A Brief Primer on Anglican Spirituality

"How good it is to center down":  so Howard Thurman begins his meditation on navigating the inward sea, retreating from the disorder and urgency of the everyday and finding the stillness at the soul's center.  He remarks on the difficulty of this for most people, the way we are besieged by the exigencies of life in the world and prevented from the moment in which we address God and find ourselves addressed.  Without that moment, it is difficult to know oneself, and so many of us go along in the world deaf to our own summons to appear before and as a part of the whole of creation in its response to its created givenness.  The creation seethes with wonder and joy in the grace that makes it exist at all.  But the paradox of humanity is we are conscious of the contingency of our own being, capable of observing and receiving the miracle that all things are, yet we are hardened somehow to it:  we are ever seeing and never perceiving. 

            
For almost as long as there have been humans, there have been people who noted this paradox, both lamenting it and attempting to redress it.  There is a family resemblance in all of these traditions, namely, a conviction that human consciousness must be trained to see what is there all the time to be seen.  The ancient Mediterranean philosophers promoted philosophy as a whole way of life, in which the mind was disciplined into seeing the ordering principle of being, the ratio or logos that everywhere surges within it.  The ancient Hebrews were commanded to enact a dramatic rehearsal of the events whereby YHWH had entered the creation.  Hindus have prayed and sought the blessings of the Devas for millennia, and Buddhists have engaged in ritual practices of detachment in order to purify the sight to perceive the absolute that negates all the world's seeming. 

            
My own Anglican tradition, itself heavily influenced by the practices of Benedictine Catholicism, retains and develops elements of all of these in the conviction that the truly living person is the person whose life sways in rhythmic and unceasing prayer; for Anglicans, prayer is inhaled like oxygen in the form of Scripture, and exhaled as expression of gratitude for the nourishment received.  We gather at morning and at evening to hear the Scripture read and to pray, in the confidence that we will both address God and hear God's address to us, in call and response, to grow in the knowledge and love of God.  As the Scripture is read, we grasp and hold onto the word as it speaks to us, turning it in our vision, allowing it to shine in a plurality of facets, reflecting the divine light this way and that, and in this light we come to see ourselves as those who are loved by God precisely in God's gift of divine speech to us.  We hear the Old Testament and the New Testament, as the promise and memory of the mystery at the heart of all existence, the mystery that is expressed most clearly as God's speech to us in the person of Christ, the logos that binds the Scripture and the world together.  This address challenges our own claim to see the world rightly; and our vision is retrained. 

            
We confess ourselves humbled by that address and respond in the prayers, both written and spontaneous, in the recognition both that our times require a response that is unique and also that only those who have been taught to speak can make such a response.  In our speech, we present ourselves to God as those who have been addressed and who have assumed the responsibility to appear as we are before God.  We ask for divine power to turn us more and more into people whose lives in the world make clear that God has spoken to the world in Christ and has summoned the world to the divine service.  At morning and at evening, there is both the call and the response, each time dramatizing the events that, so we claim, have created and redeemed the universe.  God has spoken, and creation has appeared.  God has delivered Jesus over for our redemption, and we have appeared before God as friends. 

            
Additionally, through the year, this pattern of address and response is inflected by the events not only in the life of Christ (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Life, Passion, Death, Resurrection and Exaltation) but in the life of the Church which is his body (the days of the Apostles, Prophets, and Saints).  In these inflections, we rehearse the life of Jesus over the course of the year as the event that founds our redeemed existence.  And in these rehearsals we are reconstituted as those whose center is not a vacant stillness but a perpetual offering of self in obedient self-denying love before God.  And this center's ordering principle is the prevenient gift of God in Christ, reconciling humans to God even when they were enemies. 

            
The Benedictine heritage that lives on in the Anglican prayer tradition bequeathes to it also the individual discipline of Lectio Divina, in which the movements found in Anglican common prayer are keyed to the individual in her own private encounter with God.  The Scripture is read, meditated upon, and then returned to God as private prayer and contemplation of the life God has given.  The unique flavor of Benedictine spirituality, however, is that it is only individual in a complementary sense; our primary spiritual practice is a corporate one, reflecting the inherent sociality of human being.  We are summoned to a corporate response to God in reflection, contemplation, and common action.  In this sociality, we come to know ourselves in the gaze of others, from whom we receive affirmation of our own being as gift. 

            
This rather abstract description of the practices of "Anglicanism" is surely a bit idiosyncratic, and it does not really name my spiritual practice; but that is because, in a real sense, no spiritual practice that I am a part of is mine except in the sense that it belongs to Anglicans as a whole.  We are a called out people, and while God's address spares no expense to speak to my heart, it speaks to my heart as it is actually constituted, by relationship to that which is external to me.  There is no me that is not always already me in relation, me in response to that which is not me. 

            

Thus, a life of common prayer disciplines my vision, weaning me off of a kind of preoccupation with myself, with the inner theater in which I differentiate between what is mine and what is not mine.  But in this differentiation I am choking my own response to the givenness of everything that is, the reality of God's gracious gift to me of everything I think is mine.  And in this way, the paradox of humanity that Thurman observes in our captivity to the urgent is the fruit of the desire to acquire and to make mine what can never actually be mine.  What do I have that I have not received?  The Benedictine disciplines preserved in the Anglican Prayer Book traditions challenge my presumption that anything belongs exclusively to me, that even my words are really my own.  And in so doing, it opens my eyes to the utter grace of being and of all beings; I am compelled to say of being what God has said of it, namely that it is "good."  And I am compelled to act against the evil within it by offering myself in response to God's voice as it echoes in the prayers of those around me, of my neighbors.  In this way, the so-called vita activa, the active life in which I participate in the demands of life, is reordered as a lived prayer.  My own captivity to the urgent becomes (gradually and fitfully) an offering of myself to the needs of others, in the recognition that at least sometimes the word they speak to me is an address from God.