+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city–
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.
Those words are taken from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding” and they echo, for me at least, the sorrow and the nascent hope of living in our own time, more than eighty years after they were written. The place to which Eliot invites us are the ruins of an intentional Anglican community, Little Gidding, founded by the scholar and deacon Nicholas Ferrar, and like so many things sadly shut down by the Puritans during the English Civil War, a year after the community had given refuge to Charles I.
There is nothing new under the sun. What Ferrar’s community experienced, what Eliot experienced during the blitz in his adopted homeland, and our current malaise brought on by polarization and technological idolatry and God knows what else all have the same result. Life seems fragmented and community appears an ideal whose ruins we may visit, but whose reestablishment feels beyond our reach.
There is another way. What Ferrar had done in Little Gidding and what St. Benedict established in the Sixth Century, what Anabaptists did in the Twentieth Century with the Bruderhof Communities, are echos of a primordial Christian impulse to live intentionally in community. Those whose common life is described in today’s lesson from Acts are the three thousand baptized on Pentecost in response to Peter’s sermon. The first large group of Christian converts came to Jerusalem (as the very difficult-to-read geography lesson we get on Pentecost reminds us each year) from every corner of the Roman Empire, speaking numerous tongues and no doubt bringing their own cultural assumptions and practices with them. One might expect that the response of this host would be to become the first group of organized missionaries, each going home to Pontus or Phrygia or Pamphylia or wherever, each to establish his or her own local church. Now the missionary impulse is not to be quashed, but perhaps it is not the ideal vocation for the neophyte. They had, after all, only heard one sermon. “Pentecostal fire … in the dark time of the year” to quote the poet again, may need some time to melt the snow round one’s own soul before it spreads.
And so these three thousand Christian men, women, and children set aside their ethnic chauvinisms and what was undoubtedly a difficult language barrier after the miraculously polyglot sermon ended, and set about to live as Christians together, to work and learn and most especially to pray together, and two thousand years and 2 billion disciples later we see the result.
The particular economic system adopted by these three thousand is always what piques the most interest and gets folks exercised for good or ill. In reality we can’t impose a modern term on what they were doing. I love to say that I am neither a socialist nor a capitalist, because that’s both true and gets people wound up and confused. I just say read G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and Jacques Maritain and you’ll start to understand my politics; fortunately, nobody has taken me up on that, so I don’t have to defend myself. But that’s neither here nor there, because saying that the three thousand Jerusalem disciples were distributist Christian democrats would be just as much a category error as any other attempt at pinning them down with modern labels.
The important thing about this early Christian community is just what I said a moment ago, they lived and worked and learned and (most especially) prayed together, and they did those things intentionally. Living in this way is easier the stricter a community is, but there’s an impulse here (I believe a God-given impulse) which can be adapted for various life circumstances. It’s easy in a sense for a cloistered monk or nun, with no family and little or no personal property, to pull this off. The three thousand had their own lives and families and occupations. So did those who lived at Little Gidding. So do Bruderhof brethren. But in all these communities there is mutual support and interdependence, there are common values and goals, and most important of all, there is a commitment to coming together to pray. Communes and kibbutzim rarely work out, not just because they can be too stifling or in the other direction too decadent. I think the primary reason for their failure in the long run is because they are fundamentally secular enterprises.
Now, don’t worry, I’m not about to announce the establishment of “Fr. John’s Christian Commune” this morning. I worry I’d go from gentle Abbot to authoritarian cult leader too quickly. And as much as I can appreciate people like Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth for their critiques of the unsustainable nature of our current ways of living, I don’t think radical agrarianism or neo-monasticism is actually workable for about ninety-five percent of the world’s population.
What I am suggesting is what if we just dip our toes into the shallow water of the pool built by those three thousand disciples? What would that look like? Maybe it would be keeping a half hour each day as a sacred obligation to simply pray with those in our household or friend group. Maybe it’s as simple as sitting down with other human beings to eat a meal and have a conversation when one would normally eat Doordash in front of Netflix. Maybe it’s helping a neighbor clean the gutter in a more active way than giving him the phone number for Acme Gutter Cleaners, L.L.C. or (and this is radical and uncomfortable for most of us Twenty First Century Individualists) asking your neighbor to help you clean your gutters.
To what degree one can manage any of that will vary, but at least the way to start, I think, is to try to enter prayerfully into living more intentionally. We have such great models throughout our history as God’s people. And perhaps we can repair to those places, if not physically then at least in the prayer of imagination, like Little Gidding where the saints have pulled it off in the past. As Eliot wrote, right after the stanzas with which I opened this sermon:
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.