Rule of Life

Our spiritual heritage is Franciscan, which is apt, for that tradition's founder-father also sought the early Church such as he could in Italy a century after the Great Schism. As was the case in his time, it seemed that the Church would collapse. 10% of the population in France (to take one country) loudly protested the widespread depravity of the Roman Catholic Church. Cardinal Peter Damian's The Book of Gomorrah (1051) had been circulating for a century decrying sexual perversion in the monasteries, which was spilling over into the parishes. Rampant child abuse touched every family.

We recall that Anthony of Padua fled the Augustinian Canons, it is said, for reasons of corruption and depravity. And where did he flee? He joined a group renown for its rejection of this life. That is, the Franciscan apostles were refugees, not so different from our own time. Like us, their instinct was to go back to the primitive Church and to seek the purer air of the Gospel age.

It has become obvious that radical innovations in the West, including a celibate (unmarried) priesthood, have gored the Western Church permanently. Our lives, about a thousand years later, continue to face the same issues, and we now see the effective collapse of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Communions.

St. Francis rejected this world: the pretensions of the upper social classes, a general lack of sincere Christian faith, and corruption and depravity within the Church — an entire lifeworld separated from God.

Born little more than a hundred years after the Schism, Francis saw the ancient Church around him everywhere: in Italian ruins, in nearby Greece, and in Asia Minor. He longed for its proximity to the early Church and thence to Gospel life. In the year 1205, he sat in a deserted wayside church gazing upon an Orthodox icon Cross and staring into the Byzantine past, he heard a voice, the Master!

          "Francis, Francis, go and repair my House, for you see it is falling into ruins."

We have heard this story so many times that it is hard to hear it afresh. Yet, there are clues that waken us. The disjunction between the words repair and ruins stands out. How can one repair a ruin? A ruin, by its nature is beyond repair, a total loss. It must be restored.

Francis set about refresh the Chapel of San Damiano where his encounter with Christ had occurred. But his real work would be the restoration of an Orthodox ruin — a church built in the 350s, truly a vestige of the ancient and the original. This church, later known as Portiuncula (Little Portion), had been built by Orthodox hermits of the Valley of Josephat in the Holy Land as a shrine to the Mother of God. To Francis that ruin was a virginal remnant of the Church's former wholeness.

We laugh at the idea that Francis responded to the divine command he heard by restoring the ruins of a little fourth-century chapel. Would not the Founder of the Church, rather, see a vast ruin crying out for re-founding? This famous scene, written by Tommaso da Celana, focuses on the verb riparare meaning to set right a wrong (especially a grave wrong) and to protect. Tommaso da Celano, who is the only source for this story expressed it in this way:

In this passage, the verb repair is equated to restore, which, Francis soon realizes, signifies restoration of the original, Apostolic Church. And this he sets about doing, this time turning to "living stones." The first religious order he founded with his feet striking out to live the original Church life saying, "Preach of the Gospel always! When you must use words." A group of friends he would call the "Fratelli" joined him. He would found three more orders: one for woman (Second Order), one for people in all walks of life (Third Order), and a special Rule for Hermitages (1217-1221), which we have adopted:

• Not more than three, or at the most four Brothers should go together to a Hermitage to lead a religious life there
  [living out our vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience].
• Two of these should act as mothers, with the other two, or the other one, as their sons.
• The mothers are to lead a life of Martha; the other two, or one, the life of Mary.
• Those who live the life of Mary are to have a separate enclosure and each should have a place to himself in which he may pray and sleep.
• Immediately after sunset they should say Compline of the day. They must be careful to keep silence and say their Office, rising for Matins
  [and after that the Holy Sacrifice].
• Their first care should be to strive first for the Kingdom of God and His righteousness (Mt. 6:33)
• Prime and Terce should be said at the proper time, and after Terce the silence ends and they can speak and go to their mothers.
• If they wish, they may beg alms from them for love of the Lord God, like any other ordinary poor people.
  [Our unpaid manual labor on the Hermitage Farm is an expression of godly begging.]
• Afterwards, they should say Sext and None, with Vespers at the proper time.
• They are forbidden to allow anyone to enter the enclosure where they live, and they must take their meals there alone.
• The Brothers who are mothers must be careful to stay away from outsiders and in obedience to their custos keep their sons away from them.
• The Brothers who are sons are not to speak to anyone except their mother or their custos, when he chooses to visit them, with God's blessing.
• The sons, however, may periodically assume the role of the mothers, taking turns for a time as they have mutually decided. Let them strive to observe conscientiously and eagerly everything mentioned above.
  

Now, receiving a blessing to be received into the fullness of the faith, we look further into the past for examples of rules of life. What exactly did the earliest Christian communities look like? This is not an easy question to answer. Our explorations have turned up surprising, not to say uncanny, findings.

Among the earliest Christian communities anywhere on earth are those found in the area we call Ireland and Scotland today. Recent genetic research has shown that these peoples migrated from the Western Steppe, the Caucasus, and the shores of Black Sea. Are they Scythian? Are they Slavic? These terms are artifacts point to social history. What is certain, though, is that their chromosomes mark a migration path from the areas of modern day Ukraine and Russia.

They were evangelized by the disciples of St. Andrew carrying his cross with them, which explains the provenance of modern-day Scottish flag. And they account the Declaration of Arbroath — stating that they "journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules" — as being sacred. It is argued that they were also evangelized by St. Paul, whom he called "the Galatians." That is, what had been proposed for decades now has solid genetic evidence. The earliest Christians in the far West were the ancestors of the Russian Orthodox, and surely Orthodox for they avoided at all costs contact with the Romans.

When the Nicene Council met, their first monasteries in Ireland had long since been built and a second wave into present-day Scotland had begun with monasteries being built there. Their monastery in Clonard boasted a steady state of 4,000 monks.

Vestiges of their monasteries survive as ruins in Ireland. They built small, circular dwelling places, bespeaking common life, without separate quarters for an overlord figure. They worshiped in dome-shaped and circular worship spaces, not hierarchical spaces designed around a throne. Their sacred art was dominated by circles, loops, and intertwining designs, a knitting together of all things, with nothing left out. All parts of the Body, St. Paul taught them, are equally necessary and important.

From what little we know of their social ideals, they lived monastic life, rejecting the diocese so favored in the hierarchical Roman Church. When Roman missionaries, such as St. Patrick, finally arrived, claiming to enlighten Ireland, the meant Roman Christianity deeming the Orthodox lifeworld to be rebarbative. (And it cannot be forgotten that St. Patrick's name was actually Patrician, the aristocrat.) the encounter was very much the culture of the Orthodox monastery versus Roman diocese.

We detect the Orthodox spirit in the rules of the early monasteries Sadly, no rules have survived from the first-through-fifth centuries. What has survived we can only hope is representative of the original spirit of these people.

From the Rule of Ailbe (c. 500):

1. Let his conscience be clear ... humble and without pride ... Let him assist everyone who is ill.
2. Let his work be silently done. Let him not be garrulous but a man of few words. ...
3. Let him be steadfast and without a shadow of weakness .... an anvil in his support of every profitable thing. ...
4. Let him be without any stain of sin and not be haughty. His smile should be joyous but without loud laughter. ....
5. He should not be a grumbler ...
6. Let him never bear a grudge ...
7. Let him be imperturbable ...
8. Let him beware of the temptations of the world, and let him be warlike against worldliness.
   Let him be nimble as a serpent and like a dove in his affection. Let him be gentle in his vigils and like a fortress in his prayer.
9. Let him cultivate and share the fruits of the earth. ...
10. He should be faithful to the obligation of intercession. ...
11. The poor and the needy are to be helped as far as lies within his power.

Rule of Cill Achid (c. 550):

From The Alphabet for Monks (c. 600?)

Our way of life at Our Lady of the Angels Hermitage seeks to partake of the spirit of St. Francis and of these early monastics. We seek a wholesome atmosphere trusting each other and depending on each other as witnesses before whom we might effect the transformation of our minds in Christ (Rom 12:2).

Nonetheless, within this ideal of hermit life, we may encounter infelicity. Lasting conflicts might arise (we pray rarely); business decisions not coming to closure must be made; policies not meeting with universal approval must be put in place; someone must go out into the world representing the community. We aspire to do all things in community by community, but an abbot or abbess is necessary to ensure good order exercising authority rarely.

That person, who shall be elected by Hermitage members and ratified by the Board of Directors, must bear the responsibility to act for all Hermitage members. It follows that he or she must be the least and lowliest among them always aware that authority, by our Lord's command, must first "be last and servant to all" (Mk 9:35). In particular, our Master found abuse of authority to be abhorrent:

The present abbot Our Lady of the Angels Hermitage is Father Columba.