The Significance of Eldership in Spirituality Today

It is a great pleasure to celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of Spiritus journal. If this were the Middle Ages, we would be doing it with numerous honorary degrees and ecclesiastical preferments showered upon the editorial team, and endless feasts and copious bibulations for the hangers-on. It is, however, not the Middle Ages, and so one must be content with the suitably ascetical offering of the post modern age—an essay pondering the meaning of things, from one who admires the scope and aims of the Journal, and is proud to be associated with its mission.

An essay of spiritual pondering (which might be called wonder-ment) ought to begin with the author's self identification—on the dubious premise that this might help. A Stoic sage (and several of the Christian Fathers following after) would say that the first place to start is with the triple question: Where did you come from? Where are you now? Where are you going? But I shall leave those deep aporia for later assessment, and skip ahead several pages to give the shortest of 'personal situations.' I was an Irish exile in England, then America. I came from the furthest limit of the Western Roman Empire, a border town called Wallsend (the end of Hadrian's defensive wall across the Northern moors of England) and from a tightly bonded Catholic family from Tyrone, Ireland. In my teens I traveled through the cloisters of the church for many years, in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council's liberating effect on theological schools, though my young self was perversely to be found in the stacks, the basements and archives, reading ancient monastic literature, along with patristic philosophy and dogma—a self-imposed exile of another type; always liminal, true to Irish form. In my mid-thirties, I traveled determinedly Eastwards and became Orthodox, welcomed into the warmth of the Romanian Church, who are the only Latin Orthodox peoples in the world. I was priested and left to get on with things, working out a ministry of liturgy and sacraments, alongside a university life teaching ancient and Byzantine Christian studies. I have scribbled much since, mainly seeking to understand, and knowing that to teach the innocent is the best method of learning things oneself. I have always preferred silence to speech, but have talked more than most others of my generation. When I was a child I wished to be a hermit, but now am a professor in New York City, a desert of another type. I major in the spiritual writers of the ancient past, working in schools where spirituality is not high on the theological curriculum. From that biographical pot pourri the following may be digested: I have no right to think that my wonderments here expressed about spirituality will have any force or authority for anyone reading them. Spiritual musings are like pot pourri itself, notoriously unreliable. It either fills the room or lies there inert. Usually inert. Like me, my musings may be liminal. As an Anglo Irish Romanian Orthodox priest, approaching 60 years of age, living in New York city, and teaching Byzantine Christian studies in Union Theological Seminary (which once, to my great amusement, used to call itself on its website: "The Church's Risk-Taker") I have earned the right to be liminal (though not edgy, I trust).

I wish to wonder a little about spirituality: the word, the concept, the status quaestionis. It seems to me that at a time when so many are tired of the Church, more than usually suspicious of it, more than ever (perhaps) hostile to it; there has been a greatly revived interest in matters "spiritual". People have hopes for the spiritual life; they sense that here is the golden hoard lying under the supine dragon; the cool water lying out of sight under the dusty lid of the well. Spirituality is "OK" today (a fact that still needs to be registered in the slow currents of theology school curriculum building). More than this, it is cool. On the other hand Religion is worrisome; Church is banal...