spiritual experiences I have accumulated, or which have tumbled in on me unrequested, is that the spiritual house I now live in, whose dimensions and shapes I can see only dimly, all that no longer fits the old, carefully laid foundations. It is all much broader, and airier, and far less clearly defined. I suppose some will fretfully, perhaps fearfully, suggest that I have “lost my faith” (whatever that means); but I will respond, “No, not lost. Simply grown spiritually beyond the old foundations.” Though I must confess that those old foundation stones, seeming to have been heaving slowly out of the earth beneath my feet with all the freezes and thaws of my life, are now fairly vague and shapeless. I feel them with my toes rather than see them. So I will now lay before your view as many of the older ones as I can find, so that you may comprehend the shape of this evolving structure within which I find myself.
Giving Myself to Christ
I cannot recall the details any more. It probably was in my fifteenth year that I went off to my first and only Senior High Conference. We wrestled with Martin Buber’s latest work and with some other classroom kinds of issues. And I befriended Karl, a fellow pipe smoker; I was probably much readier to associate with like-minded males at that age than girls with funny shaped skins, though both Karl and I were rather taken (I should say “smitten”) with “Peaches,” as she chose to be called (but in all likelihood we were no more smitten with her than all the rest of the testosterone-drenched teenage males in that week). “Peaches” in a swim suit was a sight to behold! The conference was filled with all the usual activities, but one impacted me more than all the rest put together. On Friday evening we had a guest speaker, an evangelist who had just returned from missionary work in South American. He told us about his experiences, and somewhere in the course of the evening he launched into his evangelist mode. Billy Graham could have done no better. I have no recollection of what he said to us. But I can clearly see the picture he evoked in my head. Over the altar in the tiny mission church where I was growing up was a copy of the very famous painting of Christ standing outside the door (to the heart, of course), lantern raised, knocking and seeking entrance. I can’t say whether he referred to that picture specifically, or whether whatever he was saying called that picture to my consciousness. But I clearly remember seeing that picture in my mind’s eye. And he called upon us to give our Selves, our lives to Christ. And I did that night. We were instructed to spend the rest of the night in silence. And I can recall going back to my room with my three roommates, myself in tears. I’d never been to an old-fashioned revival, but I now suspect I had just experienced a not-so-Episcopal version of that. I had given myself to Christ, and although I suspect that my choice to reach for the ministry had preceded that evening, that evening certainly sealed the decision. I can look back and realize now that I was far too young to soundly make that decision, but it was made, nonetheless, and quite irrevocably, as it turned out.
Caldey Abbey
I jump far ahead. I did my first and only sabbatical in 1996, the thirty-first year of my ministry. I had already been digging my way into understanding the ancient Celtic church and its spirituality for four years, and I was hoping for a sabbatical to spend some weeks living in a community that was trying to live out a Celtic spirituality. After a global search I concluded there was no such community. Early in my search a friend who knew my sabbatical hopes handed me an article about a Cistercian monastery in Wales with the comment that I might spend part of my sabbatical there. I read the article; the community was uncompromisingly Cistercian, which is to say, very Roman Catholic, not in the least Celtic. No, I was looking for Celtic and was not interested. But for some unfathomable reason I filed that article in an obscure folder. I was at the same time involved with a handful of people working to weave a network of people interested in “Celtic Christian spirituality” (I put that in quotes because that phrase was, and still is, very ill-defined.) We called it Anamchairde (ah-Nam-CAR-dja), Gaelic for “soul-friends.” We developed a newsletter. And then one day I got a letter from a fellow named Gildas. He had been handed a copy of our newsletter by a friend of his, one Nona Rees, and was very interested in what we were trying to do. He was a monastic, had taken a vow of poverty, and so was limited in what he could contribute or ways he might help our effort. But he wanted to help. Something about the way he worded that letter made his offer of help sound very personal, as though aimed directly to me, and very immediate. Though he was responding to the newsletter (my name was on its masthead along with seven others), his response and his offer of help seemed as though it was written to me personally, and warmly. I noticed the return address. Could it be? I dug into my files and found that buried article. Not only was this the same monastery, but the face staring at me from the cover page was Gildas himself. Now that was damned spooky. I felt triangulated, hit by the same message from two different and unrelated directions, and I had by then in my life concluded to pay attention when I was triangulated. So I responded to Gildas’s letter. We exchanged letters until I began to discern that perhaps I was intended to spend some sabbatical time in that monastery, Caldey Abbey on a tiny island off Tenby on the south coast of Wales. It seemed that Gildas was very into the study of Celtic stuff himself, and that Caldey Island had its own Celtic heritage, had been home to a Celtic monastic community and to several important Celtic saints, notably Illtyd and Samson of Dol. The pieces of my sabbatical felt like they were coming together, and Caldey was at the center. I did go there and lived among the monks for five weeks. That sounds like a short time, but living amongst austere Cistercians it is not. I was beginning to write my own small book on Celtic spirituality, and intended to use those five weeks to complete the work. It turned out to be exactly the right place to do that work.
The Cistercians were a reform movement within the Benedictine monks in the twelfth century. Some monks thought the Benedictines were becoming too worldly, and felt the need to purify and intensify their monastic life, to get back to the basics. They still worship seven times a day in chapel, beginning the day with the hour-long psalm vigil at 3:30am and ending the day with compline at 7:30pm. And they cram Bible-study, lectio divina1 and a couple of community exercises into each day, along with an afternoon of physical labor assigned by the abbot. It is a disciplined, demanding, and very austere life. I remember during one conversation with Gildas in my room, as we talked, how he looked longingly at the face-bowl in my room; it was a luxury forbidden to him. His cell contained a bed, a desk, a chair, and a hook to hang his wardrobe on. Nothing else! This is austerity. I was assigned a room in the guest quarters inside the monastery walls; mine was the only room in the monastery with a single electrical outlet so I could plug in my computer, or alternatively, the small electric heater they offered me. The monastery is unheated, and the Atlantic winds can be pretty chill in mid-spring. That day Gildas told me that the most terrifying moment of his whole life happened in the moments after he’d taken his final, life-long vows and went back to his cell, and as he stood there and looked around, he’d said to himself, “This is it. This is the rest of my life!” He had been told that his cell would teach him everything he needed to know, and over the years he had learned that was right.
Gildas was the cook for the monastery while I was there, and the food was as austere as his cell. I was never hungry in those five weeks, but the wildest menu item I had was on the Feast of Pentecost when we had a dessert (a rare occurrence) of a thin slice of fruit cake and a bottle of ale. Theirs is not a vegetarian diet, but meat or fish usually happened only once a week.
Within the discipline of this kind of austerity interesting things began to happen for me spiritually. I was fascinated that I was able to get into their worship routine in only three days. I missed the vigil very rarely, though after the vigil when the monks went back to their cells and began their day with Bible study and lectio divina. I had to roll back into the sack for another hour’s sleep; but then I was writing until 10:00 at night. At first the frequent worship was an intrusion into my writing schedule, and I sometimes resented it. But I intuited that this worship discipline was essential to the writing I was doing, giving support and meaning to my writing. Within a week and a half I realized that the worship was no longer an intrusion, but instead had become the structure for my day and my writing effort. Without it I would have been floundering. And I was enjoying the worship, mainly the singing of the psalms. As Gildas walked me down to the boat to the mainland on the day I was leaving
