I first met Father George Guiver of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield, an Anglican religious community, in summer 2019. An impressionable undergraduate, I had signed up to the Community’s “Monastic Experience” week after my college chaplain suggested I might explore their way of life. 

There is a story of a teenager called June Flewett who was sent from London to the home of C. S. Lewis as an evacuee in 1942, but “had no idea” whose house she was in. Now aged 97, she remembers that at first “I didn’t know that … Jack was C. S. Lewis.” She was “in the kitchen helping … with the hen food” when she first saw him. “I turned round and knew this was something momentous.” 

My experience of meeting George was similar. I had already devoured his book Company of Voices: Daily Prayer and the People of God (second edition, 2012). When I was in the kitchen helping one of the other brethren with the washing up, he walked in. I did not know that this was my new favourite author, Father George Guiver.

George is a tremendously good writer because he combines natural intelligence with a big heart. His books exude down-to-earthiness, bordering on irreverence, and the latest, All Christians Are Monks: The Monastery, Parish and the Renewal of the Church, is no exception. On page one, his argument “that the men and women who live and work in religious communities have something life-giving to share with contemporary Christians” is likened to monks, or nuns, having a fruitcake. It is “amazing”, they might say; “try a piece … go to the one who made it.” 

Fruitcake abounds at the Community of the Resurrection, and I have fond memories of sharing afternoon tea with the brethren in the refectory in the afternoons in the summer of 2019, in addition to joining in with the company of voices in daily prayer and doing the washing up. These daily practices are the subject matter of All Christians Are Monks. “What I see in the monastery”, says George, is a whole range of practices “that make up the life” becoming “more and more like the milk mingling in a cup of tea, a suffusing in [us] of skills for living, an unselfconscious walking with God’s people” in all aspects of the life. 

Mingling matters to George so far as he thinks that today’s “deeply personal approach to faith has downgraded the body and the practical. This notion of faith being utterly personal has led us astray”, he writes, in the sense that if we assume to be a Christian we must feel intensely close to God. Feelings matter, but they are not the be-all and end-all of the Christian life. 

This is not what one might expect of a book with the (some might say) provocative title, All Christians Are Monks. Just over a hundred years ago, Columba Marmion, a Benedictine Irish monk, wrote the spiritual classic Christ: The Ideal of the Monk. His purpose was to make “a greater number of souls better understand the nature of [the] perfection to which God so widely invites Christians”, but also to increase “esteem of the religious vocation” within the cloister and “help some” to pursue it. George’s book does not share these lofty objectives, and he remarks that his title is “ironic”.

There is an irony today in people wanting to buy their way into a community

In more recent times, Greg Peters argues in The Monkhood of All Believers: The Monastic Foundation of Christian Spirituality (2018) that “all Christians are monks” in the sense that we should all aspire to a “deeply personal, interiorized Christian life” regardless of whether we are in the cloister. George’s book, with its emphasis on daily practice and community over the notion of the self, would have us aspire to something else. In sum, he says we should practice the faith regardless of feeling. 

This is refreshing. One would expect nothing less from a member of the Community of the Resurrection, which attracts hundreds of retreatants every year and has been likened, by George, to “a pool of water in a dried-up river bed”.

Much of the book is about community, which George identifies as a “buzzword” in a withering world. However, there is an irony today in people wanting to buy their way into a community, as Zygmunt Bauman argued in Liquid Modernity at the turn of the millennium. Community cannot be constructed to satisfy the self. Our contemporary quest for belonging behoves us to belong to others; to lose our life to find it. The call to the cloister, or not, does not affect that fact.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that “the great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding … unpleasant things” one must do throughout the day “as interruptions from one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one call the interruptions are precisely one’s real life — the life God is sending one day by day.”

Justin Brierley’s recent work The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (2023), which seems to capture a mood of the moment, is apiece with All Christians Are Monks when it laments the “loss of a common story” as it is related to “the rise of the self in society”. However, in its emphasis on the experiences of some of our prominent public figures, there is a problem. Brierley suggests that theirs mirrors the experience of C. S. Lewis. But we ought not to expect everyone to have such interiorised, intellectual inroads into the Christian life. It is in this context that Lewis’s own reflection on daily rituals as “real life” matters. 

Monks matter in today’s “meaning crisis” in reminding us that ritual is the root to rebirth. This latter is also a piece with Brierley’s book, but Guiver’s book gives us more, and it ought to be up there as an astute wash-up on where we are at.

In sum, if we are experiencing what Brierley calls the “first-fruits” of Christian revival in the Western world, we would do well to remember that there are places where fruitcake is already on offer. We would also do well to remember that in our need for ritual and for one another, over and above our personal feelings, all Christians are monks.