Archbishop calls for wild burst of enthusiasm for religious life

A beautiful Nun

Sister Jayanti, BK

Our very own ABC, (Archbishop of Canterbury), Justin Welby, (click to see video) speaking about what he saw as a dangerous decline in the true religious life, said yesterday that Monks and Nuns are like trainspotters….(.I find myself imagining monks and nuns leaning over railway bridges and lurking round stations with notebooks like trainspotters because this seemed a rather odd description of "a decline in the religious life"!)   However, I think he meant that train spotters stay in one place spotting trains and the rest of us are commuters.   They watch, we move in the world.  He also described embracing the religious life as a "the ultimate wager on the existence of God".  

So, where has the religious life gone?  the ABC says that the Church needs not just an outward expression of religion but it is upheld by those who commit themselves totally to a religious life, committing themselves totally to God as an ultimate and total reality.  He has invited members of  a religious community, Chemin Neuf to live at Lambeth Palace.  This would mean that a cycle of prayer and interiority was at the centre of the Palace and I think this is what he is really after.  Life in the world is anchored by these few who are called to commit themselves totally to God or totally to an interior life, and what he says is that the outer world is dependent on that.

Nuns of the Order of St Benedict

Buddhist Monks

So, Meditating Grannies and meditating people, this is what we do, we hold the interior ground, we don't just do it to feel good, we do it because it is an imperative to keep the balance and it is as much an act of love for the world as all the wonderful work that goes on out there.  This makes meditating when you might not feel so much like it, or when you don't think you are any good at it, a really really reasonable thing to do not a gamble or wager at all.   So go Grannies Go, or maybe stop going Grannies because the world needs your peace and stillness.  Actually I expect there will be a revival of the religious life after Call the Midwife.  There has certainly been an upsurge in applications for midwifery because we all loved those midwives but we really all loved Jenny Agutter, the Mother Superior and all the faces of the nuns as they sang and prayed and kept the Mother House a centre of spiritual life in the East End.