The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

Of Margins and Mangers

August 16th, 2006

Esther de Waal, Anglican Celtophile and lay Benedictine, is one of those very few spiritual writers in whose books I continually find images or quotes that shift my view slightly, or sometimes encapsulate what I’ve always felt but have never put words to. Her small book Living with Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality is a fascinating meditation on paradox, on living tensions rather than trying to resolve them. It’s so cool that I even snuck it into some of my non-blog writing.

I’m just now reading de Waal’s more recent book Lost in Wonder: Rediscovering the Spiritual Art of Attentiveness. Though I’m not yet very far into it, I’ve already found one of those quotes that seems to relate to everything I’m thinking and talking about right now. Here ’tis:

“An American lay woman who is fortunate enough to be associated with a Cistercian abbey, describes her experience of the institutional Church as that of finding ‘no room at the inn.’ But she tells us that when there is no room in the traditional structures, ‘God with us’ becomes a reality in the stable, on the margins.”

I won’t comment on that much, because I know that many of you, like I, often feel there’s no room at the inn for people who aren’t interested in busy-busy “churchy” stuff. A lot of us keep going to church anyway, because Jesus can still be there even if we can’t stand the other people who worship him. But we find our real spiritual nourishment and community on the margins. Anyway, I knew many of us shared this experience, but I hadn’t thought of it in spatial terms of “inn” and “stable.”

It’s also kind of neat that the Cistercian abbey–what many people might think of as a “traditional structure”–is a “margin” for this laywoman. It’s nice to be reminded that margins can be opened up anywhere, that stables can exist inside inns. And, as those of you who’ve read The Last Battle know, stables can contain the whole world.

Entry Filed under: Books, Uncategorized