Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everyday Life by Christopher Jamison, London, Phoenix Paperback, 2007 ($24.95)
In 2005 the Benedictine Abbey at Worth in Sussex invited five men to sample the monastic life for forty days and nights (a chatline producer, a painter and decorator, a lawyer, a retired teacher, and a Cambridge PhD candidate). BBC TV produced a series about the venture called ‘The Monastery’. It attracted a viewing audience of three million people, forty thousand visits to the Worth Abbey website in the month the series was showing, and hundreds of requests from people wanting to do a retreat at the abbey. The ABC has recently screened the series here, after producing a parallel Australian version involving five lay women and a nunnery.
Worth’s abbot, Father Christopher Jamison, who anchored the BBC series, became an instant celebrity because of his sensitivity to the men, his natural charm and his firm but lucid exposition about what being a contemplative entails. The series has contributed to a groundswell of interest in the Rule of St Benedict and how the Benedictine discipline can be used by people in daily life outside the cloisters.
Jamison is a Melbourne-born Oxford graduate who became a monk in 1973 at the age of 22. He became Headmaster of Worth School in 1994, and was elected abbot in 2002. As a result of the series and frequent requests to put his introduction to novices into print, Father Christopher has now written a small, charming and brilliantly informative book on how to use the monastic steps in everyday life, with separate chapters on how to engage silence, contemplation, obedience, humility, community, spirituality and hope. It is easy to make the book the basis for contemplation sequenced over several days. He ends with a demonstration on how to use lectio divina, based on the passage about the prodigal son. It is both simple and profound, articulate and cogent.