It was a sunny spring day in 1978 when, gardening in the vegetable patch at Glasshampton monastery, I first met Raymond Lloyd. He joined me in digging out weeds and we talked about the Religious Life and his own sense of vocation. Converted as a child to a radical, joyful Christianity (and pacifism), this former Baptist minister had already lived with a small community of hermits in Roslin, Scotland. The (ecumenical) Community of the Transfiguration had never numbered more than five living in the manner of the Desert Elders and influenced by the spirituality of Bl. Charles of Jesus (Charles de Foucauld: 1858-1916), Taize, and the worker-priest movement.
Raymond was on a journey of discovery as he sought to respond to the call of the Spirit. Having been impressed by the Cowley Fathers and feeling a strong pull to their life he was due to stay with the Society of St John the Evangelist and thought God might be calling him to them, but the rest is the history of how he came to become Ramon SSF, a great mission preacher, Franciscan hermit, and writer of many popular books on prayer and spirituality.
Solitude’s
stillness is the place of vision,
Gazing
on Beauty, wrapped in silence still,
Sharing
the glory of the triune splendour
Learning
the meaning of the Father’s will.
(A
Hidden Fire, p.211)
Apart from having his heart set on God, what’s noticeable about Ramon (like so many others called to the different forms of solitary life) was his poverty/radical simplicity, hospitality, and the way he, like others at that time, was aided by that remarkable Anglican contemplative, Mother Mary Clare SLG (1906-1988), who profoundly influenced the development of the solitary life in the Church of England:
‘We must learn to wait upon the Spirit of God. As he moves us, we are led into deeper purgation, drawn to greater self-sacrifice, and we come to know in the end the stillness, the awful stillness, in which we see the world from the height of Calvary.’ (Mthr. Mary Clare SLG – source unknown)
For me, Ramon’s spirituality mirrors Jacopone da Todi whom he wrote about so eloquently, not least in his book Jacopone, and to understand what motivated Ramon one has only to read that book:
For
since God’s wisdom, though so great
Is all intoxicate with love.
Shall mine not be inebriate,
And so be like my Lord above?
No greater glory can I give
Than sharing His insanity.
Ramon included that stanza in his gift to the Third Order, Franciscan Spirituality (p.43), and if I were to recall anything about him which might animate the calling of any of us it is that profound and simple matter of being ‘intoxicated’ with love – an intoxication which draws on a profound relationship with Christ. His was a deeply catholic faith which valued the Sacraments and if ever the Society has nurtured a saint, we need to look no further than this joyful, Christ-centred friar.
(including extracts
from What Do You Seek?
Wisdom of the Religious Life, Canterbury Press, 2021
More information
about Ramon SSF can be found in:
A Franciscan Way of Life, Arthur Howells,
BRF, 2018)
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