I have been thinking a lot about two quotes this week. The first from Bonhoeffer on some words he wrote from a prison cell about how he saw a lay movement of new monastics as being a form of church for the modern world. The second, is a quote about how those drawing on a contemplative approach to life, can be fully engaged with the complexity of the modern world to seek to bring renewal and justice:
“The renewal of the Church will come from a new type of monasticism which has only in common with the old an uncompromising allegience to the sermon on the mount. It’s high time women and men banded together to do this.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a letter to his brother
“The achievement of divine simplicity implies not the annihilation of the complex world but its illumination and transfiguration, its integration in a higher unity. This will involve the appearance of a new type of saint who will take upon himself the burden of the complex world.”
Nicholas Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality, Bles, 1939, p.98
Now the words illuminating culture and transfiguring culture keep coming up. In the West, the idea of God transfiguring culture or transfiguring anything is not really a well known concept. But in the Eastern Church, the transfiguration is an important high note in the ministry of Jesus, where Jesus’s involvement in the world as a human, following his vocation, leads to a moment of transfguration, of change, and a moment of divine exposure and presence – an event of change and revealing…
The implications of holding these two quotes together, is the implication – that as we seek to pattern a Christian spirituality deeply involved in the world as community, then what we do, and our seeking God profoundly, seeking to life in a way modelled by christ, then our hope is that God will bring change and the presence of God, through tranfigured moments…
I need to think more about this idea of transfiguring…