A vow of conversation

About me…

I am Sister Macrina Walker, ocso, a Cistercian monastic of Koningsoord Abbey in the Netherlands. This means that I live seeking God “under a rule and an abbess” in a community whose life is ordered around a rhythm of prayer, work and reading.

I am originally from South Africa and I studied and briefly taught theology in what is beginning to seem like a rather distant past. My theological formation occurred primarily in an ecumenical, critical, liberationist and feminist context and my own work reflected this context. But I also had questions about the role of tradition in theology and became increasingly aware of the shortcomings of a typically Western modern-cum-postmodern theology that is cut of from the life of faith and the tradition of the Church. These concerns have continued since entering monastic life and have received further stimulus through limited contact with Eastern Christianity. Moreover, I have realised my own lack of background in much of historical Christianity and have become increasingly uncomfortable with what now seems the superficiality of some of my earlier easy judgements. Although I remain critical I now long for a deeper conversation that can help to overcome the polarisation in the Church and which can focus us on the things that really matter.

About this blog…

I was initially rather hesitant at the idea of a blog! Not only do I have questions around the way technology and the internet are changing human communication, but these questions also have particular bearing on monastic life with its emphasis on maintaining a certain distance from human society. However, having not done very much serious theological reading for some years, I am now getting down to some more disciplined reading and it seemed important to find a framework and a space in which to process this. Moreover, having been out of practise at writing in recent years I need a certain stimulus to force me to write!

Thus my primary purpose in starting the blog is to create a space and a framework in which I can process what I read. A secondary purpose is to make available a course that I am writing on the Fathers of the Church. And it will hopefully also be a space for sharing texts that I come across and which may be helpful to others. But we shall have to see how it evolves.

About the name…

Readers may recognise the allusion in the name of the blog to Thomas Merton’s journal extracts published in 1988. “A vow of conversation” is a play on words, for “conversation” refers both to the discussion that the blogosphere enables, but it also refers to the monastic vow of “conversatio morum” which Merton refers to as both the most essential and the most puzzling of the vows. In essence it means a commitment to an ongoing conversion, to a continuing transformation of one’s whole being … which is of course nothing other than the fundamental message of the Gospel itself.

I hesitated to use this title, as I don’t really want to identify myself as a Merton groupie. (I appreciate his writing but am a bit uncomfortable with the cult that has arisen around him). But I find this play on words helpful in defining what I am concerned with. If this blog gets any readers then a certain conversation may emerge (although to what extent I can enter into that remains to be seen as time is limited). Perhaps more importantly though, I see it as a stimulus to furthering my own conversation with the Christian tradition. But the point of this conversation is not abstract knowledge or merely interesting discussion but rather an engagement that leads to transformation.

For the truth that lies at the heart of theology is not something there to be discovered, but something, or rather someone, to whom we must surrender. The mystery of faith is not ultimately something that invites our questioning, but something that questions us.

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery. An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 95.