Going through some personal shifts of late, I found an
interesting correlation between an affiliation in my past
and a new affiliation that portends possibilities for my
future.
Decades back I affiliated with an abbey, as a monastic
oblate. And more recently I became a member of an
ecumenically-oriented cathedral community. What I
came to notice was that both the abbey's and the
cathedral's coat-of-arms were the same. Far earlier
than both, this coat-of-arms once belonged to
St. Anselm, a medieval Archbishop of Canterbury.
I had to smile when I noted this connection, in that my
very favorite saint *is* St. Anselm. Before he came to his
English cathedral he was the Benedictine abbot of Bec. As
for my particular connection, once I wrote a small article
about the life of St. Anselm. I was drawn to his contention,
as has been reported, that "faith precedes reason, but that
reason can expand upon faith."
Interestingly, even before St. Anselm crossed my path, I had
come to the same conclusion. More colloquially, to paraphrase
the good saint, he once put that "because I have faith, I need to
know." That's my stance as well.
Of course today "knowing" has bounced far beyond the
boundaries of Medieval Christianity. Our contemporary
knowledge-base is now both diverse and vast. But I'm willing
to bet that if St. Anselm were living today, he would be cruising
along the modern frontiers of Knowlege trying ever to
understand that Greater Reality we call "God."
