Stripping

 

I remember one account of practice in a particular monastery was what was called ‘stripping’, the annual accounting for things in each nun’s cell.  What has accumulated.  What is not needed as personal possession.  What should therefore now be stripped out. 

St Francis’ request as he was dying was that he should be laid naked on the earth, which takes all this to a natural conclusion.

I’ve blogged before about

The carefully managed dislocation between thirty-seven years of stipendiary ministry and whatever priestly ministry was to follow was well aided by a compulsory gap of six months without a licence or any permission to officiate at all. 

I thought I saw the point that those of us whose only experience of church membership over many years had been to have a measure of control, even when the ‘control’ is that of promoting collaboration. 

We needed to get used to having no role at all before something quite different and supportive could have any chance of emerging.

and then

I think I am beginning to see a deeper point.  Habitual delivery of ministry can be at the cost of the development of personal discipleship.  However much one guards against it, the obvious example is too often asking not so much ‘how do this Sunday’s readings cut into me?’ as ‘what shall I say about them?’. 

Something more fundamental struck me today as 1 Corinthians 1.26-29 was read as the Epistle for the feast of the Holy Innocents (a passage strangely not otherwise set to be read at a Principal Service on a Sunday).

Not many of those to whom Paul wrote, he says, were wise, powerful or well born.  God chooses the foolish, weak and base.  All so that nobody (‘all flesh’) should boast of themselves. 

Yet ordained stipendiary ministry is one place in which necessarily to exercise at the very least informed teaching, appropriate guidance and a level of visible precedence.

Don’t, I now hear Paul tell me, clutter up your cell with that unnecessary accumulation of honed answers, desire to achieve or perceived status.  Strip it out. 

If not, I will be the subject of my own self satisfaction (the word ‘boast’ is in the future tense and the middle voice) and not laid out naked before the mystery, mercy and majesty of God.