New Monasticism
In Autumn 2003, I was introduced to the Northumbria Community by some friends who were part of the same church that I had joined when I moved to the village. Looking back, it is surprisingly soon after the Sinai trip which I was thinking might be the start of a new phase and before my second visit to Eilat in December 2003. In fact the ethos of the Northumbria Community set the direction of my spiritual path until this day.
They are one of a number of groups which started in the 20th century and are sometimes called New Monastics, based on the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
The restoration of the church will surely come from a new kind of monasticism, which will have
nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising adherence to the Sermon on the
Mount in imitation of Christ. I believe the time has come to rally people together for this.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In the Northumbria Community this has been expressed as a distributed community, most members of which are part of local churches but who seek to live a monastic lifestyle, in a similar way to the Franciscan 3rd Order. They have a “mother house” where different people from the community at different times form a centre to which the members are linked. They have a Rule of Life, ie. a vision to aim at rather than restrictive regulations, and encourage the monastic rhythm of the day including prayer offices in the morning, midday, evening and night.
Unlike many Christian churches who are part of a denomination, the community does not have a statement of belief and are comfortable with followers of Jesus who express their faith in a variety of ways.
They were very much of the ethos I was relating to as they had aspects of the Contemplative and the Charismatic ways but in many ways they were neither. They were aiming to apply the spirit of the monastic life but without being cloistered and without being authoritarian which many communities and churches of the time had become. Rather than the traditional rules such as Poverty, Obedience and Chastity, the Northumbrian rule encouraged availability, vulnerability, to embracing the “heretical imperative” and to live as a “church without walls”. Things which I associate with Jesus and had seen glimpses of in the early Charismatic movement.
Also, and this was something new to me, they accepted the paradoxes in life, in the Scriptures and in our experience of God.
How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? These were questions which I had often pondered, and still do. The community emphasise “living the questions” rather than having pat answers.
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Franz Xaver Kappus, Rilke
My involvement with the community started by meeting with a small group each fortnight to say the evening office and to look into the Celtic roots from which the community got its inspiration. Following that, I visited the Mother House for a number of retreats, some of which involved teaching, some were just quiet space in the community atmosphere and some were individually guided which involved sharing where I was on the journey with an “accompanier” who would give feedback and share their own insights.
The first retreat I went to, in March 2004, was about identifying our “motivational gift” as described in Romans 12. My major gift was “mercy” which did not come as a surprise to me.
Coincidentally, 2004 and 2005 was a time in which there was considerable problems in the church I was part of. Almost all the leaders departed and that left a vacuum. I became part of a “caretaker” group to lead the church and later, in September 2005, I was appointed as one of a new team of Elders. It was a position which I had no qualifications for and did not feel capable of filling. The same was probably true of the others on the team but at the time we had little alternative.
My second retreat in Northumberland was only a few months later in June. This time I went with a close friend. I felt God holding and leading me which, in hindsight, is interesting in view of what was to happen.