Crossing: Reclaiming the Landscape of Our Lives [Paperback]

" ... a book whose sometimes painful honesty speaks of a life which demands the full engagement of the human person, heart, body and soul"

"... a variety of cultural references also enrich his book. "Crossing" is peppered with dozens of pithy quotations"

"Man's need to discover transcendence in daily life is a key theme in this book. He writes movingly"

A circle is the shape most of us tread out in life: whether we live alone or are busy with the many tasks of family life, routine is the stuff we all work in. Days, months, years – the pattern repeats as regularly as the spinning hands of a clock. Through the ages, monks have been characterised by the regularity of our way of life. The whole of the monastic life is founded upon patterns of repeated experience – the routine of daily prayer at set times, the times of work, of relaxation with the community. The recurrent cycle of the liturgical seasons as the year comes and goes is another, larger scale, version of the same pattern.

A monastery can seem a world apart from the lives most people lead. But recognising the circles we all tread out can make of monastic spirituality, which could otherwise appear distant to those who do not live behind monastery walls, a spirituality relevant to anyone who has to cope with a pattern of repeated experiences.

The monk’s day in any monastic community is structured by the liturgy of the hours: these are the times of community prayer that follow the circle of the day. Vigils is the pre-dawn office of readings and psalms. Lauds, the morning office, begins the working day. The Mid-day Prayer occurs at noon, and Vespers is sung as evening comes. The night office, Compline takes us into the dark again. These moments constitute a framework for the spiritual life of monastics, a series of steps along the path by which we cross the hours of the day.

The chapters of this book use this pattern of "crossings" to provide a series of reflections on finding the presence of God in aspects of our regular experience, a process which I hope may assist the seeker in mapping the paths of his or her own life. Each chapter focuses on a specific moment in the liturgy of the hours, finding in each office a way into aspects of experience and christian tradition which I hope are not uniquely monastic but more broadly human and so useful to a wide range of readers.

“Where is God in all this?” a friend asked me the other day, referring to a grief shared. “I don’t know where he is”, I said. “God’s a b*****d and I shout at him a lot.” “I find that a very liberating thing to hear”, came the reply. “I’ve never heard a monk say that before.”

“Sometimes I don’t believe in God”, was apparently the most important statement I made to another friend in a recent conversation about the darker moments of life. This same friend told me that I was the first priest who had ever been prepared to share with her that side of his own experience. That disclosure startled me more than the impact of my sharing what I take to be a common experience.

Two vignettes of moments each of which took me by surprise. But I really shouldn’t be so surprised. It’s taken me 20 years of monastic life to arrive at a place where I feel I can admit, even to myself, how tough it can be to persevere in prayer and to struggle with the boredom, the confusion, the failure and above all the powerful feelings that begin to surface when alone with God. I used to think that the difficulties I encountered were something to be ashamed of and hidden, rather than an integral aspect of any journey of faith. If things were less than ideal, this must be because I was getting it wrong. I suspect that when I entered monastic life, along with the monastic habit I put on a series of assumptions (many of them self-generated) about what feelings, what experiences and what attitudes were – and were not – proper for a professed religious. And would I be completely unique among religious in having consigned many of the more problematic elements of my spiritual and emotional life to a “shadow side” of myself?

In a recent dream I climbed down into a derelict basement under my bedroom: a vivid picture of the process of reclaiming aspects of myself that sit uncomfortably beneath the public image the public image of the faithful religious. Things in that basement were fairly severely neglected in my dream, and I’m not too sure that the reality is all that different.

Crises for individuals can occur because we refuse to communicate our feelings to others; but perhaps even more frequently because we don’t actually know what we are feeling in the first place. Sometimes, old hurts or areas of ourselves that frighten us make it difficult to be aware of what we feel, or honest about it. For the religious, it’s not unknown for the status of cleric or the fact of celibacy to present a barrier between the public expectations of the life we lead and the human reality of feelings, often agonising, chaotic and apparently humiliating. The neglected basement has a way of breaking through the well-ordered floor of our live at the most inconvenient moments. But consciously to enter that basement and engage with our discomforts in the light of day as we share the reality of our prayer lives with others – that can be frightening. Do I, as a monk or a priest, dare to tell another person what I really feel?

I cherish a passage from St Gregory the Great that occurs in the breviary each autumn. “My mind is sundered and torn to pieces by the many and serious things I have to think about…I am often compelled to associate with men of the world, and sometimes I relax the nature of my speech…Because I am weak myself I am gradually drawn into idle talk and I find myself saying the kind of thing that I didn’t even care to listen to before. I enjoy lying back where once I was loathe to stumble”. These words speak clearly to me of the need to allow the simple struggles of human life to become visible behind the monastic habit. What so appeals about Gregory in this moment of self-disclosure is precisely the fact that we all know, from experience, exactly what he’s talking about. We’ve all been there.

Too often, I know, I have, in effect, understood the spiritual path as a means of voiding messiness if the human struggle; less the “royal road” described by the Fathers of the Church than a species of urban bypass, circumventing the embarrassment of an apparently run-down city centre. But this sanitised version of spirituality is a way of hiding from the living God, not a way of meeting the inconveniently incarnate Christ.

After 20 years as a religious I seem to be losing my terror of being found out as a human being, and am learning to rejoice the powerfully unpredictable emotional side of myself. I am more able to share this with friends and to cherish the profound support and intimacy that such sharing can evoke. I now begin to see the work of God in dimensions of my life where I had never thought to find him.

Where is God in all of this?
“Surely, God is in this place, and I knew it not” Genesis 28:16

Mark Barrett OSB is a Benedictine monk of Worth Abbey, Sussex. He was born in Yorkshire, and began monastic life after an English degree at King's College, Cambridge. He is concerned to make aspects of Benedictine spirituality accessible to people in all walks of life, and believes that the monastic way to God has something to offer to seekers of all faiths and none.