Cover: Albonetti Design
© 2013 by Forward Movement
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-0-88028-368-7
Printed in USA
The Psalms quoted in this book are from the Psalter in The Book of Common Prayer. All other scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Forward
Movement
www.forwardmovement.org
Restore us, O LORD God of hosts;
show the light of your countenance
and we shall be saved.
—Psalm 80:18
For Chloe, Harper, and Simon
and in memory of Br. Paul Wessinger, SSJE
What Readers Are Saying
How can we know the way? Christopher Martin writes with tested wisdom about our need for restoration if we are to become what we already are. He is as conversant with Benedict of Nursia and Bernard of Clairvaux as he is about abuse, addiction, and the tedium of making mistakes. Christopher is a master weaver of poetry and art, ancient and new. He gives very shrewd spiritual direction when we stumble because of the fear or aggression we are loath to face. Some of his compelling stories will make your eyes twinkle; others will lance a wound, your wound. How countercultural—his writing about the steps toward humility, admittedly "a long climb,"—yet something so helpful and hopeful, and which he models. Christopher helps us settle into stillness so that we can really and finally listen to God.
— BR. CURTIS ALMQUIST SSJE
THE SOCIETY OF SAINT JOHN THE EVANGELIST
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
I love the book! I have told friends about it already, and they are excited to read it as well. When Our Potters House bookstore reopens, I will make sure it "hits" our shelves.
— MIKE LITTLE
CHURCH OF THE SAVIOUR,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
In The Restoration Project, Father Christopher Martin has applied ancient Benedictine wisdom to the twenty-first-century spiritual journey and embattled post-modern Church. He has rediscovered (maybe re-presented) habits for living that are radically changing the character of Christian community and wonderfully enriching the lives of the people of God. Reader be forewarned: the ideas in this book may change your life. They have changed mine!
— THE RT. REV. J. SCOTT BARKER
EPISCOPAL BISHOP OF NEBRASKA
Christopher Martin not only does the difficult work of translating Benedict's thoughts from the fifth century to our world but also has created a process in community for putting Benedict's teachings into practice. Altogether, Christopher has created a useful tool for Christian living. If you and some friends embark on the journey laid out in The Restoration Project, God will meet you and guide you into a life of authenticity, peace, and joy.
— THE RT. REV. MARC ANDRUS
EPISCOPAL BISHOP OF THE
DIOCESE OF CALIFORNIA
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
The Restoration of a Masterpiece
Chapter 2
Foundational Habits—Two Personal Steps
Step 1: Keeping Watch
Step 2: Desiring God Above All
Chapter 3
Foundational Habits—Two Communal Steps
Step 3: Practicing Sacred Obedience
Step 4: Cultivating Patience
Chapter 4
The Image of God
Step 5: Seeing the Image of God in Ourselves
Chapter 5
Stripping
Step 6: Releasing Superiority
Step 7: Releasing Control
Step 8: Releasing Autonomy
Chapter 6
Quiet Self-Mastery
Step 9: Being Quiet on Purpose
Step 10: Being Quiet from our Depths
Step 11: Being Quiet and Gentle
Step 12: Being Vigilant
Chapter 7
Face to Face
A. Summary Chart
B. The Seventh Chapter of The Rule of St. Benedict
C. Further Reading
D. Liturgy for Discipleship Groups
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
About the Author
Introduction
I love my church. St. Paul's is a hidden jewel in the heart of the largest town in Marin County in the Bay Area of California. The outside of the building is a non-descript, pale grey stucco, but the inside is stunning. It was built in 1869 in a style called Carpenter Gothic. This means it has the shape and furnishings of an ancient village church in England, but it is constructed out of wood, not stone. As a result, it has the dignity and depth of tradition combined with the warmth of well-aged local wood.
Even more than the building, I love what the space brings out in people. It is a long, narrow church with the altar some distance from the front pew. When the community sits to worship, nearly everyone faces to the west, toward the altar, toward what can feel like God. As the leader of the worship service, I am frequently facing the east and looking into the faces of the people. I know nearly everyone well, so I recognize that when they are in this space in worship, any semblance of a mask falls away. The faces I see are open, vulnerable, and yearning. There are tears, there are smiles, and there is often an expression suggesting the person is focused on some new life that is just coming into being.
As beautiful and moving as these moments in worship are, they are only moments. I know all of us will soon go out into a world that will do almost nothing to encourage what we experience in these sacred moments in church. If, like me, you want to be a good person, to be known and loved in a spiritual community you trust, and to have an intimate sense of God's presence in your everyday life, then church on Sundays is not enough. Jesus warns us that the cares of the world can choke out our love of God. We need something during the week to keep our love of God alive. A church building can't be the only religious structure we have.
This book is a guide for keeping God at the center of our lives by using one of the most ancient and reliable structures, Saint Benedict's twelve steps of humility. While The Rule of Saint Benedict is often embraced by monastic communities, this book applies the saint's ancient wisdom to the daily lives of those of us who are not monks or nuns. As a way to guide you through the twelve steps, I connect the process of spiritual growth to the story of the restoration of The Last Supper, the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Imagine that your soul is like the face of one of the disciples before the painting was restored: your soul is fundamentally beautiful, created by the hand of the master, but it needs some restoration work so that you may reveal the God-given beauty of your soul to the world. If you would like to see what the faces of the apostles looked like before the restoration, just look at the cover of this book.
This book and the proposed spiritual practices emerged from ceaseless experiments to help people bring their Sunday experiences of God into their weekday lives. Several years ago I began sharing my discoveries with friends and colleagues around the country. Our conversations grew into The Restoration Project, a nationwide movement of churches creating vibrant experiences for people to explore and claim their faith during the week. We are an "open source" community sharing with each other ways to create and maintain a variety of structures that hold us in the love of Christ every moment of our lives. The core of our movement is a simple structure for small groups. I describe these Discipleship Groups throughout the book.
Whoever you are, from whatever walk of life, you are welcome to join our community. What binds us together is a common desire to follow J
esus through a shared set of practices. We build upon our love of worship by adding twenty minutes of prayer each day and by regularly serving the poor in our communities. On the sure foundation of these simple practices, we hope to grow and mature in our shared life in Christ. We are not a community of experts or of the ultra-holy. Some of us are brand new to the church and to Christianity, while others are church veterans open to a new thing. I encourage you to read this book as an invitation to join The Restoration Project.
— CHRISTOPHER H. MARTIN
CHAPTER 1
The Restoration
of a Masterpiece
Leonardo da Vinci loved faces. If he saw a face in the streets of Milan, Italy that fascinated him, he would take the day off from painting his famous masterpiece, The Last Supper, so that he could follow that person and study the face. At the end of the day, Leonardo would return to his house and stay up deep into the night, sketching from memory. Details from those sketches would find their way to his painting.1 Leonardo wanted his masterpiece to reveal to the viewer real people in every detail.
No one has ever been better than Leonardo at capturing in paint a human soul. Just two years before he began The Last Supper, he completed The Lady with an Ermine. In this piece, a beautiful young woman holds a small animal and looks to her left; she appears to be caught in mid-conversation. This painting from about 1490 is considered by many art historians the first European painting to capture the motions of a person's mind, the moment of transition from thought to expression.
Only a few years after completing The Last Supper, Leonardo finished his most well-known painting, the Mona Lisa. From the beginning, people were stunned by the verisimilitude of the painting, claiming one could almost see the veins pulsing under the skin of her neck. Her watchful eyes and enigmatic smile evoke complex, unresolved emotions—similar to our experiences with real people in our lives today and perhaps even from the deepest reflections on our selves.
Most of us don't look at human faces with quite the same intensity as Leonardo. That would be rude. I was once made to stare deeply into another's face, and the moment has haunted me ever since. The instructor paired us off in a college class and asked us to sit cross-legged on the floor about two feet away from our partner. We were directed to look into each other's eyes and ask, over and over, "who are you, really?" As the exercise progressed, I became increasingly anxious. I could find no word or picture to answer the question. I knew, of course, that I was male, a college student, and the son of Vicki and Peter, but the repetition of the question begged for an even deeper response. Who am I, really?
I have come to believe the answers to all the hardest questions are found in the scriptures. The Bible has the capacity to address the unanswerable questions. The answers may be mysterious and paradoxical, they may appear as a question or as a truth we would prefer not to believe, but the answers are there, and we can rely on them.
Scripture presents a variety of ways to understand who we really are, but one of the most powerful is found early in the Bible. The first chapter of Genesis gives us the deep truth of the origins of all things. Faithful reflection on that first chapter teaches us that God created everything out of nothing—and out of love (Genesis 1:1). It teaches us that, in God's original intention, everything was created "very good" (Genesis 1:31). And, mysteriously, scripture teaches us that human beings, male and female, were created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26).
Our souls, created in the image and likeness of God, are like the faces in The Last Supper. When the painting was completed in 1498, the thirteen figures were every bit as lively and compelling as the Mona Lisa. But soon after, the painting began to deteriorate because of an innovative but unstable material used for the base. Within fifty years, the masterpiece was described as "miraculous" but "half-ruined."2 The ensuing centuries were not kind to the painting. It underwent seven restoration attempts, each of which only served to cover and distort the original. Further, the French leader Napoleon Bonaparte turned the room that housed the painting into a horse stable, and the Allies accidently bombed the building in World War II. Pollution and grime of the air in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries accumulated on the surface. By the late 1950s, the painting was a disappointing, dark blur.
The turning point for the painting came in 1978, when science, the technology of art restoration, and the state of Leonardo studies had all progressed far enough that people were confident they could, as far as possible, restore The Last Supper. A master restorer, Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, was given the authority, the time, and the resources she needed to do the best work possible.
I invite you to imagine that your soul is like one of the faces of The Last Supper. Because you are God's beloved child, you were fashioned with at least the same amount of care Leonardo gave to his great portraits. Because God made you in God's own image, you have within you the capacity to be good, beautiful, and true. You are invited to show the world the divine image in you.
This comparison of the restoration of The Last Supper and our souls has good news and bad news for us. The good news is that we were created lively and beautiful by the hand of the master. God created us in God's own beautiful image. We don't need to become something or someone else. From the Christian point of view, there is no such thing as the proverbial "self-made man." God made us, and our only work is, paradoxically, to become what we already are.
There is more good news. We know what it looks like when a human being perfectly shows forth the image and likeness of God. The climax of our scriptural story is that, in the fullness of time, God sent God's only son, who "is the exact imprint of God's very being" (Hebrews 1:3). If we look to Jesus, we see what it means to be perfectly good, truthful, and beautiful. We may have only a vague sense of what it means for us to show forth the image in which we were created, but when we look to Jesus, when we remember and reflect on his life, we can be confident that we are gazing on a human life without fault or blemish. It is as though, in a painting otherwise decayed and defaced, one face is miraculously complete.
The bad news is that so much in our lives has obscured our God-given beauty. The integrity of the likeness to God has broken apart; the foundation has not been firm. We have tried to fix things and often made them worse, and the environment in which we live can be toxic, violent, and aggressive. Whether you call it abuse, addiction, mistakes, or sin, all is not well, and all is not as it should be. We present to the world a likeness that is a corruption of what the Master intended. We need restoration if we are to become what God intended—and what we already are beneath the decay and grime.
The faces in The Last Supper were not uniform in their deterioration. Some, like Thomas, retained their expressiveness and, as it turned out, were not that far from Leonardo's original intention. For others, like John, ninety percent of the face had been lost, leaving only a pale shadow of the original. Right now, you and I are somewhere in that continuum, still able to reflect the beautiful hand of the Master yet showing a face far less good, true, or beautiful than God intended.
It took Barcilon and her team twenty-two years of careful, determined work to complete their restoration project. She wrote that "each day proved a new and engrossing experience, but one inevitably grounded in caution and reflection, confirmation, and consultation."3 It was not always easy. Their process required time, persistence, endurance, teamwork, and some measure of skill. Our process of restoration requires nothing less.
In order to embark on the restoration of our souls, we need help. We need help with our thoughts, and we need help with our behavior. This book gives you an internal spiritual structure to help you orient your thoughts throughout the week and through the course of your long climb. This internal structure comes from prayerful reflection on an ancient and reliable spiritual tradition in western Christianity, the way of Saint Benedict. He was the founder of the western monastic tradition and developed a twelve-step process to spiritual restoration.
Born in the 500s
to a noble family outside of Rome, Benedict left his home as a young man and became a hermit. Within some years, stories of his holiness had spread, and people came to him to ask him to become their spiritual master, or abbot. As part of his role as abbot, Benedict devised a short Rule of Life. It seems clear that he used material inherited from previous fathers and mothers of the faith but added his own spirit of balance, moderation, and practical reason.
From the tone of the Rule, the man seems sober, practical, and stern, not at all an unearthly mystic, although he is capable of a few moments of compelling beauty. The Twelve Steps of Humility are the heart of his Rule. The chapter in which he explains the twelve steps, which I've included in the back of this book, is the longest in the Rule.
When he writes about the steps of humility, Saint Benedict describes an image of a ladder with twelve rungs. This is based on Benedict's interpretation of Jacob's dream found in the Book of Genesis. Perhaps you know the story: the patriarch Jacob flees his home after outwitting his older brother Esau. After a time he takes a rest. The story continues that "he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it" (Genesis 28:12). Along with most of the church through history, Benedict views Jacob's dream as a gift from God that gives us a way to God. Benedict imagines that the ladder Jacob saw has twelve rungs or steps (THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 7:6). This book is a user's guide to these twelve steps that can help us as we seek an intimate encounter with God.4
The prologue to Saint Benedict's Rule concludes with a few sentences that seem to capture much of the man. He writes, "We hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome... The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God's commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love" (THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, Prologue: 46-49).
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