From Cologne to Sydney?
Benedict Coleridge
At the time of writing there are exactly three hundred and seventy five days to go until the 2008 World Youth Day in Sydney. And how am I feeling about that? Well, it’s complicated. Let me explain. In 2005 I went to World Youth Day in Cologne. It was the middle of Year 11 at school and I was 16. I have to admit I went with mixed feelings. To be honest, I had reservations about the kind of people I would find myself amongst – a bunch of zealots and me! I was hesitant about the religious aspect, but although I almost didn’t admit it to myself, I did hope, privately, for some sort of spiritual impact. Let’s say I took it seriously, but not THAT seriously. Unquestionably it was an experience which belonged to that time in my life.
At one level, my memory of Cologne is of a holiday of sorts. Good weather. No school. Vast crowds of young people from all around the globe - Brazilians, French, Australians, Italians, Polish, Filipinos and more. Bike rides through German towns, music on the banks of the Rhine, and festivals. Amidst all this there was daily prayer and reflection and Masses. Initially I reacted to the notion of sharing spirituality with others with a surly embarrassment. I found some of the spiritual exercises and conversations out of place and slightly too unflinching. That had a lot to do with the individual people (Australians) involved in running them. However I was eventually struck by the ease of the intermixture of prayer and ‘fun.’ Actually, one of my chief reflections upon those weeks is the way in which festivity and socializing acted as a sort of spiritual experience. The unquestioning hospitality and friendliness of our German hosts and the camaraderie between the different nationalities was moving. I can remember an atmosphere of outgoing friendliness and happiness; honestly, I’m not making it up. Everyone seemed very cheerful. It opened my eyes by showing me a larger and more generous picture of the Catholic Church than I had ever imagined. I caught a taste of the complexity of people and their faith, and particularly a broader view of young people. What’s more I made friends.
So I encountered things on World Youth Day which I liked and which I didn’t like. That’s the nature of the beast. But perhaps it was also my own approach to Cologne and that idea of pilgrimage as ‘weird’ which shaped my experience. It seems a long time ago now because a lot has happened to me since. I’ve completed years 11 and 12 of school and I’m half way through a gap year before starting university in 2008. It’s been an interesting year so far; I’ve found some of the hurdles it has presented quite tough to overcome and at other times it has been pretty good fun. Here, I feel I should reassure you, I am telling you this for a reason.
You see, for me, World Youth Day is like a great big search; everyone is looking for something. Despite all those huge crowds, every World Youth Day is a deeply personal event. The individual experiences of a pilgrim and the course his or her life is taking will decide what he/she is looking for. So, instead of asking what World Youth Day looks like to me from three hundred and seventy five days away, instead, it’s probably a good idea to ask myself ‘what am I looking for?’ Well, I’m actually going away traveling soon and if all goes according to plan will arrive home early next year. So, you see, this year is a rather momentous year for me. This is exactly what is moulding my view of World Youth Day and the great search. Sydney 2008 for me can’t be anything like Cologne 2005. I’ll be 19 for one. God only knows what will have happened to me between now and then. But already I can see that part of what I am looking for at World Youth Day in Sydney is a close personal experience of friendship and companionship. I will need an experience which allows me to consider all that I have done in the year past and steady me for the beginning of my years at university. Besides, I think that I want something different this time. Yeah, I want it to be seriously FUN, but I am already looking for something else as well. On a slip of paper stuck on our fridge at home, Brother Roger of Taize put into words what I might be looking for in July 2008: ‘right at the depth of the human condition, lies a longing for a presence, the silent desire for a communion.’ Well, yeah, that’s true in my case.
In hindsight, at Cologne I was expecting (and perhaps feared) this great big decisive event where my faith would be changed forever. My faith was changed, but not like a ‘flash of light.’ The real change in me has occurred in the time since then, as my range of experience has been broadened. What I have come to realize, is that no World Youth Day will simply act for me as a lightning flash of faith because faith ain’t like that. It’s completely different. Brother Roger articulated the way I see it now: ‘…faith – trusting in God – is a very simple reality, so simple that anyone could receive it. It is like surging upwards again and again, a thousand times, throughout our life, and until our very last breath.’ He points out that ‘everything is not granted at once. An inner life is developed step by step.’ That ‘today…we enter into faith by going forward in stages.’ Cologne 2005 was a stage, as has been each event in my life since then. For me, Sydney 2008 will be another stage and an entirely different one. Three Hundred and Seventy Five days is a long time and a lot of things may come to pass. Whatever befalls me I will try to spend this time surging upwards always towards the mystery of faith, in which World Youth Day 2008 will play a part.
As I said, it’s complicated.
Young People’s Spirituality in a Changing Australia
ISBN : 9781920721466
Author(s): Mason, Singleton & Webber
The Spirit of Generation Y describes young people’s spirituality, values, worldviews and community engagement. Drawing on data from a large scale national study of youth values, spirituality and citizenship, it describes the patterns and ‘types’ of spirituality in Generation Y, and discusses the possible influences shaping these forms of spirituality. It further considers the consequences of these forms of spirituality for the way in which members of this generation participate in society.
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The Benedictine Tradition
Laura Swan OSB, Editor
Liturgical Press
ISBN 9780814619148
Soft cover pps 156 RRP $31.95
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Reviewed by Terry Monagle author and speaker
‘This book is the perfect accompaniment to the ABC series of the Abbey. The more you read this book the more you realise how purely the dear, loud, Aussie, Sr. Hilda, has divined the essence of contemplative life.’
1000 Australian women applied to join the Abbey last year. Does this mean anything? 1000 women applied to enter the Benedictine abbey at Jamberoo in NSW as participants in an ABC program. Amongst them were multiple motivations. Despite many being quite non-religious, there was a yearning, a search that led them to apply. When the chosen ones arrived, their immersion into Benedictine spirituality and ways, showed how radical is the Benedictine way of life.
One participant negotiated with Sister Hilda, to be allowed to keep the jewellery and hair dryer she could not do without. Physical possessions were an inherent part of her identity that she could not let go. She says that she had to cheat to survive to break the rule of silence. But despite the crushing challenges of transformation she became allured by some powerful spiritual presence amongst the nuns. She has said, that at home, someone might robustly say, ‘do you want some more, then give us ya plate’. But in the Abbey, a similar question and movement from one of the nuns would have the grace and dignity of a recollected ballerina. This participant in the program says she has tried to stay in touch with the wonderful spiritual state she learnt at the Abbey, but the further the time elapses, the more elusive it becomes. She should read this book.
A son of hers said to her when she came home, ‘Get over it Mum, you just wanted to be on TV’.
Various front ranking theologians and teachers in the 20th century have said that the regeneration of the church will come from a rediscovery of the contemplative tradition. Lawrence Freeman, a Benedictine, leader of the World Community of Christian Meditators is one of this opinion, and there is evidence that this is happening. A local authority, Michael Whelan CM, urges those disillusioned with church institutions to make sure that they pay attention to developing their contemplative side. The inheritors of the Thomas Merton legacy are also promoting the living of a contemplative life.
Very few of us can go and join Sr. Hilda at Jamberoo, or the Cistercians at Tarrawarra. Freeman’s movement attempts to practice a contemplative style of life for religious civilians. Some argue, including Robyn, the ‘ditzy blonde’, from the program, that to lead a contemplative life as a civilian is harder than doing it in the isolated monastic community. The monks and nuns choose their way of life, but in contrast with that, is another participant in the program who needs a rest from looking after her three children including one who is disabled. The need to care for her disabled child was not her own choice. To be a loving mother is an enormous act of obedience to Providence. Of course the nuns take a vow of obedience, but maybe it means looking after the cows rather than the candles, or putting up with an Abbess whose every word might be grating. If both life styles are ascetical, and where a totality of living for the other is demanded, perhaps the ways of life have more in common than is realised.
This book has 14 chapters featuring a précis of the life of some famous Benedictine, and provides samples of the writing or thoughts of each of them. These include Benedict himself, Bede of Jarrow, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Raissa Maritain (the only civilian contemplative person), Bede Griffiths, and most contemporaneously the Trappist Martyrs of Algeria (gosh were those guys brave!). There are other sections on the Chant Tradition, and material from the Conference of Benedictine Prioresses. There are also selections from the Rule of St Benedict that came back to me as Sr. Hilda began to orient the women to the Abbey.
Sr Laura Swan, in her introduction, to the book, says that the Roman world, when Benedict formulated his monastic rule 1500 years ago, was undergoing enormous upheaval, social, economic, and political. There were massive movements of people, disease, hunger, abandonment of farms, abortion, infanticide, and civil war. Christianity itself had many competing and contrary factions.
She is probably right when she says that Benedictine Spirituality is now enjoying a renaissance. And she posits that we live in a ‘world undergoing change at a breathtaking pace’. We are ‘challenged by heart wrenching injustice, genocide is common and familiar, we are busy and disconnected from one another. Isolation addiction and siege our souls’.
It’s an interesting comparison isn’t it? And in both these periods of turmoil, the Benedictine corrective is so radical: silence and stillness, obedience, asceticism.
At various periods in history, contemplative monasteries have sprung up at extraordinary rates. Within a decade or so of the foundation of the Cistercians being founded as a reform of Benedictine monastic practice, some hundreds of monasteries had been established throughout the breadth of Europe.
Would it ever be possible that instead of there just being a couple of Benedictine abbeys in Australian that we might suddenly have thirty or forty?
Whatever, humankind’s religious impulse is resilient and creative.