seen as no less holy than the Work of God (the hours of prayer) in the chapel. Yes, the Work of God is to take precedence above all else, but in and through the Work of God one learns that all labor is somehow the work of God when undertaken with care, concern, and compassion. When the one performing the lowly tasks of serving table or washing feet comes to understand the labor as serving Christ in the other, work and prayer intertwine and inform one another. This pragmatism, this focus on common prayer, common action as the root of unity rather than ascription to theological formulas is dear to the Anglican way.

The fourth great gift of Benedict is his understanding of community. The early monastics understood that contending with demons was safer in numbers; demonic deceit plays on our weaknesses easier when we are alone. Benedict highlighted three particular vows that, taken together, foster and facilitate Christian community: obedience, stability, and conversion of life. As he makes painfully clear in his first chapter, the third—what seems to be the real goal of the monastic life—is, in fact, impossible without the first two. Only by remaining in the community, in the conversation can conversion of life be properly achieved; only under obedience to the authority placed over you, and understanding God to be both symbolized in and directing that relationship, can conversion occur.

The first three gifts of Benedict are the easier—the safer. The fourth is the resilient secret that has enabled Benedictine monasticism to remain as a viable force for almost fifteen hundred years. (By way of contrast—how many communes founded in the Sixties, a spare forty years ago, now remain…?) It is the fourth that challenges us now, that challenges our Anglican Communion now. In our current struggles, what does it mean to embody the vows that Benedict demanded? What does it look like to envision them within our current context? Benedict calls us to struggle for a stability that is neither sloth nor stagnation, an obedience that is neither feigned nor forced, holding forth as the prize the ongoing conversion of life as we grow towards the mind of Christ.

Sometime around 525 Benedict penned his rule—and now we need his wisdom more than ever: wisdom on prayer, wisdom on moderation, wisdom on the holiness of the pragmatic, and wisdom on the formation of effective Christian community that leads us ever deeper into love.

Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.