So began a nearly 40-year relationship with this community. In this place I found some security to explore the shape of faith but above all the discipline of prayer and the nurture of my spiritual life. On this journey I was encouraged and challenged in equal measure by the patient listening of the sisters to my questions and sometimes rather self-indulgent preoccupations.
It was also, of course, a time of discovery and adventure. I followed the well-worn track of throwing myself in headfirst to the freedom, the learning, the adventure of undergraduate life in London. Theology was testing of my rather protected and shallow narratives of faith. It was also an amazing adventure into a passion for theology as wisdom for life that has really never abated. Someday it might be interesting to chart the way in which theology has shaped and challenged the contours of my biography. This has been in unexpected ways but also sometimes intensely painful in the confrontation about truth, agency and direction.
Theology can hold a mirror to much of our own life. It invites us into ultimate questions about identity, agency and the mess of attempting to live a good life. Some of this is linked to the complexity of institutions of religious practice, and in my case the Church of England.
There are lots of times when I have considered that religion and religious people are not altogether good for health and well-being! I brought many questions and yearnings to the Chapel at Fairacres as I searched for a reliable map. The community was a place where I felt held and prayed for and loved. Whatever the strength of frustration and anger at the world and my limitations, it found a level in this liminal space.
In this place, I was able to rest and stand back as the community accompanied me on my spiritual journey. It was here that I learned to be still and listen. It was here that I began to understand the need for the discipline of prayer and an openness (and vulnerability) for the soul to grow and flourish. There is much more that might be said here about what followed after my years of theological formation. In Oxford, Birmingham and Windsor (and now Salisbury), this place has grown into the shapes and patterns of my life like ivy tangled around a tree.
So a few days reconnecting and a steady pace to reflect. I continue to admire the way the community has reordered their space with a major building project. It is good to see their Press still thriving with a wide range of publications.
Take a look at their list if you find a moment https://www.slgpress.co.uk/
Sister Jane SLG – The Hidden Joy and Loving God Whatever
I have been rereading the rather rich and dense collection of Sister Jane’s writings (Loving God Whatever and The Hidden Joy) and reminded of her wisdom along with her great capacity for friendship and understanding. She could tune in to whoever was with her and one always felt better and richer as a result of any conversation.
I love this particular challenge to the community taken from her Chapter Charge in 1976:
“As in so many aspects of our life, the future is splendidly uncertain. Nothing is secure, except God; we have no abiding city. We are called into the wilderness to be perpetual pilgrims.” (1976)
Jane taught me to respect and search out the density of silence. She also knew from the inside that this way of discipleship was costly and hard. Jane expected nothing else.
I am told that she often used to say to the community, “We are called to a life of sacrifice so it might as well be this as anything,” as she invited her sisters to get on with living, praying and loving.
But there was also something in her that is rare – and we often see it in generous people. It is this – hard experience does not harden a generous heart but actually makes it more tender and understanding. Some people either idealised the enclosed life or imagined that they were so removed from everyday living that there can be little sense of groundedness.
This is quite the opposite of my experience of Fairacres. Despite the enclosure and the silence there is deep within this community a huge amount of wisdom about people and the world’s contradictions.
It was Father Gilbert Shaw, a former Warden of the Community, who reminded the Sisters that the work of this particular place was listening ……taking the situation that we are in and holding it with courage, not being beaten down by it.
Jane added that it would be well for all Christians to learn to listen in that way for the sort of deepening in prayer that could bring about in us a change of heart and even of mind. A conversion of the heart and a redirection of our entire life to the will of God is essential spiritual work and a journey of a lifetime. This is language and an approach to our discipleship that needs rediscovering.
Contemplation is a silent language that we might need to learn perhaps and relearn – a self forgetfulness that doesn’t take the self any more seriously than it needs to be taken! We need to learn to rejoice in and depend more and more upon God’s unfaltering love. It may be that God longs for our happiness and indeed fun in heaven!
These present times are not easy for Christians. Conflict, anxiety and a lack of trust amongst us amidst a steady and inexorable decline over recent decades in church attendance may well make us wonder what God is up to. In every area of life we have to live with a balance between change and permanence. Each season in nature is old and new, different and the same.
There are cycles in history and patterns in the universe and we need to take a longer and perhaps more faithful view, trusting in a loving creator who is Redeemer and sanctifier. Much of this is beyond our understanding but we do need to trust and above all, to love.
This is summed up in a passage from John V Taylor’s book, A Christlike God.
Thinking about God and loving God, thinking further and loving more, is a pendulum of wonder and incomprehension, illumination and darkness, loss and possession, abasement and bliss, which, once started must continue for ever as we move further into the infinity of God. For all eternity we shall be travelling further and further into the knowledge and love of this God who is our home and our rest.
No church community has inspired me more than the Sisters of the Love of God. Amidst our functionalism and hyperactivity we would do well to stop and listen to our heartbeat and look more carefully at what’s going on. This is a call to get deep down into the soil of loving God. Nothing is secure, except God.
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James Woodward is Principal of Sarum College. This article has been adapted from the original which appeared on James Woodward’s website.
James is co-leading The Practice of Spiritual Care on Monday 13 May 2024.