Hillside Parish Magazine Extracts
July 2005

The Spiritual Director - by the Rev. Dr. Liz Culling

Like many people, I watched with interest the final part of The Monastery on TV last week. I was struck by the testimonies of the five men who had chosen to live the monastic life for 40 days, and by how much the experience had affected them and their respective outlooks. None of them left quite the same as they were when they started. Two hundred and thirty-seven services later, they had been challenged on many fronts. But it wasn't just attending services that had brought about change. I was struck by the monks as much as by the volunteers. I was struck first by the abbot, who spoke such commonsense and unaffected spirituality about the importance of living the Christian life together. He talked about the values which seem so out of touch with modern human living: silence, obedience and humility.

I was also struck by the spiritual guides assigned to each of the volunteers. They didn't say all that much. They listened, and they offered observations on how the human mind works and what God might be saying in different situations. They didn't offer long quotations from the Bible, and one of the volunteers had been worried about having it rammed down his throat. Such quotations as were put up on the screen from time to time were from the Rule of St.Benedict, the text which lies at the basis of most of the monastic world through the centuries. It is known by the way St.Benedict himself described it: 'a little rule for beginners'.

The Rule apart, the entire experience of monastic life as offered by the monastery to these five men seemed permeated with the Bible and with the spirit of Jesus. The monastic offices of course are full of the scriptures, not least the continuous repetition of the Psalms. The monks study the scriptures and their rule was written by a man who was nourished through and through by its words. In an age in which it simply will not do to quote 'the Bible says' and leave it at that, the monks at Worth Abbey offered a tiny insight into a way of living out daily the words of the Bible, embodying it for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Of course they have a huge advantage over the rest of us in that they live in community.

We were given a glimpse of how difficult that can be in the course of the series, but we should not think it's easy for the professed brothers. They too have to bear with one another's differences. In churches we can get away from those who annoy, intimidate or bring out the worst in us. We don't see one another living out the Christian life 24 hours a day. One of the men commented that living in the community was "like being who you are really supposed to be". That seems like a good description of becoming who we are meant to be in God, the goal of all Christian living, something for which we need grace, whatever context God has placed us in. "The Record", June 3rd.