Good morning. It's very good to be here, particularly in this most beautiful room this morning, which I think has much better space for us all to relate to one another here. What I'm going to look at this morning is really a continuation of the theme that I tried to present to you last night, which is the theme of being at home. And if I make my starting point, because I'm going to look at the three vows, the three Benedictine vows and how they apply to all of us, whoever we may be on our Christian journey, those of us living outside the monastery and outside the enclosure in the world and yet finding that those Benedictine vows speak to us all and help to bring us home.

[01:02]

If I make my starting point for any consideration of the Benedictine vase,… …the story of the prodigal,… …that is a connection which I owe originally to your own father, Damasus,… …in a pamphlet which was given to me of his, by Jerry Wolfe,… …long before I had heard of Mount Xavier. And so I'm very happy, here I am, to take the story of The Prodigal, which is a universal story, just a story that is told time and again throughout the world and throughout history. In the hands of artists and writers, it becomes a story that is explored time and again. In Leningrad, there hangs Rembrandt's amazing representation of that story,… …which so captured Henri Nant that he had it in his office,… …and has written what I think is actually one of his best books,… …The Story of the Prodigal, which was… only came out last year.

[02:16]

When I was in Australia a year ago, I saw a representation of the Prodigal Son by a great contemporary, Arthur Boyd, who is an Australian artist, and there was this immense tapestry, almost as big as that wall, in which the story of the Prodigal is set in the Australian desert. Relentless, arid, vast and terrifying. And on Tuesday, I've lost all sense of time, but I think it was Tuesday that I arrived here in Rochester, yes, and was staying with the Sisters of St. Joseph, hidden away in a small chapel there, a batik by one of those sisters, representing The story of the prodigal in a succession of circles, and I hope it won't be sexist if I say how very feminine that seemed to be, the great enclosing shapes with which she was relating the coming together of father and of son.

[03:24]

The story of the prodigal is our own story, and it's lived out for each one of us throughout our lives, on time and again throughout our lives because it answers that deepest need of all in us, the need to come home. Now, the rule opens with the words, listen, listen, my son. And here in this document, which as we all know, is a working document to help people to live together in community. Yet those opening words are addressed to each single one of us as a unique person. Each one of us is the prodigal, and the promise is that this life, this life that Benedict is opening up before us, will bring us all back to God.

[04:30]

Listen, my son, to the words of a loving father and return. Return by obedience to the one from whom you have strayed so that you can come back home to the place where you truly belong. That is the offer and that is the promise. And if we look at the pattern of the prodigal's return, there are three points, there are three moments, if you like, in this process. He listens, he hears, he responds. He turns and returns, Metanoia, and he comes back home. to the place where he longs to be, to the unconditional love of the Father. And now if you look at those three points, or these three moments, you will see that in fact I have been describing

[05:38]

the three vows, because the vow of obedience is ultimately simply that of listening, of audience, which is what the word means, listening and saying yes to the voice of God in our lives. And the vow of conversatio morum, continual conversion, turning and returning throughout our lives, and the vow of stability, to stand still, ultimately to be at home in our innermost selves, to be rooted And these three aren't separate things, but they are all aspects of the whole. All interconnected, flowing one into another, so that together you can't separate them.

[06:42]

They're part of a process. And I believe that these three moments and these three vows or promises are universal, are fundamental, apply to each single one of us as we make our journey back to God. And certainly for me they have been guides, supports, instruments. Ever since I suppose now 10 or 12 years ago, almost by chance, or if you like, one of God's jokes or surprises, Finding myself living in Canterbury in this vast house, I think our drawing room was, if anything, this size or possibly a little bigger. We too could have a string quartet playing and seat 120 people without any difficulty.

[07:45]

There was a great stone barrel staircase going up to the top floor. This great medieval house had belonged to the priors, the priors lodging of the medieval Benedictine community at Canterbury. And surrounded as I was by the power of the past, and living in this house with four teenage sons, I picked up the rule, because I was a historian by training, and I wanted to discover a little more about the hands that had built this place, but also about the vision that had shaped it, so that I might in some way not be cut down to size by the power of the past, but could make it something that was living, life-giving and speaking to me. And so I picked up the rule, because I was a historian, but if you like, I read The Rule as a human being and found that here was a man who knew an immense amount about the human situation, who had an extraordinary grasp of the human psyche, who knew where we were on our Christian journey.

[09:05]

And above all these vows, which if they had been the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, would have been difficult for a married, middle-aged, middle-class woman with a whole lot of possessions to take on board in my life. But the vows of obedience, of stability and of conversatio morum, how important these have been to me and how life-giving, how they have been, if you like, instruments for me as my life... moved and changed, not always easily, over the last 10 or 12 years. And that's really what I want to share with you this morning, how I believe they are the most amazing gift to any of us on our journey back to God. I want to look first at obedience because there it is, the very first sentence of the rule that you may return by the labour of obedience.

[10:16]

And here Benedict is setting out what he is looking for from every one of us. Here you have the cornerstone on which the whole of the rule is built. and how realistic it is of Benedict to tell us right at the outset that it is labour, it is work, it is hard, it is arduous. Here is a man who never patronises us by making it all too easy and that is something for which I am grateful. But Benedict's obedience is not dependency. It's not the obedience of the military. It is not just saying yes. Obedience that he's looking for comes after we have listened.

[11:22]

Listened with the ear of the heart. And that is a very delicate operation. It is obedience to the Spirit at work in each one of us. As I think I said last night, listen. that we could really spend the rest of the conference, the rest of our lives, just on that single word. We can see the whole of the rule as a commentary on that single concept. There's lots of room, because it would be very uncomfortable to stand, Listen. It's urgent. It's serious.

[12:25]

It's important. And again, I tried to say last night how passionate this man is. But listen carefully, my son. It comes over with all the softness and the loving concern of a father for his child. Perhaps one way of putting it might be to say that Benedict wants us to tune in to the voice of God, the gospel, the figure of Christ in our lives. And that is why he is so anxious that we make in our lives the space, again, that I was trying to talk about last night, the time and space, so that we have the right sort of order and structure and rhythm and framework, those are quite unthreatening words really, rhythm, structure, framework, in our lives, so that we can listen to God, hear Him and respond to Him.

[13:43]

Put that way, That really sounds quite a simple activity. And we may be tempted to say, well, what really holds us back? I think it may be not so much that we are battered by all the outside noise, which we undoubtedly are, the media clamouring for attention, all the noise of today's world. I wonder if we might also, more profoundly, be caught up in an inner noise, an inner clamour, which Benedict, with this great gift for wonderful phrases that say so much, describes as murmuring in the heart.

[14:49]

That we are actually absorbed by an inner conversation which can really totally deafen us. Because the only thing that we hear, and possibly the only thing that we want to hear, because this becomes almost an addiction, is some internal conversation that becomes beguiling even obsessive, and that is internal talk revolving round my own self, my ego, perhaps the suffering self or the wounded self, so that I am all the time exploring my own self. On the plane over, I sat next to A nice young man from California, who was a chiropractor, who pressed on me the latest guide to survival that came out of California.

[15:57]

It didn't take me very long to gut it. It seemed to me that it was saying a few things that we'd all heard before. But one chapter was the chatterbox self. And I thought really the chatterbox self is really only what Benedict knew all the time when he called it murmuring in the heart. When Merton was teaching his novices at, um, Gethsemane, and teaching them about the rule, since Merton and the Trappists too have been shaped and formed by Benedict, he talked about murmuration. And he gave an old English translation of this word as grouching, griping. He said, it's like cramps in the stomach.

[16:58]

He said, it's a vice. and it gets a grip on the soul and it is one of the most harmful vices of monastic life and we might add of anybody's life. It's a disease, it's catching. And he said, whatever happens, beware, because interior griping is going to prevent obedience and is going to prevent you being open. Listening to God, try to switch away from this monologue, which is the interior conversation with yourself, to the dialogue, to the covenant, to listening to the voice of God in our lives.

[17:59]

Because we are being faced by the Word, Today, if you will hear my voice, how each day begins for the Benedictine monk, harden not your heart. Become a listening people. Listen to God in the many ways in which he is reaching us. He doesn't just treat us as cerebral beings. He is concerned about the whole of our humanity, body and mind and spirit, and above all, the heart. the heart which is really the innermost being. To listen totally openly can be demanding and it can be

[19:16]

uncomfortable. Perhaps I want to filter, perhaps I want to select, to choose what I hear or not really to take on board what I hear. So really Having obedience in our life and a real commitment to obedient listening is a lifetime's work. Nothing once and for all. And it is totally radical. Because if it's pushed to its deepest meaning, it can't be passive and easy and leave us unchanged. It means each day living with the positive choice of responding or not responding to the Word of God in our lives,

[20:31]

which cuts like a two-edged sword, judging us, piercing, rousing us up, not letting us sleep. And it is also deeply mysterious because by obedience we are inserted into paschal mystery of Christ's own obedience to the Father's will. And yet, it is only through obedience that we shall reverse Adam's journey and return to Christ, that we shall make the journey of the prodigal son and come home. So I feel that we should think in just two or three minutes, when I stop talking now,

[21:54]

about obedience at this moment in time in our own lives. About how anything that I may have said strikes any chord in you. About this really open obedience and listening. I think it asks of us a special confidence in God's divine providence, which is able to write straight on crooked lines. It's often a call to us to maintain our faith in spite of serious reversals. and keep on even when it seems that our plans and our hopes are shattered. But Merton was very insistent that true obedience and true listening is something that is joyful.

[23:04]

That's what he kept saying to his novices. If it's half-hearted or sluggish, then that's not pleasing to God. And as we say that word, half-hearted, which we say so easily, do we actually stop and say what half-hearted actually means? Benedict wants of us a heart overflowing with love. He wants us to listen with the ear of the heart. And if we are to have the vow of obedience, deeply and truly in our lives, then it is only in the context of a response of love that we can make it really deeply creative and freeing for us. I'm going to suggest that we just have two or three minutes of silence in which you may like to reflect on that as a vow, a promise in your own lives at this moment in time.

[24:25]

Having listened, the prodigal comes to himself and he turns, he returns, he starts that journey. The vow of conversatio morum is That's an archaic phrase and we have to rewrite it for ourselves into a phrase that makes more sense for the 20th century. Continual conversion, saying yes to Christ's call to discipleship, being committed to following Christ wherever that may lead us. So it is a journey that forces us to live open to change, open to the new, moving forward all the time, whatever the cost may be, and whether that is going to take us forward into light or into dark.

[27:00]

Thomas Merton talked about this vow on the last day of his life, December the 10th, 1968. He's in Bangkok. Because we, in fact, know that he was to die before that day was out, what he says comes across with greater poignancy. Commitment to total inner transformation of one sort or another. A commitment to become a completely new man, we'd add, new woman. And he went on to say that This vow is also the most mysterious of the vows because we do not know the pattern of our lives.

[28:05]

We have no idea of what lies ahead of us. And it brings us into the paschal mystery of dying and rebirth. of death and new life. And that asks of us to be open to total and continuing transformation. O God who has formed and reformed me with the opening words of a prayer of St. Anselm, Oh God who has formed and reformed me. That's a prayer that we too can make our own prayer. And as we think what those very simple words imply, we're asking that God should take us and we should live open to being changed, formed, shaped, nurtured, perhaps taken apart in order to be healed,

[29:26]

so that gradually and each step of the way we go into the image and likeness of the person whom the Creator would want us to be. This idea of moving on Leaving behind and moving on is an age-old pattern, though at the same time it always remains new for each of us. Because God says to Abraham, go forth from your country, your kindred, your father's house. to the land which I will show you and I will bless you and I will make your name great. What's being asked of Abraham is to abandon all his human security, his family, his land, his house, and instead

[30:34]

Instead, the total dependence upon what God will give, so that there is the continual and insistent I, no longer his way, no longer my way, but God's way, handing over to God, who will take us into a future which lies in God's hands. Benedict's image of the monastic life is that of a return, metanoia, a return to the Father, a return in love and obedience. But sometimes that journey and that moving

[31:39]

forward is so risky that we're tempted to resist change. After all, the children of Israel, when they were offered freedom and the unknown and the promise of pilgrimage, they soon began to long again for safety and routine and familiar bondage. Because it can very well be costly. It's breaking down of everything that we've built up so carefully. And those things may be good in They may be very good in themselves, but all the same, they have to be left behind. The past age, an earlier age of family life, a safe job, a well-loved house, whatever it may be, and let go of these. In a way, these are all lesser deaths, out of which we know that new life can only come.

[32:45]

We all of us know in our own lives the forms of these letting go, these lesser deaths. For a mother, it starts when you wean your baby, when you leave a child at the school gates for the first time. when you let a son go off to college to his own future. Increasingly, in a time of recession, letting go may be asking of us things that we would never have chosen. We stand outside the office and they've just said, well, we're sorry, but we don't need you. any longer. You'll take early retirement, lose your job, business failure.

[33:51]

For all of us, getting older may mean aging and loss, accepting, increasing weakness and fragility. Above all, letting go of that long list of splendid expectations of achievements. that I laid on myself. And we have to do this. We have to let go. And we have to let go again in a way that isn't negative or half-hearted or anxious. That would distress Benedict beyond measure. We have to let go in a way that is positive and rejoicing. And we have to realize, too, that this process of always moving on is a lifelong process. I think when I was 20, I thought, looking at somebody who is my own age, who has just reached 60, that that would mean that I had arrived, that I was achieved it all, that I was safe.

[35:05]

But it must be one of God's mercies to give us this sense that actually we have never arrived, that there is no stopping place in this life. That if we actually think we have arrived and stay still, that is the dangerous moment. Because throughout our lives and to the end of our lives, We are going to grow in freedom towards our own maturity. I like something that I read by a Jesuit. The healing pain of the cross and the pain of psychological maturation have this in common.

[36:07]

They ask of us, they demand of us, a willingness to go on growing, even when circumstances are adverse and when instinct says that I should have arrived. The choice of a static or final negative state is the ultimate in sinful self-love because it is the refusal to be a pilgrim. Now, if we have the vow of conversatio morum in our lives and if we really try to take it into our being and listen and respect what it is saying, then there is a defense against that.

[37:19]

Are you hastening towards your heavenly home, Benedict asks us all towards the end of the realm. For each of us the answer to that question is bound to be a secret and a private answer because each of us is on an inward journey and the drama, the pain, the cost as well as joy that that involves, is ultimately known only to us alone. And yet we all share in some way in common elements which are timeless, which is why to weave the Psalms into our lives is so important. The drama of God's dealing with his people, something that we need to hear time and again

[38:30]

and make our own because it is our own story. Call and response not once but many times. Desert and disillusionment, the psalmist doesn't mind his fist against God. promise and fulfillment and all the time journeying on wherever it may lead us into the light and into the dark and underlying everything that continuous pattern of life and death, rebirth, redemption, resurrection. So to have the vow of conversatio in our lives asks us to be open and vulnerable. to a God who asks of us a dynamic response, a constantly changing response.

[39:37]

And we too, if we are prepared to respond to this challenge, If we're prepared to live a way that is risky, we are given the chance to live and change, to be reborn, to be formed and reformed. And this is lifelong, a vow is a commitment. And Maestro Eckhart said so nicely, there is no stopping place in this life, nor was there ever for anyone. No matter how far along the way they have come,

[40:44]

Then, he added, this then above all things, be ready for the gifts of God and always for the new ones. So now again, I think it would be appropriate if we took two or three moments of silent reflection in order to look at how the vow of conversatio makes sense in our lives at this point along our own journey. When things are different, when circumstances change, when my midlife crisis is behind me, when I have a new job, that's no good. Stability closes all those escape hatches and tells me those are fantasies.

[41:51]

Remain where you are and face reality. Go where flight will be impossible. Stay where the battle is actually going on. Face what has to be faced, perhaps fought out. That is the enclosure, if we take it as an image to apply to our own selves. Stay still in the depth of ourselves. Stay still in my innermost self. And I guess a lot of us would really prefer not to do that, not to face ourselves with any thought of reality, because here I'm being told to take off the mask, not to run away, not to pretend, not to hide.

[42:54]

And we live in a society which loves role-playing and encourages us to play roles. And indeed, I rather like playing roles myself. And it's a game in which it's only too easy to get trapped. Stability is saying this won't do. Stability is saying you must be earthed, rooted, grounded in the reality of your own personhood, the place, the circumstances in which you find yourself. And present yourself full face to God. the whole self. Xu Shi Pei may accept me, the novice self, and we make that our prayer too. Accept me the whole of myself, not the pretend self, the counterfeit self, the half self.

[44:03]

And of course, though this is challenging, it is the only way to that full humanity. that Benedict is looking for from all of us. As Anna Yulinov puts it in primary speech, the best parts, if left unlived, can be as poisonous as our worst parts. if left unhealed. The best parts, if left unlived, can be as poisonous as our worst, if left unhealed. the vow that earths us, forces us to stay, forces us to be at home with ourselves.

[45:10]

What this involves is perhaps seen in comparison, in a very nice comparison, that Michael Casey, who is a contemporary Australian Thurston, an illustration that he uses He says, it is really the remote control device for changing television channels which is an even more eloquent symbol of today's society and the restlessness of today's society even than the car or the plane. that there are many people who simply cannot persevere with something as watching television for longer than 10 minutes without switching because they may be missing something better somewhere else. Now, stability is the sort of perseverance which tells us that that won't do.

[46:16]

Perseverance talks about commitment. Perseverance reminds us that our commitment to Christ and the way of Christ is a lifelong process. It's a marathon and not a sprint. And therefore the whole question of stability means that we've got to stay around while the process works on us, that we've got to give it a chance to work. Again, Michael Casey, who at this point is talking to the Good Samaritans, who are a great order of Benedictine women in Australia, he says to them, it's a bit like cooking a sponge and endlessly opening the oven door to see whether it is rising or not. One has to have that special type of patience

[47:22]

That special sort of equanimity which says, I have initiated a process and it's futile for me to expect results before the allotted time has elapsed. And then he went on saying, it's a bit like going parachuting. As the plane is going up, you say, it's awfully high. It's about 500 feet. And you say, rather than go up to 5,000 feet, I'll jump out here. Well, well, you can do this if you like, except that there is not enough space for your parachute to open and you will go splat on the ground. So that you have to hang on. till you get high enough for the parachute to open and then you will not go splat. No bailing out halfway through.

[48:26]

Basically that is what perseverance is. is all about. It is letting work the natural process of growth that has been initiated by God's call. And there is no reason to say that it should go wrong, but we do need to give it time. And all those concepts of the storms, perseverance, steadfastness, renew a steadfast spirit within me. Persevere until death, at one point Benedict says to his monks. Perseverance in the long haul, it's lifelong.

[49:36]

If we're in it for the long haul, it gives it an entirely different perspective. I like what Thomas Cullinan, who is an ample fourth monk, living out his Benedictine vacation in Liverpool, in inner city turmoil, very demanding, he writes of what stability means for his life. in a situation like this. I think that staying power is a quality we need very badly and very few people have. They seem to lack long-term courage, creative patience,

[50:41]

The sort of patience that knows how to go on and on. To hang on to the vision. To hang on to the vision. To believe in God's purpose in all our lives. The purpose of stability is to center us in something greater than ourselves. Stability tells me that where I am is where God is for me. And so it's a vow, if you like, to still the wandering heart. It's an antidote to that fragmentation which comes from never really settling in to where I am or what I'm doing or what I meant to learn.

[52:02]

Again, we come back to steadfastness, perseverance, persistence. Not the popular words that are around in today's society. without ceasing day and night, Benedict says at one point. So ultimately, stability is telling us about our inward disposition. It shows that I want to live life deeply, not at the superficial, mobile level of contemporary society, And it is because I am certain of God that I'm able to hold on there.

[53:09]

It is because I recognize the faithfulness of God who is keeping his side of the covenant that I can hang in there. It is a certain guaranteed faithfulness of God which makes my stability possible, which prevents me from running away. So there are those three vows, and I said at the start that they're really, you can't separate them. They're a process, they're interconnected. And one prevents the other. We need them all. They're held in a dynamic tension. If I stand still without moving on, then I'm static, fossilized, the wrong sort of negative standing still, because I'm not growing.

[54:18]

If I continually journey, though, without standing still, having some sort of stability in my innermost depths, and I'm just a hippie, a wanderer, a jar of egg, endlessly searching, and both of those are incomplete unless I'm continually listening to God so that it is His voice that I hear, so that I follow God's will and not my own. And these vows work at very different levels. and I've come to appreciate how at different stages in my life they have really been the thing that I have held on to against all the odds.

[55:20]

They've helped me to live with myself, which is not anything that necessarily society or The church is very good at telling us and yet we all have to live with ourselves and sometimes to live alone and not from choice. But listen how basic and how fundamental that is. I need to hear and to be heard if I'm to be fully human. I need to journey on to live open to change because this is Jung's psychic reality. The quest, the journey, the search, that speaks to depths within us all. But I also need to stand still, to be at home in myself. Give me a place to stand as a fundamental and universal cry.

[56:26]

because without my base I'm lost and I'm useless to myself or to others. But these vows also tell us much about community, whatever shape community may be or take in our lives. It may be marriage or family or colleagues or parish whatever form, sensitivity and openness in listening, holding on through the long haul and not giving up when things are difficult, hanging in there and yet also moving on, not allowing relationships to fossilize at some moment in the past, not hanging on to past idols, but living open to the new.

[57:37]

But above all, these vows all the time bring me back to what ultimately Benedict is giving us. And that is not the rule, but the rule as a pointer to making the gospel real in our lives and making the presence of Christ a continuing daily reality in my life. And so, all the time, these vows point me to the figure of Christ and to the role of Christ in my life. Obedience, Christ, the word, I hear. Conversatio, Christ the way, I follow stability.

[58:50]

Christ, the ground on which I stand, the rock on which I build. This is the risen Christ of Easter. The Christ who saves, helps and heals us by taking on the human condition and who will bring us home to God. Although I end what I've been saying about the vase with a prayer, a prayer which comes in some of Merton's

[59:53]

writings when he says that it is the deep and abiding sense of God in Christ which is central in his own monastic life. Christ is the whole meaning of our life, the whole substance of our monastic life. Nothing in the monastery makes sense if we forget this great central truth. We come seeking truth. Christ said, I am the truth. It is in Christ that I find myself restored, healed, made whole, made free, brought home to God. Christ is the whole meaning of our life, the whole substance of our daily ordinary life. Nothing in the world in which we live makes sense if we forget this great central truth.

[61:03]

We come seeking truth. Christ says, I am the truth. It is in Christ that I find myself restored, healed, made whole, made free, brought home to God. Amen. I think what I'd like to suggest now is that as the day is so beautiful, and if you're English, you'll never believe that you'll see the sun, so you can't count on it, that the next half hour should be a time of contemplative walking, just being by yourself, walking slowly and taking in whatever this morning's conference may have touched you, because this evening,

[63:24]

Many of the slides will in fact deal in images with what I've been looking at this morning and there will be time then to turn it into a general discussion. So I promise there will be time to talk about any issues that this might raise but I think that it would be a nice balance between Monos, the solitary, and community life if this were to be a solitary time for the next half hour or so.

[63:55]

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