you know i went to college with Josh right?

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Blessings of Peace

Br. Leo, CoS

May God continue to lead you, guide you and keep you turning toward the light.

Hope to see you when you come back west.

Namaste, Ziggy

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It doesn’t need to be this way. The promise of a better way is there. You are correct that entering the better way is a tremendous leap when you have never seen it and have only a fuzzy idea what it looks like. The personal skills and habits to live this way are rudimentary, and few structures exist for deepening the channel where that river could flow. Truly the new monastic movement is pioneering in the wilderness. No wonder the Israelites took 40 years to reach the promised land.

And then again, Benedict pioneered a new way of living out of a social and spiritual desert 1500 years ago. St Francis and St Teresa and the great saints of the active orders have renewed structures and practices of the life of prayer, community, and service. I’m thrilled to experience your account from the outposts of a this renewal in our time. You are giving me a few more clues to follow and doors to knock on

Teresa

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I have been amazed… Still am by what you have done and are doing. Thanks for inviting us to come along.

Look forward to what is next. Ziggy

Ziggy Rendler-Bregman

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As someone who explored a traditional monastic vocation as a young(er!) person in the 1980s, one of the things I find most encouraging about the new monastic movement is that it is appears to be so creative. And it seems to me that creativity is often the way forward in the tensions between the two sides we are discussing here. It is hard to argue against creativity because it so often proves itself in fruitfulness. Would St. Paul have succeeded in his arguments with Peter and James leading up to the Council of Jerusalem without the fruit of the churches he had planted? Would his towering theological creativity have gained the currency it achieved over time without those same churches?

A contemporary case in point can be seen in the fact that Evangelical Christianity is the fastest growing religion of conversion (as opposed to growth through natural increase) in the world. This is so, in part at least, because it is so de-centralized and thus can respond so quickly and creatively to needs on the ground. I greatly admire the evangelicals for this and feel it speaks volumes to the wider church.

Much the same point is made, in a very different context, where Charles Taylor allows his own voice to come through on the needs of contemporary Catholicism in a few passages of his masterful book, A Secular Age. Taylor notes that what the Catholic church needs in our “age of authenticity”, where mobilization based on cultural– or even religious– traditions rings increasingly hollow, is new forms of life. These new forms don’t necessarily need to replace or even decry older forms of Catholic life but they do need to be allowed to exist and, better still, encouraged.

Has the Vatican’s own enthusiasm for a new evangelism understood Taylor’s point or the compelling evidence of the store-front evangelicals in the slums of the global south and the slums of Philadelphia?

There are some tentative signs suggesting that it has: but only time will show.