Cowley Magazine - Summer 2013

Volume 39 • Number 4 Summer 2013

©2013 by The Society of Saint John the Evangelist, North America

Cover photo:The branches of a tree at Emery House mirror the Body of Christ: a unity of many members.

IN THIS ISSUE: Reconciliation with One Another

In the Monastic Wisdom insert, Br. David Vryhof invites us to the challenging, essential practice of forgiveness.

How can solitude help our relationships? Br. Jonathan Maury suggests that times of retreat can contribute to reconciliation.

After more than fifty years of living in community, Br. David Allen reflects on some of its challenges and rewards.

Br. Eldridge Pendleton reflects with gratitude on his vocation to SSJE, as he tells the story of his winding path to the Monastery.

The three monastic interns share some of the riches they will take away.

The Rev. Dr. Michael Battle explores how prayer in community clears away obstacles that can keep us from loving God and one another.

Letter from the Superior | Letter from the FSJ | Spotlight on Community Life

To follow the latest news from the Brothers, visit www.SSJE.org where you can listen to weekly sermons, watch videos, and view photo galleries of the Monastery.

We would welcome hearing what you think of this issue of Cowley Magazine. Visit www.SSJE.org/cowleymagazine to share comments, ask questions,

or see Cowley in color!

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please call 617.876.3037x55, or email [email protected].

The Society of Saint John the Evangelist 3

Dear Members of the Fellowship of Saint John and other Friends,

A Letter from the Superior

Geoffrey Tristram, SSJE

A Letter from the Superior

The SSJE novitiate: Brs. Brian Pearson, Jim Woodrum, Ruben Alexis, and John Braught.

I write to you having just completed the celebration of the fifty days of Easter. It has been a profound experience for our community and for all those who have worshipped with us here at the Monastery and at Emery House. It is an Easter that I shall always remember, because in the midst of this joyful season we witnessed the horrors of the bombings at the Boston Marathon. As we prayed for the victims, and held them in our hearts, we Brothers were also so grateful for the messages of concern and assur-ances of prayer coming in from all over the world.

Violence is such a terrible thing. It can tear and break and shatter not only individuals but whole communities. So it was a very moving experience for me and for some of my Brothers to take part

in the Mothers’ Day march against violence that took place in Dorchester some weeks ago. We remembered all those who are victims especially of gun violence in our cities. We expressed our longing for peace and reconcili-ation, and acknowledged that violence is everywhere in our country, and profoundly touches us all.

The theme of this Cowley is “Reconciliation with One Another.” In the midst of so much darkness and violence, the Risen Lord Jesus, who still bears the marks of crucifixion on his broken hands and feet, speaks words of hope and life to a world that is so broken by evil and violence. His first words to his friends were “Peace be with you.” Our vocation as Christians is to be peacemakers, reconcilers.

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Geoffrey Tristram, SSJESuperior

Faithfully,

One of the highlights of these past months was our FSJ Day celebration on May 4. We were so grateful that Archbishop Fred Hiltz, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, was with us, and he preached a moving and very encouraging sermon. During the reception afterwards, our guests were able to see the progress being made on our new cloister garden. It’s already looking very beautiful, and it is a joy to be able to sit quietly in the cloister in the early morning, looking out on God’s creation. Work on the Fletcher Steele garden will be starting shortly, and I am very grateful for all of you who have supported us and helped us raise the money for these lovely gardens.

One of the casualties of the renova-tions was our library. All our books have been in storage over these past few years, and we have really missed them! Two completely new spaces have been added to the enclosure, to become our beautiful new library. Soon, all our books will be installed, having been re-cataloged painstakingly and with enormous skill, by a number of volun-teers under the leadership of our friend, May Daw. It has been a huge task, and we are most grateful to May and to her assistants.

Spring arrived late this year, but it was glorious when it finally came! Emery House is looking particularly fine. We invited our neighbors to visit for an open house and tour, and over a hundred people turned up, most of whom we had never seen before. Many of them said, “I’ve walked by here, and I’ve wondered what it was like inside.” And so we invited them in, gave them tea and homemade cakes (baked with eggs from our geese!), and offered tours of the grounds. It was a lot of fun, and the next day we found ourselves on the front page of the Newburyport News, in full color.

Lots of good things are happening, praise God. We Brothers have a deep sense of thanksgiving to God, whose Spirit is at work within our community, and thanksgiving to all of you, our friends, who encourage us in so many ways – by your prayers, by your support, and by your partnership with us.

We cherish your friendship, and we thank God every day for you in our prayers.

Water burbles from a rock fountain as new growth takes hold in the cloister garden.


A Letter from the FSJ

In August of 2010 I packed my life into three suitcases, left my internship with

the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, and moved to Nairobi, Kenya. During twenty-seven hours of plane travel, my world turned upside down. I traded the groomed cobblestone roads of Cambridge for poorly paved roads wandered by a population ailing from 45% unemploy-ment, where children roam looking for food in the ditches and the endless traffic is a perpetual reminder of the failed Kenyan government.

For the past three years I have made my home in Kenya. Like Jeremiah commands, I have settled down, planted gardens, eaten their food, and grown to love Kenya (Jeremiah 29:5). That love spurred the launching of Tatua, an organization reversing the traditional method of international aid by culti-vating the power of the local community.

Our work is to build the capacity of local leaders and local organizations to address poverty from the ground up.

Our work is exciting, innovative, yet exhausting. I spend days and nights wondering if we will heal Kenya. Will people have jobs? Will children be fed by parents? Will Kenyans be served by a just government?

These questions trouble me, and like Isaiah, I carry God’s people’s pain heavy on my heart. Though my mind knows I am not responsible for healing Kenya, my human longing to fix everything interferes, and I feel responsible.

This feeling of disproportionate responsibility often clouds out all else, even the presence and power of God. In that place, despite the inherent joy of my work, I can feel tired and small.

Thankfully, my supervisors know this mind-set is likely to occur and they

Left: Natalie and one of Tatua Kenya’s organizers, Koi Wangui, at a TatKenya Cel-ebration. Right: Natalie plants kale seeds alongside the community. Young adults from Tatua’s “Be the Change” Initiative organized the planting of a community garden at a local children’s home.

Natalie Finstad, an Episcopal Missionary serving in Kenya as the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Tatua Kenya, shares the role SSJE plays in her life.

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A Letter from the FSJ

schedule breaks for us to return home to our places of rest. SSJE’s stone walls and quiet chambers are that place of rest for me. It has become a practice of mine to spend at least two weeks out of my home visit living in community with the Brothers of SSJE.

In writing this piece my mind drifts back to the heavy wooden stalls where we sit to pray as the sun rises behind the stained glass. I hear the words of psalms sung by the ancients, feel the presence of the thousands of seekers of Christ who have sat there before, and I am reminded that I am not alone. I see myself walk to the altar, offer my hands to accept the Eucharist, taste the bread in my mouth, the wine on my lips, and I am comforted by the strength of all who walk with me. I am not alone.

More so, I am not responsible, I am just one of many. There is something incredibly comforting about the strength of SSJE – despite me or any individual, the community of SSJE stands strong. In that view I see myself as God sees me, unbelievably precious, yet one among many. Here, the psalmist’s words are in reach: Be still and know that I am God.

As I come back into contact with the almighty hand of God I am reminded that the world hardly depends on me. This humility check is vital if I am to stay grounded in the truth that it is God, not me, who desires to heal Kenya. That it is through God’s grace and power that I am acting, and it is through God that we hope to prevail.

So I will continue to come. I invite you to do the same.

Tatua Kenya trains organizations that desire to incorporate community organizing skills into their model. Here Natalie leads the Tatua Training Team in celebrating a job well done!

To learn more about Tatua Kenya, visit www.tatuakenya.org


Taking Time for Reconciliation

Jonathan Maury, SSJE

A Call to Retreat

In Christ, each of us is made a minister of reconciliation in the realizing

of God’s vision for a new creation in which all creatures are made one with God and each other, freed from the bonds of evil and death. Grace-filled, transforming reconciliation, therefore, both within our own selves and with others, always takes place in partnership with the One who first brought us into being. God has always been reaching out to us and continues to reach out to us, yearning for companionship with us. In this longing, we can see that the essence of both the divine life and our created nature is to be in relationship. In Christ, God has been revealed as a community of reciprocal self-offering love, the Holy Trinity. Thus we, made in the image and likeness of God, can only come to be fully reconciled in and alive to our created dignity through relationship with God. We, like God, find the fullest expression of who we

are in community, so our relationships with one another also have their source in God. We become truly who we are only in relationship to others. In lives committed to loving ourselves and one another as God loves us, we fulfill the ministry of reconciliation by beholding and honoring the image of Christ in every person.

Jesus Christ is the exemplar and embodiment of the ministry of reconciliation. Fully human and at one with God, Jesus chooses to bear in himself the misunderstandings and rejections that mar and distort human relationships, and he takes the risk of personal vulnerability and loss in order to redress our brokenness. Jesus looks at the disciples gathered around him and says, “These are my brothers, my sisters, my mother,” that we might come to understand ourselves, in relationship to him and one another, as having been adopted into the family

If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself... entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. –2 Corinthians 5:17-20

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The simple design of Monastery rooms like the Refectory, where silent meals are shared, helps our guests to discover the “inner space and time to know that we are beloved of God.”


of God. Jesus teaches that relationships involve the exercise of tough love and the willingness to forgive – even before those who have wronged us seek forgiveness. Jesus commands us to forgive as many as “seventy times seven,” to expose ourselves to the same vulnerability toward others in which he lives. It is much easier to avoid difficult relationships and to ignore within ourselves the same traits we despise in others. But Jesus calls us to live into the fullness of our humanity, to embrace what we, in our brokenness, experience as physical, psychic, or spiritual limita-tions. Jesus urges that, rather than seeking to be cured of our limitations, we ask God to heal us in them, and waken us to the spiritual gifts hidden in them. God desires that each of us live into the particular image of divinity which only we can be, and which God’s world needs in order to be reconciled.

One way to find renewed energy and desire for our role in God’s work of reconciliation is taking time for intimacy with Christ in silence and prayer. The chapter on retreat in the Society’s Rule of Life explains how times of retreat give us an opportunity to “celebrate the primacy of the love of God” in our lives as the sole focus of our attention. Regardless of how fragmented our lives may seem, how alienated from the world or at odds with others we may feel, retreat allows us inner space and time to know that we are beloved of God. Many guests in our houses remark on the experience of coming to a deeper knowledge of themselves and those around them in the silence of retreat. They are learning, as the Rule also says, to cherish “adoring love for the mystery of God,” to “honor the mystery present in the hearts of our brothers and sisters, strangers and enemies,” as well as to revere that mystery present in themselves through the indwelling of

Christ. This kind of silence does not see the mystery of self or other as a problem to be solved or as something to be understood. Instead, in silence, we acknowledge the mystery of self and other, like that of God, as a wonder to be adored. Even in the absence of those with whom we seek to be reconciled, praying for them and practicing silence can help us come to truly love them.

Reconciliation takes place within us not so much by what we think as by who we allow God to help us to become. God calls us to emotional honesty with ourselves and others, and we can best find that disposition through intentional relationship with God. In the humility of silence, we can hear the voice which speaks in every human heart, and says, I cannot be the God I truly am without being fully in relationship with you. Times of retreat can help to awaken in us the desire for that time when all people will be drawn into that community of love which is the only God.

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Life in CommunityChallenges and Rewards

David Allen, SSJE

Early in my time in the SSJE one of the older members of the

community was interviewed by a student journalist. He was asked what life in community had been like for him the fifty years he had been professed. He answered in a quavering voice that it had been a struggle the whole way. I had known him for a while at that point. I think that answer was an exaggeration. Fr. Johnson was known to take life seriously, but I know that underneath was a sense of joy.

Now that I have lived in community for nearly fifty-five years I can say that community life consists both of challenges and joys. Being able to meet the challenges and to enjoy the rewards has enabled me to survive without feeling that it has been a struggle the whole way. There have been times of struggle, and times of great rewards. It is our ability to “hang on” during the times of struggle and to rejoice in the rewards that enables us to persevere.

I mentioned to one of our staff members that I had been asked to write this article. He asked me, “Well, how has it been?” I answered quickly, with my tongue in my cheek, “It has been a bumpy ride!”

Yes, there have been bumpy times.

But life in almost any setting has its bumpy times. The secret is to try to keep one’s balance and hang on.

Fr. Richard Benson, the founder of SSJE, wrote in one of his instructions on the religious life that we should not expect a monastic community like ours to be made up of like-minded individuals. When we come to try our vocations it is in response to a call from God. We come from different backgrounds and environments. We learn to live with one another and appreciate the differences that we find in one another. We enter at different times. This sometimes results in generation gaps. Sharing the history of those times can be a reward.

When I was a novice and the romantic side of living in a monastery had begun to wear off, I had occasion to speak to the conductor of our annual retreat about difficulties when some in the novitiate had different opinions from mine. The retreat conductor was Novice Guardian of another congregation of our Society, and was experienced in dealing with such questions. He answered that the novitiate was like putting rough stones into a bag and shaking it. Eventually the rough edges of the stones wore off and they became smooth.


Another time similar problems began to bother me. I asked our Novice Guardian if I might try some other community to see if it was better for me. He was going away for a week and asked me to wait until he got back. A few days later I was on the subway in the early morning on my way to one of the convents to preside at the Sisters’ Eucharist. As I hung on the strap in the crowded subway car, suddenly words came to my mind, “If I leave, I shall miss all of this.” Later that day the Superior called me into his office and said he had been told that I was thinking of leaving. I told him my experience on the subway, and he said, “I am glad! I was going to talk you into staying. Some of us need community life for our salvation.” Soon after that the one who bothered me left the novitiate.

One of the reasons that I was drawn to the SSJE as I perceived a call to monastic life was work SSJE then had in Japan. I had been to Japan while I was in the Navy between college and seminary and liked what I saw there. I hoped that there might be a chance of being sent there. Later I reached the point when it didn’t really matter where I served the Lord. That winter I learned that my younger brother was to be married in Sweden in the late spring, so I asked the Superior if I might go there for my vacation instead of to Spokane, Washington, where my family lived. Fr. Williams told me, “Then you can fly from Sweden over the North Pole to Japan. I plan to send you there.” That was a real reward. I served in Japan for over thirteen years.

In July 1975 the Society made the difficult decision to close the work in Japan. I was the only American member of the SSJE in our work there at that time. That was my

“It is our ability to ‘hang on’ during the times of struggle and to rejoice in the rewards that enables us to persevere.”

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most difficult struggle with the vow of obedience. I had grown to love Japan and the Japanese people. I prayed all of that summer that one of the Japanese Bishops might ask me to stay in Japan and serve there. In the end my sense of obedience and monastic stability prevailed, and I returned to America that October as I had been asked.

I went through a difficult period of mourning. But in a few months I began to find compensations. I got involved in the Episcopal Asian American Ministry. Eventually I helped to found the

Episcopal Boston Chinese Ministry at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where I still assist about twice a month.

I think the main reason why any of us who have faced challenges in community life have persevered is the realization that Jesus’ words, “you did not choose me, but I chose you,” spoken to his disciples at the Last Supper, are also spoken to each of us who is truly called to the monastic life (John 15:16). Along with Jesus we can say, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (John 4:34b).

“Jesus’ words, ‘you did not choose me, but I chose you,’ spoken to his disciples at the Last Supper, are also spoken to each of us who is truly called to the monastic life.”


The People We’re Supposed to Be

A Conversation about Vocation with Br. Eldridge Pendleton

Q: When did you first experience a call from God?

I grew up in Texas, in a small town dominated by the southern Baptist church (whether you were Baptist or not you were Baptist in that town). In church one Sunday, when I was twelve years old, some missionaries were giving a talk about their work in the Philippines. At the end of the talk, the woman who had been speaking said, “You know, God calls people to special service. He may be calling someone here today to give their life to work for the church.” And when she said that I just started shaking my head, thinking, “Well, not me. It’s not going to happen to me.” And you know that famous poster of Uncle Sam pointing: “Uncle Sam Needs You”? Well, I felt right then like God was behind me with his finger pointing at me. I could almost feel that finger. I said, “Oh, this can’t happen to me. This is not what I want.” So I went on arguing with God, saying, “I just refuse. I will not do anything like that.”

Q: How did you eventually accept that call?

In college I discovered the Episcopal Church. I lived in a dorm with all Roman Catholics and, although I went to Mass

with them every Sunday, I just didn’t feel like I fit. As we were coming out of Mass one day, I looked across the street and saw people outside another church in a procession, all dressed up in vestments, with incense and everything. I decided to check that one out. So the next Sunday I left for Mass with my friends but just walked across the street. As soon as I came to the Episcopal Church I knew I had found home. It was everything that I had always looked for: the mysticism and beauty of the liturgy. I found the chaplain at my university and pretty soon I was confirmed and became an Episcopalian.

In the meantime, I had a really good friend, a young woman, who was from was Framingham, Massachusetts. She invited me, “Why don’t you come up here for the summer, get any kind of job you can get – in a factory or waiting in a restaurant or something like that – and during your free time we’ll run around and play and just have the summer.” So I did, because I had always wanted to see New England. The Episcopal chaplain said to me, “Well, if you do go to Massachusetts, there are two churches in Boston I want you to see.” So one Sunday I visited the Church of the Advent. The next Sunday I visited St. John the Evangelist on Bowdoin Street. I had trouble finding it at first, and when

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I finally got there, I felt like I was racing up the long steps leading to it, and kind of falling into the church. Once inside, I looked around and noticed that everybody was there: There were rich people sitting next to people who looked like they had slept on the street; there were white people and black people – and this was in 1961, before civil rights; gay people and straight people; just a whole mix of everybody. Through the music and the clouds of incense, I thought, “Wow, this is the closest thing I’m going to get to the celestial banquet.”

During the course of that summer, I got to know the Cowley Fathers. Toward the end of the season, as I was getting ready to go back to school, one of them suggested that I make a retreat at the Monastery. I had never made a retreat in my life, yet because he suggested it, I felt that maybe I should try it, so I arranged it and went. I was the only one in the Guesthouse, and everything was so different than it is now. It was just the barest, most austere place you’ve ever seen. The walls had never been painted; they were just raw plaster. And it smelled like carbolic soap. It was not inviting. I

just couldn’t imagine what these men did or what this life was all about. But, you know, when you’re twenty years old, it’s also very romantic, too, to be doing something like that. And they did eat well.

So I spent the weekend with them and, at the end of the weekend, I had this strong sense that God was calling me to be a monk. I couldn’t understand it, but it felt like SSJE was where I was supposed to be.

When I went back to school, I told the chaplain, who had become a really strong influence in my life. I didn’t tell anybody else, but I told him that I really felt as if I was called to this life. And he said, “Oh, you can’t do that.” And I thought he knew me well enough to know that I just didn’t have a vocation to it. What he meant was that at twenty years old I couldn’t make such a big decision. But I was young and listened to him. When you’re that young, you usually have several things you want to do with your life, so I decided that I wanted to be a university teacher instead. Eventually I went to graduate school and got a Ph.D. Once I went on to teach at Princeton and then a new experimental college in the midwest, I felt that I had become too smart for Christianity. I just dropped it and didn’t go to church at all. Yet whenever there was a real crisis in my life, I would find a church that was open and go there to pray.

Q: How did you eventually return to this question of a call to the religious life?

When I got a job as the director of a small museum in Maine – seven years of the most exciting, satisfying work I’ve ever had, really – I met some people who led me to this little, working-class Anglo-Catholic parish in Portsmouth. Again I felt like I had come home. I


became active in this church. I even became senior warden, and when they were looking for a new rector, I was head of the search committee. Once we got the new rector, all my life just broke apart. I had become a workaholic – the museum was my life – and yet I felt that God was calling me to do something else. I was so upset, as upset as I had been when I was twelve years old, because I really couldn’t see myself as a parish priest anywhere and I couldn’t even figure out how I would pay for seminary. And yet I also knew I could not keep doing what I had been doing.

The new rector, who was just thirty years old, said, “I think you should go on retreat and just be quiet for a while, to see if you can get some answers. I know this place down in Boston…” So I arranged to go the Monastery again. I hadn’t been there since I was twenty years old.

Q: What was that second visit like?

Well, this time, the Brothers put Bob Greenfield in charge of me. He was an incredible person. He had a DPhil from Oxford, was so bright, and his idea of retreat was lots of naps and ice cream. It was just about what I needed at that point. I remember sitting out in the little Guesthouse garden the next morning – I hadn’t been there fifteen minutes – when all of a sudden I realized, “I know what I’m supposed to do. This is where I’m supposed to be. I knew it twenty years ago, and it’s still true.”

In part, the community drew me. I really wanted to live with other men, because I felt like I could be more who I am working with other people than the kind of life I had lived up to that point. Prayer also drew me, of course, but when I entered the Society, my prayer life was maybe Grade Level 1, so

I really learned an awful lot about prayer and spirituality here in the Society. And since I have always felt drawn to listen to people, spiritual direction has been a really satisfying work that I’ve learned since being here.

It’s not as if my life here has been without crisis. But I’ve just always had this overwhelming feeling that this is where God wants me to be and to live out my life. Even though I haven’t understood it at times, I’ve trusted God enough to know that I should try it and see where it leads. I don’t think everyone who joins this Society has the strong sense of call I did. But I have such a sense that God singled me out for this life.

Q: How was the transition to life in the Society?

I entered SSJE at age forty-four, and it was hard making the transition to this life, in part because we did all the physical work – the cooking, cleaning, everything. I lost lots of weight and really looked terrible at my clothing as a novice.

I had a different picture of God when I entered than I gained during my time

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in the Society. I had this image – not exactly of an old man up in the sky – but certainly of someone who had a plan for each person. Some people were to live long lives, and some people were to live short lives. I thought mine was going to be short. Years before, when I was working on my Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, we were required to have a complete physical every year at the medical school there. As I was going through mine they recognized that something major was wrong with my heart. They asked me if they could do an experimental test on me to see what it was. They did a cardiac catheterization, and I was on the operating table for eight hours. At the end of that, all these cardiologists came in and stood around my bed and said, “We have good news and we have bad news. The good news is we know what it is: congenital heart disease.” It was heart disease that had begun at birth. The bad news was that I might live as much as ten more years. I was thirty years old at that point. And they told me all these horrible things that would happen before I actually died, blindness was one of them, and it was just really, really awful. I felt like I was living with a black cloud over my head.

When I shared this with the Brothers at the Monastery, before joining, I remember Tom Shaw saying, “We want you here. If it means that we carry your suitcases, we carry your suitcases.”

When I was having my retreat before being clothed as a novice, I had just come out of the hospital. I had had a heart infection, and I was really worried that I might not even live long enough to be clothed as a novice. And I really wanted that. But I realized that I couldn’t pray for myself. I could pray for others, but not for myself.

The novice guardian, James

Madden, said, “Well, you know, this is happening at a good time because we have staying with us a priest from New York who has healing power. He works with people that the doctors have just given up on. Why don’t you go and talk to him?”

So I did. And the priest said, “Give me your earliest memory; just the first thing that flashes into your mind.” I remembered being four years old, playing in a field high in ragweed. One little girl next to me was resting, with her hoe head in the air, when the train came by. She went running to see the train and let her hoe go. It came down and hit me on the head, and there was a lot of blood. I could remember being taken to my grandmother’s house and really being looked after: my mother coming in, her cool hands on my head. But I wasn’t mentioning my father, and the priest wanted to know why. I started giving him grown-up reasons why my father was not there. But he said, “No, tell me as your four-year-old self.” And it came down to feeling that my father really didn’t love me. The healer said, “Well, did you ever tell him about that?” I said, “No, he died when I was twenty-five, and I can’t tell him now.” And he said, “Yes, you can.” So he had me imagine my father sitting across from me and made me tell him that I had thought he didn’t love me. He told me to listen to my father talking to me. And I heard my father telling me that he did love me.

In the process of all that, the distant figure of God the Father became loving arms that were holding me. I felt like I could ask God for anything that I needed.

I continued to work with this healer for an extended period of time and well, to make this a lot shorter than it was, when I went for my annual check-up that year the doctor said, “Well, there’s


no change.” And it was true the next year, and the next, and the next, and the next. The deterioration of my heart and my lungs had just stopped. By the time I was fifty I was in such good shape that I celebrated by swimming twenty-five complete laps in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. I was so proud of myself.

Q: What’s been the most gratifying thing about accepting and living this call?

I feel like I’ve had an incredible life, and a big part of it is being in the Society, living and working with so many great people from the States, England, and Africa.

There was never another community that I thought maybe was the one instead. I never had any second thoughts. Of course, there were times when things were really difficult at SSJE. But right now we’re at the best point in our recent history, I think. It just seems like everything is working the way it should: We have a really good Superior who is challenging, and people want to be here; they love each

other and can speak to each other’s faces rather than behind their backs. And while the community is small, it has always been small. Yet out of that smallness we have a pretty big bang in the world, I think.

I wake up here in this nursing home in Somerville, Massachusetts every day with such a sense of joy in my heart that, if I could, I would get down on my hands and knees and kiss the floor. The people here are so wonderful to me. I feel like I’ve had a charmed life. And it’s not over. I’m here for a reason, too, not just to be cared for because my physical body is breaking down, but I’m here for a reason. God has placed me here for a reason.

I really feel like I was aiming at SSJE from a very early age even though I didn’t know anything about it. And I don’t think I’m done yet either. I think I’m still growing and changing, and people along the way are helping me to become who I’m supposed to be. That’s what happens when we accept the life we’re called to: We become the people that we’re supposed to be.

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Monastic Internship Program

This year, three exceptional young men took part in the Monastic Internship Program, living, worshipping, and working alongside the community for nine months. We asked them to reflect on what they would take away from the experience.

Coming to the monastery I had this idea that it was going to be rapturous holiness all day long. I found it is a very welcoming environment here with really kind, authentic people, but it isn’t anything magical. I wasn’t hearing Jesus talk in my left ear or seeing visions like Teresa of Avila. I became aware that this is a mundane environment, like every environment.

That got me thinking: “If I keep trying to go to more exalted locations, like maybe Mt. Athos, after spiritual highs, then I’ll probably only end up anxious that I haven’t had one.” I kind of freaked out: “What am I going to do with the rest of my life if I

don’t have a Message to share after I leave?” I reached a breaking point: “Well, I could just say, ‘I might not have a plan, but there may be a plan bigger than me, and I’m just going to go with that.’” I don’t have to keep seeking more rarefied experiences until I have known some exalted state of mind in which I’m pure, and then I’ll have a spiritual experience, since I will be free of all the things that are holding me back from living a full life. I can do it right now. I can just decide “I surrender my life to something bigger than me.”

The Monastery is not magical, but it is different. It’s a place where you might find God, or you might not. They give you that space to play. The liturgical life here just says, “Show up; the rest is up to you.” So, I’m in a better position than I was before I came here, despite not having discerned a clear call. You could say that I’ve had a conversion experience.

– Andrew Sinnes

one of the real beauties of this year for me has been being seen, really being seen and embraced as a person. In this, I think that the Brothers epitomize the best of Christian community: They embrace people as individuals and don’t ask that you live up to a set of standards before they love you. That’s really rare. And it’s what I needed.

So often, as human beings, we settle for less than we deserve. We’ve bought into a commercial version of life where we’re told, “If you get certain stuff you’re going to be really happy; if you get these jobs, you’re going to be happy; if you climb high enough up on the ladder and get a certain house and get a certain amount of security, then everything is going to be okay.” The truth is that none of that is very important. The most important thing is community and love. The SSJE community really exemplifies those values, which are a central theme in Johannine spirituality, but which I’d always dismissed as sort of Hallmark stuff. But love, in its fullest sense, is what God wants for us. This kind of love is accepting and it’s warm


Our friends’ generous support of SSJE makes transformative programs like the Monastic Internship possible. Please consider a gift today.

www.SSJE.org/donate [email protected] or 617.876.3037 ext 55

Monastic Internship Program

and it’s forgiving and it’s very spacious and it allows us to be fully human and not need to put on airs or pretend like we’re something we’re not or to strive in some way for achievements or possessions. When you’ve lived in a place like this, where you’ve been shown great hospitality and abundant love, you begin to realize that love does have the potential to transform us as individuals. No material things can do that. No amount of security or money in the bank is going to really transform us. But love has the ability to really transform people.

That certainly has been my story here: To be loved, as I’ve experienced this year by this community, wakes up a part of you that makes loving other people possible. And I think that, as a church, or just as people on a very human journey, our capacity to love is really the most important thing that we can develop. If we’re going to spend time in life doing anything, this is the one thing that really has the potential to transform us the most, and to transform the lives of everybody around us. – Waylon Whitley

the monastiC daily sChedule is the antithesis of undergraduate college living. Like most people after college, I graduated still in the midst of self-discovery, trying to figure out how to be the best version of myself. This internship was an opportunity to work on pieces of me that were just impossible to work on in the college setting. I knew that, as an extrovert, I wasn’t going to be able to take time to be silent and to live a disciplined, structured life without this experience.

I feel like I’ve learned a lot from just the act of being physically present five times a day for worship. Just having that discipline to show up if I’m not feeling well; if I don’t want to be there; if I do

want to be there; if I have other things to do, there’s a lot to be learned in just showing up. That’s so simple, yet I think what the monastic life offers is such simple and profoundly deep practices of life.

I have actually gotten into the rhythm of waking up with the sun and going to bed a little bit after the sun. That seemed like such an impossibility to me coming here: to be able to awake at 5:30 and begin the day! I had never done that, never imagined I could. It goes back to discipline: My natural inclinations are not to stick to a disciplined life. After being able to live in this space for nine months, to experience this structure and discipline, I feel more equipped to go out on my own and put my own practices into place. – Seth Woody

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Community is the essential foundation for Christian spirituality,

and an understanding of this reality is crucial for Christian life. Acting like and being a Christian are based on common prayer. Common prayer does not dimin-ish personal piety; rather it provides a needed reference point. In this essay, I will explore the notion of how what we practice in common makes us better individuals.

Some may find this emphasis on common prayer difficult, saying that Scripture teaches us about the need to pray alone. Remember though that when Jesus went alone to pray, Elijah would suddenly appear, or an angel would minister to Jesus. When Jesus went into his closet, shut the door and prayed, there would always be a crowded room: a communion of saints. We often forget this. So, when Jesus instructs us to go into our rooms, shut the door and pray to our Father who is in secret (Matt. 6:6), he is giving a corporate imperative. He is still teaching us to pray in concert, not alone.

Jesus teaches us that spirituality is always about being animated by the other. Jesus says, “When you pray, say

Our…” (Matt. 6:9). He doesn’t say, “My.” Common prayer points to how the human heart is made perfect when in the other it finds what it is lacking. The Holy Spirit animates our very beings with God’s communal life, and we realize we cannot live unto or by ourselves.

God knows what we need before we ask, yet so many of our private prayers seem not to acknowledge this. We pray to God as if to inform God about something God already knows. However, as we corporately acknowledge God’s presence and omniscience, our petitions and intercessions take on meaning. When we pray in community, self-understanding increases as we assist one another in focusing on lasting and sustained needs and yearnings rather than on momentary whims and fleeting desires. Thus, common prayer provides a way of seeing who we truly are in our relationships with one another and with God.

In order to explore how common prayer is essential in becoming a Christian, I would like to look at three possible obstacles to prayer and to reflect upon how prayer in community might create something new. The first is the reality of suffering.

Praying in CommunityBecoming Our Truest Selves

Michael Battle

This essay is taken (with slight alterations) from the collection I Have Called You Friends: Reflections on Reconciliation, released by Cowley Publications in 2006 in honor of Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold. The book is available for purchase through Rowman & Littlefield (www.rowman.com) and other online book retailers such as amazon.com.


Suffering

Sometimes human suffering is so severe that one cries with St. Teresa of Avila to God, “No wonder your friends are so few, considering how you treat them.” African Christian tradition articulates a spirituality capable of containing suffering. Deep in the Christian faith of black Christians is the understanding that suffering can be redemptive because the Creator God won’t let death be the last word. Perhaps this is why black churches cannot help but demonstrate their worship communally and kinetically. As the African American spiritual leader Howard Thurman states:

…despite the personal character of suffering, the sufferer can work his way through to community. . . . Sometimes he discovers through the ministry of his own burden a larger comprehension of his fellows, of whose presence he becomes aware in his darkness. They are companions along the way. The signifi-cance of this cannot be ignored or passed over. It is one of the consolations offered by the Christian religion in the centrality of the position given to the cross and to the suffering of Jesus Christ.1

1 Walter Earl Fluker et al., eds., A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life (Boston:

Through the life of Christ the world knows that innocent people suffer. Their suffering does not diminish our faith in God. In fact, Thurman thinks, “Their presence in the world is a stabilizing factor, a precious ingredient maintaining the delicate balance that prevents humanity from plunging into the abyss.”2

Human community is capable of living with both suffering and God’s presence. In community we find a mysterious paradox that could be described as robust vulnerability. Such robust vulnerability is grounded in relationships in which persons are able to recognize that their humanity is bound up in the other’s humanity and that we are vulnerable in our depen-dence on the other. I have called such a paradox of community by the name of “Ubuntu.”3

Invulnerability

Suffering can cause us to harden our souls and embrace stoic tendencies,

Beacon Press, 1998), 47.

2 Fluker, 49.

3 See Michael Battle, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1997).

22 SSJE

that is, to become less vulnerable. A sense of invulnerability, however, makes it difficult to pray. For the Christian mystic Simone Weil, any doctrine of prayer must address two kinds of pain. She writes:

When we talk of the problem of pain we make a distinction between suffering and affliction. The problem of suffering or mere pain is how to bear it. When the crisis is over, as in a bout with a headache, the problem disappears. We have a great capacity to be indifferent to this kind of pain. Affliction, on the other hand, is a kind of suffering which marks you indelibly not merely on the body but on the soul. It is the “mark of slavery” signifying an uprooting, a permanent estrangement.4

When you suffer, it is tempting to harden your heart and conclude that life is mechanistic. Hardened in our individualistic world views we are further tempted: the next temptation is to oppress others – to see them as machines. We are tempted in this way because we learn to see ourselves as mere machines – soulless objects. Affliction deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things. Community becomes impossible for them. As Weil concludes, affliction “is indifferent; and it is the coldness of this indifference, a metallic coldness, which freezes all those it touches right to the depths of their souls. They will never find warmth again. They will never believe any more that they are anyone.”5 A life of suffering and becoming afflicted can move one into this state of seeing evil as normative. One can become mechanized, and forget how to pray.

4 Quoted by E.W.F. Tomlin, Simone Weil (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1954), in the Series Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought, 49.

5 Ibid.


In such a mechanistic reality all that matters is power. Power over others legitimizes violence and perpetuates warring identities. Desmond Tutu helps us see that this is a very dangerous existence, in which evil and violence become normative and expected. As Archbishop Tutu explains:

Then there is the mystery of evil. Why should there arise a Hitler, an Amin – why should there be a holocaust perpetrated by those who appear to be quite normal human beings, why should apparently decent human beings not be incapable of the horrors of apartheid, why should apparently normal people engage in necklacing [burning people bound to automobile tires]? Why should there be those who are not appalled by a Crossroads, who can carry out the destruction of a District Six, who can torture to death a fellow human being as part of their normal daily life and return home to embrace their wives and children, to eat birthday cake and be to all intents and purposes normal…?6

Without communal prayer there is no incentive to rise above a mechanistic reality because individuals will be incapable of seeing beyond survival. As an individual, I am constantly tempted to see creation as the mere survival of the fittest. In such a reality, my goal of existence is to know myself over and against another. But we cannot know God in this way, and we cannot pray in this way.

In community there is a larger picture of God’s presence in the world. Through communal prayer the wound of creation is slowly transfigured toward a new heaven and earth. Communal prayer moves us beyond a survivalist religion in which the goal is only self-interest. Another dynamic, which I will only mention here, is that in

6 Tutu’s Handwritten Sermons, “The Angels,” St. Michael’s Observatory, 1986.

24 SSJE

situations of privilege and an accompa-nying sense of invulnerability, many fall into individualistic ways of living where achieving one’s own best interest is the goal.

Unanswered Prayer

Any discussion of prayer that seems to be unanswered must address the problem of theodicy, namely: Why does God’s good creation remain de facto violent and capricious? What does the apparently inevitable breakdown of human systems or community say about the presence or absence of God? For example, when Job prays to God for providence in dealing with creation’s tragedy and violence, there seems to be no answer for him. Job says, “O that I might have my request, and that God would grant my desire …” (Job 6:8). Job is left with unanswered prayer. Here again, Simone Weil provides an insight into how prayer is ultimately answered:

The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of that attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it. The highest part of the attention only makes contact with God, when prayer is intense and pure enough for such a contact to be established; but the whole attention is turned to God.7

Our ability to maintain the fixed attitude of “attention” depends not on successfully penetrating God as on being penetrated by God. As Romans 8 teaches us, it is God who truly prays. According to St. Paul, we do not know how to pray apart from the Spirit praying

7 Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,’ in Simone Weil Reader. George A. Panichas, ed., (Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Moyer Bell Ltd., 1977), 44.

in us (Rom. 8:26-28). What we actually do when we pray is simply become attentive to the prayer already going on within us.

The Holy Spirit who prays in us, for us, around us, and despite us performs the marvelous miracle of making community possible in a world bent on destruction and chaos. The Holy Spirit’s community is about love – a “love,” which for Simone Weil was “not a state but a direction” out of chaos.8 Crucial to practicing common prayer is the spiritual practice of moving in the direction of the Holy Spirit who prays in us such that we participate in the Spirit’s ongoing prayer. Like toddlers, we must learn how to talk to God by listening first to God’s speech that is constantly uttered in Christian commu-nities, otherwise known as the church.

A community of prayer does not expect a salvation wrought by human hands; rather, it pays attention to what and who is already there, knowing it does not reach goodness of its own accord. A community of prayer knows that it is often only after long, seemingly fruitless effort, when it despairs at prayer being answered, that answered prayer comes as a gift and a marvelous surprise. It is through these efforts of attending to God through prayer than we participate in the profound effects of prayer.

Praying in community not only helps remove these obstacles to prayer, it also can move us in counterintuitive direc-tions. For example, when facing a natural inclination to respond with violence, we may rather wait and be patient and nonviolent. When faced with difficult decisions, the appropriate response may be to seek out someone with an ability to discern greater than our own. Suffering and the consequent push toward invul-nerability need not make us hunker down in individualistic approaches to God.

8 Weil, Waiting on God, 77.


Our attentiveness when we pray in common to God’s ongoing presence – despite all obstacles – does not make us naïve Christians, as some might have us believe. Why? Because in our attentiveness to the other (the greatest Other being God), we learn to produce that which is greater than our individual parts – community. In other words, as a community of prayer becomes more attentive to God, they move beyond their individual suffering, the attendant push to become invulnerable and the sense that God may not be listening. Common prayer gives us the ability to imagine peaceful governments and a cessation of disease and poverty. Common prayer becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy. When we pray we destroy the false sense of individual fullness by acknowledging our common need for God. When we pray in common, we accentuate our differences in such a way that we realize that we need each other to know God. Most of all, in common prayer we acknowledge that we are not the ultimate being: God is. This acknowledgment helps us recognize that we are not praying to God as some kind of Santa Claus who grants our every wish.

Each of us has times when prayer is difficult. Communal prayer provides a way for us to pray even when we are unable to pray alone. Then, we can depend on the

The Rev. Dr. Michael Battle is the founder of PeaceBattle Institute, which focuses on peacemaking, transformation, and spirituality. He currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife and three children.

community to offer intercessory prayer on our behalf.

Training to pray as community provides the necessary reference point for us to honestly and truly know our deepest selves. Communal prayer affirms our uniqueness as persons. Our vocations are made sense of in community. Our talents and gifts function through relationships with others. We need others to know ourselves. And most of all, we need God made known in Jesus to know who we truly are.

Perhaps it is part of the paradoxical nature of life as we experience it that in community individuals become who they truly are called to be. As we become more of a person in God, we experience a divine socialization process that transforms us. I believe that through common prayer, God is working in the world, helping it, and us, to know we are more than animals, more than individuals who have a bundle of rights and privileges. Through our common prayer, with God’s help, we can grow in divinity, growing ever more into the image of God.

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Spo

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During the past year, we Brothers have had the unique opportunity of having a Buddhist monk from Cambodia living in our monastic enclosure. The Venerable Hoeurn Somnieng has been living alongside us while earning a Master’s degree in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. Somnieng is the second head monk of the Wat Damnak monastery (with over fifty monks) and was instrumental in founding the Life and Hope Association (LHA), a non-profit, non-governmental, and non-political organization for the relief of the poor in 2005. On its website, LHA describes itself as “an education-focused organization committed to alleviating poverty, ignorance and hardship through creating equal access to education for the underprivileged in our community,” particularly to Khmer youth. It serves over 3,000 girls and boys.

“My year in Cambridge has been like a long retreat,” Somnieng told us. “The Monastery has provided me with the silence and solitude I needed to do my studies, but also the opportunity to reflect deeply on the purpose and values of our religious traditions, and their relationship to the reality of our lives.” Somnieng says the experience of studying here this year has reinforced his connection with his religious tradition and has helped him to find his true self. He has been interested in observing the connection between the values and viewpoints of his religious world and those of the academic world.

As he prepared for his graduation and return to Cambodia, Somnieng expressed his profound gratitude to SSJE. “I am so grateful to the Brothers and this community for providing me with a quiet, peaceful setting very near my school. I do not know how I would have been able to succeed in my program without the support of this place and the encouragement of the Brothers.”

We Brothers feel tremendous gratitude as well, for the wonderful opportunity we have had to live alongside this remarkable man.

Living Alongside a Remarkable Man


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lIFe“In February and early March I made my 11th trip to Jerusalem, Israel, and Palestine, which in some ways has become a second home. I led a three-day retreat for the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, meeting with about thirty-five clergy from Palestine, Israel, and Jordan. Bp. Suheil Dawani had requested the topic, ‘Empowering the Clergy for the Challenges of this Region.’ It was inspiring to meet these men (no women clergy yet!) who are such a steadfast witness in the face of such daunting challenges.

I met also with Mohammad Joulani and Naomi Sullum, two of the leaders of Kids4Peace Jerusalem, the organization founded at St. George’s College that brings Jewish, Christian, and Muslim children from the Jerusalem area together for several months of meetings, culminating in a two-week trip to the United States to meet counterparts here. I am on the board of directors for Kids4Peace Boston, one of several American chapters that host these groups of children and their adult entourage here in this country. Again, it was inspiring to see the passion, energy, and commitment of these young leaders.

In addition to Kids4Peace, the Brothers have supported the Lajee Center at the Aida Refugee Camp for Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war. Lajee is a cultural, educational, and recreational center for children and young people of the camp. It was my third visit; Salah Ajarma, the founder and director of the center, offered a tour of the facilities and the new playing field, a project desperately needed since the Israeli separation wall has closed off access to Palestinian land where children used to play.

For I believe the 8th time, I served as chaplain for a course at St. George’s College, the Anglican continuing education center in Jerusalem. This course, ‘The Palestine of Jesus,’ was a rich combination of pilgrimage and learning about the land, its history, its place in sacred geography, and its continuing importance for Christians, especially for the ‘living stones,’ the Christians of Palestine and Israel today.

We Brothers are so grateful for the support of so many friends that make our efforts on behalf of ‘the peace of Jerusalem’ possible.”

Br. Mark Brown in the Holy Land

Participants in Kids4Peace Boston visit the Monastery. To learn more about this organization, visit www.kids4peaceboston.org

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Cowley Magazine - Summer 2013

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