One of the things that struck me most forcibly about community life when I first joined was the contrast between that and ordinary life in terms of the way I felt. The obvious differences – the kinds of things most people ask about – were superficial, even though they were big enough to make you wonder sometimes if you had made the right choice.
For me, the difference was at a much deeper level, not even connected with any directly visible cause and effect. In “normal” life I felt restless, bored, anxious about where life was going. In community the restlessness was gone. That might well be just a personal experience; others may have felt quite differently, but it was real enough to make me want to figure out why that was so.
It was something to do with unifying religious and secular life. We used to talk about that in community, but it took years for me to connect it to my feelings.
In ordinary life church is almost like a hobby. Even if you are heavily involved, there is often the sense that your own life and that of your family is a quite separate affair. It also runs along secular lines for the most part, just like most other people’s lives. It was this separate existence that seemed to be at the root of my restlessness. I was neither one thing nor the other, neither wholly religious nor wholly secular; and I was bored with both.
It’s a bit of a cliché to say life didn’t have any real meaning. Some day I’ll have to revisit the subject of the meaning of meaning, but that is the best word to describe how it feels when life is a unity, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. Even if circumstances are difficult, you feel as if you are as you were made to be and therefore at a profound level you are at peace.
I expect people have various ways of achieving this. Unifying religious and secular life is a description of both a way of life and an inner state; there isn’t a blueprint. What can be achieved in community life can also (in my experience) be accomplished by a discipline of prayer through daily offices. Church activities may become less important yet in some way secular life is sanctified and therefore all life has meaning.
“Meaning” is a pretty important asset, to Christians as much as anyone else. Without it, consciously or unconsciously we tend to spend our time and energy looking for it. Since community living proved to be a good source of it for me, I felt it worthwhile to include a chapter on it in the book.
On Easter Day I was leading and preaching at the main morning service in church. I wanted to say something about the resurrection, but the question was what? The gospel narrative telling the story of Mary Magdalene was easy enough to use as a picture of how we too might encounter the risen Jesus, but what was the reality? People nowadays want something real, not just theological words, so I had to dig deep.
To cut a long story short, I ended up talking about the song of alleluia that sings in our spirit in the face of the material world, whether in adversity or prosperity. That is real enough, though very hard to find adequate words to describe. That led on to further reflection (though I didn’t preach on this) about where the song of alleluia comes from.
In community we don’t find it comes to us any more easily than in conventional life, but there is nevertheless something about community living (at least in the Community of Celebration) that nurtures it. The most obvious expression of it is the spirit of praise that is characteristic of Celebration’s worship, and yet that is hard to sustain if it depends on a continuous diet of songs beautifully performed by gifted individuals.
It is in fact the regular rhythm of prayer that sustains it. I was brought up in a tradition in which prayer seemed a rather arduous activity, mostly consisting of a glorified shopping list of petitions. It took a certain amount of re-education to recognise prayer in a wider sense as genuine – for example, saying the offices. As with many things, of course, it depends on how you do it, but if you focus and make the office your own prayer then over time it enters your soul and nurtures the spirit within.
The power of words to shape the human spirit is well known. Religious communities have always known this, and that is why I felt it important to include a chapter on prayer in Following the Spirit. In the midst of all the ups and downs, the struggles and the politics, of community history, that is the silver thread that leads direct from Houston in the 60s to the expression of community today.
Whether we live in community or not, offices are an invaluable resource to sustain the song of alleluia. Some of those in the Liturgy of the Hours only take a few minutes to pray. Repeated use often opens up fresh insights into one’s own spiritual life. After the Bible, I find one of the most useful resources is the Benedictine breviary.
One thing I always found frustrating about Graham Pulkingham was that it was often hard to pin down exactly what he was saying at any given point. Over the years masses of cassette tapes were accumulated of teachings he gave at various gatherings - which (you might imagine) would give a pretty good idea of what he was on about. And perhaps they do, but the task of wading through them and distilling something from them always felt herculean to me.
Graham’s talks were usually quite long and rambling, though he normally engaged with his audience through provocative comments or questions that held their attention. There was nothing of the three point sermon about his talks. But apart from the problem of taking coherent notes, it was also difficult to know whether what he said was his own settled position or whether it mainly reflected what he happened to be thinking about at the time. Many of Graham’s talks were pastoral in the sense that they spoke to a current situation, and his ideas might later change or at least not be repeated.
Nevertheless he had a formidable reputation as a teacher and most people considered him to be a fount of wisdom. I felt it was important to say something about his teachings in the book, but the question was, what?
In several chapters dealing with aspects of community life I found it useful simply to use one of his phrases as a peg on which to hang the discussion. This device incorporates Graham’s teachings in the book better than discursive narrative. For example, “the simple sayings of Jesus”, a typical Pulkingham expression, focused our attention on realising the humanity of Jesus in modern life rather than visualising him mainly as an exalted figure in the heavens.
Despite this I felt it important to try to give some flavour of his teaching at greater length. There were several subjects I could have chosen – worship, for example, or community – but in the end I decided on the “Sons of God” teaching, together with a related subject, the “elder-younger relationship”. (The latter was a slightly idiosyncratic topic in the way that Graham developed it, but its source in Jesus’ sayings about the Son in relationship to the Father reflected the same idea.)
The “Sons of God” teaching came straight from Romans 8.14. The reason I chose to highlight that rather than talks on other subjects is that its essential subject matter – that of Christian identity – seemed to me to be foundational. Christianity is not about what you do or even about what you believe, necessarily; fundamentally it’s about who you are. That is the basis for “following the Spirit”, whether you do it by living in community or in some other way. It’s also central to the tradition handed on by contemplatives and mystics down the ages, albeit from many different points of view.
We may not look in the mirror and say, “Good morning, son of God” very often today. But the recollection of a truth awakened in us by Graham’s pastoral teaching continues to generate spiritual energy long after the original context has passed and gone.
When I was writing Following the Spirit, a number of people reminisced to me about relationships. Apparently that was one of the things they remembered most about the Community of Celebration. I felt I had to write something about it in the book; it was clearly part of the story. Yet it wasn’t easy to find words that captured what people were talking about. How do you depict in ordinary everyday language a reality that at least some past members felt was tinged with the divine?
Of course, it wasn’t all like that. Leaving aside relationship problems, of which there were plenty, even fulfilling relationships did not necessarily meet that description, even if they seemed rewarding to the individuals concerned. To others they may have appeared a bit exclusive, and in fact I remember a point at which some people did talk about “special relationships”, as if they were something sacred that the Community had to take account of in the administration of its life.
Relationships that are “tinged with the divine” do not have that one-on-one exclusivity about them; they are characterised if anything by a certain detachment. In fact, the one-on-one kind are a potential danger to the experience of God in spiritual life. St. Teresa of Avila had something to say on this subject.
In her mind, all members of a religious community ought to be friends, loving, cherishing and helping one another. She urged her own community to avoid particular friendships, no matter how holy, because they were liable to introduce a kind of poison without any advantage to spiritual growth. “O great God!” she cried, “The puerilities that arise from such friendships!” (The Way of Perfection, chapter 4).
We seem to be in good company. Apparently “special relationships” have been an issue in community life throughout history – but conversely so has been the experience of pure spiritual friendship, which is difficult to put into words but which affected many people in our Community so profoundly that, as the saying goes, they became “spoiled for the world.” Life in the church was never the same again; it was like drinking plonk after tasting vintage wine.
Curiously enough, I wrote that last sentence without once thinking about the story of the wedding at Cana.
Recently I came back from a trip to Israel. It was a packed schedule, and very stimulating. Trips to Israel nowadays, particularly pilgrimages as opposed to tours, tend to include opportunities to interact with Palestinians as well as visiting holy sites. If they include a visit to Yad Vashem (the holocaust museum) as well – as ours did – you get a feeling for both sides in the current situation.
On one of our trips we visited the latest archaeological excavations of the City of David. In Israel today archaeology is highly political; we were told that uncovering sites and creating access has involved the destruction of Arab homes, and that the government has handed over responsibility for care of the City of David site and guiding of visitors to a group of messianic Jews.
Sure enough, our guide was a young woman who spoke about Jerusalem as if it were the citadel of heaven. To listen to her, you would have thought the city had an unbroken 3000 year history of mystical significance as the capital of Israel. In contrast, a secular Israeli archaeologist at Bet She’an was quite honest about the fact that only three times in history (the Davidic period, the Hasmonean period and the present day) had anyone identifiable by the name “Israel” had control of the whole of the country.
Rarely have I encountered religious imagination presenting itself so passionately as historical and political truth. It was a graphic illustration of the problems in Israel today, but it brought to mind one of the central themes of Following the Spirit, the notion of hearing God in each other.
Hearing God in the other is not just a matter of recognising that someone has a different point of view. To hear “God” in the other is to recognise the other’s dignity and integrity, to accept that I am not self sufficient without the other and that in embracing the other’s humanity I am in some sense inevitably going to be changed by them. Put in those terms, I suppose we Christians (and especially Anglicans) have a few specks to remove from our own eyes before preaching to Israelis and Palestinians. But that’s another discussion.
Meantime, it was good to experience the Community of Celebration’s own connection with Israel, in the shape of a phone conversation with Patricia Allen who now lives in Israel and has a ministry of prayer.
Following the Spirit had a very long gestation. In some ways it was extraordinarily difficult to write. In fact, I didn’t want to write it. In the first place, how do you do justice to all the individual stories of people who lived in lots of different communities over a 30-odd year period? Secondly, how do you present the story when you know the opinions of participants range from enthusiasm and nostalgia to unresolved anger and cynicism?
In other words, what is truth? Some Christian stories are virtually religious propaganda; they overstress the positive and see the negative only in terms of obstacles triumphantly overcome by faith. I had no interest in writing that kind of story. On the other hand there is the “exposé” approach: telling the story of what “really” happened. I wasn’t interested in that either. I couldn’t see the point in it.
A Christian book needs to be encouraging in some sense, either of personal faith or in terms of principles and experiences that deserve to be more widely known. Cynicism achieves nothing in that respect, and still begs the question of what is true. Despite painful things that happened at times, my experience of Community life was extremely faith building – and that, for me, is truth, every bit as much as a supposedly realistic blow by blow account.
So how to write about it? I realised that as a participant myself whatever I wrote would inevitably reflect my own interpretation and experience, so I might as well acknowledge that in the book and come clean about it from the start. But I didn’t want to write only a personal memoir. I needed a theme, something objective that most members and ex-members could relate to.
In the end, it struck me that the most obvious narrative arises from the situation that the Community of Celebration finds itself in today. How did we get to become a religious community of the Episcopal Church of the USA? That wasn’t how we started out. It was a long process. But that is the story that needs telling, not a lot of anecdotal material from years ago that means nothing much now except to those actually involved.
The chosen narrative does of course restrict the scope considerably. The story of the Community now at Aliquippa narrows things to a particular stream, limited still further by the focus on “religious order” development. Individuals’ names are mentioned only insofar as they assist the narrative; there is no other logic that determines why some are referred to and others not.
Hardly anything is said, for example, about Post Green, at one time a major branch of the Community of Celebration and one in which I lived for several years. But I decided to include a number of chapters on aspects of community life, and here I was able to draw on the Post Green experience. I also included a theological section, and I could not have written this without years of reflection on the journey God has taken us. It may well be that this is not your perception of it, and if so that is fine by me.
