IN THIS accessible and hopeful new work, George Guiver, member and formerly Superior of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield, and veteran writer on liturgy and spirituality, tells us that he would advise somebody who had lost their faith not to become too bound up with their own mental state. Rather, they should attend to the flesh and blood reality of the Church before their eyes: “the people, the worship, reading of the Scriptures, the practices of prayer, the gestures, artefacts, sacraments, church buildings, Christian art and music, the service of our neighbour, the engagement in public life. . . give yourself to all of them and see what happens.”
Not everybody is called to be a monk or a nun, but Guiver’s central argument is that the habits and practices of monastic communities can be a source of renewal for the entire Church. The order that this will normally take again reflects the practical orientation: “things are done, then engagement follows; and then begins the long process of articulating our belief about it all.”
Guiver argues, perhaps controversially in the current times, that, for this to happen, we must love the Church; for, while “it is true that the institutional Church routinely makes a mess of things,” it is, both in its visible and invisible reality, the body of Christ. Here, too, monastic communities make a distinctive contribution by reminding individual believers of the priority of the Church. No prayer is ever private, but always in communion with the Church’s prayer. No act of worship should just be created by a community or cleric to fit their own agenda, but always springs from the flow of the Church’s living tradition. Encouragingly, he utters a rare call from within Anglicanism for the necessity of a renewed eucharistic life as a precondition for wider renewal.
There is the occasional clunkiness that might have been ironed out by the editor: plates put into the monastery “washing up machine”; something that “Rowan Williams has said somewhere”; and a couple of unnecessary routine genuflexions to being anti-Brexit and anti-Trump.
But this thought-provoking and inspiring book surely does point to a deep wellspring of genuine renewal for a new era in which the worship of a fictitious church that Guiver (perhaps a touch uncharitably) calls “St Mega’s” is at last acknowledged to be not the only way forward.
To our incalculable loss, however, it is not clear that our current religious communities will be strong enough to point the way forward in the way in which, he argues, they could and should be doing. Perhaps their own renewal — in new but continuous forms — may be a necessary priority and first step.
The Very Revd Dr Edward Dowler is the Dean of Chichester.
All Christians are Monks: The monastery, the parish and the renewal of the Church
George Guiver
Sacristy Press £14.99
(978-1-78959-346-4)
Church Times Bookshop £13.49
