William H. Johnson, Three Friends, ca. 1944-1945, screenprint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Let us live with uncertainty
as with a friend
to feel certain
means feeling secure
to feel safe is unreal
a delusion of self
knowing we do not know
is the only certainty
letting the self be lost into Christ.
From “Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict” by Esther deWaal (82)
When I began this post, I selected the above quote because I found it challenging. The following day, I looked at the news before I returned to finish and found the quote hard to swallow. On that day uncertainty was what I wanted least—uncertainty seemed to be my enemy. Being told to befriend uncertainty felt like receiving a blow and being told to turn the other cheek, or to pray for my enemy.
Whether the urge for fight or flight comes from engaging with others or from within, Jesus seems to insist that we confront what is hard with our impulse to turn away, and embrace uncertainty. His commands to take up our cross or to take his yoke upon ourselves imply that true stability comes from relying on God as we cannot always rely on any other, including ourselves.
Introspective prayer helps us with the struggle within, which in turn effects our relationship with others. Being with others is necessary for us to have the material with which to fulfill Jesus’ commands. We cannot do unto others as we do unto ourselves if we do not embrace one or the other—we need both. Working at holding them together to “work out our salvation” (Philippians 2:12).
Hence the existence of cathedrals, churches and monasteries and the quote above inspired by St. Benedict. His life’s work was leading people to Christ through obedience to the Rule he developed around prayer, study, and work—bringing body, mind, and spirit together in communion with God and others. His Rule from the fifth century is still in wide use among rules, many feel, for how it deals with human frailty and uncertainty.
Father Leander S. Harding, the Dean of our cathedral, recently published an account of being led by a bishop who worked with his priests in the spirit of St. Benedict. The article invites a read from anyone concerned about the role of bishops or who wants an example of St. Benedict’s teachings in action—click HERE to read it.
Dean Harding’s article also adds a resource to a recent Cathedral Arts program--a group of us are working on developing a rule of life for ourselves. This is why I began reading Esther deWaal’s book Seeking God: the Way of St. Benedict, a copy of which I found in the Cathedral offices, from which the quote at the top of this post comes.
“David Ball” is written on the inside of the front cover this book. I never met him, but often I feel a sense of the his presence. Bishop Ball and I share an office--I work where he did after he retired. It is a dark corner office, but my sense of prayer in the green-gray walls makes it light.
The paperback copy of Seeking God was published in 1984, the same year Albany’s seventh bishop, The Right Reverend David Standish Ball, was consecrated. When I noticed the inscription and realized from whose hands the book had come, I felt touched. I imagined Bishop Ball in his new role, his mitre pitched at an angle while studying the words of the contemplative laywoman with our diocese in his heart.
Esther deWaal wrote the book during her much-interrupted life of teaching, raising children and incessant hospitality as the wife of the then-dean of Canterbury Cathedral, an ancient Benedictine monastic site that welcomes pilgrims from all over the world, as it has since since the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170, two centuries before Chaucer’s time.
As a child and teenager, my community was the books that spoke to me, such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales with its intriguing characters. I did not know Bishop Ball in his lifetime, but from the stories I have been told it seems to me that one thing he is remembered for is his hospitality—both how he extended it to a variety of people and how he received hospitality from others.
I think this relates to my comfort in imagining the Bishop present in our office when I enter it. On the days I feel unsuited to working in a cathedral, I walk into our office and look at where I hung curtains over some remaining unimportant books and papers that seem to have belonged to him. Sometimes I say something before I wait for prayer to come from God through the walls and reach me, and eventually it does.
The word “hospitality” can seem old-fashioned. Before I understood that following Christ is impossible apart from community, the word conjured for me only clean sheets. More recently hospitality meant buying curtains and covering the few books the Bishop or someone else left behind in my office, imagining that from the other side of the veil hospitality was also being extended to me. In my office I have felt an invitation to take up space and to be myself.
I imagine that those of us who have used my office over the years entrust our prayer, work, and study to each other as faith communities do the world over, and as our group thinking about a rule of life is doing now. Living apart, we do not have a monastery to define the nature of our work, prayer, or study, so we use some tools to look at where we have been and where we are to help us discern what is ours to do now.
We need a good Bishop and we need good leaders, but if we each take upon ourselves the understanding that Jesus has commanded us to each “take up” and know ourselves and to lead in the roles we have received—we will have more peace and our relationships and the world will benefit. If we learn to abide uncertainty as a friend, we will not lose ourselves to the chaos around us. Allowing our delusions of certainty to be lost into Christ is to allow God to help us move forward.
I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou shalt enlarge my heart.
Psalm 119:32
We shall run
On the path of God’s commandments,
Our hearts overflowing
With the inexpressible delight
Of love.
(Prol. 49, from the “Rule of St. Benedict,” (quoted by deWaal,44))