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

[David Dunn]

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:

I¹ve just completed the final make up for a session I missed during the
first year of the Benedictine Spiritual Formation Program--the session
called ŒMoral Decision-Making.¹ My reflection and writing last night have
placed the great moral questions of our time in the front of my mind and
now, the Œmorning after,¹ I find myself thinking of matters of life
vocation, personal strategy, and social impact. If you read between the
lines, you¹ll see just about the exact shape of the discernment process in
which I¹m engaged. You won¹t 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 summer¹s 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 Œpublicly¹ for the first
time.

The second journey is reclaiming my vocation as a secular religious, and
with that Œreclamation,¹ 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-¹90s. While I had many
good experiences in the three parishes I served in the early ¹70s, I was
neither quite right for nor Œup to¹ the clergy role and I went on to a time
of ministry Œbeyond the local church.¹ 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 Œsecular religious?¹ 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 community¹s 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 God¹s creation depends on my
colleagues¹ and my ability to take courage and consider the history which we
have shared to date a worthy prelude to the discernment of our order¹s 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
Hanh¹s order in America.

This leads to an observation. I read Oblate Norvene Vest¹s remarks made at
the North American Oblate Directors¹ 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 community¹s life, namely
no less than sharing together the challenge of Œshaping the coming age of
religious life.¹

Ms. Vest said in 1999,

"I would suggest that this witness is strengthened in the respectful
interaction of oblates who live daily directly in the pressures presented by
the world, with monastics, who live daily directly with the challenges
offered by their center in God. If both learn to speak with each other with
humble self-awareness, their mutual discoveries can be of inestimable
benefit to the world."

"Dare we begin to share, one with another, monk to monk and oblate to
oblate, these painful and disrupting fires of our hearts, so that together
we begin to discern the shape of the Spirit working among us all?"

My own paraphrase of Ms. Vest¹s words indicates my own, slightly nuanced
variation on a similar experience and insight:

I suggest that the presence of religious communities will be strengthened
and their passage into the future facilitated by a yeasty mutual
appreciation among extended community members whose daily lives reflect the
challenge of being claimed by the God whom they meet in their struggle to
bring healing and health to the world and the vowed members of residential
communities whose members wrestle daily with the God whom they meet in the
pressures of balancing spiritual formation, vocational integrity, missional
authenticity, and economic sustainability.

Dare we begin to share, one with another, monastic with monastic, oblate
with oblate, and monastic with oblate, the insistent, unnerving and
compelling fires in our hearts, so that together we might begin to discern
the shape of the coming century of religious life and in so doing find our
energies sustained and our spirits encouraged to tackle the transformations
that are now required of us.

Let me write pointedly and personally. I have no need to be associated with
a monastic community in which the sisters or brothers assume the roll of
feeding me or answering my questions or giving me directions. I deeply wish
to be associated with a monastic community with which I may share the
deepest questions of polity, witness, mission, form, faith, and
sustainability. I long for a community with which to be on intimate terms as
a fellow traveler.

In some sense I am doing action research seeking deeper experience with
these questions‹the same questions that I have about the future of the Order
Ecumenical. I am not content to let my own community pass from history; I
believe that it is uniquely positioned to serve other religious communities
and other persons of faith who wish to see the day when people of different
faiths might live as servants of each other and together of the suffering of
the world.

I am a monastic who lives in a condo in central Denver. I do not yearn for
some other cloister; my home is a religious house and my study is my
cloister. I do yearn to be received as a fellow pilgrim on the path of the
religious life. I wish to share responsibility for being who I am along side
others who share the same vocation, whether residents of a symbolic
community or solitaries dispersed like Anthonys in the dessert.

I hope that I might help to invent new forms of an authentic religious life
for the world today. That I believe this requires of me some sort of
commitment to gather around a Brother or Sister Pachomius is undoubtedly why
there has been an inevitability about my journey with your Benedictine
community. I wish that your community might find reason on occasion to
gather around the Order Ecumenical as well.

With gratitude for the Benedictine heritage, the Benet Hill Community, the
Benedictine Spiritual Formation Program, and the Order Ecumenical, now in
the sixteenth year of its first sabbatical hiatus, I look forward to
becoming better acquainted with each other.

David Dunn
Denver