Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Have been reading a book of Thomas Merton's lectures given on Cassian and came across a good quote where he talks about the task of monastic life today."Besides renewal of our own tradition we must of course obviously adapt ourselves to the needs of our time, and a return to tradition does not mean trying to revive, in all its details, the life lived by monks, or trying to do all the things that they did. But it means living in our time and solving the problems of our time in the way and with the spirit in which they lived in a different time and solved different problems."
This strikes me as a very good and succinct way of understanding tradition and its place in helping to re-imaging what a monastic community may look like today. Its always easy to simply copy something, it is much harder to become familiar with something to the extent that you understand its inner logic, and can allow that to inform your own context.
In re-imagining monastic life in the city today, we must immerse ourselves in the monastic texts and commentaries of the last 2000 years, allowing them to speak to us, shape us, orientate us, but never wholly hold onto us, for a key part of the imaginative process is letting go of the past and asking the Spirit to lead us into something wholly new, and probably unexpected.
It also of course means understanding the problems of today, in our time, which in turn means immersing ourselves in our own culture, and opening ourselves up to encountering God in the now, in the latest books, films etc...
All of this cannot be done by one person (phew), but rather in community, for there we have people who speak of tradition, others who speak of the now, others still who are adept at hearing the still, small voice of God in the now or in the tradition. Together, by listening over time, over the meal table, in silence and in debate, we can continue to re-imagine how we can best follow this living, crucified, resurrected, Christ in the city.
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