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Tantalus and the Pelican: Exploring Monastic Spirituality Today
This is an informative and engaging book about monasticism, its history, practice, and relevance to contemporary life, combining personal insights with sound scholarship. Buxton begins with a focus on the early days of Christian monasticism and the transmission of this tradition to Western Europe, concentrating on particular themes or figures of interest and seeking to draw parallels with the present-day. He then explores the central features of monastic life, such as silence and humility, drawing on personal experience as well as foundational literature. Part three examines the contemporary relevance of monasticism, suggesting that the core Benedictine principles of stability, conversion, and obedience offer a framework for an alternative way of being that may enable our everyday lives to be enriched and even transformed.
- GenresChristian
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 15, 2009
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17 people want to read
About the author
Nicholas Buxton
7 books6 followersNicholas Buxton is the Director of St Antony's Priory, a retreat centre in Durham, and the founder of 'Just Meditation' and the Newcastle Meditation Centre.
He was born in Singapore and grew up in London. He took up meditation in his late twenties, has a PhD in Buddhist philosophy from Cambridge, and is an experienced meditation teacher and retreat leader, having studied and practised extensively within both Buddhist and Christian monastic traditions.
His latest book, 'Just Meditation', 2020, describes a distinctive approach to the learning and practice of meditation that is simple, accessible and inclusive: everyday meditation for everyone.
He was born in Singapore and grew up in London. He took up meditation in his late twenties, has a PhD in Buddhist philosophy from Cambridge, and is an experienced meditation teacher and retreat leader, having studied and practised extensively within both Buddhist and Christian monastic traditions.
His latest book, 'Just Meditation', 2020, describes a distinctive approach to the learning and practice of meditation that is simple, accessible and inclusive: everyday meditation for everyone.
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April 24, 2018I 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 difficulties. 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 this year 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.
“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 difficulties. 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 this year 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.
September 6, 2021
This is a well-written, clear, and concise account of the history, practice, and philosophy of Christian monasticism. I only purchased it because the author was one of the participants on the BBC's reality TV show, The Monastery from 2005, a programme I loved. Disappointingly he doesn't dwell on it much but nonetheless, this book proved to be one of those pleasant better-than-expected reads.
February 4, 2016
This book was good, a really interesting autobiography crosshatched with a history of monasticism, meditation, contemplative spirituality, and how it all applies to modern life.
However...
I admit that as a non-Christian reader I'm harder to convince than a believer, but I ultimately found aspects of the book unconvincing.
I was fascinated by how someone with Buxton's background could ultimately end up becoming a C of E Vicar, and I don't feel like there was an answer in the book.
Rev. Buxton seems to think that reality is just stories all the way down. He advocates engaging creatively with our traditional stories to find deeper truths... but he never really explains why someone should invest religiously in the stories of the bible but not Star Wars, or Hamlet. Surely biblical stories are only valuable if they contain actual insight and wisdom on some level? If we are the ones creatively injecting meaning into the stories so that we can derive meaning from them... Well then we aren't actually deriving meaning from the stories, are we?
I'm not sure that he explains what the stories and traditions gave him that he didn't have already.
Why put energy into rehabilitating a mythology unless it contains value of its own?
Where do Buxton's values come from *originally*?
I feel a lot of modern Christians spend a lot of time trying to tortuously interpret the bible so as to find our own values in it... But if you didn't derive your values from the text originally, I don't understand what the point of that exercise is.
Maybe reality is nothing but stories layered on stories. But it seems to me that it was Buxton who converted the bible, not the bible who converted Buxton.
So the book leaves us with a question: which story was it that informs his reality and why does he not engage with that?
However...
I admit that as a non-Christian reader I'm harder to convince than a believer, but I ultimately found aspects of the book unconvincing.
I was fascinated by how someone with Buxton's background could ultimately end up becoming a C of E Vicar, and I don't feel like there was an answer in the book.
Rev. Buxton seems to think that reality is just stories all the way down. He advocates engaging creatively with our traditional stories to find deeper truths... but he never really explains why someone should invest religiously in the stories of the bible but not Star Wars, or Hamlet. Surely biblical stories are only valuable if they contain actual insight and wisdom on some level? If we are the ones creatively injecting meaning into the stories so that we can derive meaning from them... Well then we aren't actually deriving meaning from the stories, are we?
I'm not sure that he explains what the stories and traditions gave him that he didn't have already.
Why put energy into rehabilitating a mythology unless it contains value of its own?
Where do Buxton's values come from *originally*?
I feel a lot of modern Christians spend a lot of time trying to tortuously interpret the bible so as to find our own values in it... But if you didn't derive your values from the text originally, I don't understand what the point of that exercise is.
Maybe reality is nothing but stories layered on stories. But it seems to me that it was Buxton who converted the bible, not the bible who converted Buxton.
So the book leaves us with a question: which story was it that informs his reality and why does he not engage with that?
December 16, 2024
I stumbled upon this book in Google Reads, drawn by the sub-title (of course), but intrigued by the title itself. I'm not quite sure what I expected, but this proved rather a different story from that. It didn't help that I had completely forgotten who the author was and was only reminded about a third of the way in that he had participated in the Monastery reality show in 2005, which had been an influence on my interest in monasticism so evident in my reviews.
The book is part autobiography in which Buxton tells of his spiritual searching, first in Eastern monasticism and eventually in Benedictine monasticism. He, of course, explains his experience on the Monastery, which was interesting because he always came off as the most centred of the bunch. He weaves in monastic teaching sensitively and maintains an amused detachment about his own foibles. The result is an insightful, but not too heavy narrative which manages to teach a surprising amount of wisdom.
This book really is a wonderful book and is interesting not only to former views of the Monastery, but to those interested in monastic wisdom.
The book is part autobiography in which Buxton tells of his spiritual searching, first in Eastern monasticism and eventually in Benedictine monasticism. He, of course, explains his experience on the Monastery, which was interesting because he always came off as the most centred of the bunch. He weaves in monastic teaching sensitively and maintains an amused detachment about his own foibles. The result is an insightful, but not too heavy narrative which manages to teach a surprising amount of wisdom.
This book really is a wonderful book and is interesting not only to former views of the Monastery, but to those interested in monastic wisdom.
October 14, 2012
Really liked it. Honest and in parts, incredibly beautifully written. It sent me off on a wonderful search for more books about the Desert Fathers.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews