Feast of Fr. Richard Meux Benson: January 14, 2025

1 Kings 19:9-12

“Examine yourself then, as to your love of Jesus upon the throne of his glory. Do not think of that as if it were a world far away. Jesus is very near to you; nearer than he could be when he walked in natural form upon the earth. Seek to live in his love. Look up to him in his glory.”

These are characteristic words of Father Richard Meux Benson, principal founder of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, whom we remember today. This intimate nearness of which Fr. Benson speaks, the nearness of Jesus to each Christian by the power of the divine indwelling surfaces again and again in writing and spirituality.

It is a theme founded entirely on John’s gospel: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”

 Yet this nearness which Benson extolled – this consoling, transfiguring, and at times crucifying imminence of Jesus – is always balanced and infused with a lived experience of Christ’s transcendence, as the one seated at the right hand of the Father, to whom we must direct our heart’s gaze if we would live in him. Christ is always more, always a higher height, a deeper depth, inviting us beyond the life we know now into something “greater than we can either ask for or imagine.”

Transcendent experiences are, in many ways, what give our human lives ultimate and enduring value. I’m sure you have known this dimension of life in your encounters with the sacred: moments when you were suddenly, inexplicably lifted up, out, and beyond the predictable confines of everyday life. Perhaps the colors of a sunset flaming above the frozen river pierced your heart and opened it once again to the source of all beauty. The tiny, perfect hand of an infant or the myriad wrinkles in the smile of an elder bring unexpected tears as we know, in our flesh, the fragile, immeasurable gift of being alive. For many of us, there is an existential aloneness to these moments, as perhaps there was for Elijah in the midst of that deafening yet pregnant, divine silence. Any words we may use to translate our encounters with transcendence to another person fall far short of their mysterious, living heartbeat. Yet rather than leaving us lonely, our Creator uses such moments to knit us more deeply into a reality where everything belongs: the transcendent reality of our heavenly home, glimpsed, tasted, and felt.

The effect that Fr. Benson had on the lives of so many, both within and beyond our Society, was to make this transcendent dimension of human experience real – so real that it was worth offering oneself up to it entirely, in soul and body.

To the sleepy, establishment-minded Church of England in the mid-nineteenth century, a life lived with such passionate abandonment to God was unthinkable. The path of consecrated religious life was met with staunch resistance. While the first communities of Anglican sisters had been founded in the 1840’s, consecrated religious life was still enormously controversial in the Church of England by the time he, Fr. Grafton, and Fr. O’Neill quietly made their own vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience in 1866. Yet the mentors and peers who formed Fr. Benson, the theologians and priests of mid-nineteenth century Oxford, embodied a new spirit flaring to life in the English Church: a Christian discipleship both ancient and scandalously new that risked everything for the sake of a God who risked everything for us.

Rather than making this life of the glorified Christ a remote, ethereal horizon in some distant future, Fr. Benson devoted his whole being to a God who makes heaven real here and now supremely in the person of Jesus. “Do not think of that as if it were a world far away,” Benson urges. In another place, he writes,

“We must lay hold upon the glory of Christ as the basis and life of the eternal kingdom. The triumphant glory of the incarnate Son of God, the Redeemer, is the fundamental principle which sustains the universe he created; permeates it; quickens it; develops it in purposes of expanding power, elevates it as an object of the Father’s love. God’s decree shall make all who enter this eternal kingdom to share the glory of the eternal Son.”

The wisdom and witness of monastic life, at its best, points to the reality of the kingdom present here and now, even as we yearn for the “freedom of the glory of the children of God” in its fullness.  We engage that consoling, transfiguring, and at times crucifying invitation in religious community. But this, we believe, is the common calling of every disciple of Jesus: to practice loving and being loved by forming, and being formed by, communities of love.

 Life in religious community powerfully shaped Fr. Benson’s vivid apprehension of heaven. This is a vision desperately needed in our time because we have lost both the urgency of our desire for heaven and our sense that our ultimate healing and wholeness can only come by participation in community. Benson writes:

“The glory of heaven is the love which rejoices in all the glory of God, as manifested in all that are around. There the saints shall rejoice, each in the glory of all. All that we have, we possess along with the rest as the common gift from Christ to all the members of his body. All that Christ imparts to others is no less our own because it is manifested in them.”

Fr. Richard Meux Benson, principal founder of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, whom we remember today.