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29th June2006
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Study weekend at Ammerdown
Council for Christians and Jews
In Search of Holiness:
CCJ's Ammerdown Weekend
(Led by Jonathan Gorsky and Sr Margaret Shepherd nds)
At the heart of our weekend this year was a
desire to promote dialogue not only for Christians and Jews but also between
different ideas of holiness in both traditions. Over Shabbat we arranged group
work on the Holiness Code in Leviticus (morning) and the Beatitudes (late
afternoon), asking everyone to try to understand what each passage meant by
holiness. We looked at the Beatitudes in the light of a very helpful commentary
by Rowan Williams and traced relationships and contrasts with the Leviticus
text. At our Friday evening meal we had shared the holiness of Shabbat and we
saw that both the Holiness Code and the Beatitudes were, like the Shabbat,
concerned to bring holiness into our lives in the world. Neither text saw
holiness in terms of withdrawal or separation. 
On Saturday evening we watched a film made by Cardinal
Hume about the 7th and 8th century saints of North East England, including
Aidan, Cuthbert and the remarkable Abbess Hilda of Whitby, all of whom shared a
monastic conception of holiness. One of the film's most striking images was
from the later life of St.Cuthbert who gave up his responsibilities as a Bishop
to live alone in an island hermitage where he built high walls for his cell so
that his beautiful surroundings would not distract him and his eyes would turn
only heavenwards as he prayed.
Clearly Cuthbert's
understanding of holiness was very different from that of Leviticus. vThe
contrast became especially poignant when Cardinal Hume shared something of his
own life: like the 7th century saints he too was a bishop involved in the world
and rooted at the same time in the monastic life. He believed that monastic
holiness was at the heart of his pastoral life in the wider world and, whatever
the tensions, the two concepts of holiness were in fruitful relation with each
other. 
In our final discussion on Sunday we talked
about the different approaches to holiness and looked at the consequences of
their loss for the contemporary world. Shabbat is about recovering the holiness
of creation and its loss is apparent in the environmental tragedies of our
time. Even more troubling is the loss of any sense of the holiness of the human
person which has led to the cruelties that are commonplace at work and in daily
life and the infinitely greater terrors that defined the history of the
twentieth century. Finally we asked how we could bring a sense of holiness into
our own lives and begin a dialogue with the secular world around us. We had
enjoyed a very rich and thought provoking weekend which will remain with us for
a very long time.We discovered that holiness, far from being unworldly, can in
fact be a source of a radical agenda for the problems of our time.