HELD IN TRUST
Like a lot of other young Episcopalians, I often catch myself wallowing in lament over the widespread disinterest in our Church’s spiritual disciplines. So many parishes and even whole dioceses seem to operate as humanitarian nonprofits with no evident roots in any direct experience of the Gospel, let alone commitment to rigorous Christian discipleship. The refrain of lament—“Why don’t people care about this?!”—quickly worms its way throughout my thinking.
And that’s a problem. Not because the object of the lament isn’t real—there is a real problem with the way we’ve collectively sidelined spiritual discipline—but because that question so easily crowds out questions of renewal: “How do we get people to care about this?”
When this tendency to bemoan without action was gently but firmly pointed out to me by my friend Tony, I started pondering what it would look like to “do something” about the spiritual lethargy in our Church. Mr. Gandhi would probably tell me to “be the change” that I want to see in the world—though I doubt he’d much care about the spiritual health of North American Anglicans. But mass movements are hard enough to mobilize in the secular sphere; it seems foolish to think that any of us can somehow engineer a spiritual revival, no matter how extensive our networks or organizing experience. Spiritual renewal is God’s work. We’re merely called to cooperate in the revival, not mastermind it.
What can we do then? We’ve inherited some truly astounding gifts through the Church: liturgies of time, sacramental means of grace, disciplines of prayer and fasting, deep contemplative traditions. These practices haven’t been passed down carefully through the generations merely for the sake of fond tradition. They are deep wells of wisdom, tried and true patterns of life that can mold us into the likeness of Christ, dependable supports for cultivating a profound, life-giving love for Jesus. If we have tasted these fruits and seen the world hungry for healing, the question necessarily arises of how to share these joys.
As I think about this longing to share what I have found, my mind instinctively turns to the words etched into my memory through the 12 Step program. An intentionally non-credal organization might not seem an obvious resource for a Christian spiritual revival, but one central document contains a nugget of very pertinent wisdom: “We can only keep what we have by giving it away.” This is the principle underlying sponsorship in the 12 Step world, and it captures an animating spirit we Christians would do well to learn from: spiritual stewardship.
Alcoholics Anonymous (and other 12 Step groups) operates in the tension between this need to pass on the gift of recovery and the tradition of operating publicly by “attraction rather than promotion.” In actively engaged members, this dynamic tends to cultivate a dedication to the hard work of the Steps that is lived more or less openly. Members of AA keep away from proselytizing but also evidence the growth in their lives and openly share about the practices that have fueled it. These practices are not pushed aggressively on the people who need them. They are held in trust for the world by people who live them openly.
We Christians have been given an immense treasure through the spiritual disciplines of the Church. But this treasure is not our own. “We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7 NRSV). We can only be faithful stewards of these gifts, holding them in trust for the hungry Church, and witnessing to their power in our lives. It’s in this witness that the hope of revival lies.
And by God’s grace, this witness is already alive and working in our Church. I see it most beautifully exemplified in the Order of Julian of Norwich. This contemplative order of monks and nuns in the Episcopal Church have ordered their common life around retrieving the great hallmarks of Christian practice and living them faithfully as a witness to the wider Church. In their mother house in central Wisconsin, they pray the full round of the Daily Office from the Book of Common Prayer, sit for regular periods of contemplative prayer, gather for daily Mass, and practice fasting and abstinence on penitential days throughout the year. They model, in a very intentional way, much of the fullness of traditional spiritual life in the Episcopal Church.
And those of us who are privileged to share in their religious life as Oblates and Associates are called to join in this spiritual stewardship and bring this witness out into the world. The Order calls affiliates to join the monks and nuns of the order in holding these traditions and practices in trust for the whole Church, but to do so in their own contexts—in their homes, parishes, and workplaces. As the oblates and associates engage in the deep work of spiritual growth, the fruits of that labor will show and themselves act as leaven, gradually drawing others in to taste what has been kept for them until they were ready.
Not everyone is called to religious life, though—even tertiary religious life. And if the Church’s spiritual fervor is to be revived, it is imperative that the disciplines designed to cultivate our spirits not be cordoned off to be the sole property of those who have taken some sort of religious vows. These practices belong to the whole Church, and any revival needs to invite the whole Church to take them up again. In order to rise to this challenge, those of us who are invested in promoting spiritual renewal within the Episcopal Church will need to think creatively about how to hold and cultivate these sources of renewal in a way that serves as a genuine witness to the wider Church.
The range of possible ways to live this witness are probably endless, and the process of exploring will undoubtedly involve many missteps. My own attempts to contribute to this renewal have arisen from continued conversation with Tony Hunt, the friend mentioned earlier who insightfully noted my tendency to lament. As Tony and I talked about the way the Daily Office in particular has shaped both our lives, we started discussing what a concrete witness to a “prayer book spirituality” in the Episcopal Church might look like. He and I were both already semi-regular Daily Office commentators on Twitter. But we were interested in moving beyond a medium of sharing that strays so easily into perfunctory performance.
Through this discussion, we hatched the idea for the Society of Saint Nicholas Ferrar, a decentralized devotional society made up of people who commit to praying the Daily Office and helping others in their community discover the practice. It is not meant primarily as an organization to “promote” the Daily Office and “mobilize” people. It’s intended as a support system for people to nourish their own spiritual lives through the Daily Office. And it is our hope that, as a result of members sharing their experience with this venerable practice, others will be drawn to try it for themselves. As the society’s collect says, we ask God that we may be “faithful stewards of this worship and constant beacons of its fruits.”
And thrilling though the response to the Society has been, this is just one attempt to cultivate an appreciation for one aspect of our spiritual tradition. Those of us who are distressed by the Church’s neglect of spiritual discipline and the attendant spiritual lethargy must continue exploring.
And this exploration can’t just be a scheme of spiritualized venture capitalism, trying to find the approach that has the best results or hits some putative benchmark. Numbers and metrics, for all their uses in the Church, cannot drive revival. This has to be a process of truly holding onto these spiritual traditions for the Church—living them out ourselves for our own lives to be transformed—and exploring different ways of sharing them with others to beckon the world closer. God works through these practices to transform and nourish us. And only when we allow ourselves to be fed at this banquet will we be able to live in a way that makes others say, “I want what they have.”
