Graffiti found in an alley of the old city of Jerusalem – “We need peace.”

I’ve just had a meeting with a group of people interested in forming a Boston area chapter of Kids4Peace. Kids4Peace (K4P) is an organization that began a few years ago in Israel/Palestine at St. George’s College in Jerusalem. SSJE’s work with St. George’s as chaplains for many courses brought us into contact with the K4P program and its founder, Dr. Henry Carse

K4P is a fascinating undertaking. Kids from Jerusalem 10-12 years of age representing the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam gather regularly for activities and conversations designed to foster better understanding and genuine mutual regard. In the summer, the Jerusalem kids come to America for camp experiences with kids of the same age. As a promotional brochure puts it: “By celebrating the differences and similarities between their cultures and faith traditions, these children are taking a step toward global understanding and peace.”

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I am sure many of you are aware of the Society’s current missionary work in Tanzania and Kenya. But you may not know of our early work in South Africa, both in Capetown and in the Transkei area of the East Cape. The Society of Saint John the Evangelist was founded in 1866 as a society of missionaries and the ministry of the Society was intended to be missionary work, both domestic and abroad

Its organization was modeled on that of St. Vincent de Paul’s Company of Mission Priests, founded in France in the mid 17th century. Within four years of the founding of SSJE, a missionary province had been opened in the United States, and in 1874 the Society established a base in India. It was not until 1883, however, that the Society began its work in South Africa, when Fr. Frederick William Puller arrived in Capetown to serve as chaplain to the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, who ran a hostel for girls and a medical mission which included the care of lepers on Robben Island. The Society started the parish of St. Philip the Deacon and built a school. The work in Capetown was primarily with native Africans, mainly migrants from countries to the north; and “coloreds,” which included all other non-whites—Malays, East Indians, and persons of mixed blood. Virtually all of these were men who had left their families and had crowded into Capetown seeking work. To provide them housing and to serve as a evangelical base, Fr. Puller established St. Columba’s Hostel in 1886. It was through St. Columba’s that Bernard Mizeki, a native of Mozambique, became a Christian, was trained as a catechist and sent as a missionary to Mashonaland (now Zimbabwe).

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“From the earliest days God has given members of our Society the calling and gifts for the ministry of spiritual direction.” (Rule of the Society: Chapter 30.)

The ministry of spiritual direction is very rewarding.  The exercise of this ministry is for me a deeply humbling experience and one which I never take for granted. As the Benedictine writer Matthias Neumann put it, “It is an immense responsibility to take on the guidance of human lives, especially the sifting, discerning, and supporting of the inner-most secrets of hearts.”

In the monastery here in Cambridge we have several rooms set aside for spiritual direction. Many of the brothers meet with individuals regularly, perhaps once a month, over several years. We also offer directed retreats where we welcome a person to spend a few days with us and give them the opportunity to meet with a brother several times during their stay. At other times a person will ask to meet with a brother just once in order to receive guidance about a particular issue in their life with God.

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One sunny summer day as a young boy I experienced a miracle.  I was holding a small magnifying lens, examining a flower petal.  Suddenly the flower leapt on fire.  I was shocked!  In a profoundly simple way, I witnessed the power of captured light: enormous.  All light emanates from God.  In the Genesis creation account, God creates light on the first day – “Let there be light”; however it is not until the fourth day that God creates the sun, moon, and stars (Gen.1:1-19).  God’s light precedes our light.  This is such an important reminder when you are living through a cloudy day or stormy season of life: how to capture, store, focus, reflect God’s light, the light of life.  Several practices are helpful.

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Fr. Spence Burton next to Ralph Adams Cram, with three unidentified contractors, at the construction site of the Monastery.

In October 1929, the stock market crashed, sending the nation into the worst economic depression in history, the Great Depression. During this time, Spence Burton, the superior of SSJE, was working with the celebrated architect Ralph Adams Cram on plans for the new Monastery on Memorial Drive. The project, when finished, would not only enable the Society’s work in the spiritual formation of students, lay people, seminarians, and clergy, but would also be a living monument to the Society’s hope for the future

The American Congregation of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist gained autonomy from the English branch of the order in 1914. When Spence Burton was elected the second superior of the American branch in 1924, he had high aspirations for its mission; aspirations that required a suitable mother house for the Society’s growing numbers and ministry. The project began to be realized when initial financial gifts from Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Burton family allowed land to be bought and the first building to be built. This building, known as Saint Francis House, was completed in 1926. A second unit, with more rooms and a temporary chapel in the basement, was added to it in 1928. It was used for ten years to house the members of the Society, and is now the Guesthouse of the Monastery. But much was left to be built, including the chapel and new living quarters for the Brothers, as well as a refectory, library, and common rooms.

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“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” – Jesus

“Simplify, simplify, simplify.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Rules for a simpler lifestyle cannot be universal rules. We are responsible for their imagination and situation. Nor is a simpler lifestyle a panacea for what ails. But, a simpler lifestyle can be an act of faith as a matter of personal integrity and commitment to a more just distribution of the world’s scarce resources. It can be a resolution against a mindset that calls for overconsumption.

Jesus called his disciples to become simpler like a child. Withdrawal from the often neurotic pressure of our materialistic society can be a response to that call. It can be an act of solidarity with the vast majority of humanity which lacks the range for choices we enjoy.

A simpler lifestyle can be a way to share with those who have less and a way of returning to them what is usurped by unjust social and economic structures. Assuming a stance of under-consumption can be provocative invitation to others into a conversation about affluence, poverty and social justice.

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A few years ago, in a op-ed piece for The Boston Globe, retired Archbishop of Capetown, Desmond Tutu wrote:

Whenever I am asked if I am optimistic about an end to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I say that I am not. Optimism requires clear signs that things are changing – meaningful words and unambiguous actions that point to real progress. I do not yet hear enough meaningful words, nor do I yet see enough unambiguous deeds to justify optimism.

However, that does not mean I am without hope. I am a Christian. I am constrained by my faith to hope against hope, placing my trust in things as yet unseen. Hope persists in the face of evidence to the contrary, undeterred by setbacks and disappointment.

Archbishop Tutu speaks with the kind of authority that is won only through hard experience, living as he did through some of the cruelest years of South Africa’s apartheid. I find myself humbled by his words, disposed as I am on most days to a kind of complacent despair for the state of the world—how many war zones are there today? Israel/Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan are only the most immediate. Or if I think of the state of the Church, especially the Anglican so-called Communion—how many variations of the via media are actually possible and plausible? Or closer to home, my own life—how many variations on a theme are possible for making the same mistakes over and over and over again?

A bed in the cloister garden, viewed from the balcony of the Monastery.

Hope has been described as the bastard middle child of the theological virtues—known, and perhaps even admired, but not much mentioned and only quietly practiced. Visit any theological library, and you will find a vast literature on faith. You will find an even larger body of writing on love. But you will find surprisingly little on hope. I am not sure why this is so—perhaps it is because theologians (and we) have been disappointed so many, many times by unrealized hopes, discouraged by the frank awareness of prayers which God has apparently chosen not to answer, at least as we would like.

This intrigues me because I understand and know personally that is hope as crucial to a whole life as either faith or love. Hope, simply defined, is the capacity to imagine a future. Like memory—which we could define as the ability to recall the past—hope is an essential element of what it means to be fully human and fully alive. Without hope, we die.

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The English word “despair” comes from the Latin desperare from de- “without” + sperare “to hope.” Without hope, life can easily be too much, and despair comes knocking at the door. Hope is not optimism. Optimism is a mere gloss on the surface. The traditional symbol for hope is an anchor. An anchor will hold you fast and keep you from drifting, and yet, pulled up and stowed, an anchor also travels with you as you sail ahead in life. Hope is a “steadfast anchor of the soul,” we read in the Letter to the Hebrews 6:19. Hope is something that rests deeper in the water than what happens on the stormy surface of life. For Saint Paul, all that we do and every step we take is underlined by hope. We live by hope, he reminds us. Most everything else in life is fleeting, and yet “faith, hope, and love abide.”1 Cor. 13:13

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“Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
I Samuel 3:10

I once had a deaf friend, an earnest Christian, who asked me whether hearing people could hear God’s voice as clearly as they could hear one another’s voices. He had often observed hearing people responding to one another’s voices, mysteriously communicating meaning to one another through the movements of their jaws and lips, and understanding one another even when they weren’t looking at each other, or when the speaker was in another room. He had learned that they possessed a mysterious ability that he had never had, and now he wondered if the same ability that enabled them to communicate with one another even when separated by a wall or a door enabled them also to communicate with God. “Does God talk to you?” he asked; “Can you hear God?”

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Br. Geoffrey, serving as Chaplain to the House of Bishops, pictured with Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

The “big top” (as it was called) was filled with people from what seemed every nation upon earth. Everyone was absolutely silent and watching heartbreaking pictures of a terrible disaster. On the screen, we saw the lush and beautiful landscape of Burma or Myanmar and yet its beauty had been shattered by a terrible monsoon.

We saw pictures of homes destroyed, dead men and women and children floating on the swollen waters of the Irrawaddy, and then we heard the wonderful stories of loving service provided by so many.  In particular we saw on the screen the work of the Anglican Church of the Province of Myanmar. It’s not a large church but one whose members sacrifice so much to bring relief to the suffering around them. And then we all sang together a hauntingly beautiful Burmese rendition of the Magnificat.

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