Of late, we have been gathering together the memories and papers that tell the story of the Northumbria Community. Intended as a book it soon became evident that our notes and the many documents and papers collected over two decades loaned themselves to publication over the internet.
We are now happy to make them available on northumbriacommunity.com and to provide narrative. We hope they will serve as a resource to all those called to community and a new monasticism. We pray they will inspire a new generation of community to respond to the call of the desert. Today, we are living in Turkey, continuing God’s call in the desert.
To go they knew not where,
to find they knew not what…
When we began we could never have known how many far-flung individuals would be touched and challenged encouraged and influenced. It was mostly a struggle to survive and a determination to live authentically what God had given us so far “reality will be your strength” I had been told. When the Northumbrian Office was published as Celtic Daily Prayer the ripples spread inevitably far beyond any direct personal contact.
Out of our broken-ness and personal failure and the inescapable challenge of being loved by God had emerged something that speaks of vulnerability and availability. Just as the Daily Office has been appreciated and used by many who have never formally been part of the community so we hope that the memories of our early struggles will meet with resonances in all kinds of people also.
Within the Community and beyond it, the real edge is wherever the people of God have the courage to say YES to Him, YES to risky living, and are living an authentic YES to availability and vulnerability. The journey is bigger than any of us, and for me has involved many relationships – formative, rich, costly, (at times strained almost to breaking point) – but the most important relationship of all is with a living Jesus who we must always keep pointing to, because as Frederick Buechner says…
“there’s something about His eyes and His voice,
there’s something about the way
He carries His head, His hands,
the way He carries His cross
the way He carries me.”
