Calls can also be intensely personal. In my group, one member has a spouse with advanced cancer. Over the last year, we have supported him as he's gradually released other things from his life so he can focus on caring for her in every way possible. We have helped him keep up his sense of humor and reminded him that this is a season in his life and that other things will emerge. For myself, I was recently faced with a rather deep dilemma around how I was called to serve. My Discipleship Group was the one place in my church where I could be honest about my dilemma without causing needless anxiety or fear. I knew that from my brothers I would receive calm, patient, loving wisdom, and I did.
Receiving and following a call is more of an art than a science. Nonetheless, there are reliable guides that God is in the mix. Is the call persistent? Is it energizing? Is it shared—that is, do other recognize the call? Jacob and I are wrestling together with a sense of call. Last October we had a conversation with Diane, the executive director of the Ritter Center, one of the two major help organizations for the poor in San Rafael. St. Paul's has been a supporter of Ritter for decades. In the course of the conversation, we discovered that we were their major faith-based supporter, which came as some surprise. Also a surprise was what little support she feels from most faith communities here. Then, the director began to spell out for us her major vision.
Marin County, where San Rafael is located, has a chronic problem of homelessness. The most effective and proven way to address homelessness is through a system called permanent supportive housing. The problem though is that the community must first acknowledge that there's a homeless problem and then find the property to set up the housing. Both of these are profound challenges in Marin, which is terrible at facing its own pockets of brokenness and where Not In My Back Yard is a common rallying cry.
As the months have gone by, Jacob and I have repeatedly returned to our October conversation with Diane. When we have these conversations, we become animated and passionate. It does not seem right that the affluent county where we live can't face this basic human problem squarely. Further, we each have the sense that we may have a role to play in helping Diane's dream become a reality. Jacob works for a major non-profit in San Francisco and knows in great detail how permanent supportive housing works. I am well connected with the faith communities in Marin and feel confident that I can find others to help lead the invitation to Marin to do the right thing by embracing this kind of housing for the homeless. Our conversations are persistent, energizing, and shared. They may very well represent a call for both of us, if we will only obey.
Jesus has always had a lot of admirers, but that is not what he asks for. He wants followers. These groups are called Discipleship Groups because in them we hold each other in his love and encourage each other to practice the disciplines he taught. These groups are a road-tested way to get off of the bleachers and on to the playing field, obeying our unique call.
Step Four:
Cultivating Patience
his heart quietly embraces suffering
— THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 7:35
Patience is the fourth step that creates the sure foundation of our own restoration project. Patience is the virtue that allows us to stay focused in the midst of the bustle of daily life; it also allows us to remain faithful to our deepest spiritual longings over the course of our lifetime. But it is no coincidence that Benedict places patience just after obedience. Patience is required when we are embracing community. Benedict well knows that it is no easy thing to listen attentively to the needs, desires, and commands of others, which so often run against our own impulses.
Cultivating Patience with Others
We learn patience, above all, by the people we know and love. We learn by watching and emulating people like Ann Hanson, the Living Rule of St. Paul's congregation for many years. We learn by simply staying faithful to our friends, family members, and fellow parishioners even when they seem tiresome or difficult. One close friend and parishioner had the courage to be honest with me about his relationship with a member of our community who is poor, struggles with mental illness, and can be persistent and disruptive. My friend said, "To be honest, I can't stand him, but I'm afraid he may be Jesus!" The poor man is teaching my close friend patience.
The first time I read The Rule of Saint Benedict the detail that struck me the most was how severely and often Benedict attacked the sin of grumbling. There are many human faults revealed in community. Why single out that one?
As I have devoted my life to nurturing healthy, thriving Christian communities, I have come to see the wisdom of Benedict's admonitions against grumbling, against those casually disparaging remarks about each other or about our common life. Of course more cruel and profound ways to undermine each other exist. But it is precisely because grumbling can seem so innocuous that it needs to be cut off. We are all tempted to grumble and complain from time to time. Worse, we are in the habit of having our grumbling make it clear that whatever is wrong is clearly not our fault. Our grumbling is a subtle way of marking out our own superiority and, perhaps, our own paradoxically powerful status as a pitiable victim. Grumbling is a subtle and persistent path to self-glorification and community denigration.
Patience is the virtue that releases the habit of grumbling. I previously referred to the ancient Christian practice now called centering prayer. The practice is to sit still in a comfortable position for at least twenty minutes with your eyes closed. When thoughts come to your mind, release them ever so gently. The technique is to pick a one-syllable word like "love" or "faith" and then use that word to gently encourage the thought to move along. No matter how holy or profound the thought seems to be in the moment, we are to let it go, trusting that the truly important will come back around when needed. The goal of the time of prayer is simply to make oneself as open and responsive to God's presence and initiative as possible.
When we are in community with other people, countless opportunities to grumble will present themselves. There will be people who, in our view, talk too much, or don't do enough to help, or seem manipulative or cruel. In a fit of generosity, we might take on some hard piece of work, only to find no one has noticed. Our temptation will be to draw attention and sympathy with our grumbling. In that moment of temptation, patience consists in the internal practice of acknowledging the thought and then letting it go, like a thought in centering prayer, before it crosses our lips.
Churches should always be two things simultaneously: schools for saints and hospitals for sinners. On the good side, they ought to be schools, helping to draw out of us our best, teaching us the skills and practices that help us, in imitation of our Lord, to be humble, loving, and wise. At the same time, in an acknowledgement of the broken place where each of us starts, it ought to be a hospital. There is much sickness in us that needs to be healed on our way to sanctity, and it will take time. In any church, we are always going to be surrounded with other recovering sinners like ourselves. Among the great gifts we can give each other is to release the temptation to grumble at each other's brokenness.
Discipleship Groups provide an intensification of this process of Christian community building through which, in our tradition, we are saved. The people in an honest, mature group will give us more to grumble about, not less! This is because, over time, we will come to know the full glory and shame of each person in our group, and none of us is perfect. Far from it. We each bring into any group our own mixture of good gifts and bad impulses. Part of the purpose of a group is to help us face our negative impulses squarely and to work through them. Experiencing such a process, both in ourselves and in others, requires patience.
A guideline in the formation of any kind of small-group ministry is the rule of thirds. One third of small groups will fall apart, one third will stumble along, and one third will thrive. I have found this guideline stays true for Discipleship Groups. This means that, once again, patience will likely be required on our way to building intimacy and trust in order to spiritually
thrive.
For members of The Restoration Project, thriving means hearing God's call on our lives and following it. In a mixture of metaphor, this process of hearing and following call is often called "discernment." To discern something means to see the rough outline of a thing and then, through careful and persistent looking, have the details of the object slowly come into view. Those who have actively pursued the knowledge of God's call have frequently found that the process of call is similar. We may have a vague sense of what we ought to be doing in the world, but it is only through time, persistence, and care that we can slowly become clear and confident in what we are meant to do and then build the confidence and support to pursue it. We can't type "my call from God" into Google and expect a reliable response. Helping others discern call requires patience with others just as surely as discerning our own call requires patience with ourselves.
Cultivating Patience with Ourselves
The importance of this fourth step of patience is reflected in how long Benedict takes to describe it. While he dispatches with some of the steps in only a sentence, this single step takes up eight sentences in its English translation. The most important phrase in this long step is Benedict's description of the interior state of one who is learning patience. He writes that the "heart quietly embraces suffering" (THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 7:35). The metaphor of a quiet embrace suggests that our hearts face life with a stance that is a middle place between cowering fear and angry aggression. A heart that is capable of quietly embracing suffering is a heart with great poise and equanimity. There are two practices I have found helpful in gradually nurturing an interior attitude of patience. Both have helped my heart quietly embrace suffering and so to become more patient. One is remembering an image of some American heroes and the other is embracing scripture's power to gradually shape my spiritual imagination.
I carry around in my mind a mental picture that has grown from my admiration of those who led the Civil Rights Movement. I particularly think of what they learned about non-violent protest. The pioneers of this practice in India initially thought it would be best to lay down in a fetal position when attacked. They discovered that laying down always escalated the violence. Protesters were kicked even harder. As they reflected and learned, protesters learned to stay standing and maintain non-threatening eye contact with the police or other hostile forces.19 When life becomes frustrating and difficult, I hold on to this image of the strong middle way. The challenges I face are to be neither blindly attacked nor are they to be fearfully submitted to. Instead, I imagine that I can stand firm, with dignity and with clear vision. I imagine that those non-violent Civil Rights protesters were models to us of Christian patience.
Our hearts are not only trained by images. They are also trained by stories, and the most important story is the one told by the whole of the Bible. As a reminder, a devotion to scripture is one of the seven vows of Discipleship Groups: "By God's grace, I will 'read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the Holy Scriptures, trusting that they are inspired by God' for my 'training in righteousness,' working toward knowledge of the entire book" (2 Timothy 3:16).
A deeper and broader knowledge of the Bible can lead us to at least two scriptural insights that are particularly helpful in training our hearts to quietly embrace suffering. The first is a deep understanding of the cross. The cross is the ultimate expression of the consistent scriptural theme of the suffering servant. The Bible teaches that the full expression of love in this fallen world always seems to have a cost. Moses suffered the complaints of the people and, in the end, did not enter the Promised Land. Job lost everything before ultimately being restored to great prosperity. The servant in Isaiah is spat upon and rejected as the necessary experience to heal his people's wounds. Jesus continues this pattern and tells us we must do the same. He bids us to pick up our cross daily as we follow him.
The pattern of the suffering servant continues in the most influential stories in our popular culture. Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn each go through near-death experiences on their path to triumph over evil in The Lord of the Rings series. Aslan suffers death and the Pevensies suffer betrayal before the White Witch is conquered and spring returns to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Harry Potter is an essentially homeless orphan who must lose his new mentor, Dumbledore, and his new home, Hogwarts, in his triumph over Voldemort and the Death Eaters.
Each of these stories deliberately echoes the definitive story of Jesus. They derive their power from the fundamental truth of Jesus' story of life-giving suffering. When we know the whole of the scriptural story by heart, we too are capable of writing grand stories of suffering patiently endured on the way to greater life and love. There will be anguish and pain on our way toward the peace that passes all understanding. Jesus' story of death and resurrection helps us reframe our trials so that our hearts can quietly embrace suffering with the faith that death is not the end and that love conquers all.
The second helpful insight that can train our hearts in patience is to allow scripture to shift our perception of time. There are two Greek words in the New Testament that we translate as "time." One is chronos, and it is the source of our English word "chronology." It means time like we tell it on a clock. Chronos time is passing steadily and inexorably. There is a date on the calendar when we were born, and there will be a date on the calendar, still unknown, when we will die. Time marches on.
The other Greek word for time is kairos. It is the word Jesus uses in his most concise mission statement, which occurs at the beginning of the gospel of Mark. There he declares "the time [kairos] is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news" (Mark 1:15). Reading the whole of scripture invites us to know and experience the fulfillment of time with little tastes of this heavenly kairos.
I know of one surefire way to experience kairos with the help of scripture and in the context of community. About fifteen years ago in a monastery library, I stumbled across a tourist pamphlet from Little Gidding. This house was the home of a brief experiment in Christian living in England in the seventeenth century. Families lived together and kept a kind of monastic rule centered on worship from The Book of Common Prayer. They were well regarded by many and even played host to King Charles I three times. Their leader, Nicholas Ferrar, was a close friend and confidant of Anglican priest and poet George Herbert. Centuries later, T.S. Eliot would name one of his Four Quartets after the house.
I read in the pamphlet that one of the practices of Little Gidding was to gather as a community and to say the entire Psalter in one sitting. I was intrigued and wanted to give it a try. Upon returning to my seminary, I reserved the prayer chapel and with the help of some friends, dove right in. I have since read the Psalter aloud with friends in its entirety six separate times with three different communities. When I do it, people are invited to come and go as they please. Each time, I am joined by somewhere in the range of ten to thirty people, and there have always been a small handful who make it all the way through. We go in a circle with each person deciding how the next psalm will be said or sung. We continue until we are finished, usually with one short break for a light dinner.
The experience takes about five hours, but it is a most peculiar five hours. I cannot tell you whether the time passes slowly or flies by. It does neither. Time shifts, somehow, into a kind of deep stillness. There is always a kind of thickness that comes into the air that makes the present seem so present that our shared sense of time is changed. By the end, I feel as though I have been on a retreat many days long. Despite being relatively sedentary for five hours, I am not restless. With my brothers and sisters in Christ, I have been in the kind of time that Jesus promises, a time fulfilled. It is kairos time to me. My heart is strong and at rest. The words of the psalms, which encompass all possible human experience before God, have given us the strength to quietly and with great compassion and forgiveness embrace our allotment of human suffering.20
CHAPTER 4
The
Image of God
5. Seeing the Image of God in Ourselves
Barcilon and her team were prudent in how they restored The Last Supper. They knew that for most of the twentieth century, those responsible for the care of the painting deliberately left the unwanted gunk. They were afraid that if they started cleaning too vigorously they would strip away the work of Leonardo along with the pollution and the crude repainting. After careful study and scientific advances—and thanks to good taste, Barcilon's team reached a point where they were ready to strip the painting of all that was not from the master.
The greatest help for Barcilon and her team for understanding what Leonardo intended for the faces was a series of Leonardo's drawings now at Windsor Castle. Some are mere sketches, where a beautifully drawn line indicates a precise expression of the mouth. Others, for example Simon's head, are careful studies that reproduce the way skin folds together at the back of the craning neck of an old man.21 The sketches of the master showed them the true intentions of his painting.
Where can we look to find reliable sketches of our true selves, made in the image of God? As Christians, we are always called to look first to the words and images of scripture. But we have also been blessed with holy women and men who, through the centuries, have proven to be reliable guides to learning about God and ourselves. The portrayals of human experience they have left us are still useful and dependable. We have been looking at the art of one of those holy people, Saint Benedict. In this chapter, I invite you to think and pray alongside one of the people who inspired him, Saint Augustine.
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