I had been a priest for about four months and four days, Richard Gundrey a Bishop for a few months more, when we stood in the snow by a black pine at Amelia White Park for Richard to receive my Rule for the Order of St. Chad. I didn't know the term LARP then, but it would be one of my most involving and revealing LARP's. I was inspired from reading about St. Chad in Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Chad, it seemed to me lived in a time not unlike our own. Print was making a new world around him just as the digitized web is making a new world around us. I wanted to encourage myelf and others to take a step back from the confusing explosion, a step far enough to see what was happening, but not so far back as to run from it. Of course the ideas of Marshall McLuhan were undergirding my effort as well, although I did not actually mention him in any of the St. Chad documents.
I vowed to poverty, stability, and obedience. Poverty not with deprivation, but with the recognition that there was enough for everyone in the newly emerging economy of abundance. (Clue the Star Trek theme music.) Stability not in the sense of living in a hole in the side of a mountain, although I have occasionally in the years that followed come very close to that model, but in the sense that we all live on this same 'island Earth, our fragile home' (Howard Galley)., and it behooves us to understand it. (Obviously this was before Elon Musk had entered the scene.) Obedience not in the sense of obeying some 'superior' but in the more radical sense of listening. Of trying to hear what is going on. Of not just reacting but in trying to understand. We were also expected to pray a daily office.
At first I was a bit evangelical about the Order. It was Santa Fe, after all, a place too spiritual for its own good, perhaps, and soon there were twelve of us. We had a newsletter, Peregrinations with St. Chad, which would later become the title of a blog I wrote. But then the copying machine was all we had. I confess I haven't been a very good Abbot and kept up with everyone in the Order. One woman moved to Magdalena and started an orphanage. We lost one member to the Benedictines in Minnesota, One young man got all caught up in 'native american spirituality' and started wearing moccasins and carrying a flint knife. Another member decided to dedicate his life to remembering that one time he was abused by a Roman Catholic priest when he was a teenager and making it famous. I don't know if any of the other twelve have continued to follow the Rule, either rigorously or casually.
My own practice of the Rule has fluctuated in its nature over the twenty-nine years after the pine tree. For a while I would sign documents with O. S. C. after my name. Very impressive, I suppose, on wedding registers. (I had fancy wedding certificates printed up with the St. Chad cross as a watermark.) My office would sometimes become rather elaborate, sometimes be reduced to sitting and watching the sun rise and set. I had a very beautiful St. Chad's cross, made as a gift by a member of St. Bede's Episcopal Church, appropriately enough. Paul was another member who wandered off into a move primitive live style, taking his family off line in some north woods or another. I wore the cross for many years before giving it to a young woman at a sort of coffee shop where I was volunteering. She was seriously depressed and who kept drawing it. I told her it had served me well for years, and I hoped it would serve her well, too. Sor a wmetimes I wore a fairly traditional monk's habit--one of the most practical sorts of clothing, actually, but I cheat and ride a bicycle more often than I walk, and long robes and bike chains don't play well together. For a while I wore my hair in an authentic celtic tonsure, but in general I find hair care a waste of time so now I usually just let it grow everywhere until it becomes a nuisance then whack it off for another year or so.
Despite the passage of time and my increasingly taking myself and everyone else less seriously (Clue Shakespeare's Puck.), I find that the Rule at least implicitly continues to help me through these revolutionary times. Just as written books replaced Chad's memorized 'texts', so digital devices have replaced my books. It was kinda hard to claim to be living in poverty when I was surrounded by 35,000 books. Now now one can see how many digital texts I have literally at my finger tips. But, I try to use all of my toys as tools to help me listen to the events of the earth--poverty, stability and obedience in one convenient Chromebook--and to consider whether the way they extend myself are something I want or not. So, Chromebook yes, car no. Spending less time earning has let me have more time for learning, but I try when I take a job for it to be in some environment new to me so I can learn something different.
I confess to being a complete place slut. I have never lived anywhere that didn't seem to have its own particular bit of paradyse--although I don't enjoy heat so much as I did when I was younger. So, I have worn my St. Chad's cross from coast to coast and to a few foreign countries exploring this place I share with 7.53 billion other folks. My veinous problems have become more severe as I have aged, so travel now is really comfortable only on trains. Go, Google Earth.
Obedience has been the most difficult vow to maintain, not because I don't listen, but because as we have become a planet of 7.53 folks, very inter-connected, there's a lot to hear. Many people lament the abundance of information available to use, making some sort of distinction between data and wisdom. I must demur. I have never known anyone wise who didn't want to know more. The difficulty for me is to maintain perspective, not to be caught up in this weeks' Twenty Years War.
Whatever else the past twenty-nine years have been, they have certainly been interesting and entertaining. I am a bit amused that as I have dribbled on this morning, I have been listening to Enigma, who were of course the shit-and-fell-in-it of Santa Fe when Richard and I stood in the snow. Life remains an enigma for me. I have already lived longer than I had expected. If I live another twenty-nine years, I hope I can at least casually follow the example of good old St. Chad.
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