[Oe List ...] A brief glimpse inside my heart

[Herman Greene]

Thanks John,

Your message is very meaningful.

Herman

-----Original Message-----
From: OE-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:OE-bounces at wedgeblade.net]On
Behalf Of John-Rupert Barnes
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 10:25 AM
To: Order Ecumenical Community
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] A brief glimpse inside my heart


Kamerithu village, Kenya
July 31, 2004,

Dear David,

In response to your reflections on the OE, it's
relationship to other spiritual traditions and its
possible role in future history, here are some of my
reflections from my own nearly 75 years journey of
faith commitments, Quaker, Anglican, Balokole (the
great East African revival movement), OE, Sufi and now
Buddhist. I'm writing this in the large circular
central room of a unique African house 20 miles from
and 2000 feet above Nairobi while waiting in the dark
illuminated by one dim hurricane lamp for the owner
who I now know is not coming tonight.

This evening's "waiting for Godot" has been an
opportunity to reflect on the 50 years since I felt
the call to come to Africa. Looking back it has become
clear that my primary covenental spiritual community
has been and still is the OE, this in spite of having
been one of those who participated in the great ritual
of ending for the Order as a formal historical
structure.

I had seen in the newspaper that Ngugi wa Thiongo,
Distinguished Professor of Literature at the U. of
California was due to return home today from over 25
years of exile and would come straight to his house in
Kamirithu. As a very old friend from his student days
in Uganda I decided to welcome him at his home rather
than with a large crowd at the airport. I arrived to
find the gate locked and the place looking deserted.

But people were there, including Ngugi's nephew,
another unexpected visitor. We were welcomed with the
now traditional African ritual of tea and bread. I
took the bread and broke it.

Whenever I break bread, I am remembering with
gratitude the brokenness of my life and of all life.
Whenever a drink is poured, I likewise remember the
poured-outness of my life unto death and the
poured-outness of all life.

Jesus at his final Passover meal took the bread and
the wine of his religious community's most important
ritual, and as he broke the bread and pored out the
wine for his disciples, he transformed and
universalized his peoples' ancient and central
celebration, by which they remembered with
thanksgiving their deliverance from slavery in Egypt
and the beginning of their great journey to the
promised land.

That same day (by Jewish and African reckoning, which
starts at sunset) he consummated the transformed
ritual with the sacrifice of his own body and blood on
the cross. Christians remember his sacrifice and his
words at the Last Supper every time the Eucharist,
Lord's Supper or Holy Communion is celebrated.

We in the OE took the universalization of this great
celebration -- of possibility in the face of the
brokenness of every human being's life and the
certainty of every human beings death -- a step
further. We called it the Common Meal, rightly so,
since just as one does not have to be a Jew to
celebrate the great thanksgiving of the Eucharist, so
one does not have to be a Christian or a believer to
celebrate the Common Meal.

I have celebrated the Common Meal with Jews, Muslims,
agnostics and atheists. It does not require assent to
any creed; it only requires the stance of gratitude
for the universal human experience of the brokenness
and pouredoutness of life.

The OE has left humankind many actual and potential
gifts, among them the technology of participation, the
social process triangles, the Other World and New
Religious Mode. But it is the Common Meal that I
believe is the greatest gift for it has the potential
to unify us all in the Ground of our Being.

The body that was pierced and the blood and water that
flowed therefrom still have transforming power. By his
wounds we are still healed.

John-Rupert Barnes


--- David Dunn <ddunn at ica-usa.org> wrote:

> July 21, 2004
>
> Barbara Chambless, OblSB
>   Denver, Colorado
> Sr. Anne Stedman, OSB
>   Benet Hill Monastery, Colorado Springs, Colorado
> Colleagues in the Order Ecumenical
>
> Dear Barbara, Sr. Anne, colleagues:
>
> I9ve just completed the final make up for a session
> I missed during the
> first year of the Benedictine Spiritual Formation
> Program--the session
> called Moral Decision-Making.9 My reflection and
> writing last night have
> placed the great moral questions of our time in the
> front of my mind and
> now, the morning after,9 I find myself thinking of
> matters of life
> vocation, personal strategy, and social impact. If
> you read between the
> lines, you9ll see just about the exact shape of the
> discernment process in
> which I9m engaged. You won9t be surprised that I
> work out such weighty
> matters by writing about them. In fact, one of the
> great illuminations of
> the past year was the insight that much of my
> writing is in fact praying on
> paper. You may take this note in that spirit.
>
> My encounter with you and the Benet Hill Monastery
> community has had a force
> of inevitability (for which read kairotic time)
> about it. When my wife Burna
> pointed out the catalog listing for last summer9s
> directed retreat, I knew
> that I wanted to participate. When Sr. Therese
> O'Grady tentatively handed me
> the brochure for the BSFP I knew that I wanted to
> enroll. When the question
> arose at the end of our first year about going on to
> Year II of the program,
> there was no doubt that I wished to continue.
>
> Two journeys are unfolding in this association. The
> first, of course, is
> exploring the role of spiritual director. It was a
> revelation to see that I
> have informally played this role with at least three
> people during the last
> few years. Now, while I work the question of whether
> I intend to take on the
> role of spiritual director formally and
> professionally, a second parallel
> journey is beginning to reveal itself. With some
> amount of fear and
> trembling, I want to describe this second journey
> publicly9 for the first
> time.
>
> The second journey is reclaiming my vocation as a
> secular religious, and
> with that reclamation,9 reshaping the form of the
> order which has been my
> vocational context for the last 36 years.
>
> You may remember me saying that I was ordained a
> Methodist clergyman in 1970
> and that I surrendered these credentials in the
> mid-990s. While I had many
> good experiences in the three parishes I served in
> the early 970s, I was
> neither quite right for nor up to9 the clergy role
> and I went on to a time
> of ministry beyond the local church.9 I joined the
> staff of the Ecumenical
> Institute in 1974 and was accepted as an intern in
> the Order Ecumenical the
> same year. This September is the 30th anniversary of
> this vocation as a
> secular religious.
>
> I am aware that language like this raises many
> questions. What do I mean by
> religious? What does it mean to be a secular
> religious?9 In what sense was
> the Order Ecumenical a religious order? What does
> the Order Ecumenical look
> like today? How can a community which I still
> describe as an order, but
> which has no religious houses, no corporate
> entities, no formation programs,
> no strategic plan, and no assigned priorship be, in
> fact, a religious order?
> These questions have been quietly but insistently
> simmering on the back
> burner of my heart for at least a decade.
>
> These questions show up in my daily life in quite
> existential ways. What do
> I do for a corporate life when my community has in
> many ways disappeared?
> How do I hold myself accountable for interior
> discipline and spiritual
> growth when the persons I trust as priors live
> hundreds or even thousands of
> miles away? How do I formulate a corporate mission
> when my colleagues gather
> only once every five to ten years? How do I grow in
> understanding the nature
> of the calling of the secular religious, how do I
> offer my energy to the
> embodiment of that role in society, and how do I
> symbolize my vocation in
> such a way as to identify who I am to myself and to
> others whom I might wish
> to serve? How do I organize the energy of vision and
> the desire to lead
> surging within me? What do I do about the fact that
> the founders of the
> Order Ecumenical are dispersed, elderly, and prone
> to die? What do I do with
> half a century of charism and praxis, principles and
> a pertinent mission,
> and the life-giving liturgical forms that seem
> essential to the world now
> more than ever?
>
> All of these questions bring me to one central
> question: Why would I think
> to voice such questions within the circle of
> historic orders who still have
> form, substance, polity, and location? Who am
> I--vaguely a member of a
> community whose heritage dates back to mid-twentieth
> century America--to
> approach a Benedictine community whose heritage goes
> back a millennium and a
> half, with the question of what must I do to
> re-conceive an order which no
> longer exists? Should I not simply apply to be
> received as an Oblate of the
> Benet Hill Monastery, come regularly to retreats and
> worship, add my gifts
> to the community9s publishing efforts, and consider
> that my historical
> calling to the religious life has been fulfilled?
>
> My answer is simple and practical. I am a 62 year
> old Episcopalian layman
> who is simultaneously suffering and energized as I
> consider that the charism
> of the order whose life and mission has given focus
> and meaning to my life
> might disappear from the face of the earth without a
> way of continuing
> beyond the first generation. Yet I am convinced that
> the mission of my own
> religious community has become even more valid today
> than when it was
> founded and that in some sense the future of God9s
> creation depends on my
> colleagues9 and my ability to take courage and
> consider the history which we
> have shared to date a worthy prelude to the
> discernment of our order9s true
> calling for the next century. Perhaps I have
> discovered a possible rhythm
> for religious orders of the future: once every
> ninety years they disband for
> a decade to reconsider their call and to discern
> afresh their task and way
> of being in the world.
>
> More to the point, I have become convinced that the
> future of my own
> community, if it has any future, depends in large
> measure on the quality of
> dialogue, engagement, and learning with intentional
> communities of different
> religious traditions. The two communities within my
> field of vision are the
> Benedictine women of Benet Hill Monastery and the
> Buddhists of Thich Nhat
> Hanh9s order in America.
>
> This leads to an observation. I read Oblate Norvene
> Vest9s remarks made at
> the North American Oblate Directors9 Meeting in 1999
> with great interest.
> She spoke of the shift of the interest of oblates
> over the last three
> decades from volunteering needed skills and physical
> help at the monastery
> to sharing in the spiritual life and aspirations of
> the monastic community.
> I propose a third kind of engagement in a monastic
> community9s life, namely
> no less than sharing together the challenge of
> shaping
=== message truncated ===




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