Last week Lyngine commented: “I’m leaning towards the idea that it may hinge on teaching/helping individual clergy and laity to cultivate a strong, grounded spiritual life and how to sustain that as an OC/IC priest or lay person in the midst of isolation—ministry then flows from that—-if the strong spiritual/religious grounding isn’t there or can’t be sustained, then the rest of it falls apart anyway.”

Cultivating a living grounded spiritual life is, I agree an essential element of stability. I think it falls into that category of “this is what we do as a sacramental community” (emphasis on community). There are some elements of this that are I think worth unpacking – the phrase is deceptively short and simple. What is the spiritual life? What does it do? What does it express about our theology? How does it influence our praxis?

Where this gets really interesting is when we begin reflecting on the inherited language, images, and practices we bring to our new life in an OC/IC community. How often do we individually and collectively sit and ask: is this practice, custom, point of theology, a living example of an OC/IC ethos – or do we do it/keep it because it is “known” and “comfortable”?

I’m not suggesting that we re-invent the wheel here. What I am suggesting is that we are happily free to keep those ideas and practices that cultivate our living spirituality and nurture our identity as OC/IC folk, while leaving the baggage, dead weights, and plain nutty rubbish outside. Indeed, sometimes, it is necessary to pick up a broom and sweep away these things.

The caveat of course is that this process of pruning can only be effective in the context of a well informed, connected community. Too often it seems to me, this essential element is missing – so what ought to be an exercise in cultivating positive results, actually leads to strife, and dissolution.

A solution would be to, as a collective effort, cultivate scholarship, and to draw upon those resources in the local, and wider OC/IC community. This again is another step towards breaking down that terrible wall of isolation many communities, and individuals feel and observe.