Lindisfarne Community: The Understandings

In addition to the Rule, the Lindisfarne Community embraces a set of understandings as guidelines to our way of life.  A link to the full text of the understandings is here.  For the next while, I will think through these nuggets of spiritual wisdom, and apply them to life at the hermitage.

 

The First Understanding:  "Our understandings are those things we aspire toward as we follow Christ and seek to keep the community Rule."  Our life in Christ is aspirational.  It is a calling toward which we are directed, a telos which is both now and not yet.  In this understanding we are described as seekers, people who know themselves to be loved and called, Christ-like and yet incomplete.

There was a time when I would not have resonated with this way of understanding life in Christ, and especially life in community.  I wanted so badly to be "done," certified, accredited, stamped and delivered.  I wanted to think of myself as already "good" in God's eyes, not a perpetual work in progress.

So this understanding is really important for me.  It is a reminder that not only is it ok to be unfinished, it is nothing less than the human condition.  The paragraph closes with this observation:  "We see these understandings in the life of Jesus; shining, precious gems, winsome, lovely, drawing us out of ourselves and towards Christ."   So if the life I aspire to has not yet come to completion, I can live with that.  I get to embrace a way of living that reflects the shining, precious, winsome, lovely truth of a loving Christ.  It is so much more worth living for that vision of spiritual life, than to encase myself in hard-coded rules and expectations.

I am grateful for this understanding, and look forward to sharing my thoughts on the others as we go along.  As always, conversation is welcome!