The Waystead Clearances

I am a professed secular monastic of the Lindisfarne Community, and I keep a Hermitage of the Community, called The Waystead, under the guidance of Amma Beth, Prioress of Solitaries. 

I intended the name to convey the idea of a threshold; a kind of hinterland between the known and unknown, the seen and the unseen. I wanted the name to indicate a place which holds both the holy and the ordinary; a haven which contains both distress and comfort; a refuge which is both safe and completely defenseless.

 

The Waystead Clearances are an expression of a way of life in which I undertake to live in agreement with God— they represent a practice that I consent to with all my heart, mind, and will.

One: To trust in God’s call to the practice of a solitary, contemplative life.

Two: To keep a quiet household; empty of expectations but open to grace.

Three: To hold myself in kinship with all beings in Christ

Four: To bear in mind that kindness is necessary for knowledge to become wisdom.

Five: To practice equanimity, both in delight and in discontent.

Six: To keep my vows as both Christian and Buddhist, living according to the Way.

Seven: To keep the habit of silence as a practice of the Presence of God.

Eight: To manifest the unity of heart-mind-body in the practice of a physical skill.

Nine: To study for the sake of learning itself, not for the sake of accomplishment.

Ten: To practice living without contention or discord, in affinity with all beings.

Eleven: To wait on God, learning to stop where certainty ends and remain there.

 

This way of life is rooted in prayer and contemplation, and it isn’t intended to be self-referential. In fact, every time I try to visualize it in terms of an established pattern, or I start to form an opinion or a set of beliefs about it, it’s as if someone put a finger across my lips and said, “Shhh, stop it!”  It wholly relies on what the author Maggie Ross calls “beholding.”

It’s a watchful waiting, but a waiting in the present, without expectations or suppositions. It’s a ‘holding’ of ‘being.’ It’s a practice of un-knowing. It’s an exercise of immaterial stamina and unfocused clarity. It’s roaming at a standstill. It’s a confident recognition of the utterly unfamiliar. It’s an endless horizon in the compass of a pebble. It’s a Mobius strip of life and death; being and un-being; action and inaction. It manifests, all at once, the wind that blows and the one that hears it blow. It’s the certain knowledge, and the complete ignorance, of where that wind comes from.

Both ‘beholding’ and ‘beholden’— to God and by God— it’s a Way of Life which recognizes that “what the Christ has freed us for is freedom,” (Galatians 5) as well as what the Buddha teaches us about how to practice living in that same freedom: “Vast is the Robe of Liberation, a formless field of benefaction. I wear the Tathagata’s teaching, saving all sentient beings.” (The Verse of the Kesa)