Making Room for Hermits and Peregrines

Wisdom received and lived in everyday matters describes the spirit and practicalities of St Benedict’s rule for monasteries. Yesterday (7/11) some church calendars commemorated Benedict. The rule was a fruit of experience, life, work in community, study, prayer, and built upon a few hundred years of christian efforts to live more in common with one another. This is as a faithful response to the calling out of divine word and wisdom in everyday circumstances.

The rule asks us to make room in our lives for one another, and for prayer, good work, learning, rest, leisure, beauty, and more. The rule, and guides like it, can help you make room for the good and right things for life lived more in common with others.

In the rule Benedict describes ‘four types of monks.” Coenobites, sarabites, gyrovague and hermits.

Viewed a little differently, these help us appreciate typical dimensions of life that the church and christian community need to make room for.  Last year I scribbled here about communal monks addressing cooperative economic enterprise, and small groups of monks addressing intentional tending of households.

The early church, monastics and beguines, anabaptists, numerous modern communities, from pietist groups like the Moravians, to maroon communities of people having escaped enslavement, golden age pirates imbibing radical Xtn ideas like providing for the disabled, African American Cooperativism, the Antigonish movment and the Mondragon Cooperatives. A past worth rediscovering, sorting out, salvaging, re-purposing into practical life that carries us God-ward.

Likewise, room for households. Small groups, Sunday school, church mutual aid groups and pulpit preachments could bring the light of divine wisdom upon out kitchen tables and grocery lists, our electric bills and manner of transportation, our work, our recreation, our child rearing and more.

“welcome to the desert of the real”

All of these things provide the daily matter of growing in the place of our lives with compassion, gentleness, patience…as persons created and renewed in the divine image and likeness.

A friend in my prayer group beautifully described the three benedictine vows of listening, conversion of life, and stability of place. In particular she said stability of place meant that “we don’t easily give up on people or the places we live.” So a year later, here are some concluding thoughts on the need for our church and christian communities to make room for hermits, & peregrines (a more appreciative word for a wandering monk.)

These can symbolize our spiritual impulse to listen truly and to move/change faithfully.

In this connection, I think about the many hermits, whom we or they themselves may not know by that name, around us. People who have stayed in their faith, even as the way they practiced it has changed. Or who have lived with another person, or a community, or in a place, for however long, to try to really see it, let it be more truly, and take part in its life more compassionately and fully.

They may not be ‘disruptors,’ “entrepreneurs’ ‘innovators,’ or ‘organizers.’

They may be more what Psalm 35:20 calls the quiet in the land.

Does your congregation make room for them? Does your pastor, lay leadership and expectations make room for their quiet gifts, their firm and effective background awareness and presence?

These may be the very people someone is always trying to ‘get to do more…”

People who are done with committees, church politics, and the ever shifting focus of denominations. People formed and reformed who have drifted away from weekly sacramental participation in a parish building, but who are nonetheless around, and desire to drink deeply from the well of spirit and wisdom where she calls out.

Such as in marriage, in memory of ancestors, in grandchildren, in hobbies and garden, in the streets of the city and suburbia and wild places where neighbors and strangers and wildlings are met.

Maybe that’s you.

Benedict is cautious, saying the hermit call is not for everyone, and it has spiritual risks. You can go ‘off the map’, you can take on more than you humbly are capable of. The risks of wilderness travel, including spiritual wilds, are real and require patience, groundedness, experience and good sense of your own needs and vulnerability. Hermits do need community and help.

But they may be people who have walked the community road all their life, and they just have gained a healthy intolerance for the kind of crazy-making, anxiety and other frenetic busy-ness that some congregations make too much room for.

They have learned to tend a place of quiet within and without through years of movement among life’s pressures and currents. That place of quiet let’s them listen more truly, and raises the ability of those near them to listen more truly.

The hermits in our urban, suburban and country midst-Do we make room for them?

The same with wanderers, peregrines. Does you church make room for this expression of faith?

I’m not talking about the fear or failure to root, dig, delve, invest or otherwise respond to others faithfully and more fully in commitment of self and being. Nor the unique privilege of class and wealth, spiritual tourism. Parishes and seminaries make room for that by sponsoring multi-thousand dollar destination pilgrimages by plane, train and automobile in a time of climate crisis. This expression of the spiritual impulse to wander faithfully requires pastoral, prophetic, ascetical guidance. What are we doing with all that vacation travel?

We might dwell a little more carefully and reflectively upon the best ways for wealthier disciples to use those impulses to travel and vacation, and the material resources available to them to do so.

We don’t want to end up as rootless “gyrovagues,” now do we?

But then there is Brendan and co.

we possess a faithful impulse to wander, to walk, to travel. Like the falcon on wing, like the wild birds migrating across the globe in order to seek food and warmth in winter, rear young in summer.

What would it be like to make room for faithful wandering, movement, the guidance of the impulse to move into a God-directed shape and orientation in our churches?

We might do more neighborhood walking in a spirit of prayer and thanksgiving and open-ness to learn and connect.

We might orient teaching and preaching and practices around times of decision and change in life when moving and transition crop up or intensify, like emerging into adulthood, midlife transitions, retirement, older age changes, changing jobs, relocation, and more.

But it is a beautiful to imagine casting ourselves out with others into the currents and winds of God’s gracious and life-giving spirit, like celtic and african saints may have once done.

Like geese and peregrines on the wing.

Ready to go?