My recent visit to Hilfield Friary (‘Forty years On’) has prompted thoughts about community. When I first visited this Anglican Franciscan Community in rural Dorset 40 years ago there were about 20 brothers (including novices), clearly visible in their distinctive brown habits, (complete with a girdle with 3 knots, representing the three vows, poverty, chastity and obedience) walking around the Friary site, which is a collection of buildings grouped around the main house (with refectory) and Chapel (a former cow shed). There were also, gathered around the table at mealtimes, a number of homeless men and others with a variety of learning disabilities who had come to make their home with the friars.
The Community, with its varied buildings, has evolved over the last 100 years from a home for displaced men in the years following the First World War, a residential school for ‘maladjusted’ children, becoming eventually the Friary of St Francis, dedicated to following the example of St Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) who called men, women and lay people to follow his life of simplicity, joy and prayer in his three orders. A short history of the Friary can be found here https://www.hilfieldfriary.org.uk/abouthilfield/ .
Unlike many other monastic orders, whose monks take vows of ‘stability’, committed to living in a given monastery for life, the life of St Francis was more mobile and peripatetic, travelling the villages of Umbria and further afield to spread Christ’s gospel amongst the poorest and neediest of people. For that reason his modern day brothers are mostly found in cities, working amongst the poor, as well as in other houses of prayer. This means that there are only a few (4-5) in Hilfield. However, this House took a decision, around 20 years ago, to invite many others, including families and volunteers, to become a complete part of the Community, alongside the brothers, helping around the site in all kinds of ways with commitment to the love of the Earth expressed in St Francis’ ‘Canticle of the Creatures’ and to put that love into practical action around the site. So in fact the community is much bigger than just the friars, including guests like me who come to stay for a while.
This Holy Week, therefore, it was a joy to gather in the Chapel on Maundy Thursday to remember Christ washing the disciples’ feet and seeing friars, children, young volunteers and more elderly guests take part by washing each other’s feet. It was also a joy (well, kind of) to get up at 5am for the Easter bonfire before going into the Chapel for the Ceremonies followed by a festive breakfast, then later an Easter lunch. Around that table community is formed, with a committed core but ever changing personnel, with everyone always included. One of those people was the absent brother Jonathan, whose harrowing emails from the West Bank (Palestine)were read out each evening during the week.
One of the names for the place that became Hilfield Friary, when it was a school for ‘maladjusted’ children (as they were known) was ‘The Little Commonwealth’ , an experimental school where children made some of the rules , a bit like Summerhill but very small scale. In involving the variety of people they do involve in its day-to-day life, I think Hilfield continues to deserve that name.
As I look back over my years in ministry, ‘The little commonwealth’ is a phrase I’d love to be applied to the parishes where I served (though it would be rather pompous).I can see now that forming community has been at the heart of my work, like a series of concentric circles. At the centre was the worshipping community. This included committed adult disciples, but also children and people with learning disabilities, gathered around the altar at the Eucharist, just like they do at Hilfield. As the circles grew wider, this Commonwealth would take in the church schools where I served as Chaplain, the groups which took part in Community Pantomimes and Musicals based at the church, Messy Church, , the Warm Space Lunch, Community Improvement Groups and occasionally the wider community, as people gathered in church to mark the passing of a well-known person. All these groups of otherwise unconnected people either met in the church or were brought together by it.
What did these groups have in common? A good question. As secularisation grew over the 30 years or so of my ministry, there was less and less of a sense of shared faith (in terms of religious belief) in the different groups and more and more of a sense of ‘using’ the church as a venue. Yet there was an indefinable ‘value added’ element to such church-organised events which somehow elevated them beyond the purely practical and made them into ‘community’ gatherings, a ‘little commonwealth.’ They would not have been the same without the presence of church people at their heart.
‘Community’ is an overused and often meaningless term, especially when co-opted by Government (eg ‘Care in the Community’) but you know it when you see it, or don’t see it any longer. I have moved in retirement from a place with a strong sense of community where the church had an important role, to a large housing estate, where there is little that unites the residents and where the church seems to have no presence. TS Eliot’s lines from 90 years ago still feel quite relevant:
What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of God.
Even the anchorite who meditates alone,
For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of God,
Prays for the church, the Body of Christ incarnate.
And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere (Choruses from ‘The Rock’ 1934)
I have quoted these words before and heard them quoted, but never before realised what a polemic the poem is in defence of church building in an age where people increasingly couldn’t see the point of them. ‘The church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.’
90 years on, I take two things away from this poem for our age. First, the importance of church buildings. For all my 36-year old ministry, I heard the voices of churchgoers, including those in authority, decry church buildings as a ‘millstone around our necks’. ‘The church is the people,’ so it is said. ‘We can pray anywhere.’ Both are of course true, but they are spoken from the point of view of the faithful, not the vast majority in our land. When my successor, with the help of the Archdeacon, closed the church building where I had happily ministered for 20 years and where my daughter was married ,my grandson baptised and where many of the gatherings quoted above took place, a lifeline of faith was cut to the children of the church school opposite, to couples who would have liked to marry there and to local people who would have wanted to celebrate the life of one of their own, just as they were able to do at the church I moved to. Such severed lifelines are not easily re-connected. This is a sad lesson which is being learned up and down the country as parish churches are abandoned in favour of new Christian communities (‘church plants’) established in anonymous halls and warehouses with no connection to the past.
The second ‘takeaway’ is the importance of the faithful and their prayers in building up the community. Just as those 4 friars at Hilfield provide focus and definition for the majority lay community, so does even a small group of praying Christians give definition to the community it serves. I spoke of the parish as a ‘little commonwealth’. St Paul writes of the early Christians that ‘our commonwealth is in heaven.’ (Phil 3:20, more commonly translated as ‘citizenship’. Our vertical look to God our Father defines our horizontal regard to our brothers and sisters. ‘Our citizenship is in Heaven’ (writes Eliot): ‘yes, but that is the model and type for your citizenship upon earth.’
25 years ago I was involved in discussions around setting up a community centre on an estate in the parish blighted by vandalism and drug use. When I was asked why I, as the Vicar of the church up the road wanted to be involved on this estate, a local man answered the question for me. ‘Well, you won’t be coming for our vote every four years’. I think what he was saying was that we, in the church, are committed to a higher, non-partisan ideal which seeks the good of all, rather than just a section. From those discussions grew my involvement in a drop-in Flat which helped to revitalise the estate and led to the establishment of a bigger centre at the parish church which was better positioned and open to a wider range of people.
The church, however small it might be, has a vital role in community building, because Christianity believes in God the creator of all and therefore wants to draw people together. Without that life together, there is no life, for there is no life that is not in community. I thank God for the ‘little commonwealths’ of which I have been part.
Hugh's Views 