Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Lindisfarne
I keep awakening in new times always born into a future and yet remembering the past. Old people know this well. We who lived in the past, also live here and now in this time we once called future. Now this future where we are, is harder to navigate than the past because future doesn’t know its outcome.
The now explains monasteries emerging from the past. What seemed like a natural merger with the Holy Spirit in prayer, became a pilgrimage, a movement, a democracy of many with a single song, a harmony of voices, a prayer, and of course, God only knows, it became deep and significant. Our spiritual nature starves for it. It happened with the early Christians. It happened in solitude, and it happens in monasticism. It is an intentional human closeness with God. Spirit is an invisible realty and like all of God, invisible like air surrounds and is our very breath.
It isn’t a thing as much as it is a power, but not forceful — just present. It seems beyond us and unfathomable but for the constant reality, the touching reach of it. Reality would be nothingness, without God, and that same nothing shows up as an emptiness longing for power. Vacancy of power yearns for something. And the yearning seems to the human spirit a need for control or rule. The wilderness seems a dearth, a weed patch, a mustard seed overgrown into a magnificent weed, and the controlling nature of humankind invents a scythe. The wilderness is shaven and shorn to become orderly and controllable.
And that is what happened in early Christianity when Roman order separated Christianity from Judaism and made a religion of it. It happened to an emperor’s army when the bind-rune or the Chi Rho became a good luck charm on a military flag — and when the emperor Constantine announced it was Christianity that won his war. And it happened again when thirst for the invisible Spirit led people to find the quenching in ecclesiastical polity — making order of the hierarchy and designed the rule.
It turns out, the yield of all this order and control is the increase in wealth and power. We label that a good thing, right? So, religion should be good. right? But sometimes religion gets in the way of the spiritual connection, and the monastery that succumbs to the religious rule struggles to meet the spiritual need of its origin.
It is what it is.
(Continues Wednesday, October 1)
Lazarus Ink 