Tantalus and the pelican: exploring monastic spirituality today: Nicholas Buxton

I wrote the following for my church magazine. The book is published was by Continuum in 2009 and it available on Kindle.

I picked up this book in the gift shop of Ripon Cathedral, where it was advertised as by their recent curate. As I read the introduction, I was struck by one passage and cried out loud “Good man!” People turned round and looked at me so I thought I better buy the book. The passage that impressed me said:

“Rather than seeing spirituality and religion as separate - or worse as opposed - I suggest that if spirituality refers to the innate human instinct to seek meaning and fulfilment, then religion is the formalisation of that in terms of a way of life, to which we have a duty to be faithful and true.”

I was so grateful to find someone putting it so simply, and explaining the vital role of what he calls religion.

Nicholas Buxton is really writing three books, but they all three work together. One is a survey of monastic thought and history, one is his own spiritual autobiography and finally he provides an individual and convincing justification for religious faith in the light of much current criticism.

In the first place, as the sub-title says, the book is an explanation of monastic spirituality for today, although in no way trying to ignore the challenges or difficulities. From Antony of Egypt to Benedict with a detailed look at Evagrius (who first identified the seven deadly sins), the significance of these monastic pioneers is clearly explained. Buxton was one of the participants in the TV reality show The Monastery and he has spent time in the austere Carthusian monastery of Parkminster. He begins the book by saying the first time he visited a monastery it was “one of the most exciting things I had ever done”.

This is very surprising given what he tells of his background. The second aspect is the book is of how he came to be a Christian: it is always inspiring to hear how someone becomes a Christian when it is completely unexpected. He was confirmed at his public school and found the Christianity as there presented totally unconvincing, with its emphasis above all on social conformity. He left school with no further education and spent his twenties bumming around in various dead end jobs, drinking too much: the classic drugs, sex and rock and roll scenario. Although he was an atheist, he had become interested in the ideas of Buddhism. After ten years he realised he was going nowhere and he didn’t just need to read about Buddhist spirituality but experience it. So he gave up drinking and flew out to India to learn Eastern spirituality at first hand. He spent time in an ashram in India, meditating seriously, and also in a Buddhist monastery in New Zealand. After a while he began to sense that it would be more appropriate for the exploration of the divine, which is beyond any human culture, not by taking up on the cultural language of the East, but to live in the culture to which he was born. He went to church one Easter on impulse, and although the whole service was in a native language he didn’t understand, he left after receiving communion( for the first time since his confirmation) with a grin on his face.

He returned to Britain and took a degree and in due course was accepted for ordination in the Church of England. Since July 2012 he has been a priest for a parish in Newcastle.

With this unexpected background, Buxton comes up with reasons for living with the orthodox Christian tradition, dependent neither on authoritarian rulings, individual emotional experience or sentimentality. I find this very exciting and hopeful. His starting point is the simple insight “The fact that human beings can think at all is something we take for granted. It suggests that we are creatures who have self-awareness, which is to say we have a fundamental intuition of being, an awareness of the irreducible fact of existence which some people call God”.

In Buddhist thought, which was a major influence for Buxton, this means that everything in life – pleasurable as well as painful – is somehow unsatisfactory and frustrating as it is all impermanent. We live like Tantalus in Greek legend with satisfaction always just out of reach. And yet there is a sense of an “irreducible fact of existence which some people call God”, a source for healing and wholeness. But this source is not something we can own or describe in words. However words are the means by which we have a formalisation of that insight of the divine. Buxton is sad that although many people now say they are eager for spirituality, they reject church life on the basis that they cannot accept the literal truth of its creeds or scriptures. This attitude he considers a failure of imagination and a failure to understand how stories work. He says:

“We live our lives according to and within stories ... story telling is what we do because we are human: it makes us human. The supposedly distinct boundary between truth and fiction now seems blurred at best. It is all stories. This is not to say that religious stories are merely stories in comparison with something else that is really true. I mean there are only stories.”

Spirituality needs to be embodied in a way of life and a community, not just left to interior feelings, and this is what the monastic life has always tried to do.

This book deals with some of the basic issues of life and prayer in the contemporary world. These are not simple issues and I am not at all sure of the implications of much that he says. However Nicholas Buxton writes in simple terms and with personal charm. It left me thinking that lots of writing on these issues is mere waffle repeating clichés. I can thoroughly recommend this book.