There’s a time for everything, says one biblical writer. As the summer has now definitely gone, there’s still time. Many will recall statistics about the last few months; the wet weather, the effects on insect species and other populations. Now the swallows are leaving for another year and the wildlife watchers are counting the skeins of pink footed geese across the sky. There’s a time for coming and a time for going.
Advice in Devon
I’m just back from a visit to Devon, somewhat south and west of Longdendale. One of the the things they hold in common is disused railway lines. By the late 1960s decisions had been made to close most of the railway lines in Devon, except the main ones through the county. They weren’t economic enough for some. Instead small roads were filled with fume emitting vehicles a new roads were built to take all the traffic. The disused railway lines became just that, disused, until the age of slower travel by off road routes came along and we tried to join them back up again. These are the routes we have been walking along.
Additionally one section of local rail line has been re-opened, to Oakhampton station and other small projects have big ambitions. The station at Oakhampton seems to be thriving and has an interesting museum. Of course, it costs more to re-open a railway now than it did to close it then.
Oakhampton Station, once again on the main line.
Religious communities can find it difficult to see ahead at the benefits and costs to changes in community life. It’s not unusual to hear members in many such places moan about the lack of younger members often in the same breath as they complain about those that are present.
The village of Sticklepath used to be on the main road route to Oakhampton. John Wesley came that way and preached at the white stone. A few years ago the small parish church was faced with closure. But today it is a space shared with the village heritage centre and the worshipping community, one at each end of the building.
So too on Lundy Island the church has a new life for visitors but is still celebrating the old one as a place of worship. The Landmark Trust re-purposes old buildings of interest and we’ve found them intriguing places to stay.
Evening at Winsford Cottage Hospital, care of the Landmark Trust
We face similar challenges in our high streets. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the Rule doesn’t embrace community change. The buildings can get a new life along with the people. What’s required is faithfulness in prayer and service, not unswerving adherence to activities that no longer contribute to holy communion.
From my remembered bible: There’s a time for everything under heaven.
Direct my prayers to the opening of your ways.
Janet Lees, the wandering anchorite of Longdendale., 9th October 2024
Take the narrow
path: it is the most life-giving (RB)
I doubt many of my forebears or contemporaries spend much time on the Rule of St Benedict, but then neither do I compared with someone who has lived under monastic vows for half a century. I come from a Reformed heritage and as such the temptation to reform is running through my veins every day. It’s a wonder I stick to any path.
As far as the east is from the west, in Longdendale
I’m not a totally
off-piste person either. I do love the edges though, where the
speedwell forms vibrant blue clumps or a pale helleborine is shielded
from the main trail, where the butterflies are dancing. The trail
that makes its way through Longdendale is wider in some parts than in
others. Sometimes there is a separate track for horse riders; the
spotted orchids thrive there. If you want to see a bracket fungus or
a delicate ring of age-old lichen you’ll need to go beyond the edge
of the path.
What about a rule
for building community? I wonder how I find myself gazing at that. I
grew up in a small village in Essex and took that kind of community
for granted. Without probing too deeply, I gradually, with age,
became aware of its flaws and frayed edges. A child suffocated to
death in a grain silo, marriages that fell apart, where Travellers
were welcome to pick fruit but not to live alongside us. It was much
the same in the rest of the country I expect. I went to South Africa
in the mid 1980s and was confronted by other communities and stories
of injustice. I came back to look differently at the scenes of
children playing in bread baskets on a narrow balcony or Black women
doing piece work in tiny flats.
My privilege took me to one of the oldest universities in Britain where I was mostly unhappy, conflicted, lost. I never learnt to revere the Great Men. A few threads of community brushed off on me in passing: we sang ‘Shalom my friends’ in a circle around the communion table in the ecumenical Estate Church on a Sunday. I picked up other echoes in SW London and Yorkshire by the kindnesses of those I met. For a while it was just enough to keep me on the path.
The next valley, where rules were broken.
A school has its
rules and Benedict knows that. He writes in the Prologue:
‘Our intention is
to begin a school for God’s service’ (RR) 1
As a school chaplain
I was aware of rules and their interpretation, roles and authority.
It is with all of this baggage that I stumble along with Benedict’s
Rule. There are other rules of course: most religious communities or
networks will have them and their unspoken interpretations. A good
Benedictine reads the Rule three times a year. A good enough one
remembers a few bits of it.
There are those who consider the Rule that is over a thousand and a half years old a gift to the twenty-first century. I am still unsure about that. It contains a lot of words, and much of it is archaic in language and authority. However, it seems to include three main ideas: the importance of stability, accountability and of owning nothing.
Walking
Stability is the reassurance that it is ‘a gift to come down where we ought to be’. 2
Accountability is my
take on obedience. We seek to live in mutual respect to each other.
We own nothing. You
cannot own a valley, though this one doubles as a water catchment
area for part of Greater Manchester so swathes of its (mis)management
are taken over by a private company that is run for the profit of a
few shareholders rather than the eco-system as a whole.3
I am finding
stability here. The three-times-a-year Rule is mixed up with the four
seasons, the boundaries of which are unravelling. An arctic tern
turned up in the black-headed gull colony on a peninsula on the
farthest reservoir this spring (2024). A colony that shouldn’t
really be there are we are a long way from the coast, and nearly
wasn’t there for the two breeding seasons it was ripped apart by
avian flu, but it came anyway. Maybe a gyrovague looking for a
familiar wave to ride. Not finding one, it stayed a day or two and
then went on its way to some other community, some other place, some
other stability.
I count stuff and share my observations with a group of enthusiastic wild-life watchers. They see more than me, charting the comings and goings of migratory species and newcomers looking for a place to call their own. As I write this (May 2024) there are rumours that a family of otters has taken up residence on a small body of water towards the moorland. After another wet spring my fears are for the orange-tipped butterflies, their one early breeding flight washed out again. ‘To whom do you consider yourself accountable?’was the question posed at my surplus-to-requirements interview weighing my value to the larger community that saw school based ministry as pointless. My answer, in this valley, more than seven years later, remains the same: To Jesus Christ, the head of the Church. I could go on, but essentially, if no one else wants to know that the climate is changing, as few enough seem to, I can still count stuff.
Heron
A heron has just
flown over on its way to goodness knows where, and the rain is
falling in stair rods (uncommon enough metaphor these days). I own
none of these things. Of the things I do own I try to share them with
those around me in a not-for-profit way, mindful I still have too
many unused possessions other are unlikely to want (the local charity
shops have been the recipients of quite a few of them). I can’t
take you through the Rule of St Benedict one paragraph at a time,
backwards of forwards. I do not keep it under my pillow. I walk
through this valley with a remembered bible and a remembered rule and
quite a lot of baggage, as a good enough Benedictine.
Come, walk with me. The way maybe narrow but it is life-giving. Tomorrow I need to go and see if the bog-bean is flowering.
Stone cross, possibly 8th century.
Janet Lees, Friend
of Scholastica and wandering anchorite of Longdendale, 27.05.2024
1RR
is the Remembered Rule – and RB is of course the Remembered Bible.
so it’s all about what I’ve internalised, how I have
interpreted, what has shaped me.
Today the internet is awash with photos of the Northern Lights taken from all over the UK. I wonder what you would have made of them 1,500 years ago, or even if they were visible in Italy?
I’ve had them explained to me but actually they are just awesome. Sheets and bursts of colour dancing across the night sky. Last night was clear and ideal for them after such a big ‘solar burp’.
Aurora over Longdendale
Everyone who saw it is talking about it and everyone who didn’t is kicking themselves for missing it. It seems that lots of people had them on their ‘bucket list’: a must-see sight or event that notion of which would probably puzzle you too.
Between Compline and Lauds, Benedictines still observe the great silence. There’s no more fitting time to contemplate the heavens. They are immense and vital, providing air to breathe, highways for aerial species and space to pray. As human activity messes with the air we must do all we can to raise awareness and right the balance.
Aurora in Longdendale
Remembered bible: Keep watch and pray.
Make me air aware.
Janet Lees, Friend of Scholastica, Wandering Anchorite of Longdendale. 11.05.2024
When I think about putting your rule into practice today, it sometimes seems too complicated. All 73 chapters are about how to live in community. It’s a daunting prospect. Would you suggest a top ten perhaps? Most days I barely scratch the beginning and end: ‘Listen’ and ‘try not to be discouraged’ (my remembered versions).
Sign post on the End to End 2019
This is partly because my usual companion is the remembered bible, rather than the remembered rule. The bit I’m thinking of today is about bearing each other’s burdens. We developed some strange ideas in the 21st century and one of them that has caught hold and will not seem to let go, is that as we age we become a burden.
We don’t. We are never that. We need a major reboot here.
What becomes tough, daunting, frustrating, can be re-balanced if we can only think of sharing the load, standing by each other, giving a hand. Of course the complexity of our lives has made that harder. Everyone needs to work, and often at several jobs, to maintain the expected multi-holiday, big car, comfortable house, lifestyle that is advertised in our celebrity endorsing, selfie-society.
I haven’t seen a dentist in over five years. There are no NHS dentists in the area where I live or in many other parts of the country. Is this because the NHS has failed. No, it’s more complicated than that. The best dental service I ever received was from the students at the dental hospital (that was years ago now). Yet, even then it was clear that one of the motivating factors for some students was the high salaries they believed they could and should command.
Teeth on the End to End in 2019
Too many of the people not now able to afford dentistry are now in the grip of the worst post-war poverty epidemic we have yet seen in this country. There’s a two child limit on family financial help via child allowance and too many families are having to rely on food banks.
My first profession was as a speech therapist in the NHS. Even then it was hard to find speech therapists, and sometimes waiting lists were very long. Once again you could look to pay for private speech therapy but it’s not a part of the profession I ever went into. I learnt at a young age to give stuff away and most of all to give away my time. I didn’t get my first paid job until I was 18 and that was as an au-pair. During my adulthood I’ve often worked for nothing, volunteered for stuff, had unpaid roles one way or another. I don’t have a large income, because I’m a woman born in the 1950s so I don’t get my pension until I’m 66. But I still have enough to give my time and efforts to other people, make soup, sew up things, visit people.
Soup
I’m fortunate that is the case but it does puzzle me what multi-millionaires think they will need all that money for….Or even why ordinary people get hooked into the must have this or that culture. Later today, I hope I will put my walking boots on and walk up the valley. I’ll see some birds, plants and maybe something unexpected. It will cost me nothing.
If you want to live with the Risen Christ, think about how you can take life beyond the restrictions and false attractions of a culture that promises much but delivers so little. Think about how you can be part of a community that ‘shares each others burdens’. It seems to be a somewhat counter cultural way of life now in a context in which everything costs more and the fear of having nothing dominates the richest, while the poor have to scrap by on several low paid jobs and a bag of free groceries.
Bob carrying Hannah and Sally Bunny, sometime ago.
If there’s a rule it should be ‘Let no one go without what they need to thrive’.
From my remembered bible: ‘Jesus said ‘I have come so you might have the fullest life possible’.
Show us how to bear each others burdens.
Janet lees, Friend of Scholastica, living in Longdendale. Easter Sunday 2024.
I begin wandering again this week. The winter is over, even with snow forecast. We have passed the Spring Equinox. The geese are going the other way. A lot of other avian migrants have recently arrived. Lapwings make a display of themselves in the fields.
The Lapwings are back!
I’m taking Bambi a few miles down the road to see the view. Derbyshire is full of them. Every bush is burning.
The bin men have been, so we’re officially emptied again. The Cross-Wise Way is a way of frequent restarts. A new notebook and a sharpened pencil. Begin again at chapter 1. Some of us never get any further.
Greylag with young
Holy Monday is a day for resting your voice after all the shouting and yelling of yesterday. You may need it again later in the week.
Holy Tuesday and Wednesday are days of pondering big questions. Why the fig tree is not fruiting, why a poor woman is putting her life savings in the offertory plate. Why oh Why? There will be other questions later in the week.
Maundy Thursday is a day for washing and plotting.
Good Friday is a day for hanging around.
Holy Saturday is the quietest day of all.
Easter Day is a day for rock rolling and surprises.
From my remembered bible: Blessed is the One who comes this Way.
Any week can be holy if we let it.
Geese coming or going
Bless us on the way.
Janet Lees, a Friend of Scholastica. Setting out from Longdendale. 25.03.2024
The season of wandering is nearly over for this year. We are back on Greenwhich Mean Time and the evenings are now darker as the light part of the day shortens. I’m back to my thoughts about wandering.
I think you took against it because by the time you came to found the community for the Rule that bears you name, you’d done your bit of it and were happy to settle down. God help the rest of them. You wanted them to experience stability and that’s all very well but it can be stultifying.
A goose in Longdendale
Of course I understand that wandering has its downside too. No roots, shallower relationships, a whole host of questions. But maybe this was just what your community needed. I’m back in the valley after my final wanderings of the season and I’m full of observations, questions and feelings of being unsettled. Maybe that does make it harder to re-integrate into a solid settled community. I can imagine the whispering: ‘Who do they think they are, coming back here with all those ideas?’
Of course most of our communities are not that settled these days. Poverty and inequality, for example, are unsettling. Newcomers need attention and understanding. What should we tackle first?
More soup
I settle back to the tasks I’ve taken on; a bit of soup making, reusing and recycling unwanted items, and observing the changes that the seasons bring to the valley. About now many more geese are on the move, from their summer to their winter nesting round. Hundreds at a time fly high overhead to find the right place to spend the winter.
I will spend the winter here. It’s my winter nesting ground. I’ll walk and write and pray in this valley for a few months. I think about the observations and questions that came from wandering. This week I think of the souls and the saints, old and new, their stories of wandering and stability, their homecoming. May they rest in peace and rise in glory.
And more soup
From my remembered bible: I will walk through the valley without fear.
I am thankful for all the saints, even the most unlikely ones.
From a Friend of Scholastica living in Longdendale, 3rd November 2023
This is called ‘Ordinary time’ but then time is itself ordinary. Now we call it Creation Time, although I’m not sure how much time we have for creation, or how much time creation has left for that matter.
I read about a creature from the deepest ocean, found by an exploration team, one never before seen by humans. It was bought up out of the depths and put in a jar. Dead of course. What if it was the only one?
In ordinary time in your Rule, the early morning worship gets a whole chapter 13 to itself. It’s proceeded by chapter 12 which is for Sundays. This morning I lay in bed and listened to the geese again. They flew past my window and made themselves known in their distinctive way, their calls sounding up and down the valley. They don’t know any numbered psalms, just their own. I’m not sure what an Ambrosian Hymn is (sounds like custard) but if it means sweet and musical every bird I know has a version.
Geese flyby
A group of wildlife watchers in the valley, message each other daily on the progress of creatures great and small, sometimes a rare one, sometimes a well ordered flock, sometimes good news, sometimes not so good. They keep alert.
The sun rises and sets, and the valley continues to be the holy space it is.
Geese
This morning my copy of your Rule fell apart when I picked it up. I’m not yet sure if this is a good sign or just carelessness.
For now I’ll listen to the geese.
From my remembered bible: Look at the birds…..
A Robin in the valley
Your call comes with the birds. I am glad.
From a friend of Scholastica in Longdendale, 10th September 2023
I walk a lot and you write a lot. In chapter 7 of your Rule, you write that there are 12 steps to humility. It’s certainly a long chapter and one, as you might imagine, I have issues with.
Walking one step at a time.
I’m not sure how many people would regularly use the word ‘humility’ today. Like some other words in your Rule it has been left on the sidelines and replaced by more modern concepts. Self awareness is perhaps the most obvious because being humble is not just about imagining ourselves lower, but perhaps more about enacting equality.
Would you wish to be kissed after football match? It’s caused quite a row in Spain who won the cup but not the issue of equality. Of course, I’m not sure any country would be able to claim it had got that fully worked out, but in some ways, the issue of sexual harassment arising in Spain has granted it more exposure than if it was Iran or UK, for example. It’s now a year since street protests began in Iran over the death of a young woman considered to be wearing the wrong clothing, or rather not wearing the right clothing. In that year many others have been killed and injured in the resulting protests. Some consider what they wear to be a sign of humility but surely that is only true if it is freely chosen. Equality is based on informed choice.
In the UK various events across the summer have celebrated Pride, often seen as the opposite to humility, but in this case the capital letter denotes a particular kind of Pride related to identity. Even though now acceptance of LGBTQ identities are more widespread in the UK this has not stopped violence against those embracing such identities. In a country of choices some choices are still considered more equal than others.
Pride
Times change and 5th century Europe was a different place to the one of the 21st century. And so humility was the word you choose for your 12 steps. Self awareness seems to balance both humility and pride saying ‘I am not greater than you but I am your equal’. In that equality I can be gracious, grateful, and generous. I cannot be these thing freely if I am forced to do them from a down-trodden position. As it is I can choose to do them from an equal position. We are not forced to follow poor leaders but welcome the chance to travel with our equals.
‘Follow me’
And so, if I might suggest a rewrite, the 13th step is equality, faced full on.
From my remembered bible: Jesus said ‘Come with me’.
Let us start from a position of equality, one step at a time.
From a Friend of Scholastica, in Longdendale, 03.09.2023
I hear that you knew a friendly raven. Various saints are linked to animals: there’s St Cuthbert and his otters and St Oswald is also linked with a raven. In Wales, St Melangell is the patron saint of hares. I’m sure there are many others though I’m not familiar with which saint is linked to the Lesser Stag Beetle, the Gannet or the slow worm. I did once know a child who was very fond of slow worms so perhaps it’s him.
Benny’s raven at Stanbrook Abbey, Wass
It’s interesting that we link holy people to animals in the wild and then promptly forget about them ourselves until it’s time to print another Countryfile Calendar or we see another bit of road kill. Some of us feed birds or count butterflies but it is our general disengagement with the natural world that contributes to our climate crisis. We have forgotten, in our rush to make as much money out of it as possible, that we share the planet.
You never mention the raven in your Rule. Probably it was one of those tales that got expanded later. The faithful raven and the humble monk make a good story, although I can imagine that you had much wild company when you were hermiting. I saw a young jackdaw in the valley recently, but I’m not very good at identifying corvids, except for the raucous magpie in the blue-black and white suit. There are quite a few of those.
Geese in Longdendale
My favourite avian companions are the geese that make their calls in the morning and evening, on the way out or on the way home, commuting up and down the valley. Unfortunately, the avian ‘flu virus has been seen in the valley again this year, especially amongst gulls.
Sea bird cliffs in North Yorkshire
If I was going to add a chapter to your Rule it might be one about recognising the holy space all around us. About how the creatures that also occupy it are holy too as is every species of plant, fungus and bacterium. Some people point to parasitic wasps as proof against God but there’s no need to do so. They all have their own beauty and honouring the place of each one doesn’t mean we have to behave like parasites. It’s only 40,000 years since the earliest painter of Indonesia drew a pig on a cave wall. How long before there are no pigs to draw.
We have forgotten our first vocation, to name and care for our companion earth-dwellers. We need to remember before we all fall asleep on the job and there are no ravens left to guard us.
Lesser stag beetle on the Meridian Way at Greenwich
From the remembered gospel: God does not even forget the sparrows.
May the Creator of slow worms bless you;
May Christ, the counter of sparrows accompany you;
May the Spirit of the wholly connected mycelium bring you together,
That together we may grow in wisdom and understanding and know that all things count.
A Friend of Scholastica in Longdendale, 20.08.2023
I’m back from wandering for a bit so perhaps I’ll manage to get back to blogging about your Rule again. How frustrating it must have been to have monastics in the community who seemed to loose the point so often. There’s more than one way of wandering in community.
I’ve never managed to write about chapter 2 of your Rule, which is about the leadership of a community. Partly because I didn’t feel equipped to do so and partly because, whatever the community, it’s a tough subject these days. So I’ll try to give it a go now, although I am an imposter myself.
I haven’t been for an eye test for a while. I remember when I got one in my teens and spectacles were first prescribed. I said to my mother from our kitchen ‘So that’s what the end of our garden looks like’. Even with spectacles, I have for a long time, been aware of the planks and I’ve got good at squinting round them as we all do. They are a constant.
The eyes have it
So how will anyone lead with a massive great beam projecting from their eye? You must have found this to be a hindrance too. Your Rule is said to have been a departure from the usual power play of the post-Roman world, reminding the community as it does of the leadership of Christ. Of course that’s not easy to adopt either. Western Christianity is full of examples of leadership that claim to be Christian but what sort of Christ do they reflect?
For example, recent attempts to amplify the voices of survivors of Church Abuse are to be commended, but quite frankly why is this taking so long?
Chapter 2 is a long chapter. It wanders about, and includes all sorts of stuff like physical punishment ‘for those that err’ and I don’t think you meant hesitate. Such action would be unthinkable in our own context. Yet stories still emerge of those who have endured physical assaults by bad leaders. In such cases it is the bad leaders who need rooting out.
Ribbons on Roughfields
It seems to me it’s easy for bad leaders to fool people. This accounts for some of the imposter syndrome in any humble would-be leader. We look at others and too often our own sense of inadequacy comes flooding back. To tell us to ‘lead like Christ’ is small encouragement in a setting that has Christ emblazoned in glory on the ceiling everyday and only on the floor with a bowl and towel once a year.
The community that yearns for Christ like leadership needs to keep up the search for Christ in the everyday. Christ in the kitchen, Christ in the cleaning, Christ in the listening, Christ in the welcoming. If a would-be leader cannot translate this into Christ in the meeting, Christ in the negotiating, Christ in the board room, Christ at the dispatch box then that’s not Benedictine leadership.
The real response to the call to Benedictine leadership is to be good enough. There’s probably no such thing as the perfect leader. But there is real leadership in owning a sense of inadequacy, a real discussion of feelings and reactions and in celebrating the success stories of the community. There’s always a need to keep on travelling.
Bowl at Stanbrook Abbey, Wass.
From my remembered bible: The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Grant us all a holy life.
A Friend of Scholastica, writing in Longdendale, 24th July 2023.
