Thank you so much for inviting me to address this congress of abbots again. As last time, I accepted as a small expression of gratitude for all that I have received from the Benedictine tradition. Ten years of marvellous education at Benedictine schools! My great uncle Dom John Lane Fox lies at the root of my vocation to be a religious. Despite suffering disfigurement as a chaplain in the First World War, he was filled with a joy that could only be from God. But when I told him that I wished to become a Dominican, he uttered a word of caution. ‘You know, they are terribly intelligent. I doubt whether they will accept you!’ I just squeezed in.

Abbot Gregory asked me to talk about a vision of monastic life for the next twenty years. At first this struck me as a strange topic. Twenty years is the blink of an eyelid in Benedictine history. But I last addressed this congress in 2000. A year later, 9/11 changed our world for ever. Two years later, the Boston Globe exposed the massive crisis of sexual abuse crisis in the Church. The Church will never the same. Recently before addressing an audience at a Jesuit School, I had to produce a police certificate to prove that I had not committed any crimes. This would have been unimaginable when I last talked to you.

None of us can imagine what the next twenty years will bring. All over the world, democracies are faltering, and dictatorship is on the rise. In most countries outside Africa, the birth-rate is plummeting. Research suggests that in every continent, young men and women are finding it ever more difficult to communicate with each other, as the men become more conservative and the women more progressive. And we all live under the threat of ecological catastrophe.

The first gift of the Benedictine tradition should be the confidence to face this time of crisis with hope. St Benedict wrote his Rule in a time when Europe was descending into chaos and you have survived innumerable crises since then. When that beloved Benedictine Cardinal Hume introduced me before a lecture, he said it was a pleasure to welcome me, the head of a relatively young religious Order. But even we Dominicans have, like you, lived through so many crises: the Black Death, the crisis of the Papacy in the fourteenth century, the Reformation, violent revolutions in the late eighteenth century, then aggressive nationalism in the twentieth century. Both our orders are still here.

Jesus told his disciples that they are the branches of the vine: ‘Every branch that bears fruit, he prunes that they may bear more fruit.’ (John 15.2). We have been suppressed and expelled, become lax and been reformed, endured collapse and rebirth. We have been vigorously pruned so that we may bear more fruit. So we can face crises in hope. The American Dominicans even gave me a T shirt which said, ‘Have a good crisis.’

How are monks sign of hope? The last time I put it in terms of doing nothing in particular. Cardinal Hume once wrote of monks that, “we do not see ourselves as having any particular mission or function in the Church. We do not set out to change the course of history. We are just there almost by accident from a human point of view. And, happily, we go on ‘just being there’”[1] A friend wrote to Thomas Merton: ‘When people ask me what I do, I simply tell them that I am a human being.’[2] By doing nothing in particular monks point to the one for whom we do everything, whose name is I AM. That is what I talked about last time, and so I must not repeat myself!

Abbot Gregory pointed me to an illuminating book, The Way of St Benedict, by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Williams focuses on your vow of stability. In a world always in flux, of transient relationships when people find it hard to be committed to each other for life, monks promise to remain with each other faithfully. He writes that in Benedictine stability ‘we learn to sit still with whatever company arrives, in the confidence that God in Christ sits still with us.[3]’ That marvellous film, Des dieux et des hommes tells the story of a community of Trappists in Algeria which in the 1990s was engulfed in the terrorism that devoured the country. The community debates whether it should stay or leave for safety. They remain because they cannot leave their Muslim friends. One of the villagers said: ‘We are the birds that rest on the branches and you are the branches.’ Most of the community were taken away in May 1996 and disappeared: stability that lead to martyrdom.

In 2018, they were beatified along with the Dominican bishop, Pierre Claverie. He too was urged to flee Algeria. Shortly before his death he said: ‘Throughout the dramatic events in Algeria, I have often been asked, “What are you doing there? Why do you stay? Shake off the dust from your sandals! Come back home!” Home…Where are we at home? … We have no power, but are there as at the bedside of a friend, of a sick brother, silently holding his hand and wiping his brow. We are there for the sake of Jesus, because he is the one suffering there amid violence that spares no one, crucified again and again in the flesh of thousands of innocents. Like his mother Mary and Saint John, we are there at the foot of the cross where Jesus died abandoned by his followers and bitterly mocked by the crowd. [4]’ Many of your brothers and sisters remain faithfully at the foot of the cross in places of suffering around the world.

In the midst of increasing violence, verbal and physical, the monastery should be an oasis of peace, where brothers or sisters remain together as a sign of the Lord whose last words in Matthew’s gospel were, ‘Behold I am with you until the end of time.’ (Matthew 28.20).

You dare to stay because we believe that on Easter day, love and life triumphed over hatred and death. In the wonderful sequences we sing after Easter, Victimae paschali laudes,

Mors et vita duello
Conflixere mirando:
Dux vitae mortuus
Regnat vivus

“Death and life contended in a spectacular battle: the Prince of life, who died, reigns alive.” We are in peace even in the midst of conflict because, as it says in the First Eucharistic Prayer, our days are ordered to God’s peace. This is a peace that we can taste even when we do not feel at peace. My fellow novice Simon Tugwell OP, wrote: ‘It is not a subjective sensation of peace that is required; if we are in Christ, we can be in peace (in pace) and therefore unflustered even when we feel no peace.[5]’

In the late sixties, Blackfriars was subjected at 2am to a very small bomb attack. Two small devices blew out all the windows in the front of the priory. We were all woken and rushed down. The police came, the ambulances. But where was the Prior, Fergus Kerr? The youngest novice was sent to his room. ‘Fergus, Fergus, wake up, there has been a bomb attack.’ ‘Anybody dead?’ ‘No’. ‘Anyone wounded?’ ‘Actually no.’ ‘Why don’t you go away and let me sleep and we will think about it all in the morning.’ Whatever happens, the victory is won. When his executioners came for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his last message was for his friend Bishop Bell of Chichester: ‘This is the end and, for me, the beginning of life….Tell the bishop..our victory is certain.’

Rowan Williams claims that this stability is founded on living with each other honestly. He wrote: ‘The community that freely promises to live together before God is one in which both truthfulness and respect are enshrined. I promise that I will not hide from you – and that I will also at times help you not to hide from me or from yourself.[6]’ Hence the insistence of the Rule that each monk exposes his thoughts to an experienced elder who can gently lead him into the truth. Together we dare to face the truth of our vulnerability, fragility and mortality.

Simon Tugwell again: After the Fall, Adam and Eve ‘were certainly not prepared to look God in the face, and soon lost the courage to look each other in the face. Eventually they forgot what faces were for.[7]’ We trust our brethren to see us as we are, and dare to be, as it were, naked in their sight. We dare to be visible. Gregory of Nyssa wrote of baptism, ‘casting off these fading leaves which veil our lives we should once again present ourselves before the eyes of our Maker’[8]. An ancient Eastern prayer: ‘unveil our eyes, give us confidence, do not let us be ashamed or embarrassed, do not let us despise ourselves.[9]’

The temptation is always project on to others what we fear and dislike in ourselves. Simon Tugwell again: ‘peace comes with an unflustered self-knowledge…..The way to peace is the acceptance of truth. Any bit of us that we refuse to accept will be our enemy, forcing us into defensive postures. And the discarded pieces of ourselves will rapidly find incarnation in those around us.[10]’

We face our complexity without panic: Charles Baudelaire:

Ah ! Seigneur ! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon cœur et mon corps sans dégoût [11]!

G. K. Chesterton wrote a famous series of detective stories whose hero was Father Brown who was famous for solving murders. A group of American criminologists came to interview to discover his secret. Did he have special scientific techniques? He replied. ‘It is simple. I committed all those murders myself. Until you understand that there is nothing that you could not do, then you have the soul of a Pharisee.’’ Elsewhere he writes that no one ‘is any good until he knows how bad he might be…till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees, till his only hope is to have captured one criminal and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.[12]’

So in a world which has fallen out of love with the truth, a world of fake news and mad conspiracy theories, of “your truth” and “my truth”, monasteries invite us to step into the light of Christ. We dare to be seen as we are and see each other with compassion. We dare to do this because religious life should liberate us from caring too much about our identity.

Our global culture is obsessed with identity: Ethnic or tribal identity; gender identity, the identity of one’s sexual orientation; the politics of identity, identities as victims or victors. The cry of the age is: ‘This is who I am. I demand that you accept me as such’. As Master of the Dominicans, I was required to meet every brother privately. In one community in the United Sates almost every brother introduced himself saying ‘I am brother X and I am a gay man.’ I had to tell that one’s identity is not founded on one’s sexual orientation, which is not of particular interest, but on one’s capacity to love whoever!

For a Christian, and a fortiori a religious, identity is not chosen or constructed but discovered as one responds to the Lord who summons us by name, and as we summon each other to follow him. As we respond, surely we grew ever less concerned with who we are. Iris Murdoch said, ‘the chief requirement of the good life is to live without any image of oneself[13].’ Because who we are is wrapped up in the mystery of Christ. In the cult film Barbie, which I am sure you have all seen, all the Barbies sing of their freedom to be whomever they want. This is the American dream. But for Christians, our identity is hidden in God who is, as St Augustine wrote, ‘closer to me than I am to myself.’. Who I am is wrapped in the divine mystery..

So paradoxically, at the heart of Benedictine or Dominican identity is a sort of lack of concern with individual identity. God knows who I am. That is enough. Being a branch of the true vine, means living from the Lord whose sap is life itself. ‘Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.’ The pruning that we are undergoing at the moment is often the Lord cutting away the little identities that we have cherished.

The greatest joy and trial of religious life as we all know if living with or brothers and sisters in what Williams calls ‘their unyielding difference.[14]’ Their abiding otherness. At least we Dominicans are assigned from time to time to other communities and so we have a space of time before we begin again to want to murder each other. Though early Dominican General Chapter punished a prior who walked thirty kilometres to the next priory just for the pleasure of punch another prior in the face[15]! But stability means that that other monk is there for the duration. My great uncle Dick told me of his irritation at sitting next to a monk for years and years in the refectory, noisily slurping his soup. There could be no escaping him until one or other died! Basil Hume liked to remind the monks of Ampleforth that when they died, there would always be at least one monk who was relieved!

One of the ways in which the Rule of St Benedict helps us to see each other truthfully, is in its stress on work. Ora et Labora. Every one has something to offer for the common life. It belongs to the dignity of every brother and sister that they have something to give, and the Abbot’s eyes must be open to see the treasure each bears. Rowan Williams again: ‘The monastery both demands from each a positive contribution and distinctive share in sustaining its life, and gives to each the dignity of responsibility for that life, in every prosaic detail. This cannot be a community in which some live at the expense of others, or in which some are regarded as having nothing to offer and are mere pensioners or objects of charity.[16]’ Work is understood as ‘shared dignity or creativity.’

This is a beautiful sign of a hope in a world which is enduring a crisis of work. Those who can find work are often ground down by its endless demands. Thomas Merton believed that ‘the rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the roots of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.[17]’

Other feel useless because they can find no work, or cannot work because of illness. Or else they give their lives in care for others, for the young or the old or the sick, in ways that are not recognised by society . Either people’s dignity is subverted because they can find no work, or their work is not counted. But religious communities are oases in which even the ancient branches can bear much fruit. We have no conception of retirement. We had a brother who for years had cooked for the community. When he was no longer able to do this, he just made the soup at midday. When he was in his late eighties and this was too much, he laid the table and looked after the salt and pepper. To have been told to retire would have been an affront to his participation in the community, and to his dignity as a servant of his brothers.

But if we go on living with each other, resisting the impulse to flee or to murder, then the fruit we bear is a human heart open to joy. As I said, it was the joy of my great uncle that first opened the door to my religious vocation. A former The Abbot Primate of the Benedictines, Notker Wolf, invited some Japanese Buddhist and Shintuist monks to come and stay for two weeks in the monastery of St Ottilien, Bavaria. When they were asked what struck them they replied, ‘The joy.’ ‘Why are Catholic monks such joyful people?’ It is a tiny glimpse of the beatitude for which we are created. It is the exuberance of those who have drunk the new wine of the gospel. The new wine which makes you drunk was the favourite metaphor for the gospel of the early Dominicans. In fact I have the impression that they did not only enjoy the metaphor!

The promise of God in Ezekiel is that : ‘A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you: I will remove from you body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’ (36.26). A heart of flesh is open to joy and sorrow. In a world which hungers for some vision of what it is to be human, the monastery is surely called to be a sign of the human vocation, the universal call to beatitude, God’s peace.

I love these words attributed to Antoine de St Exupery. They are even better than what he actually wrote: ‘If you wish to construct a boat, do not gather your men and women to give them orders, or to explain each detail of what they must do or where to find everything….If you want to construct a boat, give birth in the hearts of your men and women the desire for the sea.[18]!’

At the heart of the Benedictine mission, especially in secular world, is to give people a taste of the infinite. Then they will find their own ways to make boats. The most profound instinct in humanity is to worship. Dom Bede Griffiths describes a moment of revelation when he was a school boy, listening to a lark singing at the close of day: ‘Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look at the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.[19]’

The great patristic scholar Peter Brown was brought up as a Dublin Protestant but he drifted away from the practice of his faith. What brought him back was hearing the singing of the Qu’ran on a visit to Iran and the next day the celebration of the Eucharist[20]. He glimpsed the beauty and knew that what had been missing from his life: worship. Etty Hillesum, the Jewish Christian mystic who died in Auschwitz wrote, ‘It was as if my body had been meant and made for the act of kneeling. . Sometimes in moments of deep gratitude, kneeling down becomes an overwhelming urge.[21]’ I have a tiny experience of what she meant. After major surgery for cancer, it was two years before I could again kneel. It was a profound deprivation.

Young people are often attracted to Catholicism by ‘spiritual restlessness[22]’. In worship they find the peace for which they search. ‘My soul is restless until it rests in you My God’ as Augustine said. Maybe your mission in these dry and violent times is above all to worship, opening the window onto our final homeland, our patria. C. S. Lewis calls this sehnsucht, ‘the inconsolable longing in the heart for we know not what.’ ‘In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness…. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name… the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.[23]’

We cannot imagine what will befall our turbulent world in the next twenty years. The future looks dark. But I do believe the Benedictine tradition embodies a promise for fearful humanity. In the wonderful phrase of Rainer Maria Rilke, we are called to be ‘seekers of the inner future …[of the] past.[24]’ Having lived through so many crises, we trust that though the pruning may be painful at the hands of the Lord, we shall indeed bear much fruit. We can dare to see ourselves and each other as we are, truthfully, trusting that it is these frail, mortal, mixed up people whom the Lord loves and calls to himself.

____________

[1] In praise of Benedict p. 23

[2] William H. Shannon Seeds of Peace: Contemplation and Non-Violence New York 1996 p.55

[3] The Way of St Benedict¸Bloomsbury 2020, London etc, p.6

[4] Jean-Jacques Pérennès OP A Life Poured Out: Pierre Claverie of Algeria, Orbis Books, New York, 2007 p.243f

[5] Reflections on the Beatitudes London 1980 p.114

[6] P.18

[7] Way of the Preacher, p. 92

[8] De Virginitate XIII 1,15f, quoted Simon Tugwell OP, The Way of the Preacher London 1979 p.92.

[9] Euchologion Serapionis 12,4 ibid.

[10] P, 112

[11] Le Voyage a Cythere, stanza 15. Quoted by Tugwell, p. 106

[12] The Complete Father Brown, Mysteries, 2010, P.153 and 154

[13] Quoted A. N. Wilson Confessions: A life of Failed Promises, Bloomsbury 2023, p.5

[14] P.14

[15] Simon Tugwell, The Way of the Preacher p.94

[16] P.77

[17] Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Doubleday, New York, 1966 p.86

[18] : “To create a ship is not to weave sails, forge nails or read the stars, but to give a taste of the sea, which is one, and in the light of which nothing is contradictory but community in love[18].’

[19] The Golden String¸ Fount, London, 1979, p.9

[20] Journeys of the Mind, p.431

[21] David Brooks. P.21

[22] ‘Why Adults become Catholics’. The East Anglian Diocesan Commission for the New Evangelisation. 2024.

[23] The Weight of Glory, Macmillan, New York, 1966, pp 4 – 5.

[24] Quoted by Paul Murray OP in The New Wine of Dominican Spirituality: A Drink called Happiness. Burns and Oates, London, 2006, p.4