tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20626632415061202662024-02-19T08:31:56.532-08:00contemplative vernacularChristopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-89693121459625442322013-04-09T08:40:00.003-07:002013-04-09T08:40:30.862-07:00"Eastern Rite Anglicanism": Reflection One
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I want to say a few things about a notion for an “Eastern
Rite Anglicanism.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will offer a
reflection day by day as time allows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
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When I was 19, icons are what attracted me to liturgies and
to liturgical traditions. In a paper I wrote at 22 after a visit to an Orthodox
Divine Liturgy:</div>
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Incense swirls upward, rises
loftily toward the roof and abruptly pours out through the room, descending
upon the crowd.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gold-dusted icons
of angels and saints on the iconostasis surround the central doorway, enthroning
the icon of Christ, the Lord of the Universe who overlooks the assembly of
worshippers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All sense are
enraptured in the sheer majesty of the experience as the Divine Liturgy
prepares to unfold….The Divine Liturgy, therefore, is an icon of heavenly
realities in which the people of God participate as if angels in the rituals of
the Heavenly Court. </div>
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At 19, the qualities of color and light of the icons of Christ
Pantokrator and of Mary Theotokos stole my heart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Icons remain a central place in my
devotional life and they are a part of the ritual life of my parish where our
Mary Chapel features a lovely icon of the Theotokos of Tender Mercy as the
central devotional aid. </div>
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Icons are not foreign to the sensibilities of the
sacramentalitous traditions, traditions that hold that creatures can show forth something of God precisely because of our profession of the Incarnation, that blend in complex ways to make up Anglican
common prayer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And fragments of
these pictorial proclamations of the gospel can be found scattered throughout
the Western Churches, often as mosaics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most notably, we Anglicans know a parallel tradition, that of our poets who brush
words to paper, writing these same surprising windows onto Heaven by ink, windows that become a
way for us<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as a way to see all of
creation anew and aright.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
those poems are deeply steeped in common praying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You cannot fully appreciate Donne or Auden or Eliot or Countryman
without opening and praying the BCP.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
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Also at 19, reading Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton and the
Desert Elders, I adopted the Jesus Prayer in simple form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Combined with the Offices, this form of
meditation or contemplative prayer has been my prayer practice ever since.</div>
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Some practices we label “Eastern” are in fact deeply rooted
in a catholicity that stretches East, West, North, and South.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Jesus Prayer tradition stems from a
way of praying the Psalms, a way of doing so consecutively that is found among
the wilderness saints from forests and oceans of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales to the forests and
steppes of Russia to the deserts and caves of Syria and Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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This way of doing the Psalms, one of several ways of doing
the Psalms, was taken up into the Office in many places, sometimes in
monasteries, sometimes by cathedral chapels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It has traditionally been the heart of our Anglican
Offices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Within this way of doing the Psalms, St John Cassian and others recommend choosing a word or verse to return to again and again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some, like St. Isaac of Ninevah recommend simply “Jesus” the Name above
all names.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His has been my way of
doing the Jesus Prayer to this day. </div>
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I first realized the relationship between praying the Psalms consecutively and praying the Jesus Prayer in my formational visits
to a Benedictine monastery at 22.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sitting close to the monastic choir day in and day out for a week here
and a week there as I hoped for and prepared for acceptance into the monastery
I later turned down, I had an “ah-ha” moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One day, as I was chanting with the monks, that feeling
stole upon me so familiar to my practice of the Jesus Prayer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was “caught up,” to use St Paul’s
phrase, in the loving darkness and blinding fire of contemplation even as I chanted
on. Only many years later did I do the research that led me to St Cassian's and others' relating of these two ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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The Psalms become like one great rosary or mantra or word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cranmer’s own stretching out of St
Benedict’s Psalm schedule is continuation of this tradition. Especially when slowly said or chanted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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If you want, our Anglican way of doing the Psalms at the heart of the Office, deeply rooted
in St Benedict’s reforms and within wider catholicity of the West in their
choices of and structuring of content, are readily related to bedrock
practices that shape the theology of our Orthodox kin: Psalms and Jesus Prayer. They remain a central lens by which to see all of creation and greet every creature as Christ.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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There is no need to hanker after others' forms, we need only pray our own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-70639473063777751272013-01-21T10:41:00.001-08:002013-01-21T10:41:14.654-08:00System Down?This is a brief follow up to one part of a conversation related to sanctity, Christology, and our common praying. See at Derek's <a href="http://haligweorc.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/relaxing-into-the-person-of-christ/">here</a> and at bls' here <a href="http://topmostapple.blogspot.com/2013/01/conversion.html">here</a><br />
<br />
One of the things I have learned as a lover of the Prayer Book and of Anglican history is this: <b>The system has rarely been fully operational. </b><br />
<br />
To put it another way, drawing on Martin Thornton, our Rule of Life is interpreted and interpretive, reforming and living. And always just a little bit non-functional and broken, in need of debugging and rebooting. <br />
<br />
What this does for me is give me a sense of generosity, appreciation, gratitude, patience, and a wariness toward any need to defend (God, Prayer Book, rigor, Anglican Christianity). Rather, I wonder at the mess, and treat our pray and profession like an extended, lifelong canticle, psalm, confession, and lament.<br />
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Our own Ritualist revival [and later Anglo-Catholic continuance] often led to non-communing Masses and daily Masses. Sunday Holy Communion and Daily Office were displaced for another rhythm, a rhythm that looks an awful lot like pre-Vatican II and some post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism. <br />
<br />
Evangelical practice often led to Sunday Morning Prayer with sermon.<br />
<br />
Methodist rigor often led to para-Church activities replacing the parish.<br />
<br />
And then there is the average Anglicans over the course of Anglican history post-Reformation who likely knew Morning Prayer as Sunday worship with the possibility of ante-communion for the strange and righteous. Non-communing was the norm for complicated reasons. That this is no longer the case in the Episcopal Church is also due to a complicated history. <br />
<br />
Currently, in small part to due to the contributions of our Ritualists and the Liturgical Movement, regular Sunday Holy Communion is the norm in the Episcopal Church. The Daily Office, however, has all but fell off the map as a part of the life of a parish.<br />
<br />
All in all, I would aver that in the course of 500 years, it has been the rare and rarer parish congregation (not just the priest, not just the occasional parishioner) that fully lives our rule as given to us in the Book.<br />
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Christ meets us through these cracks, continuing to guide us in Himself through the fullness of His Incarnation as prayed together. <br />
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Another of the things I have learned as a lover of the Prayer Book and of Anglican history is this: <b>The most of the people are occasional practitioners at best. </b><br />
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To put it another way, pre- and post- our Reformations, we continue to be people. The occasional, lax, and Christmas/Easter Christian is not a new phenomenon. And neither is the call for renewal and rigor. I only wish that instead of so many of our own sour, defensive, grouchy, ueber reactions, we had instead more calls to wonder, like that bls gives us. Such calls to wonder are worth a million well-argued apologies.<br />
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And we can either get irritated by disorder and imperfections and laxity or we can appreciate folks when they do show up. Who knows where they have been, and what Christlike deeds they have been doing? The hope is whether or not everyone shows up on Sunday or Daily, though we wish this were the case, that those responsible for the wonder of our common praying continue to make it available Sunday and Daily regardless of attendance. Those responsible include our clergy and lay leaders. <br />
<br />
And all in all, I would suggest that the Prayer Book has personally nourished countless ordinary folks in Christ as they went about daily life, sometime daily life that might go for spans without darkening the door of the parish. A psalm there, a prayer here. Pieces in the bones for the pilgrimage.<br />
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<b>I have wonders</b>: The concern that the system [has not been and] is not in most places fully operational or that most Anglicans have been and likely will continue to be occasional raises questions about our ideals and about holiness.<br />
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The ideal of our Anglican catholic rule as I understand it given to us in the Prayer Book is Sunday Holy Communion and Daily Office of priest and people together. How this is executed will vary from contemplative solemnity to boistrous informality, be they simple or be they elaborate. <br />
<br />
And yes, style can say something about our understanding of rite and sacraments, or it can simply say something about our cultural contexts and formation and tastes. And then there is flexibility and enrichment, both central to our Prayer Book in the Episcopal Church. <br />
<br />
And this rule is both reformed, that is, Protestant--yes, I will own this for us, and catholic, that is, in keeping with the Great Chuch. Indeed, central protesting concerns lodged in our rule of prayer, our rule of living are often catholic concerns, something F.D. Maurice, A.M. Allchin, Michael Ramsey, William Temple, and others have reminded us about. For example, three of these that Cranmer gives to us are the singularity of Christ's merits and propitiation once-for-all(ways), God's initiative as ground, and a primarily thanking rather than pleading posture or orientation. <br />
<br />
What does it mean for us then that many of those we cherish as forerunners in the race, to one degree or another veered from the ideal? <br />
<br />
Holiness is not something grasped. Holiness grasps us through the less than ideal and even broken circumstances of our praying and living together. God works with what and who is available. And that is one point of our broken rhythm, to open us, to make us available to the One Who Is. <br />
<br />
Does this mean that we should not pay attention to our rule? On the contrary, to continue to hold up the ideal is to hold up a concern for a prayed Christology, that is a living relationship with and in Christ, that encompasses the whole of humanity and creation, and where this has and does continue to deepen in communal reflection, to revise the prayers accordingly. To hold up the ideal is to be ready for all comers.<br />
<br />
Within this Prayer Book rhythm, we are caught up or deepened in Christ's union with us by the power of the Holy Spirit, and much of that is slow, hidden, unnoticeable, and very ordinary and profane precisely because we pray and profess a common Hope, a God become earthy. Holiness in Anglicanism is on the whole not flashy and extreme, not emaciated and wild, but often drab and dowdy, kind of worldly and sometimes even baudy, even creative and poetic. <br />
<br />
A wonder for me remains, how much flexibility and enrichment? If flexibility leads to a loss of Sunday Holy Communion or Daily Office as the heart of our common praying, flexibility is not in keeping with our rule. If enrichment--of number of offices, of number of Saints, portends a break down of the central foci of the Daily Office, such as there being two main offices or a schedule of psalms and readings not repeatedly thrown off by the sanctoral, then the enrichment is not in keeping with our rule. <br />
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Another wonder for me is this: If our notion of sanctity is no longer rooted in looking for those virtues of Christ, yes, uniquely displayed, in the person considered, then we must return to our rites of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion to remind ourselves of the fruits of union, knowing that in every age Christ in us and just so our being in Christ will manifest uniquely for that age in response to the needs of the world, and the needs are always many and various, indeed, as many and various as the fruits--patience, kindness, love, silence, justice, joy, courage, creativity...<br />
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I have many other wonders.<br />
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And probably we will never get it right.Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-91669227320595787482013-01-08T07:25:00.001-08:002013-01-09T09:10:52.576-08:00"Indissoluable Bond": Our Beginning, Middle, End, and GroundIn a recent <a href="http://haligweorc.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/more-on-the-baptismal-litany-of-the-saints/">post</a> on Holy Baptism, my friend, Dr Derek Olsen muses:
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<blockquote>
"Baptism is a beginning. It is the establishment of a new life in Christ. It is the gifting of the Holy Spirit, and the mystical union into Christ and the physically gathered community of believers. It is not the consummation and perfection of the life in Christ, but its start" </blockquote>
I want to begin some reflections that tease out a bit more from Derek's words to clarify somethings vital about our Baptismal rite. This is just the first reflection. More will be forthcoming. <br />
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In the words of F.D. Maurice, whose invisible hand guides much of the underlying baptismal theology of the 1979 Prayer Book and so much of baptismal theology in revisions throughout the Anglican Communion, "Baptism is the sacrament of constant union."<br />
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Maurice, who drew deeply on Luther and particularly John 1, reacted strongly against both Calvinistic Evangelical and budding Anglo-Catholic notions of his time that made of Baptism an event-back-there after which we either ever-worried about holding on to that faith in what we had received or tried to recover the superabundance of grace we received but that was ever-after lost by most because we do sin.<br />
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Rather, for Maurice, Baptism being our reception of God's covenant with us made once-for-all through, with, in, and as Jesus, is the the center and circumference, the orientation of our entire Christian life and existence, the faith and grace out of Whom we live (and hence, the ground for the sacramental practice of Reconciliation, etc. rather than means to try to, but never hold onto a necessary faith or recover a pristine state-of-grace).<br />
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Like John Wesley, at heart Maurice reinvigorates that catholic insight of justificatory grace found in St Paul and Luther. And he does so by placing it squarely at the heart of Holy Baptism not merely as propositional or a doctrine or a back-there-event, but as reception of Jesus' Personal union and relationship, and therefore, alive. <br />
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His revision is Christological, and makes Jesus' Person and work on our behalf in his once-for-all Incarnation primary, central, all-encompassing, and all-embracing. This means that it is Jesus' faith and Jesus' grace we receive in the waters with the Word and by the power of the Holy Spirit. And Jesus' faith and grace are without end and without limit. And so, these are not centrally up to us to hold on to or recover. They are to us given...given...given...<br />
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What does this mean for us? It contains a vital shift in conceiving of our spirituality, our orientation in how we view, go about, make meaning of, participating in everything.
Baptism is more than "a beginning" or "start." Baptism is our beginning, middle, end, and ground precisely because we receive (that is, we are reoriented out of being turned in upon ourselves toward this One and thus all things rather than remaining turned in on ourselves) this unity with Jesus Christ through Baptism, a unity Christ has already once for all made with us and all of creation in his Person through his humanity--by his <i>totus Incarnation</i> from conception to sending of the Holy Spirit. Unlike Pusey, Derek alludes to this shift. I would take it further.<br />
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In the words of the Prayer Book, Baptism is "indissoluable bond" (BCP, 298). The real and personal union with Jesus' Person through his crucified and resurrected and ascended (that is available to all), his divinized, humanity is received full and complete in Holy Baptism. <br />
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Again, thinking Christologically, in Holy Baptism, the fullness and completeness and perfection and consummation of Jesus is received by each of us once-for-always.
Rather than being "a beginning" or "start" on which we build, Baptism is the fullness, completion, and the promise out of Whom we live and into Whom we are called to deepen daily, called to become, called to be really (here I think of St Augustine's Sermon 272), in this real and personal union. And this becoming, this being really is returned to again and again by our remembrance of our Baptism and nourished and strengthened by Holy Eucharist. <br />
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Notice a subtle difference in feel? There is one.
And it relates to a real danger that Luther and those of us like myself who struggle with scrupulosity know well, namely, a want to "getting it right" and to perfection that can make a real mess of us.<br />
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As Fr Bill Carroll once noted, "Anglicans are not anxious about our salvation." Precisely. Because salvation, that is union with God, is accomplished once-for-all in Jesus' Incarnation and received by us indissoluably in Holy Baptism, we can put worry about our salvation, that is our union with God, aside. That is not for us the issue now. The issue is deepening in relationship with the One who will not let us go (see Rom 8). Another way of saying this is how is it that this Salvation will now work Himself out in us and with us? How will that union be deepened in us? And, how is it I am called to live our this union--which without our ever being able to see, deepens union? Not, how can we achieve union. We cannot. <br />
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In receiving Jesus in Baptism, we are personally united to Jesus' Person by means of his humanity, and out of this union and relationship we live and move and have our being, that is, we participate in the divine Life already and everywhere always at work in creation and general society, though oft hidden and even reviled.<br />
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In receiving this Life, we respond by taking up witnessing to this Life in the midst of all things, knowing we will often get it wrong, may even lose faith, may be anything but gracious.<br />
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Now, unlike my Lutheran kin who are shy about sanctification, as an Anglican, I am obliged to consider sanctification, sanctity, or theosis lest we, in the words of Drs Michael Aune and Carol Jacobson, think this an "eschaton collapse."<br />
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Note that our receiving this fullness is not the same thing as our living out of, becoming, being really, this fullness. This is partial to Derek's concern. We struggle with sin. We carry burdens. We die.<br />
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However, the feel and movement are different. Ours is non-anxious. Christ's is the grounding move.<br />
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So, unlike so many Christian spiritualities in relation to sanctity, ours is not anxiety ridden or anxiety driven, and is first of all, not grounded in our morality (important as this is) or our striving for union (God does this) or even our being sinners (for as Maurice reminds us, we are first Christ's "who came to his own"). <br />
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Rather ours is rooted in union and relationship with God Who Is Love, Jesus' Person and his virtues (work), Who we received forevermore in public and visible sign and out of Whom we grow into Who we received.<br />
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There is something relaxed (see James Alison) about us that makes others wonder if we consider sanctity at all important; indeed, there is something worldly about Anglican sanctity that is distinctive from other Christian spiritualities. And that is central to my point: Getting stuck on becoming holy--striving for union--is dangerous, even deadly to the soul. <br />
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Rather, we are oriented out of Union, Jesus in Whom we are rooted and live. We ask ourselves how it is we are called to be Him for others and greet others as Him.<br />
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Jesus who is fullness moves toward us and Jesus who ascended so as to fill all things is quickened and sealed in us (that is in our hearts, our whole being) by our being baptized and we can and should ever turn to that fullness, that sealing (+), especially precisely because we do sin.<br />
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In such a reorientation, sin itself is redeemable and can be itself forgiven, redeemed, and even taken up to show and grow something of that fullness of Christ in us. Being able to confess becomes gifted, responsive faith as much as a praise psalm or creed.<br />
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And that means that sanctity can have about it a trial-and-error quality, a lived feel, even experimentation and "getting it wrong"(see James Alison) because Jesus is alive! Because Jesus is alive, we can live life with all of the complexity that is for human beings.<br />
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That means sanctity can take shape for the times and the particularities of persons, which inevitably is more complex than our hagiographies allow. That means that sanctity has a contemplative, a receptive character to it that can never be reduced by us anxious types to something we can "be good" and strive for. Sanctity is first and foremost, received and out of Whom we participate. And this shifts the contours of how we approach sanctity quite a bit.Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-40173006188264085062012-12-25T10:43:00.000-08:002012-12-25T10:43:32.984-08:00The One Who You Behold Is A Divine MysteryA few days past, I was pointed to an <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2012/12/22/how-nt-wright-stole-christmas/">article</a> in that left me shaking my head, not because it is untrue, but because it is not a full enough vision.
I must confess that I remain unconvinced of the ueber-seriousness sometimes found in the writings of the likes of Hauerwas and Wright. Something of wonder is lost in their want for the singularly corrective historical and ethical, biblical and traditional that finally does not do for me what these are intended to do, make This One alive in our time and place and culture in each of us in our own way together.
Moves that, first, would press one season to another, Christmas to Advent, as if the two seasons together, along with Epiphany through Presentation to Transfiguration, indeed, by Lent onward through All Saints, do not break open a fuller and more whole encounter of Jesus, each in their own way, as they comingle, collide, and coalesce. I think of that verse of “What Child Is This?” when Good Friday breaks into Christmas Day:
<blockquote>Why lies He in such mean estate
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christian, fear: for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spear shall pierce him through,
The Cross be borne for me, for you;
Hail, hail the Word Made Flesh,
The babe, the son of Mary!</blockquote>
Or of those words of Wesley’s "Hark! The Heralds Angels Sing" when Pentecost closes upon us at Christmas: “born to give us second birth.” Or of Watt’s “Joy to the World” when Advent breaks into Christmas: “Joy to the world! the Lord is come: Let earth receive her King.”
Persons are finally irreducible, are ultimately, not amenable to our grasping. And that must especially pertain to the Incarnate Word, the Infinite, Eternal Second Person, who emptied himself and commits himself to our finite and mortal condition in his Incarnation. Jesus Christ is irreducible and not amendable to our grasping. But this same Jesus grasps us as one of my favorite Noon Prayer collects reminds us: “Grant that all the peoples of the earth may look to you and be saved.” Our seeing and hearing this One, these move us to change...can do so for each and all of us, because the One we meet, being God, can meet us each and all where we are at. Not as we might become, not as others think we should be.
Austin Farrer’s words posted by Fr. Gunter struck a bingo:
<blockquote>God does not give us explanations; we do not comprehend the world, and we are not going to. It is, and it remains for us, a confused mystery of bright and dark. God does not give us explanations; he gives us a Son. Such is the spirit of the angel's message to the shepherds: 'Peace upon earth, good will to men . . . and this shall be the sign unto you: ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger.'
A Son is better than an explanation. The explanation of our deaths leaves us no less dead than we were, but a Son gives us a life in which to live.
– Austin Farrer (1904-1968)</blockquote>
Moves, that second, can so easily lead to justifications of our agendas. We can move so quickly to press Jesus to our agendas, political and ethical and otherwise, that we fail to leave space for others to encounter the Living and Incarnate and Wounded Person. When we do so, we leave no room for conversion…not to what we think the other person should do, but to what God is calling that person to become, which is never precisely what we think they should be or do. You see, our Mother Mary’s Song, and St. Zechariah’s, and St. Simeon’s, yes, they declare God’s Reign and the overturning of all that is at odds with God’s Reign, but they proclaim a doing of that that is finally not ours to complete, but a Person who is the Ruler and the Dominion.
And this One, in the mean time, makes room for each and everyone one of us moved to become a someone called to a particular becoming in Him, a particular part in that Dominion, to be particular and unique…and that usually isn’t who others have decided for us, pressing their own desires or calling or becoming onto all others in pushy, moralizing fashion. Holiness has a million faces, each distinct, all Christlike.
Archbishop Rowan Williams puts it beautifully when he writes:
<blockquote>The Church exists to be itself a symbol of God's purpose for a reconciled humanity; as such it works on the assumption that we do not yet know where the boundaries of the Body of Christ might finally lie. It cannot assume that this or that group is ultimately unreconcilable to God or to the rest of humanity. This is not because of any sentimental preconceptions about the natural goodness of human beings, but because of a conviction that the call of God can be addressed to any human person or community, and that is the same call to compassion, justice, conscious, and responsible love. Thus policies which involve wholesale slaughter or which rest on indiscriminate demonisation of a real or potential enemy cannot be squared with the kind of thing the Church is. Just by being itself, the Church will put a question to any such distorted ideas. The Church proclaims that there is one human destiny and that is found in relation to one focal figure, Jesus; but also that what this human destiny means cannot be worked out without "communion", a relation of profound and costly involvement with each other and receiving from each other. This and this alone is what saves the proclamation of Christ's uniqueness from being a piece of ideological tyranny. Only as each different "other" becomes a friend and a member of the Body can we discern how the unity of the Body will look; we do not begin with a blueprint which is to be forced on the stranger, or even a timetable and a programme for how they must accept the gospel. It is a matter of looking at the stranger with candour, patience, and hope, in the trust that our common destiny can be uncovered by the grace of Christ. -Rowan Williams, <i>The Truce of God</i>, 27.</blockquote>
Precisely in hymn sings and liturgies and at table in song of Christ to Christ we are changed…our hearts are moved…often slowly imperceptibly…not all at once…in a twinkling…a bit...
Persons with too much may not be moved by a political rant or a hymn so ethically focused that no room for meeting the Living God is left to them, but they may be moved by an Infant nestled on hay at the back of an inn, in a cave surrounded by adoring parents, shepherds, astrologers, and farm animals accompanied to an angel’s praise. By a pageant. By a song of adoration. By candlelight. In our going out into dark night. And looking up to see the moon perfectly ringed by an opening in the clouds, like last night. And wonder. Awe. Tremble.
And no the historical accounts we sing are not all sewn up so quickly as the author would suggest of the hymns. Compare ten Christmas hymns on the matter. The accounts aren’t sewn up tight in the Gospels for good reason. This gives us room. On the contrary to the ueber-serious, the point of Christmas hymns is what we will make of the contextualization of this One, this Joy, in our time, and culture, and place, and yes, politics, just as so many of our Christmas hymns do just that in the climes and times of those who composed them. Our politics is response, and necessary, but not the encounter. The setting of things right, God's politics if you will, which is more than our politics can attain, in the Canticles will finally not be ours but the advent doing of the One we encounter. So be careful of reducing these matters, right, left, or center.
And what responses in this mean time! “Go Tell It” is a rousing strength by those enslaved the United States every bit as much as powerful as Wesley’s “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus” is a revolt against the slave trade. But do we know that about either hymn? To what do they move us today? “Go Tell It” moves me to consider how the Glad Tidings are for all of creation, not just homo sapiens sapiens.
Precisely at Christmas, as not other time, save Good Friday, there is room for the flesh in our fullness, for the affective, even yes, the sentimental and schlocky and tacky and kitsch that moves our hearts in ways that moralizing or right history or politics or the correct interpretation or a singular read of tradition alone cannot.
I think of my mother-in-law last night, singing along in German to the hymns we sang in English…and later that evening, as we bustled in the kitchen in preparation for today’s open house Christmas Day dinner, my humming “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and her singing along in German as she peeled potatoes. Here too in the singing, a political happening unfolds, a dinner prepared for others.
I think of the too many sermons that tell us that Jesus came for some or another group. No, I have to respond, Jesus came for all—all of humanity, rich and poor and inbetween, all sentient and living creatures, rocks and stars, every speck of dust and lone atom. Not first and foremost to save us, but first and foremost to be with us, to love us…and it is his loving us that changes us. Our salvation is the consequence of his becoming flesh, one of us, loving us in the flesh, not as a sort of mechanistic first thing, as the reason for the Incarnation. The Reason is kinship and friendship, and these invite us into citizenship. It is this Love first that we sing at Christmastide, the Reason of the Season, Glad Tidings, sometimes in kitschiness.
It is, however, this first thing tendency we give to the reason for Jesus' coming, this same pressing want to make of the Person a result or consequence, that makes me uncomfortable when applied too easily to the Canticles and their declarations of upheaval, for that upheaval is an upheaval Who is King and Kingdom, and none of our politics will remain on that Day.
In the mean time, we live <i>as if</i>, and in our own small ways, each in our contribution, our responsive works of love, our citizenship, live out the hope of this End. And the schmaltz of Christmas Day moves my heart toward fellow human beings in a very sad moment in our nation's life when calls to do this or that left, right, and center simply do not and cannot.
The contextualization of this One is precisely why the <i>Benedictus</i> and the <i>Magnificat</i> and the <i>Nunc Dimittis</i> are not only Christmas or Advent songs, but songs we sing in Lent, and Easter, and after Pentecost, and on All Saints. In every season, we are called to put on, contextualize, make manifest the One who became one of us, Jesus Christ. A song about a sweet Child in a manger is political in a way that breaks apart all of our political categories, makes room for us to become the one who God is calling us each to be, uniquely holy, makes room for us to greet others as Christ:
<blockquote>Goodwill greets us by the strong wails of a newborn crying,
his wail our own and every, his stillest sleep is no more
Peace than his raising a tiny hand, clenched to fist With-Us.</blockquote>
Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-79410910181721358312012-05-31T07:15:00.004-07:002012-05-31T07:16:54.344-07:00A New Piece at the Cafe: Living Lenten Wisdom in the Greening Time<br />
A <a href="http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/church_year/living_lenten_wisdom_in_the_gr.php">piece</a> on living Lent in our ecological age:<br />Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-51877825626294083752012-05-18T08:28:00.000-07:002012-05-18T08:28:09.488-07:00Matter Matters: Anglican MaterialityEverywhere I read these days, I encounter a lot of words about “spirituality.” In a recent conversation with a Lutheran student, I asked, “But what spirit?” “Well, the one in creation.” “Certainly. But Whose?” … Finally, I said, “The Spirit of Jesus.”<br />
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For me, as an Anglican Christian, Jesus is the “hinge,” to draw on Tertullian’s famous quotation about the Incarnation. And Jesus is the lens through Whom I am drawn into seeing human social life and all of creation as dignified, loved, redeemed, acting, in the words of F.D. Maurice and Michael Ramsey, as if the Consummation is already. As I observed in a sermon on Philippians 2:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This Lord Jesus, by his birth and life and death and resurrection and ascension and sending of the Spirit, freely shares the dignity of his Person and Name with you, with me, with us, with every creature and the whole of creation. In Prof Carol Jacobson’s paradoxical completion of St. John Damascene’s words, “Because of the Incarnation, God reverences all remaining matter,” you and you and me and us and every creature. Amen. </blockquote>
This is not one of the many spirits of woo and woo, but the Spirit who leads us into life. And by that, I mean the Spirit Who will not let us divide out a moment of experiencing God in contemplation from a moment of experiencing God in nature from a moment of dealing with conflict in our parish or work or home life from a moment of experiencing absolute Lutheran/Ignatian hiddenness and desolation. For someone like myself, who has experienced God in all of these ways, any lesser spirit will not do because any spirit lesser does not love flesh and life enough to have conceived God’s own Image as one of us in the womb of the Virgin Mother.<br />
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All are moments of potential encounter with the One Who promises to be with us always, not finally escaping this world, but continually engaging the world and recreating us all, not only in silence and beauty, as much as these are necessary for my well-being, but through the daily ins and outs of messy life. Any spirituality worth my time will be one that puts fingers to flesh, not just in the beautiful moments, but in the hard times.<br />
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This is what Anglican liturgies do.<br />
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Anglican liturgies lead us into encounter with and train us to experience God who comes to us as word and song, innerward and outward, silence and voice, prayer and sacrament, as Word of our need for God in all things, as Body and Blood given to us in such a way that we are prevented from decoupling sweet things from “In the night in which he was betrayed.” In our liturgies, we taste the vision of a God Who “goes all the ways down,” to quote Reformed theologian, Serene Jones.<br />
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The Spirit of this Jesus cannot lead us but to do the same, being of one will with the Father and the Son.
So, our liturgies lead us not merely into fleeting moments of bliss, but train us to enduring responses of ecstasy, of going out of ourselves to be with and for others.<br />
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At the dismissal, we go forth thanking God, bearing thanksgiving into our fallen human social worlds and joining our voices with those of birds and bees and dogs. We go forth into our human social worlds that are beloved and betrayer, we go forth into nature that is at once in glorious song to God and disfigured by our fallenness, our failure to acknowledge God in Christ as our “center and circumference,” to quote St. Bonaventure.<br />
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And just as Thomas does, we are asked to touch these wounds. For precisely where there is vulnerability, hurt, suffering, hard times and hardened hearts, the Word and Spirit are at work, blessing, healing, reconciling. They ask our responsive cooperation. Or in the words of Anglican theologian, John Booty, our “contribution.”<br />
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This Spirit and any spirituality that goes and be-s with, takes us into the life of the world to be for the life of the world. Contemplative practices, meditation on Scripture and creation, praying the Office, going to Mass, must be interpreted in this Light or they fail the Incarnation smell test.<br />
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[And as an aside, before some object, I would remind them that for St. Augustine, proclamation of the word too is sacrament. I don’t object. Words too are creatures, if you will. Through these too, God makes Godself available. As I’ve written before, words are icons—again, matter encounters with God in Christ Jesus. Use them with care and love.]<br />
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Recently in a sermon at my partner’s parish on Faithful, rather than Doubting, Thomas, I pondered for a moment the implications of a resurrection untethered from the cross (and crib):<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In other words, in St. John’s proclamation and in Blessed Julian’s revelation and in Updike’s reading, bodies matter. “The flesh is the hinge of salvation.” Precisely from the inside, as one of us, a human creature of blood and sweat and clay, the Second Person, the Word, the Wisdom of God, the Image of God, wholly identifies with you and with me and with us and with every creature and the whole of creation, showing in himself very God, and in himself overcoming our march to an end in non-existence, non-being, hell—we might even say, [in] the spiritual. </blockquote>
As I have continued pondering my “dense musing,” as a congregant observed to me afterward, rather than spirituality, I would suggest that we Anglican Christians are shaped by a very material orientation, a matter-loving ethos, that is rooted in the Incarnation, God become one of us as Jesus Christ. In the challenging words of William Temple, “Christianity is the most avowedly materialistic of all the great religions.”<br />
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And among Christians, though not uniquely, Anglican Christians embrace a vision of all of our human social worlds and the whole of creation reoriented to and reconciled with and united in the Communion of the Triune God, not just in the beauty of holiness in the sanctuary, but in the of joy in being alive even as we have to wrestle with all our complexity and mess and sin.<br />
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So, I would prefer to speak and write of Anglican life as practices of “materiality.” What do I mean by this? In a recent article, Lutheran Martin Marty quotes Anglican Martin Thornton. Thornton reminds us of that distinctly Anglican focus on matter because of the Incarnation. We Anglicans are a matter-loving people. Marty spots our sacramental worldview and applies it to his Lutheran own. So, I mean this way of viewing and engaging our fallen human social worlds and all creation as potential encounter with the Living Christ by the Holy Spirit, not by skirting around blood and flesh and bone, but by meeting the uniqueness of a created being spoken into existence and sustained in being by the Triune God.<br />
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I use this term, “materiality,” rather than the theologically proper “sacramentality” because we need a jolt to our system in the midst of the ubiquitous “spirituality” that in many of its various forms as interpreted is more often than not desirous to escape the grind of dust and press of flesh, to be at blissful peace away from others. Such an interiority is at odds with contemplative practices (for these are the one's most labeled "spiritual"), and indeed, Office and Mass, intended to lead us deeper into the Life of God and paradoxically deeper into the life of the world. Prayerful peace is a peace engaged with others' needs and sufferings and harms. Daily bliss is a bliss in the sweeping of floors and changing of diapers. <br />
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Our experiences of God, to quote Karl Rahner, are “mediated immediacy.” God meets us through, with, in, or in the words of that ditty, attributed alternatively to John Donne and Elizabeth I, as matter:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He was the Word, that spake it: <br />He took the bread and brake it; <br />And what that Word did make it, <br />I do believe and take it. </blockquote>
Whose Spirit? The Spirit of Jesus.<br />
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The Spirit Who works through, with, in, and as flesh, drawing us into Jesus Christ by calling us out of ourselves to be with and for others, so that indeed, I may encounter God in a bee buzzing in the flowers outside my window this morning as I pause from writing this or in the working out of ugly conflict with a co-worker. And I might do so because I have been schooled to do so with daily Psalms:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: 'Goudy Old Style';">O LORD, how manifold are your works! </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: 'Goudy Old Style';"> in wisdom you have made them all;</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: 'Goudy Old Style';"> the earth is full of your creatures.</span> </blockquote>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-75546024657824136302012-04-11T06:36:00.002-07:002012-04-11T06:48:03.221-07:00Reconnecting ConfirmationDerek helpfully opens up another <a href="http://haligweorc.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/brief-thought-on-confirmation/">conversation</a> that is all the buzz in Episcopal circles—at least among liturgy geeks. The question is Confirmation. A movement is afoot to eliminate this rite as part of our 1979 process toward recovery of Holy Baptism as our ground. The claim is that it is a sacramental rite or Sacrament in search of a theology. I fear that like CWOB, to do this will cause our Anglican kin to pause and wonder about us regarding sacramental matters. In other words, it raises questions of catholicity. <br /><br />The issue is that in the Western Church(es), a portion of the oil rites, due to distance, where overtime stretched from the water rite as dioceses became larger and bishops could only make such trips on occasion, sometimes once a in lifetime or even not at all. In know this is hard for us to imagine today, but remember that St. Augustine's own cathedral as we can reconstruct it was likely parish-sized. Connection to the bishop was not so far away. That changed. Both water and oil are part of a whole intended to signify our being made a member of Jesus Christ through Christ’s own Body, the Church, and deepened in this life and identity by the power of the Holy Spirit that continues with receiving Holy Communion. For the Roman and North African rites, those that most influence us, there are two oil rites, a pre-baptismal exorcistic anointing and a post-baptismal anointing [yes, I mixed these up in my comment’s at Derek’s blog]. For the Romans, the post-baptismal oil rites had two anointings. It is this second post-baptismal anointing that moved due to episcopal distance and sometimes lost a connection to Holy Baptism, becoming Holy Confirmation. Other rites had not a pre-baptismal anointing or only had one post-baptismal anointing. I might add, however, that Christmation was not always administered by the bishop, in the East, but could be and is today administered by parish priests as permitted by the bishop. And today, in the Roman tradition, a priest administers confirmation as so permitted as well, especially for adults. For example, I was baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church by my parish priest. So making too much of the necessity of episcopal hands and thumbs directly will not serve the claim of Bodily connections that the bishop signifies. <br /><br />I do not see a reason why we cannot restore the connection between water and oil in one of two ways, either by placing Holy Confirmation with Holy Baptism as is done with adults being initiated and as the Eastern Churches do to this day for adults and babes alike, OR by restoring the connections theologically. I think both are worth much more consideration, and are less likely to severe catholic connections that are suggested to my mind by eliminating the rite altogether. <br /><br />The former is a relatively easy fix, given we now commune babes, and the emphasis on understanding has been placed in a careful lifetime learning approach rather than on a moment with the caveat that understanding is always limited when it comes to the Mysteries. <br /><br />I want to linger on the theological alternative that is in keeping with a recovery of our baptismal emphasis and that is rooted in centuries of Anglican practice and concern for formation. Just as Confession/Reconciliation is grounded in our baptism, as a moment of returning to our grounding in Christ and Christ’s Body, it does not seem a great stretch to suggest that Confirmation is a maturing of our baptism, as a moment of personal owning for oneself by profession of faith and of being strengthened in the life of Christ and Christ’s Body by hands of the one among us that signify our being bound with the whole and oil that signifies quickening of the Spirit in us for a life of service in the Community and for the world. Why is this not worthy? It is much of our present practice, and it has a sacramental practicality about it that is every bit as much valid as theology as the treatises and tombs we have on Holy Baptism and Holy Communion. <br /><br />This is not so very different from current practice where some catechesis and making the faith one’s own is hopefully to occur and where the confirmand is prepared to take up responsibility in the Community.Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-16539657604163239022012-03-27T07:49:00.002-07:002012-03-27T07:57:57.930-07:00CWOB: Asking the Wrong QuestionsFor all looking for a current state of the question on the development of some of what I discuss below, I recommend <span style="font-style:italic;">The Origin of Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons</span> by Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson.<br /><br />The question of receiving Holy Communion without being baptized (CWOB) as rubric, that is as constituent of who we are as Episcopalians continues to vex us. Up front, I have to say that I find this practice gravely theologically deficient as a practice. The claim that there is an exclusivity otherwise, is I think, specious because all may be baptized, and indeed, we are commanded to go to all peoples and invite and do so, that among every people we would find some living out of God's Life for the life of the whole. I think we continue to ask the wrong questions by focusing on theologically upending CWOB. <br /><br />So, I want to reframe the question, necessary in a changed contextual reality--post-Christendom. The question is about Holy Baptism. What is our practice of invitation? <br /><br />Baptism has been greatly recovered as the ever-ground out of which we participate (and grow) in the Life of God—“indissoluble” "bond" as our Prayer Book notes. One of the great unspoken influences on our Prayer Book renewal is F.D. Maurice. He shifted Anglican thinking muchly, drawing upon Luther among others to move us beyond an event understanding of this Sacrament. Moment by moment, day by day, we return to our baptism, God’s adopting us as children in the community as our lasting identity. Baptism is not a mere one-time event as F.D. Maurice reminds us, it is our proper existence before God and once done is not back there but right now. Nothing can separate us from this bond God does for us as pure gift. Our nourishment and deepening in this baptismal existence is by Holy Communion. To jump the shark, so to speak, and make CWOB as policy, leaves the unbaptized person guessing about her or his adoption, about her or his lasting identity. The desire for Christ as the invitation to communion, as is the CWOB rubric, is a desire, best constructed, that is not solidified once-for-all not by us, but by God through the community. No words, no mark, no cleansing and rebirth by water has touched, soaked, wrapped, slaked, drowned the person. The classic Western Invocation (In the Name of the Father, and + of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit) could mean little, where to the received, it means adoption irrevocably, not matter what, including what is always true, that we are sinners and need God. Repentance is return to our baptismal existence. The official practice of CWOB, it could be claimed, is a form of a docetic sacramentality (an oxymoron, I know) because it denies the need for matter, for created things mediating, in our being adopted. It suggests that sin has not wreaked havoc on us, fragmenting us, and leading us to live lives as if we are not God's human creatures.<br /><br />It is not that such a one, an unbaptized person, is not beloved of God. On the contrary, as Maurice reminds us, Jesus came to his own. In so doing, Maurice draws together the intimate connection of creation and redemption. Yes, Jesus came to his own—the Hebrew people particularly, but as is the case in Scripture, particularity always stands for the whole, so ultimately to all of humanity, and indeed the whole of creation. Nevertheless, we knew him not. It is we humans, as the Orthodox remind us, that have stepped outside the dance, and require the attention if all of creation is to experience healing, renewal, salvation. Being sinners, our receiving of being God’s own requires particular attention. This attention is Holy Baptism. God’s work on our behalf by water with Word and Spirit that we indeed receive and be indissolubly children, where children is a living out of this Life and growing more fully therefrom living for one another, general society, and all creatures. This is the human creature freed, again, drawing together our creation and our redemption—for the latter is who we are intended to be in the former.<br /><br />So, before we begin to reframe the question, however, we need to dispel some historical truisms that may be getting in the way of our revisioning the practice of Holy Baptism in a post-Christendom Episcopal Church.<br /><br />1) Catechesis—While mid-Twentieth Century historical research placed great weight on Apostolic Tradition and its recommendation of a three-year catechumenate, the document is now in question. The provenance of that document was once considered to be Roman. It is now likely to be read as of mostly Egyptian origin. The generalizing of its instructions to all of Fourth Century Christianity is now greatly questioned in light of a variety of practices and theologies within the orthodox range. After all, it is notable that Tertullian, of North African provenance, recommended a one-year approach. And we all know the famed passage from Acts and the Ethiopian Eunuch. The notion that somehow folks must have oodles of formation before being baptized is only one of several perfectly catholic notions. It may serve in some contexts and moments. I do not think it may best serve our own. <br /><br />2) Pre-Baptismal Preparation—Coupled with a hard-and-fast thumb at Apostolic Tradition, our 1979 revision assumes that Triduum was to a tee the high feast for Christians that was later lost and that Lent contains and derives from a pre-baptismal preparation that includes the reception of the penitents. We now know that the Triddum, while on the Roman books may not have received as much attention always and everywhere in the Western Church(es) in practice. What is on the books cannot be assumed to be what was actually done. Indeed, most books carry on what was once done well past their use. We see hints of this (sadly) in the example of Rite I in our own time. Moreover, while in some places, Lent developed at least partially from a pre-baptismal, penitents receiving origin, it also developed as much from a post-baptismal Epiphany. Epiphany too has historically been a day for baptism (by the way, any Sunday is, and even any day as necessary). The baptismal theology that flows out of Epiphany is not one of penitence, but of deepening in the mind of Christ, that is, the light of Christ as adopted children. This after approach is very similar to St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s catechetical mystagogical approach. The Mysteries are unfolded in the undergoing and in follow up to having undergone them.<br /><br />3) Terminology—Open Communion is the invitation of all who are baptized to receive Holy Communion. Communion Before Baptism occurs when unofficially or officially an unbaptized person receives and there is the hope that any receiving by a non-baptized person will lead to follow up to draw the person to receive God’s indissoluble embrace. CWOB is official policy of communing the unbaptized, and what I think actually happens in most cases of so-called Communion Before Baptism because we’re too shy to boldly proclaim the Good News and invite others in. <br /><br />4) Inclusivity—Our Church denies no one the possibility of Holy Baptism. Inclusivity is a red herring, drawing on a simplistic read of certain Gospel stories of meals that conflates Holy Communion with these. I am reminded of the rabbinic story of God searching the earth for a people to take up the covenant and commandments. Only the Hebrews are willing to be chosen. Being chosen is not about being privileged, it is about precisely the opposite, about being called to serve. What is missing from conversations about inclusivity is that adoption, our being grafted into Christ, carries with it that same weight as the Covenant God has with our Jewish kin. Do invite without any sort of explanation of what the person is getting into seems dishonest. The invitation is to be included in God’s work in Christ Jesus, and that is no soft thing.<br /><br />I’m accustomed to end my sermons by pointing to the Altar-Table in word and gesture, reminding folks of our life as receivers, our life as God’s in Christ. Perhaps it is time instead to point to the Font? <br /><br />One possible solution for us to truly consider is to have regular invitation to Holy Baptism in Sunday liturgy. Folks have heard the Word proclaimed. They have heard the News expounded upon in Sermon—or so we hope, with the hard call this entails. Instead of these or similar words for invitation to Holy Communion as I have seen them in CWOB settings, “All who desire to draw near to Christ are welcome to receive communion,” why not use these words instead to lead folks to the Font? “All who are not yet baptized and who desire to receive Christ are welcome to come forward to be baptized.” And from there to the Altar-Table in a beautiful drawing together of the Sacraments as new-old catechetical approaches do. And instead of emphasizing pre-baptimal preparation, why not overlap this with or do instead post-baptismal teaching and mystagogy? At least then we maintain a catholic approach, if one different from the one we have emphasized in the last century.Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-27011057564386917362012-01-29T20:16:00.000-08:002012-01-29T21:03:46.063-08:00Complicating Liturgy: Problematizing Community, Evangelism, and Mission in post-Christendom“If we don’t, we’re not.”<br /><br />In words to this effect, an interviewee coming out of the Mass tells anthropologist, Victor Turner, why it is she must go to Mass. Her words capture to my mind the essence of why we Christians are gathered together Sunday after Sunday. <br /><br />Yet, lately, I have read a spate of suggestions that unless we do it differently, we will be not. And by differently, those doing the suggesting mean complete overhauls. We must undo everything we have done before. <br /><br />Complete breaks with languages and idioms of our past. Rite I must go. [And even Rite II.] Good-by Schmuecke Dich. [Bach be gone, too.] <br /><br />And with these breaks we must countenance complete rejection of the liturgically-formed pieties that have fed generations to go forth and serve a world in need. Including the pieties of many currently living. We are asked to dismiss generations with all of their own greatnesses and failures, compassions and sins, just like us in all of our own ambiguities and complexities.<br /><br />This either/or approach to liturgy sets my teeth on edge because it is quite distinct from a tradition, like the Anglican tradition, or I would suggest, the Lutheran tradition, that has tended to incorporate insights, expand options, and build bridges between liturgically-formed pieties past and present as we go along. This antagonistic thinking is at odds with a canonical approach to liturgy in the same vein Luke Timothy Johnson uses when discussing Holy Writ, an approach that makes us stronger because we have many resources upon which and whom to draw from across many, many centuries. New languages and idioms and theological insights will indeed find their way into our praying—alongside that which and those who have gone before. And after sifting. But they will not pit themselves over and against that which has fed ancestors in faith or current sisters and brothers, but seek development in which ancestors and kin too might recognize themselves if but in glimpses and in which they too would recognize the Jesus who came to them as he does to us and turns us from ourselves.<br /><br />Recently, Dr Derek Olsen offered a cogent, to my mind, initial <a href="http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/episcopal_church/nonnegotiables.php">answer</a> in a conversation on what it is that we Episcopalians should and should not bring up for negotiation in these changing times. Derek noted that we cannot negotiate giving up our common prayer with the theological commitments as expressed in the 1979 Prayer Book. Another responder suggested that, on the contrary, the Prayer Book must be the first thing negotiated—and fast. And if we do so, young people will show up “in droves.” <br /><br />[As an aside, to be fair, the languages and idioms of the Prayer Book may no longer be in a language understanded for all comers. Nevertheless, finding languages and idioms that do communicate and maintain the scriptural allusions, inherited resonances, and creedal commitments of those we currently have is delicate if we are not to lose the gains of our current prayers--both in Rite I and Rite II. Finding such languages and idioms is careful work if what we shall have in a “Rite III” is to be heard as development consonant with Rites I and II in keys that communicate the Incarnation in his fullness as he is for us here and now AND as he has been for those gone before us. ] <br /><br />So, droves. Let me be honest. I don’t buy it. The fact is that there are many other, often more interesting, things most younger people (sometimes, including myself) would rather do on their Sunday mornings no matter how revised, with it, or expressive of current spiritual longings our prayers might become. In fact, I am willing to wager that many of the unending debates about language we Christians are currently engaged in are lost on many who don’t currently go to Church or who have never gone to Church. That isn’t to say these debates aren’t important, but it is to say that making these changes won’t make us less sinners and more saints, less irrelevant and more appealing. That work largely lies in community, evangelism, and mission. <br /> <br />What gets me is the suggestion that we make all of these changes, and if we do so, people will come in droves. This is only verifiable if we make all of the changes and risk losing everything that has made us who we are to-date. Are we willing to take that risk? I’m not. The liturgies that we have in our Prayer Book are the stuff of many hundreds of years of people in ongoing encounter with Jesus Christ by the Spirit to the Father and the simultaneous theological and Christological reflection that goes with these encounters. This simultaneous encounter/reflection being what Rahner termed an ever “mediated immediacy” in which the prayers shape the encounter and the encounter shapes the prayers. <br /><br />What also gets me about this suggestion is that when we get to brass tacks, many of those telling us we must change everything about ourselves don’t seem to have a common understanding of what that would be. Some say chant. Others say not. Some say Lord. And others say not. And so on. In the mean time, I have worshipped in many Episcopal parishes, and the breadth of variety that touches all of these suggestions is to be found with varying levels of numbers and vibrancy (and numbers are no guarantee of vibrancy). No single formula seems to do the trick if numbers is the measure. <br /><br />And then yesterday, I read a piece in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Lutheran</span> in which the author claims that unless we change everything about ourselves as insiders, we will keep others away and die of irrelevance. <br /><br />In a rather overly general and swift dismissal of the pieties that feed many to go forth and serve through their life, work, and loves, the piece suggests that folks must give up what makes them who they are using the insider/outsider trope to guilt us into changing everything. This sort of thinking is a set up for a new round of liturgical warfare in congregations. And that will serve no one. <br /><br />Like those who suggest changes in language and idiom will solve everything, with due respect, I think the bishop who wrote the piece mistakes liturgy for the hard work of community, evangelism, and mission.<br /><br />Liturgy, particularly, Holy Communion or the Divine Service, is meant to feed those who are already Christians, and Christians of this or that particular stripe. And before anyone reminds me that liturgy is embedded, yes, I am quite aware that liturgy as actually done in any given context is contextual and cultural in communicating our Risen Lord. I expect to find that cultures have been and are being taken up in liturgies to this task. But inculturation does not mean we will not continue to recognize one another and what we’re doing even across cultural expressions and variations. <br /><br />And what is this we're doing? Receiving and responding to Jesus Christ who comes to us as word and bread. <br /><br />Just as our Orthodox kin are masters at inculturation while maintaining shared liturgical commitments across a wide range of peoples, I hardly think it wise to suggest we lose recognize-ability. And who, by the way, are growing in the U.S. without changing a thing? The Orthodox. [And yes, I know that that growth has a complicated story.]<br /><br />The end result of all of this is that we are in danger of making relevance the wag that tells the god. And then who shall we be? <br /><br />Now, we are living into post-Christendom. This is neither necessarily the greatest thing to ever happen to us as Churches, nor is it the worst. It is different.<br /><br />One mistake we often make is to compare post-Christendom with pre-Christendom or Christendom. <br /><br />Post-Christendom is not pre-Christendom. We who are living into post-Christendom realities are not on the whole prone to sporadic persecutions. On the whole, society is indifferent to us at best and carries a low level hostility toward us at worst. <br />Unlike Christendom, we are finding ourselves increasingly irrelevant and marginalized and vulnerable. And this taste of low grade marginalization, however, does carry resonances with pre-Christendom. This taste is an opportunity. Yet, who knows now what finally will differentiate post-Christendom from Christendom? <br /><br />But, let me make a bold claim about our current liturgical expectations: The expectation that liturgy can and must carry the weight of community, evangelism, and mission is itself a hangover from Christendom. Why do I say this? Because only in societies in which Christianity has been dominant and thoroughly a part would we suggest that liturgy should be the most central or primary or initial encounter the unchurched have with us. <br /><br />Folks in the pre-Christendom era did not join up with the Way because of liturgy. In fact, depending on their locale, they might not have been permitted to join us in God’s Service at all because they might be spies on the look out for trouble-making Christ-followers. <br /><br />As historian and theologian, Robert Wilken, once noted, Christianity spread because we were the great redistribution society at a time when mystery religions of similar ilk and style disconnected rite and right. Our deacons, like St. Lawrence of Rome, were a hit because they distributed the goods brought to the service to those who were poor and in need, radically undercutting a society that, like our own, reduced most human beings to resource and use and numbers and disposability. <br /><br />What makes us distinct is that unlike these early ancestors, folks do walk in off the street and join us from time to time. The question I have for us is not how did we change our liturgy to bring them in, but how does who we are at prayer reflect who we are we being with one another, who we are in sharing the Reason for our worship in the rest of our lives, and raising a stink and sharing daily bread in the middle of a society willing to use up and spit out the masses? <br /><br />How is it we are being actively irrelevant, nay a thorn in the side, to a culture that measures relevance by use, resource, numbers, and disposability?Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-86325624596791854632011-11-23T08:34:00.000-08:002011-11-23T09:11:13.607-08:00Recovering the Commons, Part III: Occupying Advent<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJbHplUD1Iy8pv4wENfpgrbHh27pcMaXVG-IwUmYf7F154PbKuoGFTIn74y1DR2IGhiqM6q_-LLxeNsc-NNmgPGGPWJ6XI-CUrK7Vqx6u3Bho_1UVcs2ITLa7ElPd6frUlxHZvggSutmgp/s1600/virginofsign.aspx.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 97px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJbHplUD1Iy8pv4wENfpgrbHh27pcMaXVG-IwUmYf7F154PbKuoGFTIn74y1DR2IGhiqM6q_-LLxeNsc-NNmgPGGPWJ6XI-CUrK7Vqx6u3Bho_1UVcs2ITLa7ElPd6frUlxHZvggSutmgp/s400/virginofsign.aspx.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5678231035783471506" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">“And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”</span></span><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />In my previous posts published at The Episcopal Café <a href="http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/theology/recovering_the_commons.php">here</a> and <a href="http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/politics/faith_and_politics/recovering_the_commons_ii_self.php">here</a> I began teasing out a concern for economy that does not have many takers in our American two-party increasingly unregulated market system. This concern veers both left and right, being concerned for both the personal-local and the social-global. It cannot easily be classified as either Republican or Democrat—indeed, radically criticizes the sycophantic, greedy corporatism of both parties. It cannot readily be classified as capitalist or socialist, noting that each expression has tended to turn over an ever-increasing authority to the state or the state in collusion with transnational corporations to the detriment of freedom that is not merely individual and individualistic, but rather personal-communal-ecological/cosmic and that touches not just on political rights but on economic rights, and indeed, on the rights of our fellow creatures and creation. <br /><br />Benedictine, Roman, and Anglican Catholics of other times, giants really, such as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, J.R.R. Tolkein, Dorothy L. Sayers, C.S. Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, F.D. Maurice, Samuel Taylor Coleridge were involved in similar searches, often quite Biblical in their vision, drawing on the positive aspects of Medieval and monastic existence, as well as insights of capitalism and communism to propose third ways that honor the legitimate value in our past scrubbed of romantic notions because lest we forget serfdom actually carried the day for most in other times, that takes care to note what is positive in both markets and the social, and in our time, I dare add ecological. <br /><br />Their search was deeply rooted in the Incarnation, Holy Communion, the Body of Christ (the Church), and Creation. Almost without fail, a radical and Biblical Christocentric-Trinitarianism pervades their thoughts. And rightly so. A Christian concern for the economies of earth will orient itself to and within the Economy of God as the centering Relationship. <br /><br />As a poet and theologian who views the world through the lens of radical and Biblical Christocentric-Trinitarianism, I cannot help but follow the lead of my High Church ancestors in faith as I look at the current economic situation, a situation I will dare say is in this moment at odds with the Economy, the Household, of God revealed in Christ Jesus. <br /><br />Knowingly and unknowingly, the Occupy movement brings this into the open. As Christians, we ignore this to the detriment of our vocation as witnesses to God's Word. <br /><br />I have read a lot of criticisms of the Occupy movement. Some are more valid than others. Reading between the lines, most of these criticisms tell me that many of us have not yet experienced the full horror of what our current economy can mete out upon us if we fall behind, fall between the cracks, or fall out of the net all together. Indeed, I sit writing this from a heated office, drinking a cup of hot coffee with milk. <br /><br />Whatever else the Occupy Movement may be, this movement brings into the open and into sharp relief, the brokenness of our economy, an economy that is the expression of how we relate to one another personally-communally-ecologically/cosmically, an economy that commodifies everything and everyone and everybeing: <br /><br />Resource. Mine. Self. Me. Hoard. Produce. Consume. Job.<br /><br />This brokenness is not new. Riding CalTrain past US 101 many years ago on my way to my field placement at Stanford, I remember observing the tent cities hidden away beneath the overpasses. But things were good then. For many of us. It was the last years of the Clinton Era. So many didn’t have to pay attention. <br /><br />Many did not notice where Jesus was at work, where Jesus dwelled, where Jesus was crying out, pitching himself still among those our own worldliness would rather enough forget and doom to the underside and death.<br /><br />Most of us will not remember or perhaps even know about Hoovervilles. But the Reaganvillages, Clintoncamps, Bushburgs I and II, and Obamavilles have been with and are all about us.<br /><br />Now that the middle classes and the educated classes themselves are under threat,<br /><br />Occupy forces us to reevaluate our own dance with worldliness;<br /><br />Occupy pushes brokenness into the social center, the common ground of the various public plazas, circles, squares, and parks;<br /><br />We can no longer avoid our mess and complicitness and vulnerability and fragility;<br /><br />We have to confess that we interdepend on one another and the whole of creation.<br /><br />Meandmine stepped too near the ledge and fell off on Wall Street. Most of us went along for the ride, participating in ways great and small, failing to notice who was getting bilked and who we’d left behind. The bandages of the past, labor movements and government safety nets and the like, may not be able to put Meandmine back together again. <br /><br />Even amidst what may be problematic about Occupy, including hints of utopianism, the tents sitting in the midst of us bring a word to us of what has gone ignored for a very long time. And, indeed, as Christians we are called upon to interpret in that word what the Word is saying to us by these bodies pitching their tents among us. <br /><br />For, as one of us, a creature of earth, God choses to home with us in the Incarnation. God does so because God loves and desires to be with us and all the creatures throughout the far flung cosmos.<br /><br />God comes to us not as an alien invader, but as One coming to and being with God’s own creation, a creation radically off-kilter, alientated, because we human beings have a tendency to turn everything to our self-interest alone, eschewing the call to be tillers and caregivers and wild-respecters and most of all, reverenters, venerators.<br /><br />Precisely as one of us, Jesus Christ, God cannot in loving us, help but also enter the depths of this tendency. God liberates us for the good, “by means of Himself,” to quote St. Irenaeus.<br /><br />And God brings into being a Body who is called to witness to wherever the Word is at work in general society, though hidden, unknown, forgotten, despised, even amidst all of the worldliness—especially our own. <br /><br />We call this God’s Economy. <br /><br />So, let’s turn things to God’s Economy, God’s Relating to us, for a moment, a relating that is very much concerned with the beings and being of earth. Indeed, this is unavoidable because we Christians proclaim the Incarnation, Emmanuel, Jesus. In him, precisely because he was conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to play on William Porcher DuBose, every being and all of the cosmos is encompassed potentially, that is, with the promise and hope of the Consummation when God shall be All In All. A promise we receive really in Holy Baptism, not for ourselves, but that as in the Gospel according to St. Mark, we would go forth and proclaim and witness to the Gospel to every kind, to every creature. <br /><br />God makes home with us, as one of us, a creature of clay, and freely gives to us, sharing with us God’s goodness and bounty and health, just as it was in the beginning when God began to create:<br /><br />Gift. Share. Us. Work. Create. Forgiveness. Together. Joy. <br /><br />These are the language of God’s Economy precisely emerging through and with and by the Incarnate One, Jesus Christ, who is the fullness of God’s vision for us as human beings with one another—not just the Church, but all of general societies.<br /><br />While the media portray the dangers of disease and unruliness of Occupy encampments, what goes uncommented upon is a relational criticism of the status quo, of the unruliness of those who crashed the system and left the rest of us to carry the burden for generations to come, of a growing disparity between the extremely wealthy and the growing poor, of the degradation of earth, of the disease of greed, exploitation, and domination that touches us all. <br /><br />What I have not heard about in our media is that precisely in Occupy encampments, those who have been without easy access to services, sometimes for years, can find a meal, a bed, a clinic without stigma. <br /><br />What of the free library at OWS providing reading for those who can no longer accessed our many closing libraries? <br /><br />I won’t romanticize Occupy, for that is the danger of flitting with utopianism, and I will nevertheless suggest this movement is a strong criticism of the wealthiest nation on earth in our exploits here and abroad. And it is a criticism framed not largely as a series of demands, though they do <a href="http://occupywallst.org/article/September_Revolution/">exist</a> contrary to media claims, but as a collection of tents, a community of bodies.<br /><br />I do not have easy solutions to the problems of our broken economy, an economy steeped in the vices of self-interest alone. <br /><br />Perhaps sitting with the brokenness and being with one another is the one thing most needful, learning to:<br /><br />Gift. Share. Us. Work. Create. Forgiveness. Together. Joy. <br /><br />This sociality on the level of human beings correlates to God's Economy in refraining from more than need as each requires in her or his body and for sharing of her or his gifts, skills, and talents; being a self-for-with-by-others to accomplish life together, being-in-doing; spacious time; and most of all, being present to one another in our brokenness rather than escaping. <br /><br />I do,suggest that as we move into Advent, that a season of examination, confession, preparation, refraining, and witness to God’s Economy is appropriate for we who profess Jesus Christ as the One Who Causes To Be, as the One Who Saves—that is, as Lord.<br /><br />How will you, how will we be occupying Advent?<br /><br />How will you, how will we Gift, Share, Us, Work, Create, Forgiveness, Together, Joy?Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-60552942265241321132011-11-09T05:29:00.001-08:002011-11-09T05:30:32.183-08:00Continuing the Conversation: GraceLee, bls, and myself continue the <a href="http://thinkingreed.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/participatory-soteriology-and-the-shape-of-christian-life-together/">conversation</a> on sin and grace. I note,<br /><br /><br />bls makes a good point. Perfection-seeking often reinforces addictive behaviors. It is also crippling to the overly scrupulous like myself. The two can go hand in hand. To be able to admit our limitations is healthy and mature Christian spirituality. The saint is one who accepts without self-loathing that she or he is sinner, and paradoxically grace flows from and through that acceptance. And that for some of us, that involves a felt and experienced break with the past. For some of us, it involves a revision of inhabiting a loved universe not as we might wish it but as it is. I think that much of the sharper divisions on matters of sin and grace exist for at least two reasons: 1) particular theologians of great weight experienced sin and grace for and in themselves in particular ways–spiritualities, and write these into their theological musings–it’s unavoidable, 2) others are shaped by these spiritualities as they are enacted in prayer and imbibed in study. This leaves us always in conversation with others’ spiritualities that do or don’t give us full sense of our own experiences of sin and grace. For those who have experienced the surprise of grace in the midst of addiction or perfectionism, those who seek a way or rule of life may come across as reinforcing the very trouble grace is freeing them from. For those who experience the slow steadiness of grace, such folks may seem to be asking for dispensation from a shared way of putting on Christ. As someone who navigates both of these, I want to avoid legalism because it will crush grace, and at the same time not lose a sense of shared discipleship. At the heart of the genius of Anglicanism is a common rule that is meant to lean us encounter the surprise of grace–Common Prayer (see Countryman’s work on Anglicanism and poetry).<br /><br />I would posit that accepting our dependence on or trust in God (sound familiar) is the cornerstone that leads us into a vision of our shared coinherence as human beings and interdependence on one another and the entire creation. Dependence on our part paradoxically if slowly renews freedom because as Kathryn Tanner reminds us God is not in opposition to our createdness, but releases our createdness to be more itself, including admission of limitations and shortcomings. I would use Luther’s positive insight re: we don’t want to be creatures as the heart of Sin to reframe the famed theosis phrase, “God became human being so that human beings could become divine” to mean precisely not an upwards movement, as in ladder spirituality, but a groundward movement, where admission of and acceptance of dependence on God is the foundation. Divinity or our partaking of divine nature or participation as well as ways of life together are reframed not primarily as moral requirements, but shared ways that support our being more human–more honest with ourselves and others, more able to admit failure and sin, more responsible for ourselves, more generous to others, more caring of creation, etc. In this way, God became human being, so that human beings might be free, more ourselves, human. That is to say, that “divinity” on our “side” of the experience does not look more ethereal, but more earthy.Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-9869625588978097602011-11-05T19:02:00.000-07:002011-11-05T19:13:59.131-07:00A Call for an Ascetical Advent MovementLee offered us a <a href="http://thinkingreed.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/pelagius-for-the-rest-of-us/">post on Pelagius</a> that reminded me that that age-old debate is as complicated as that of Theodore of Mopsuestia—and both may have been unfairly condemned. History gives us space to reassess. We would do well to remember to separate out Pelagius' teachings from what Augustine said Pelagius taught from Pelagianism, just as we would do well to separate out Theodore from Nestorianism. We would also do well to note that what we do know of Pelagius’ teaching in his own words is not very different from that of Orthodox, that is, Eastern Patristic writings on these matters. Now, setting aside that debate for a minute. <br /><br />Lee’s post reminded me that what is missing from many modern appropriations and reappropriations of Celtic Christianities is a way of life together rooted in a participatory Christocentric Trinitarianism. And of course, that at least something of these Christianities lives on in the Christian expressions of the Isles we have today, and I would argue, especially Anglicanism at our best. And definitely so in the music and poetry and art of the Celtic peoples. <br /><br />Like the Hebrews, these Christianities value a way of life together lived in response to the creating-liberating God—think Torah. And like the Hebrews, these Christianities do not shy from a world enchanted—yes, animals do speak if we pause to listen; yes, angels grace us if we prepare our hearts with hospitality; yes, Mother Mary and all the Saints and all who have gone before us in faith are not far away but present if we pray; and yes, evil beings walk about looking to destroy flesh beings.<br /><br />Last year I was a guest lecturer on Indigenous theologies for a course taught by Dr Moses Penumaka, “Theology from the Margins.” My lecture covered a lot, and emphasized those things we call a way of life as intended to keep the people living out of grace and in harmony, what Christians have called asceticism, even as we live in hope when All Shall Be In All and lions shall lie down with lambs—by the way, I take that hope literally. At the close of the conversational lecture, I asked for feedback. A young woman who is a Coptic Christian raised her hand and said, “For the first time in any course at the GTU I feel that someone has understood my tradition, that our ascetical ways exist precisely that we might live out of grace and in harmony with one another and all of creation.” <br /><br />A Rule of Life in Community and ascetical theology are not primarily about earning or gaining heaven. Rather they are about living out of and in response to Heaven, for Heaven is among us though often unnamed, unknown, forgotten, and even despised. Christian ascetical theologies worth their salt assume Emmanuel, God-With-Us, Jesus Christ at work in the life of not just the Church or general society (i.e., what we often call “the world” which is distinct from worldly), but all of the cosmos creating, redeeming, healing, sustaining, sanctifying. That is, grace is assumed present and active and abounding and ground for our existence at all and for our living good. Human beings living out of this grace, however, is not assumed as evident. We call this the Fall or stepping outside the dance, and it is not merely a back there occurrence, but existential, something in which we personally participate. The Fall touches on us all. Yet grace abounds all the more. By Baptism we receive and participate in Christ, and in Christ by the Spirit, in the Life of the Triune God.<br /><br />A graced world—a God-With-Us world, nevertheless upended by Sin (and if you don’t think so, read a newspaper) requires shared patterned gospel response on the part of a people called to live in and out of the Harmony of this One, Jesus Christ. This approach assumes the Body as a Community of and within the Head in a way that much Protestant theology rejects, claiming a once-for-all salvation in Christ that often suggests this means that grace need not meet Sin still in our own living out of this once-for-allness. In contrasts, AM Allchin notes that High Church and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans have a participatory soteriology. I might add, that perhaps despite himself the Cranmer of the Prayer Book also does so. Just read Cranmer’s 1549 Eucharistic Prayer. In my writings past, not aware of Allchin’s work on this matter at the time, I called it a gift soteriology. What this means is not that we save ourselves, or that salvation has not been given once-for-all, but rather in Christ we receive this Life as pure gift and participate in and live out of the Life of this One who is our salvation, our healing, our reharmonization as a leavening society and as a people of and friends of the earth, that is, the whole of creation and every creature. <br /><br />What shall be our shared patterned gospel response together is the question? <br /><br />Sin is like a hydra. Cut off a head and new ones appear. Which is to say that our response and life is contextual to how it is Sin is operative in me, among us, destroying all creatures. <br /><br />And so our responses will draw on the wisdom of the Elders of every age, for it is in wisdom that is, a sort of means testing over the long haul, that we learn ways that live Christ. <br /><br />And “our” is paramount. And where Protestantism runs into trouble. There can be no shared rule of life, for “how dare you tell me what to do,” and where then, a participatory soteriological ascetical theology breaks down. For such a theology is necessarily communal in the One Lord Jesus Christ. What then is lost is means testing over the long haul, for after all we learn new things AND we encounter Sin in changed form, requiring adjustments to our way of life together. Hooker does this similarly be means testing natural law with a common law approach. And what is lost is a shared way of living together that is not about earning salvation but living out of salvation not just pro me or pro nobis but pro mundis. <br /><br />And in our time poverty and ecological devastation cannot be ignored as how Sin is at work among us. So too, then, must be our shared patterned gospel response. <br /><br />Which gets us to criticisms lobbed at those who appropriate portions of Celtic Christian spiritualities in a middle class comfortable way. Now, parts of the Celtic traditions run in the familial traditions in my veins. An abiding sense of the aliveness of creation, for example, in which rocks and hills and mountains are not inert but mineral creations of Love meant too to have a name. Rocks sing. I believe this. Or that a raven may speak a word. Yes, I believe this, too. In fact, it is because of God’s Other Book as proclamation of God’s goodness that I as a gay man did not lose my faith when treated harshly by the Church. And so, my own faith cannot divorce the Incarnation from the Creation. <br /><br />What goes lacking in middle class appropriations is a participatory Christocentric Trinitarianism (read Celtic prayers and you will be struck by their Christ-Trinity focus) and a shared ascetical outlook that is meant to call us to and hold us in harmony, and has extremists, who mind us to our own living and remind us of our utter dependence on God and interdependence on one another and all of creation. Extremists, or elders, however, while always reminding the community to itself should not be confused with the bulk of participants, who nevertheless, lived an outlook based in a prayerful way of life. And hence, we have been bequeathed numerous prayers and prayer-poems and runes of precisely this sort that are common praying. <br /><br />Which gets me to Advent. Martinmas is coming Nov. 11, marking a time when the season we now know as Advent began not merely as a time of expectant joy for the Nativity, but as a time of expectant preparation for Lord of History to bring all to completion in the Consummation. Advent, like Lent, is a time to reassess our ways, ask about our ways, and wonder if we have any in response to the Incarnation, Jesus Christ. Penitential has become a dirty word not to be applied to Advent. It has also been associated with being anti-body. But penitential is really another way of saying, being off the way, reassessing, turning away from, repenting, and turning to the way again when it is removed from any sense of self-hatred and flesh-hatred. On the contrary, lack of penitence, a failure of ascesis may itself show a hatred of the self, the body, all flesh, and society if our aim is to live out of grace and in harmony, that is, peace, Shalom, holiness with all of life. For example, food is good. But overindulging... Eating animals treated like product... Being comfortable with others not eating... These dishonor and mar bodiliness, both ours, others', and the whole of creation. <br /><br />So, how are we living out of Christ’s ways as our community has determined this shared pattern of gospel response?<br /><br />Am I praying daily? Or not? Are we?<br /><br />What are my buying habits? My habits of heart-mind related to a society based on production and consumption? Ours?<br /><br />How am I eating in such a way to reverence creatures and creation? Or not? And We?<br /><br />How am I restraining my own wants so that others’ needs might be filled? And we?<br /><br />…Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-15044429178026233172011-09-29T17:44:00.000-07:002011-09-29T17:49:42.609-07:00Death, death on a cross...In the Name of the Father, and of + the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.<br /><br />A few days ago Troy Davis was executed in the state of Georgia. I do not claim to know his innocence or guilt. I do know that a great deal of uncertainty surrounded his case. And conservatively speaking such uncertainty should have been enough to grant Troy clemency. And I do know that in these United States men of color inordinately bear the brunt of incarceration and the death penalty. That under conditions of a racist society, the death penalty cannot be but a racist act, an act of desecration.<br /><br />I know we do not like to speak of encountering God in our white-washed Churches, but as the news announced his execution and broadcast pictures of him, for a moment, a flash, I saw pictures of Troy Davis, and his spectacled face was the face of Christ. And I wept.<br /><br />Yesterday, Wangari Maathai died. She had championed the planting of nearly 30 million trees to restore her Kenyan homeland. Many women joined Wangari in her work, and planting trees came to also highlight the plight and dignity of women in her country. Wangari did all of this in the face of early scorn and even government opposition. Late did she receive the Nobel prize for her work. In “Redwood Cathedral,” a poem dedicated to her life’s work, the poet tells of an encounter with the Living God among the Redwood forests of Northern California:<br /><br />I enter the house of your praise<br />without thought of worship<br />stumps and needles cense <br />the heated air in late day <br />you still even my heart<br />at columns holding the sky<br />I touch my lips to rot.<br /><br />I dip my fingers in decay<br />forgetting pious decorum<br />a salamander red-tailed <br />lingers in the last warm rays<br />you turn me again to dust<br />by pillars of silence keeping<br />I walk your dwelling place.(1)<br /><br />I know we do not like to speak of encountering God in our sanitized Churches, but in the poet’s telling of smelling sweet decay and kissing rot and delight in a lone salamander, I am awed by a sense of God’s walking among us just as God does in the Garden in Genesis. I do not claim many such encounters for myself. But I do know that in these United States of late capitalism, creatures great and small bear the brunt of our insatiable use that now threatens all life. That under such conditions, to hug a tree destined for mansion-building is laughable, if not heresy. <br /><br />“Because of the Incarnation, I reverence all remaining manner.” St. John of Damascus wrote these striking words in defense of icons during the struggles over iconoclasm in the Sixth Century. For many of us today, his words may seem outrageous if not outright heretical or even pagan. <br /><br />Yet, at the heart of the controversy over icons rests this question, Is matter, created existence, made for and to show forth God? That is, in questioning the implications of the Incarnation, the icon, the Incarnation himself is at stake. Is matter, created existence, made to bear, to birth God? And finally, Do we dare hope in the Incarnation fully leavened in every creatures and all of creation, when in all transparency and fullness, God shall be all in all? Do we see? Dare we act as if?(2) <br /><br />Let me reframe St. John’s maxim for the iconoclasms of our time, among them racism and sexism and ecological devastation: Because God became one of us, human, clay, creature, flesh, matter, Jesus Christ, I reverence every creature and all of creation. I will be so bold to say that in matters of racism and sexism and ecological devastation, the Incarnation is at stake for you and me and us. In the words of 19th Century Anglican theologian, F.D. Maurice, “the Incarnation may be set aside in acts as well as words.”<br /><br />Maybe it’s easier for us to imagine matter showing forth God in proclamations written on gold leaf backgrounds in vibrant egg tempura strokes of cinnabar and cobalt? And perhaps it’s easier for us to believe that a mother tender and mild, holding an infant, ancient of face and robed in dazzling array, reveals matter bearing forth God? Though perhaps the controversy on Facebook last year over censoring pictures of women breastfeeding suggests otherwise?<br /><br />Yet to gaze upon the doxa, the glory, the beauty of the Nativity, the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Sending of the Spirit without paying attention to the Crucifixion is to finally miss the Person Whom they proclaim: The Word became flesh and dwelled among us all the way.<br /><br />No, the Incarnation hymn we heard proclaimed from Philippians this morning is itself an icon written with strokes of iron on parchment and meant to be proclaimed as song. Just as with every icon of the Incarnation, this hymn brings us to encounter with a Living Person, God become Human, Jesus Christ. For hear, we encounter the God who so identifies with us as flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, that in Christ Jesus, God willingly experiences humiliation, enters abandonment, and risks annihilation for you, for me, for us.<br /><br /><br /><br />Make no mistake, this Incarnational hymn at the heart of St. Paul’s letter to the Church at Philippi contains within it the Personal, that is Christological, seeds of social, cultural, and I dare say, economic and ecological, reorientation and reordering, starting not with general society out there, but with we who sing and hear the hymn, Christ’s own Body. <br /><br />So, just as we would gaze closely at an icon written in paint, let us listen attentively to a few stanzas of this hymn. Hear and meet again, God’s own Self-Word given to us:<br /><br />Though he was in the form of God, <br />did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, <br />but emptied himself, <br />taking the form of a slave, <br />being born in human likeness.<br /><br />This God enters fully into the midst of us as one of us. And God does so not in glorious array and imperial might on clouds of thunder and lightning, but in the words of St. Martin Luther, “There in a stable, without man or maid, lay the Creator of the world.” This Jesus, God’s own Self-Word does not grasp at his divinity, but having identified himself with us as one of us in the flesh, he gives over his Person fully to us. Jesus does not hold back entering into the fullness of human life and experience. And the fullness of God is found as a newborn infant crying in a cave adored by those considered of low or no estate, shepherds, sheep, oxen, donkeys, and chickens. <br /><br />Oh, the innkeeper had done his best. The inn was full. Full of a questionable crowd, raucous on beer and wine, some women without any other means to support themselves than prostitution, some men thieves and murders taking refuge for the night from the very roads they made unsafe. So a place of quiet and relative safety seemed a gift. Yet, here in the midst of these, a child is born. And for a few moments of calm, at least, the Human One nurses as cattle bend their knee and donkeys bray loud rejoicing and sages sneak in with gifts of kings and angels sing out glorious Peace. But already the Cross looms as Herod slaughters the innocent. <br /><br />No, this God does not ignore the vicious realities of human existence, of Herodian monstrosities and Caesarly usurpations and the banal, everyday cruelty toward one another and the use of creation for profit and gain. This Jesus is born into particularity, smack dab in the midst of that viciousness, as a slave among a people who have known slavery and live under to the boot of a new Pharaoh, Caesar Augustus. Not a servant as some translations give us. Servant, after all, sounds so genteel and civilized doesn’t it? No, God who is perfect Love, and therefore, perfectly free, comes among us as one without freedom, a slave. A slave, one who unlike the sons into today’s gospel proclamation, is sent out into the vineyards without a choice to break his back in hard labor in scorching heat. A slave, a class deemed of no account in the societies of Jesus’ day, a class deemed without personhood, a class worthy only of supporting the scaffolding of an exploitative economy through daily burdensome labor, and often, through physical, verbal, and sexual abuse at the whim of those who claimed ownership over their lives. <br /><br />And in the words of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, “by means of Himself,” by means of his very Person, as one in the flesh, as one bound in chains, Jesus binds Godself to us precisely where the most wretched inhumanity to inhumanity shows itself. Indeed, precisely as one whose very treatment and station or lack thereof is representative of humanity gone awry, a humanity of siblings turned against God and one another and all of creation, God becomes one of us. And it is this One enslaved that the hymn dares name human, person. Do you hear a social revolution? <br /><br />And being found in human form, <br />he humbled himself <br />and became obedient to the point of death<br />—even death on a cross.<br /><br />This God enters fully into the midst of us as one of us, holding back not at all, not fleeing from being body and blood, but experiences himself the most terrible death of torturous suffocation at the hands of the state with only vinegar for comfort and dogs and vultures for company as his body begins to rot alive! Here on a tree, without friend or family, hangs dead the Creator of the world. <br /><br />The fullness of God is found in this One condemned alongside thieves and murderers, as one of us. Precisely here, surrounded by thieves and highway robbers, this Jesus, muscled by hard labor and long walking, now broken and beaten, of late age at 33, hangs from a cross, an instrument of torture and death for criminals. And it is this One hanged that the hymn dares name human, person. Do you hear a social revolution? <br /><br />Therefore God also highly exalted him<br />and gave him the name<br />that is above every name,<br />so that the name of Jesus<br />every knee should bend,<br />in heaven and on earth and under the earth,<br />and every tongue should confess<br />that Christ Jesus is Lord,<br />to the Glory of God the Father.<br /><br />Do we imagine still, even now, after all of that, flame orange angels and gold foil? Of triumph and might? To encounter in this hymn God Crucified in the flesh spoils our quick reverie and flight from this life and engagement with all that desecrates. <br /><br />Again at this Table we shall receive this Lord Jesus in his Body given for you and me and us and his Blood shed for you and me and us. This Jesus, true to the Incarnation, does not run off to the far heavens to bask in the unapproachable light of Godself adulation. But, true to Love’s self-identification with all creatures, by means of his humanity, bends a knee to every creature and speaks a name. Above every name is a Name who surprisingly bends his knee to us. <br /><br />This Lord Jesus freely shares the dignity of his Person and Name with you, and with you, and with me, with us, and with every creature and the whole of creation. Above every name is a Name who surprisingly confesses us. In Prof Carol Jacobson’s paradoxical completion of St. John Damascene’s words, “Because of the Incarnation, God reverences all remaining matter,” you and you and me and us and every creature and the whole of creation. Amen. <br /><br />__________<br />(1) Christopher Evans, “Redwood Cathedral,” Unpublished manuscript.<br />(2) This emphasis on the Consummation is characteristic of Anglican theology and is reflected in Anglican ascetical theology that we act as if the Consummation were already. Dr. Carol Jacobson in her explorations of eschatology also notes that we are called to act in the subjunctive, as if.Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-76823927951572259882011-05-03T19:43:00.000-07:002011-05-03T19:47:41.805-07:00Problematizing the Language of Inclusion and Exclusion as a Singular Hermeneutic for Christian CommunityI remember the first time I found myself refused Holy Communion because of being a gay man. It was a deeply painful experience and I lost faith in the Church that day. That faith has recovered only as my faith in Jesus Christ has deepened, my love of the Community even in brokenness and sin has emerged with an honesty that does not brook romantic notions of Church communal life while nevertheless insisting that we can be better, and my sense of self before God has grown even in the face of sometimes mean and unexamined behavior by fellow Christians. <br /><br />In recent times, the language of inclusion and exclusion has largely been attached to queer persons and our place within the life of the Body of Christ. There are gains and losses with this language. <br /><br />A central gain is that this language raises awareness within the Body of Christ that not all is well with us, that we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves, that we too are deeply shaped by racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and the like, all of us. And we treat one another in ways we would never wish to be treated ourselves if we were the other both by commission and by omission. <br /><br />In contrast to this, this language implicitly recognizes that we are quick to point fingers at the world, to claim “counter-cultural” status—a term by the way that I utterly despise because it allows us to fail to note our own cultural shapings and often produces a cultural claim that is the mirror image rather than one more shaped to Jesus Christ and his life for and to us. <br /><br />We as Church are slow to note how we are ourselves very worldly-shaped and very cultural, claiming a superiority, justification by place and position and traits and accidents of birth, rather than our shared drowning in the watery grave and regenerative womb of Holy Baptism, our being united with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in new birth, our being made able to stand before God in Christ Jesus apart from any work of our own. That we, any of us, could claim a priority of voice for Christ’s Community because of our bio-socio-cultural status is worthy of challenge. Even our counter-cultures often look more like the culture of another time than truly a culture concerned with being shaped by the Other, Jesus Christ, and engaged with our own cultural shapings and changing realities in constructive-critical ways so that we might all excel in the mind of Christ, being love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. And to these, let me add single-heartedness or chastity, persistence and diligence, wisdom and courage, generosity and justice, and most importantly, humility—close-to-earth-ed-ness—remembering that without God we are but dust, that our only true standing place is acknowledging our utter need before Infinite and Eternal God Who is Risen, that we share together the vulnerability of all finite creatures—just like everyone else. <br /><br />And there are losses. <br /><br />Increasingly, this language functions at a very low level as an all-encompassing hermeneutic or lens by which to interpret all matters.<br /><br />This language may even be used for any and every situation in which someone feels her or him self wronged or left out or not on the inside no matter what the situation is or why or intent and often without engaging with the other person about whom such a claim is made that she or he is exclusive. Use of this language in this way ends up trivializing real and painful harm to persons in the community often associated with identity traits such as skin color, culture, class, and so forth. <br /><br />Indeed, such trivializing ends up overturning the very ethical concern this language originally hoped to name and redress, namely the real and painful harm done to persons because of race, gender, ethnicity, and more. In other words, true communal ethical or ascetical theological concerns of the Body of Christ, Christ’s Community in our care for one another are compared with any and every matter of concern. <br /><br />Use of this language alone as a singular interpreter of Christ’s Community finally does not allow for questioning or making of any claims about communal ethics or ascetical theology at all. It ends up precisely negating the possibility of making any such claims because no other hermeneutic or claim can stand alongside it when pushed to its final end. <br /><br />The extreme claim by some is that it allows for an “anything goes” mentality. An example might be that a person in the community is bedding another’s spouse. The personal and communal damage of such behavior is enormous. To suggest this is not okay, however, could be claimed to be exclusive—and I have witnessed this happen. But this “anything goes” works both from the “right” and from the “left”. What of the person who is a Neo-Nazi and makes no bones about it. Or the landlord who actively oppresses her or his tenants and shows up on Sunday expecting to be praised and admired and unchallenged. To be truly inclusive in this low-level understanding of this language dialectic would not allow for me to claim that racism and anti-Semiticism and sharkery and adultery are not okay. And that makes me exclusive on both counts where this dialectic becomes the singularly driving interpretive framework. Or if we do make such claims in the name of inclusion we automatically put into question using this as the singular interpretive framework by which we challenge ourselves and the community. And to then jump to claiming that the other person is being exclusive without further ado is to instantiate a framework that is inoperable on its own alone. Better to get specific about the communal ethical or ascetical theological claim regarding sexual conduct, racializing, and the like. <br /><br />After all, in all three cases, I am willing to make faithful pastorally informed communal ethical or ascetical theological claims. And to do so is not to cast that person out the door, but it is to challenge them, and in some cases, yes, it might mean the possibility of excommunication if there is failure of amendment of life and the community is increasingly harmed by unchecked behavior. Whether I like it or not, this is the charitable interpretation of my own experience of excommunication even if I must finally disagree with the assessment and must assert in kind that in actuality the Church is very culturally-shaped in relation to queer persons so that it is not clear to me if it is possible for the Church at this time to make an equitable examination of our persons and lives in light of Christ's mind. That bullying (and worse), for example, is a regular feature of Churchly and worldly treatment of queer persons should give all Christians pause that perhaps something is off. But that is not nearly as interesting as what a committed pair does between the sheets. <br /><br />The framework of much inclusion/exclusion however makes communal correction at all nearly impossible. And when dealing with matters of racism or adultery, communal correction, preferably conversational-conflictual in style is vitally necessary to make change to how it is we are with one another.<br /><br />Further, this language dialectic also allows the user of the language to claim instant personal and moral unchallengeability no matter what and in such a way that any shade of distinctions is lost. A circle emerges in which to ask any questions of a person claiming to be excluded is to make oneself into an excluder also. With this, the language tends to assume willful malice or willful obliviousness on the part of the other and is not available to alternative input much less conversational engagement and awareness raising. Worst of all, it can shut down conversations or development of awareness about painful and hard matters we face as fellow God’s-beloveds at precisely the point when conversation even conflictual conversation and awareness raising are most necessary and vital to begin to rip away masks that tell us as Church that all is well with us and that we actually treat one another as we would wish to be treated if we were in the other’s shoes. <br /><br />But finally, and not unrelated to this unchallengeability, indeed coupled precisely with it, this language actually becomes a language that holds persons in a place of victimization and allegiance to a noblesse oblige benevolence mentality toward the harmed on the part of those who think of themselves as including. <br /><br />There is a failure to recognize that in Christ’s Body, it is God who includes all of us through Holy Baptism. The challenge to the ways we treat one another in community, that is our communal ethics or ascetical theology or lack thereof, thus, flows first and foremost from and in God’s embrace of each of us as beloved in Jesus Christ and God’s embrace of us to become more like Jesus Christ. In other words, to be included by God is also to be being changed more into an image of Christ. And that comes with communal ethical or ascetical theological claims to excelling in the mind of Christ as growth in love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. And to these, let me add single-heartedness or chastity, persistence and diligence, wisdom and courage, generosity and justice, and most importantly, humility—close-to-earth-ed-ness—remembering that without God we are but dust, that our only true standing place is acknowledging our utter need before Infinite and Eternal God Who is Risen, that we share together the vulnerability of all finite creatures—just like everyone else. We can disagree about those patterned gospel responses that increase us in these character markers or ways of being, certainly, but we cannot set aside that these have claim on us at all for the sake of including as a singular interpretive framework. <br /><br />As theologian, James Alison, reminds us, to be baptized is to be on the inside of God’s life. And if I am on the inside of God’s life, I am a responsible. To be on the inside, to a responsible, means that I can speak face to face to my fellow baptized, and challenge her or him and the community if necessary because I am held by God's indissoluable bond. And they can do the same with me. It means that I can refuse to place myself in a grateful subservient position to others simply for being allowed through the door. It means that I am free to offer my gifts irrespective of whether or not they are welcome or received or wanted. It means that I am a full participant in God’s own life through Christ in the Spirit. And it means in turn that I am a full participant in the life of this world, so I can stand in solidarity with others rather than think of myself as their defender or think of them as recipients of my charitable excess, so that I can take responsibility for those moments when I do not treat a fellow beloved of God as I would wish to be treated if I were her or him.Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-35747144340517563842011-03-12T11:36:00.001-08:002011-03-12T11:40:58.031-08:00Baptism Practicum: Afterthoughts: Responsibility and NormativityLast week we met to do the baptism practicum. In solidarity with the students in my practicum group, I too led a practice baptism using the rite from the 1979 BCP. <br /><br />What I appreciate in the BCP besides the spare, yet elegant language and theologically focused brevity, is that this is what you will do. Period. No options to the nth degree. As I noted to the students, as an Episcopalian, I don’t get to choose, but must do what the Church does as legislated for in this Church. Common Prayer and canon law are means to provide for normativity in a non-established setting. <br /><br />This not being free to choose among myriad options is a form of freedom in its own right similar to the freedom of marriage. The tyranny of choice is removed and in its place is given the freedom of commitment over the long-haul. In a society driven by an economy of choice, an economy of commitment is liberating while also difficult because it counters the daily justification for our wandering and changing desires.<br /><br />As a pastor in the ELCA, however, my students will be required to choose and not simply let the one being baptized or the parents choose from options, some of which are better than others. This too is a pastoral responsibility, a commitment to something, the Church, and to Someone, Christ, who is more than just ourselves. <br /><br />When asked why it is I recommend all have the Baptismal formula memorized in both its Eastern and Western forms, I noted that in extremis, a layperson too may be called upon to baptize, especially if you work in a setting where death is a regular occurrence. Even as a layman, however, I am not free to futz with the formulae and I am responsible to use the Western form as a common prayer Anglican:<br /><br />N., I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.<br /><br />Or if free to use the Eastern form, it is:<br /><br />N. is baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.<br /><br />I remain surprised then that some thought themselves free to futz with the formulae in either form. Ecumenically, historically, and theologically this presents great problems and places the baptized in pastoral danger. What do I mean? She or he may transfer at some point to another congregation or to another tradition and mentioning that she or he was baptized in the Name of the Source, Word, and Spirit, or God forbid, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer may put her or his baptism in question, may take away the liberty of God’s assurance marked by word, water, cross, and oil. That is not to say that we cannot write and speak of the Trinity in several ways that are orthodox, but for the sake of catholicity, these liturgical formulae are not futzable, just as we would not substitute something other for the Words of Institution. To do so here again raises pastoral questions as to whether this is what we say it is, namely, Holy Communion, the Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. <br /><br />This is all to say that to be beholden to Someone and someones more than oneself is part of what if means to be Christian, part of what it means to be ordained.Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-79080431241208944932011-03-12T11:04:00.001-08:002011-03-12T11:07:11.251-08:00Six Signs: Two Years LaterI still think this has punch: <a href="http://sextilateral.blogspot.com/">Six Signs</a>. The unbinding of our Prayer Book in processes not as carefully structured as those which went into its 1979 revision slowly undoes common prayer, our yardstick or normativity, as Anglican Christians in practice.Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-38469018245302070502011-02-13T09:16:00.001-08:002011-02-13T12:12:16.986-08:00Communion Without Baptism (CWOB): A Follow-Up to Derek OlsenThough I played a little bit the interlocutor or gadfly, Derek's assessment of CWOB gels close to my own concerns. At heart it undermines God's Economy as received and responded to us through means of matter and words. It undoes the Anglican commitment to a sacramental worldview on the universe, a rather generous outlook toward our social worlds, creation, and the entire cosmos despite it all, made possible because we have been given Sacraments of Irrevocable Union in Christ and Ongoing Nourishment by Christ. <div><br /></div><div>Read his three-piece concerns on the subject:</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/sacraments/communion_without_baptism_i.php">Communion without Baptism I</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/sacraments/communion_without_baptism_ii.php">Communion without Baptism II</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/sacraments/communion_without_baptism_iii.php">Communion without Baptism III</a></div><div><br /></div><div>I will say this as follow-up to Derek's concerns, oriented through my own lens, which tends to orient ecclesiological and ascetical concerns to the Person and work of Jesus Christ:</div><div><br /></div><div>Jesus Christ's incorporation of us into His own Body, not simply inclusion into any old community--the Church is not a club (and parties left and right be ware! Unsavory ones, Gentiles abound.), is for me the explicit theological point of entry for God's wide welcome, into explicit relationship within God's own Life, made available at the Font by water and word and the Holy Spirit. </div><div><br /></div><div>Explicit Welcome into and living within God's own Life is through God's Community, the Church, we are given a Community and given over to one another in Christ, which should signify to us and to the whole cosmos, that God's Welcome explicitly received and taken up and put on in Holy Baptism, and living in as well as out of God's own Life as flesh and blood human creatures, works itself out on the level of creatures in the ways we relate to one another and the whole cosmos in Christlike ways and not (and when not, turning again and again, to our only Life). St. Paul calls these fruits of the Spirit: faithfulness, promise-keeping, courage, listening (obedience), and the like. </div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, God's Welcome explicitly received and taken up and put on in Holy Baptism and living in God's own Life flows into discipleship rooted first and foremost not in being the interlocutor of my sister or brother, but of myself. How might my habits, emotions, attitudes, behaviors not show forth God's love of myself, my neighbors, and the whole cosmos? Where do I lie? Not keep a promise? Forget the least? Scorn the vulnerable? </div><div><br /></div><div>Where we downplay that our Baptism is an incorporation into the Life of God the Father Unbegotten through Jesus Christ the Son Only-Begotten by the Holy Spirit Proceeding in Christ's Community, that is, Christ's Body, Christ's Temple, Christ's People, Christ's Convocation, Christ's Church, Christ's Bride, Christ's Friends, we fail to be honest of Whose we are as members and of our calling when inviting the potential praiser, and so, we fail to be the Church, the visible Witness to God in Christ. </div><div><br /></div><div>God's Baptismal Covenant presupposes this grounding as the inclusion into Christ's Community, beginning as it does with The Apostles' Creed, and only then moving on to our promises as response. It also suggests that inclusion in this Community, Christ's very Body, requires of all of us as response the ongoing reordering of the way we relate to one another, the world, and creation--that is, discipleship, in light of Who Christ is for us and to us. The fallout of being incorporated by God through God's Community is a life ongoingly reordered to the Incarnation in His totality, namely, His Person, Jesus Christ, is a life, in other words, reordered to the Life of the Holy Trinity on the level of human creatures. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the totality of Incarnation of the Second Person the Word the Only-Begotten from Conception to Cross, from Resurrection to Ascension, heaven and earth are irrevocably joined. This is the bedrock and ground of our witness, our proclamation, our invitation. And it by this lens that we are called to live in all the everyday and ordinary as well as the extraordinary difficulties of being alive. </div><div><br /></div><div>We need not be anxious mongerers of damnation, swelling the ranks of the Font through fear and unbelief, nor need we be hawkers of salvific wares as if the chief point were purchase of heaven rather than receiving Life in God, but we are called to witness, proclaim, point to, and invite all peoples and indeed the entire cosmos into open praise-response to this Generous, Loving, Saving Word Who Has Once-For-All Overcome, Who is present and working among us hiddenly in the day-to-day life of the world and all of creation, and Who is present to us explicitly wherever two or three are gathered in His Name in Psalm and Prayer, Word and Sacrament, in proclamation as well as presentation.</div><div><br /></div><div>We are called as the Witnessing, Praise Community to invite all so moved to receive and take up their part and put on Christ in the Witnessing, Praise Community, and Holy Baptism is the means given us for this purpose as well as the chief visible witness and Testament in matter and by word to the work of God's Holy Spirit in making known God's irrevocable decision for me, for you, for us, for the whole cosmos in Christ Jesus once-for-all.</div><div><br /></div><div>Giving no explicit account of Who we receive in Holy Communion and the claims this One makes on us to grow up into full stature, is false advertisement of a chummy hospitality cheese-and-cracker affair without the risks entailed in receiving God's xenia, God's peace-offering. God's xenia, God's peace-offering will and does change us, and starts not with that one or that one, but with pointing at me in making self-examination, of reflecting on where my own life shines forth less than God's once-for-all peace wrought fleshwise in Christ. </div><div><br /></div><div>If and only if we are clear and upfront that it is this Life Who we are inviting any and all to receive at the Altar-Table, then should we feel comfortable opening up the Altar-Table without explicit mention of Holy Baptism as prior ground.</div><div><br /></div><div>And with this warning to us should we so choose: We set up the one unbaptized receiving for great travail, for she or he has no visible Mark by water and word so necessary to a created race, that Irrevocable Sign and Seal of God's joining heaven and earth once-for-all in Christ. </div><div><br /></div><div>She or he has no explicit being joined to the Support Community by etching on her or his flesh by drops and drips and splashes of water with words of God's Irrevocable Embrace sealed by oiled traces crossward forever, of which our daily remembrance by marking ourselves (+) at The Apostles' Creed serves as rebuke to hell, and upon which we fall back when the Tempter comes scheming, and the Tempter will come as F. D. Maurice reminds us: <a href="http://anglicanhistory.org/maurice/colenso_communion/04.html">Baptismal Calling</a></div><div><br /></div><div>Here are some of my previous posts that relate to the matter:</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://contemplativevernacular.blogspot.com/2010/06/questions-on-communion-without-baptism.html">Questions on Communion Without Baptism (CWOB): Real Presence</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://contemplativevernacular.blogspot.com/2010/06/prefer-nothing-to-christ-or-keep-death.html">Prefer Nothing to Christ or Keep Death Always Before You: CWOB and Patterns of the Cross</a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-44596395534738716352011-01-26T18:29:00.000-08:002011-01-26T19:15:57.605-08:00Focus of Unity? Inclusion?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">One of the current problems afflicting Anglicanese especially as we concern ourselves with ecclesiologies and the Anglican Communion as institution is that oft repeated phrase that "the Archbishop of Canterbury is the focus of unity" and such similar turns. Let me be frank. As an Anglican, the Archbishop of Canterbury is not my focus, nor that Who binds me to all other Anglicans and more Christians besides. There is One Center, One Focus of our Unity, One Head, namely, Jesus Christ, Who is not localized but available in all times and places to all sorts and conditions of human beings whenever they call upon His Name or so gather. </span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">There can be and is only One focus of our unity, Jesus Christ. This Reformation profession of faith is at the heart of our Anglican praying surrounding headship and representation, mediation and salvation. If and whenever one called to present and represent, that is, point we the Body to the One Christ among us, binding us, holding us, abiding with and in us, or the office that that one occupies rather becomes another Rome or Constantinople or Alexandria or Jerusalem, we have sold our inheritance for rotted pottage. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The second is like the first, inclusion is the work of God in Christ by the Spirit first and foremost, not our own. God's inclusion is likely to upset apple carts for those who don't want to be related to sorts considered unsavory wherever that lies for you and I. If we have no place for those we hold to be unsavory, Christ may have no place for us. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">To be included in Christ's own life by Baptism, that is, to receive Christ's decisive once-for-all overcoming of sin, evil, and death calls us into a life of discipleship, but a life of discipleship is not a program, however, great the intellectual edifice and theological arguments for a formulaic response, but a living response to grace of which the fruits, as St Paul reminds, us are rather obvious. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Ascetical theology, thus, gives us time-and-community-tested shapes for what a faithful response looks like, not a pat-program for success or a one-size-fits-all formula that expects extraordinary things of a small group while being comfortable with the ordinary and even rather less than shining for the majority blessed. Adjustments can and will and must be made to the time-and-community-tested patterns in light of the ongoing observation of graced lives of peoples living in response to Christ as members of the One Body. We must always ask the question of one another, What is grace doing in your life? Fruits will surely tell us over time. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">That is to say, any ascetical theology worth its catholicity requires observation and experience, and not just those of the majority. All the careful biblical, traditional, rational, theological, intellectual, ecclesiological, "objective" arguments and systems and programs regarding our current ascetical theological issue de jour end up making of these honorable enterprises a laughstock to our despisers when observations and experiences of real flesh with real flesh simply do not fit the edifice. Sometimes it requires the Word working in the world to turn us again to consider what He might be up to among the peoples and nations. Sometimes it is the Word at work in the world that catches our attention long enough to repent, that is, turn us again to reliance on the only Center we can or will ever properly have as Churches. We finally have to admit that theology too can disguise sheer loathing, prejudice, and ill will. And all in the Name of Jesus Christ. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">To quote from F.D. Maurice:</span></span></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; "><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This is the second characteristic of the Prayer Book I would speak of. It is expressed in the words of my text,—“With all that in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both theirs and ours.”<br /><br />The Romanists asserted that the Church was bound together by the common adherence of its members to a visible Person and a visible Centre. How was this notion to be refuted? Can you overthrow it by calling the Bishop of Rome Antichrist? By denouncing the Church to which he belongs as the Babylonian Harlot? Or by setting up an Anglican system in opposition to this Roman system—by determining that the centre in our fellowship shall be at home instead of Italy? Or is exclusiveness best defeated by Catholicity, cruel anathemas by an universal fellowship, a mimic Ecclesiastical centre, by turning to that invisible spiritual Centre which was made manifest when Christ rose from the dead and ascended on high? Our Reformers adopted the latter form of protest as the most reasonable, and they made it in this way. They found prayers which were based on this universal principle, many of which had been narrowed and debased by the local and idolatrous principle; they removed the outgrowths, they took the substance of the petitions. So they claimed for themselves and for us a fraternity with other ages and other countries, with men whose habits and opinions were most different from their own, with those very Romanists who were slandering and excommunicating them. They claimed fraternity with men who in every place were calling on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, whether they were tied and bound by the chains of an evil system, or had broken those bonds asunder. They claimed fellowship with men hereafter, who on any other grounds should repudiate their Church and establish some other communion—with men of every tongue and clime, and of every system. If they will not have a Common Prayer with us, we can make our prayers large enough to include them. Nay, to take in Jews, Turks, Infidels and Heretics, all whose nature Christ has borne. For he is theirs as well as ours. He has died for them as for us, he lives for them as for us. Our privilege and glory is to proclaim him in this character; we forfeit our own right in him when we fail to assert a right in him for all mankind. The baptized Church is not set apart as a witness for exclusion, but against it. The denial of Christ as the root of all life and all society—this is the exclusive sectarian principle. And it is a principle so near to all of us, into which we are so ready at every moment to fall, that only prayer to our Heavenly Father through the one Mediator, can deliver us from it.[1]</span></span></span></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /><br />[1] F.D. Maurice, “Sermon I,” </span></span></span><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The Prayer Book</span></span></span></em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> (London: James Clarke & Co. Ltd., 1966), 6-9.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span><div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div></div></div></div></div>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-60943290266873076502011-01-15T08:50:00.001-08:002011-01-15T09:08:04.869-08:00Forget "Contemporary" and "Traditional": Other Directions<div>In teaching courses in liturgy last semester, I found myself having to give names to assumptions and observations I make about liturgy that move outside the usual categories, categories often used in derisive ways by those of various parties in worship warfare. While avoiding cultural tourism, I am cognizant that hybridity is ever at work. The idioms that move one generation may not move another simply because the overlap of popular and church music in everyday experience is different over time. Here are some thoughts:</div><div><br /></div><div>Recycling - We have riches in orders of service for a reason. Each of these orders in their time, place, and culture intended an encounter with the Living God in a way consonant with the distinctive Christian tradition through a particularity of shape and content. To recycle is to familiarize oneself with these riches and to incorporate these riches into liturgical preparation, for example, the Minor Propers, such as the Introit.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fusion - Whether or not recycling is well-received often enough depends on how it is placed in linguistic and musical idioms that will speak to people in a particular locale and cultural formation. In Twenty-first Century America this can be quite wide and understanding your own parish context is vital. Though I am white, of largely Isles origin, and partial to Gregorian chant, I also move to Latin and African beats that are both vital to American music formation in our various types of music. To take the Introit appointed in Gregorian chant, adapt it to a Latin, Gospel, etc. is not necessarily at variance or inauthentic to my own musical or idiom formation on the whole or to that of many in our cultural. It is wise to teach how it is inculturation need not mean dumping what is inherited. Fusion is a way to do this. </div><div><br /></div><div>Directionality - How is it that the overall flow or direction of the service carries how we meet God and God meets us?[1] For Lutherans, this is generally an Incarnational, Christocentric, God comes to us, movement. For Anglicans, this is generally a Pneumatic or Trinitarian, God takes us into God's own life, movement. Neither is wrong, and neither is necessarily only to be found in either tradition, but they are distinctive "feels". </div><div><br /></div><div>Formational Resonances - We are not tabulae rasae. We are already shaped before we shape. We come to preparing and doing worship already formed in certain ways. For example, assumption that there is an ordo is to already be formed without consciously recognizing this as such. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>_____</div><div>[1] "meets us" is language I received from two students, Holly Johnson and Michael Larson.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-27476148661645502722011-01-11T15:34:00.000-08:002011-01-11T15:36:29.387-08:00Marriage as DiscipleshipMy friend Lee points us to a piece <a href="http://thinkingreed.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/traditional-marriage-hasnt-existed-for-a-long-time/">http://thinkingreed.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/traditional-marriage-hasnt-existed-for-a-long-time/</a>noting how marriage is no longer traditional. The observations are true that marriage has changed a great deal in our time, moving away from a focus on alliances and property and begetting to love and partnership. But romantic notions too will not do. This wedding frenzy of modern American life is not consonant with relating the married estate to the gospel life of discipleship as I understand it, and so, I continue to raise the question of what marriage means as disciples of Christ. As a minority sort and condition, I have more freedom to do just that. <br /><br />From here, it often seems like defense of marriage looks an awful lot like an unwillingness to examine how much Christians do not have a singular theology of marriage, and so, we're quick to resort to simplistic reaffirmations (of ourselves). A quick perusal of scripture, history, theology, and liturgies bears this out. And any who tell you otherwise have not wrestled with the fragments adequately. So the question for me is this, how will we arrange the fragments into a response to Jesus Christ? In vows? In rites? In ascetical or moral theologies or ethics? In the particularity of real human lives (no two marriages are alike)? <br /><br />For me, marriage is about discipleship, about growing together in being for others in response to Christ. That will look different in each case even as all cases share similarities. In this regard, I do not see the monastic life and married life as unrelated, nor do I accept Manichaean tendencies in the tradition that would break eros and agape completely sometimes doing so by making of monastic life something superior (as if celibates are not sexual) rather than a particular way of discipling fallen connectivity. Both are oriented to bridle and disciple our fallen connectivity (sexuality) for others over the long haul. Nor do I accept the romantic lauds of marriage that somehow make of it in itself our sanctification if not salvation. Such is romanticism pushing into our ascetical theologies in an unwarranted way. On the level of systematics, we would call that eschatological collapse. Marriage is wrought with tensions of the incomplete and contingent. Rowan Willliams reminds us of this in The Body's Graces by observing that such notions do not bear out in examination of real marriages, where blessed and approved relationships harbor abuse and the like all too often. Such romantic, self-justifying notions are just too easy. In our own time, marriage itself has become something of an idol just as in the days of the Reformers was monastic life. And it is used to make oneself feel superior (justified) to the minority sort. That this seems to go unnoticed except by those of minority affectional orientation puzzles this Christian. That this subtle salvation by marriage trajectory flies in the face of God's unearned love in Christ astonishes and horrifies. It leaves no room for others to receive themselves from God as good and as also fallen in their connectivity. It has a program for you too... No receiving God's gospel first and having patience to see how that might work out or not in receiving a self for others. <br /><br />Marriage is about disicpleship not some sense of feeling oneself glorious and superior for being made a majority sort (some sort of heterosexual theology of glory thinly disguised by a too quick and self-justifying read of nature without Hooker's and even Aquinas' recognition that minority possibilities are likely in creation and human life and need be accounted for within the same required virtues or rather gifts of the Spirit--as in, does this have any chance of showing any? Hooker does this by relating the minority sort to the usual cases as his reform of natural law by common law sensibilities. But moreso, all cases for Christians must be related first to Christ. <br /><br />The Norm for us, and Marriage properly conceived, is not heterosexuality nor homosexuality, but Jesus Christ and his relationship to us in Holy Baptism. All others at best are derivative, pointing us to Him (that fruits of the Spirit thing again). Just as Bl. Julian makes of maternity something first reflective of Christ's own for and to us. And it is this directionality that leaves us wiggle room for rethinking several things. <br /><br />Within discipleship, it is possible to have variety. I say this because there is more than one relationship of Christ to us, than Ephesians on Marriage or Luke on Mothering. John's Friendship is one, and one with which many same-sex partnerships resonate precisely because some of the other notions suggest domination and too easy pigeonholing of men and women without care for their particularity. And hence, why some of us continue to raise questions both about Christian conceptions of marriage and whether or not a third estate is not called for the same-sex affectioned. Or if not, marriage needs further rethinking. After all, same-sex partnerships bear many similarities to both married and monastic life. So much of traditional marriage rites have little to say about marriage as discipleship and I want little part in them. It very well could be that we are being given a gift in our time because of having to wrestle with the existence of same-sex affectioned persons to really rethink our rites to discipleship.<br /><br />As I wrote in comment to Lee's post:<br /><br />I think companionate is a key term here and maintains a central component of traditional notions of marriage that cannot help but be concerned with matters of estate, namely board and bed. To be a companion is one who shares bread together, and be extension, all that this requires as responsibles–work, home, hearth, children if so blessed, parents to attend in later years, etc. It does not allow you to fly the coop of responsibility as too much of romantic notions tends to do.<br /><br />In companionship love unbridled and undisciplined and otherwise disposed not to care but for self (lust) needs takes shape as for others, firstly within the realm of hearth and home, but not without being so in the rest of life at work, extended family, etc. Romantic notions of marriage at play in our culture are a problem for me as Christian because what I am looking for, what I would discern as a mark of a healthy marriage, is are you overtime both growing in for others? And sometimes that starts with accepting that the beard shavings will never be wiped out of the sink!<br /><br />What I would ask you, whether monastic or married, single or partnered is this, Are you growing in being for others in response to Jesus Christ? This question of the Incarnation, both in the Crib and on the Cross, is what makes or breaks our notions, ideologies, and prejudices all around.Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-90963605206329476692010-12-19T08:02:00.000-08:002010-12-19T09:02:51.014-08:00The Rhythm of the Days and Seasons of our Church YearOne of the things I am reminded of at two of the greater transitions in the Church Year, After Trinity/Pentecost to Advent and After Epiphany to Lent, is that at its best, as <a href="http://haligweorc.wordpress.com/">Derek</a>, reminds us again and again, the lectionary is a key to understanding the formation of us by the Church Year. <div><br /></div><div>Transition is gradual. The lectionary texts start taking on the themes of Advent before Advent, and the same with Lent. Preparation is already underway in the trifecta of the Cloud of Witnesses. Preparation is already underway in those formerly numbered weeks. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is how we are formed and normed by the Incarnation, to the oneness and totality of Jesus Christ's conception, birth, life, teachings, death, resurrection, ascension, sending of the Spirit, and coming, always coming to us explicitly in psalm and canticle and prayer, word and bread and wine, and hiddenly in life everyday and in all of God's creation, until finally, when as Tutu writes, we shall reach a tipping point, and Christ hidden and at work always and everywhere shall burst forth full bloom and we see the Little One in every face and the great Cloud take on flesh before our eyes in the blinding light of Love. <div><br /></div><div>This all gets me to the point of this post. The Advent Sours, those people who go into apoplexy if you dare sing a Christmas hymn in the Advent season, need to take a chill pill. I write this as a former Advent cranky-pants extraordinaire. This sort of thing is a little like an anachronism. Sort of like those in a perfectly pristine sanctuary of 21st Century America trying to recreate in exact replica the rites of 14th Century Hereford cathedral (never mind that local practice in parishes was probably quite unique, and never mind the dogs and horses and stink). Singing carols and hymns in Advent as preparation for the Nativity is longstanding and finds support in all sorts of popular practices if we dare to look at dramas, local customs, and the like. Advent after all has a multivalent character, looking toward Nativity, looking toward Parousia, bleeding into and being bled into by the trifecta of the Cloud of Witnesses, and even carries with it more than a tinge of the Cross and the promise of Resurrection and the goodness of Creation afire by God's Holy Spirit.</div><div><br /></div><div>The central concern of many sour folk, a very catholic concern, is that the American Reformed tradition's elimination of the liturgical year has led us to a socio-cultural rhythm of the commercial days of Christmas starting after Black Friday, if not earlier, and ending Christmas Day--just when the Days and Season of Christmas are beginning. Commerce swallows up both Advent and Christmas and forms us! And not to the Incarnation! We lose expectation, waiting, preparation, and a bit of penitence (yes, I think, a bit of penitence as much as joy characterizes this season, disagreeing with some of my former professors in this regard. I recommend using the first Collect everyday just as Ash Wednesday's is used in Lent.). But this swallowing up is only so by our own actions and habits. We have been formed in competing ways. That is the catholic concern, and rightly so. But rather than rail and whine and get all pissy, let's take responsibility for this, rather than slam someone down for singing, What Child Is This? Better a hymn to the Incarnation than not. We do not know how God might move a heart to faith by that long stretch of holiday favorites usurping regular radio programming unto Christmas Day. </div><div><br /></div><div>As Dr. Michael B. Aune noted of Candlemas last year in a magnificent sermon, this is a day already portending Lent. He mused, perhaps we Twentieth Century folk have compartmentalized our Days and Seasons of the Church Year in ways our ancestors in the faith would not--because they knew better. To hear, Lo, How A Rose at Rejoicemas is a welcome relief, a bit of Christmas, and more than a bit of Marian piety for we who swing that way.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nativity reaches into Parousia, and vice versa. Purposely. As I wrote in my last post, the Nativity is put-to-promise on God's word to us that in the End the fullness of God shall be visibly, completely, fully All in All. Nativity should reach into Parousia. And just so, Parousia should reach into Nativity. God is with us! God is with us, indeed! God has not gone absent in the meantime contra popular cultural tales of being left behind. Though often hidden, unknown, even despised, God in Christ is present, working, redeeming, creating anew through, with, and in flesh. And calling we who are Church to say so. Everyday! Nativity reaching into Parousia is also a reminder that flesh matters. Flesh is fit for showing forth God, as the Damascene writes in defending icons. Yet, crap still happens. Flesh bleeds. The Cross is present, too. Folks still are starving in the streets. People are now dying from wars. Creation groans from our pollution and waste. And we hear God say, "I send you." Flesh matters, love Me in the flesh.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, if we must offer a liturgical solution so that Advent gets its due in an overly commercialized cultural context, rather than become Advent Sours, I recommend revisiting the possibility of an earlier start to Advent, say the Sunday after St. Martin's Feast. After all, catholic practice, the want to make the Incarnation encountered here and now in proclamation and sacrament, is known to respond to the contextual realities of flesh. </div><div><br /></div><div>We tried just this solution this year at the seminary. What I have noticed is that the longer Advent season has led on my part to a bit of melancholy, perhaps depression if not despair, and impatience for Christmas to arrive. One person noted, there are consequences for making such changes in the calendar. Yes, there are. And a bit of melancholy and blues, not just contemplation and give aways, are precisely how it should be in Advent. The long seeming slow decay to despair that otherwise haunts this season in a world of hunger and fear and hate makes way to the Promise that we and all flesh shall behold God, in the Child, and Though, With, and In Us and All Flesh. And in this mean time of tensions, when we know Him only explicitly in remembrance of His death and by proclamation, a longer Advent reminds us as does the Nativity to "Love Him in the World of the Flesh." (W.H. Auden, For the Time Being).</div></div>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-45892967614963078622010-12-12T07:23:00.000-08:002010-12-12T09:16:04.347-08:00At the Heart of Anglican Catholicity is the Incarnation: Devotion to the Theotokos<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSQg0FDri61h5l2eZ80LkuBE6OG5nthRRBLUkARrRAYM7aWowNjvzDci4GZKECdO4YajzCKbfwjbXadappvurRdFzrUKXKsZGLogNWbaGEeEDJIJHj2jZJy1gk0cLRuD_7kSb-heSkAIxd/s1600/OurLadyoftheSign.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 122px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSQg0FDri61h5l2eZ80LkuBE6OG5nthRRBLUkARrRAYM7aWowNjvzDci4GZKECdO4YajzCKbfwjbXadappvurRdFzrUKXKsZGLogNWbaGEeEDJIJHj2jZJy1gk0cLRuD_7kSb-heSkAIxd/s200/OurLadyoftheSign.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5549829896731585746" /></a><br /><div>Anyone who has read my ramblings over many years know that I tend to resist labels, partially because labels can get in the way of learning from those with whom you disagree and partially because the categories Anglicans tend to work in do not fit very well or have become ossified by their most ardent adherents so that I associate:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Anglo-Catholic</i> not only with the sensuous worship without which I cannot live, but also with some serious 19th Century theological errors related to Baptism and Eucharist; with a tendency to focus on an autocratic if not tyrannical authority of the episcopate to the exclusion of the rest of the Body in Council, sometimes in ways, as of late, that show inclinations toward Roman ecclesiologies at odds with our messy (because alive and engaged with flesh) lived Anglican ownhood (to draw from Auden); with a museum curator's habit in collecting liturgical artifacts that at the same time makes dismissal of any creativity or recycling necessary to make the Incarnate One known in our time, place, and culture even as is lauded the creativity of other times, places, and cultures; and with a don't ask, don't tell tendency that kills members of the Body and is justified for the sake of the greater good in an imperial interpretation of 1 Corinthians 12. While lauding the flesh of the Incarnate One, I have sometimes found a tendency to denigrate the flesh of others, whether women or gays, in the name of theology and beauty. Such seems at odds to me with the Incarnate One in his fullness, of whom we too are members. </div><div><br /></div><div>What I have come to realize is that these things are not the markers of one who is catholic; many in fact, are conditions of temperament, time, and place, and culture. But as I lit the candle before the icon of the Virgin of the Sign at seminary this last week, made the Sign of the Cross, and said the <i>Ave Maria</i> in Latin, I could not avoid the catholic label in some fashion. Some have thought me Catholic (that is, Roman or Anglican) for such devotion, but I have explained that no, such devotion is just catholic. Just catholic. Meaning simply ordinary, common, universal. The sensuousness of it all in the best of High and Anglo-Catholic worship is the inspiration of imagination, to vision, to a world as seen through the Image of God, Jesus Christ. A truly catholic worship should inspire creativity as response and even as offering liturgically in hymnody, art, poetry, and the like. </div><div><br /></div><div>I do not flee to Mother Mary because she stands in for Jesus. As Anglicans we did away with any sense that mediation or merit is other than Jesus Christ's. And rightly so. I go to her because in her as like no other, Holy Wisdom was, and is, and comes. She is the one pregnant with promise and possibility. My connection to the Theotokos is not for need of mediation, but it is for comfort and friendship and intercession and inspiration as members of the same One Body, for we are of hers by Him and through His. Like other saints, I have a relationship with her. I talk to Mary, yes, I talk to Mary, often. In hard times and easy, she listens, embraces, and challenges, pointing me to Christ, as if to tell me pray, "Be it done unto me, according to your word." And she really likes, not just loves, her gay children, btw. </div><div><br /></div><div>At the heart of an Anglican catholicity is the God who gets himself dirty, humbles (makes himself earthy) Godself out of love for us into all the ordinary and messy places of life unto birth in a manger, our <i>theologia incarnationis</i> again. Not that the manger is where it will end in some gross nostalgia, for the Cross already looms in Herod's evil order and Rome's imperial foot-on-neck, but because at the Crib everything is already won. God is become one of us! Today! as the antiphon for the <i>Magnificat</i> declares for Christmas days. In the Word become flesh the powers of sin and death are subjected no matter how they whisper lies otherwise in the meantime, and in this Child, our humanity and indeed all flesh is shown its true dignity as that fit for deity. The promise of Easter arrives in a Crib: God will never let us go! So it has been from the Beginning, when God began to create... </div><div><br /></div><div>And just so, the promise of the End is given in the Beginning. We were and are ever spoken into being through God's Word, as Maurice noted--the powers never had a chance. Even before his birth in time, we were and do belong to the Word. That is precisely why what feels to be the close of the Church Year is also its beginning. The promise of the Consummation found in the All Saints Octave and its afters, in Adventtide, and Saptientiatide is found in the Nativity and the entire swath of Presentations through Candlemas. That given and promised in the Nativity of the Word of God shall be finished in the Consummation, when that same Wisdom, Jesus Christ, who fills all things in his risen humanity, is All in All, hidden, unknown, even despised, and always at work, shall burst forth full bloom upon us all unawares and overtake all that separates us from ourselves, one another, the whole of creation, and God: </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Janson;">One day, the Gospel tells us, the tension gradually accumulating between humanity and God will touch the limits prescribed by the possibilities of the world.<span> </span>And then will come the end.<span> </span>The presence of Christ, which has been silently accruing in things, will suddenly be revealed—like a flash of light from pole to pole.<span> </span>Breaking through all the barriers within which the veil of matter and the watertightness of souls have seemingly kept it confined, it will invade the face of the earth….Like lightning, like conflagration, like a flood, the attraction exerted by the Son of Man will lay hold of all the whirling elements in the universe so as to reunite them or subject them to his body....<span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span style=" ;font-family:Janson;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2062663241506120266#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title="">[1]</a></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Yes, we live in the tension of the meantime of promise, feeding on him who we know only explicitly as proclaimed Word and ingested Sacrament, but we shall see face to face. But this feeding nevertheless opens our eyes to a creation ever being spoken into being by this One, ever groaning forth shoots of light, and so the catholic Christian gives each due reverence, even praying that God remember a Holy Thorn Tree <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1337159/Glastonburys-2000-year-old-Holy-Thorn-Tree-hacked-vandals.html">cutdown without thankfulness or purpose</a> when others would scorn:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;font-size:11px;"><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; font-size:13px;"><span class="UIStory_Message">Blessed are you, O God, Creator of the universe,</span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; font-size:13px;"><span class="UIStory_Message">who was, and is, and will ever be our only life: Receive into your care this holy thorn tree, daughter of that which you gave to the people of Glastonbury to twice yearly bloom as remembrance and sign of the incarnate deity and risen humanity of your Son; Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.</span></h3></span></div><div><br /></div><div>By Word and Sacrament, we may read Christ in his Other Book from hurtling Asteroid to braying Zebra. For me, the Mystery of God Incarnate, Jesus Christ, and of the Body nurtured by him, and the promised fulfillment of all creation in the Consummation is no where better discovered than in Mother Mary. I cannot help but see that promise most fully in the she who birthed the Creator of earth, and sea, and sky: </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 28px; font-family:'Goudy Old Style', Garamond, 'Hoefler Text', Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif;font-size:large;">Mother of Christ, hear thou thy people's cry</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 28px; font-family:'Goudy Old Style', Garamond, 'Hoefler Text', Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif;font-size:large;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 28px; font-family:'Goudy Old Style', Garamond, 'Hoefler Text', Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif;font-size:large;">Star of the deep and Portal of the sky!</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 28px; font-family:'Goudy Old Style', Garamond, 'Hoefler Text', Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif;font-size:large;">Mother of Him who thee made from nothing made.<br />Sinking we strive and call to thee for aid:<br />Oh, by what joy which Gabriel brought to thee,<br />Thou Virgin first and last, let us thy mercy see.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 28px; font-family:'Goudy Old Style', Garamond, 'Hoefler Text', Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', serif;font-size:large;"><br /></span></div><div> <div style="mso-element:footnote-list"> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div style="mso-element:footnote" id="ftn"> <p style="text-indent:.5in"><a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2062663241506120266#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="FootnoteCharacters"><span style="font-family:Janson;"><span style="mso-special-character:footnote">[1]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-family:Janson;"> Tutu, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">No Future Without Forgiveness</i>, 266.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="text-indent:.5in"><span style="font-family:Janson;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment--> </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-14443011552738397932010-11-20T09:21:00.000-08:002010-11-20T10:03:46.120-08:00Ramblings on Our Anglican Theologia Incarnationis<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><i>More Deeply Into the Life of the World: God’s Humility and Human Glory </i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I live and work among Lutherans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Over time, in fact, I would say that I have become somewhat “bi-lingual,” able to speak both “Anglican” and “Lutheran” theologically, historically, liturgically. A certain vocabulary and directionality characterizes this Lutheran distinctiveness. And it is a gift to the wider Church universal. </p><p class="MsoNormal">This ecumenical conversation has not left my own thinking unchanged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>On the contrary, this conversation has led me to appreciate more deeply my own tradition, which shares much with Lutherans, and to examine afresh our own conceptions, theologies, doxologies, teachings--our distinctiveness as Anglicans. </p><p class="MsoNormal">Lutherans often speak and write of the <i>theologia crucis</i> or theology of the cross. I will go so far as to say that this <i>theologia cruci</i>s is not so very far from the Anglican emphasis on the Incarnation. After all, if I may speak so boldly, what characterizes Anglican theology is a <i>theologia incarnationis</i>. </p><p class="MsoNormal">The Lutheran focus on Christ on the Cross as the paramount self-revelation of God rubs wrong all of our desires for a glory rooted in success and self-centeredness, excess and exaltation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>As an Anglican, I would chime in, so does a God in diapers living under threat of empire and vassals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal">This Lutheran focus on the Cross is an Incarnational bent not unrelated to the Anglican emphasis of the crib, heightened this time of year. But just as the Cross is more than the Crucifixion, so is the Incarnation more than the Nativity. Both in my experience indeed take us through the full sweep of the event of the Person of Christ happening among us, not just back then, but here and now among us explicitly in Word and Sacrament. Both in turn take us into the life of our social worlds and all of creation--good, bad, ugly, and shit. This is what Anglicans have tended to call "incarnational," that notion, that because God has become a creature, nothing creaturely is outside the purview of God's concern. This incarnationalism is not unrelated to Anglican emphasis on the Church as Christ's Body, something we take rather seriously, sometimes to the point that Christ who makes us "by the power of the Holy Spirit" is eclipsed by our being made, ecclesiology, and related polity and governance. </p><p class="MsoNormal">Yet, our <i>theologia incarnationis</i> is not first and foremost a mystical emphasis on birthing "Christ in us," though it may be that for some few given particular gifts, but first and foremost a communion or fellowship or commons of "Christ for us and we for others." Irrespective of gifts, explicit means are what remain commonly shared and required. The emphasis is on relationships to God and one another centrally in Baptism and Communion, and in turn, to our social worlds and the whole of creation. And not that we bring Christ to an otherwise Christless world, but that we go forth to name where the Word is at work in our social worlds and creation, though hidden, unknown, and even despised. What we might characterize as Brs. Paul and Cranmer's "we in Christ." That is why leaves can burst forth divine fire and surprise us, why it is that movements and changes in our social worlds too can say something of truth, and so, precisely why Anglican poetry has tended not to ignore God's working in our social worlds and creation. </p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">But before we get to the good and the ugly, something perhaps most obvious in Anglican poetry, being bold enough to look at the bad and the shit begins at Nativity. The close of Auden's <i>For the Time Being </i>is a prime example. This is where Cross and Crib kiss. </p><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The Lutheran emphasis on the Incarnational direction of God’s self-gift, that is a direction toward us as ground for our response, questions any spirituality that would put our own quest for God as the starting point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We are, to quote so many, receptive responders in relationship to the God of the universe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We do not go up to God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>God comes down to us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In modern parlance, we do not find God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>God searches us out and meets us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In Christ, God has found us, embraced us, once for all times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The spiritual quest under such conditions is not finding God, but loving our neighbor as ourselves in our daily society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>At the same time, this Incarnational bent is not unrelated to the Anglican emphasis on participation in God’s own life in the Spirit by Christ to the Father precisely by living lives of good with others in society—that is, a Trinitarian emphasis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Our participation, as Hooker reminds us, is always gift, that is, a receiving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">So it’s a matter of seeing things from different angles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">As an Anglican and Benedictine, I want to appreciate this critical Reformation insight into grace, into God’s unearned Love in Christ—one we have bequeathed to us by Cranmer and our Prayer Book; I also want to appreciate self-examination and contemplation, again, bequeathed to us by Cranmer and our Prayer Book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Self-examination, waiting on God, contemplation, inwardness are not necessarily opposed to love of neighbor as ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">However, much of contemplative and monastic thinking and spirituality is focused on our ascent, our gain in spiritual gifts, our growth in grace, me, me, me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Inwardness can become an excuse for not being in life with and for others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Many books offer us stages of progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Even the wisdom of our Elders sometimes suggests a division of the personal and communal in the struggle that cannot stand the test of a Trinitarian theology where the personal and communal coarise in the Three Who Are One.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Our own personhood is itself formed by others and by Another prior to budding self-awareness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We are never alone when we are with the Alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>All of humanity, each human being, every creature, all of creation is present with us in this One In Three. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But stages tend to suggest how we are apart or better or further along.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Stage-thinking separates (the definition of Sin I most often use) rather than serves sisters and brothers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">As an introvert, I have always been quite aware of an inward concern and yet skeptical of stages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>One because I do not see the life of discipleship as rooted primarily in an inward focus on levels of attainment, but on resting in God’s graciousness and self-examination, where is it that God and Sin are moving the heart?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And two because I think we humans are prone to put ourselves higher up the ladder than is truthful or honest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How many of us know someone who announces often and floats about “spiritual,” who yet is narcissistic, self-serving, miserable to be around, all about me, and clueless of this (lacking insight)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For myself, just about the time I start feeling all “spiritual” is about the time comes a moment of crabbiness, snarkiness, or grumpiness to bring me back down to earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Just ask my partner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Ascent language, though common in Christian tradition through interpretation of Jacob’s ladder, can be trouble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Too often, it has interpreted gain in spiritual gifts and growth in grace as escape from ordinariness and daily life, and without intending, bequeathed to us portions of a Manichaean inheritance—a distrust or even hatred of flesh or world understood not as vice—the power of Sin (hubris, domination, selfishness, etc.), but as our createdness, our social worlds, and all that goes with this: </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Food</p><p class="MsoNormal">Drink</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Sex</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Work</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Play </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Under such conditions, self-control has tended to become hypervigilance, eliminating, or extinguishing passions rather than manifest as moderation, gardening, or tilling our desires: the "mutual joy" of our marriage office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The message underlying such a hypervigilant understanding of ascesis or discipline is that our createdness is evil rather than fallen, has tended to suggest that we have to escape our createdness in order to become more Christlike, rather than to embrace our createdness through direction, that is, discipline, patterns of life, as disciples in the midst of everyday life. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">So many of the Churches great ethical errors arise from a theological error to properly appreciate bodies, social worlds, and creation in light of the Incarnation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Our christology, frankly, is not robust enough to deal with a God who ate, slept, wept, and shat. And so we cannot in turn, deal with our own messy createdness and that of one another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Fear of createdness has tended to rigor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Every era has its rigorists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And too often those rigorists are dismissive of human finitude.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Ethics and ascesis are ever cast in either/or terms and sometimes with little thought about what supports and nurtures fruits of the Spirit for particular human beings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Rare is the rigorist who connects how and what we eat with other’s lack of food or our farming practices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Or if so, the spirit is one of guilt-inducement and shaming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I think of the nobleman in the film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Chocolat</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Rare is the rigorist who connects human lovemaking or refraining there from (as expression of our capacity for connectivity, our sexuality) with Christ’s faithfulness to us as interpretive key in determining styles and manners of life suited to Christian discipleship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Of if so, connects it so as to puff up oneself and tear down another, to paint an aura of light about oneself while denouncing the other. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">And alongside the rigorists, we have the moralists and traditionalists, who more often than not simply mouth the past formulae without apprehension of God’s Word at work in the present, often for the sake of institution-protection rather than concern for what serves to support the Spirit patterning Christ in our lives here and now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Formulae under such circumstances become dead letters rather than life-giving expressions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The danger is that left naked by this failure to present the Incarnation in our time and culture and place, formulae are rejected altogether rather than reinvigorated—antinomy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>These folks do more to undermine any credibility for Scripture and Tradition than all of the liberals and even libertines combined because the conflations are so strong that one of the traditions of both Scripture and Tradition is completely ignored, namely criticism in light of God’s self-revelation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> And hence, the possibility of handing over Christ in our time--traditioning.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">On the other hand, love of createdness has tended to extremity.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Quite in contrast to these rigorists, though they may appear the same, we find those who just as extreme, embrace the most messy realities of created existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Sr Catherine and Br Francis licking lepers sores like dogs to give relief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But this extremity, while having the same outward appearance as that of the rigorist in discipline, carries a different Spirit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This Spirit loves the flesh even in its vulnerability, passions, and death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">For most of us, however, between rigor and extremity, lies moderation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Moderation is intricately wrapped up in an embrace of finitude, in a recognition of humility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Few are they who can show forth God in the extremes and not become rigorists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Many are the rest of us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And our hope lies together in a community of humility of common humanity at prayer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In the Rule, Br Benedict gives us a curious ascent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>A ladder of humility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>To ascend a ladder of this sort is precisely to climb down from the ethereal plane.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Ascending the ladder of humility requires climbing down from the ladder of exaltation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>To climb the ladder of humility is to step into the things of dirt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Only by stepping into the things of earth will we find ourselves surrounded by God’s ever-Presence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The point of Benedict’s approach is not a focus on personal inward attainment, but on lived expression of love of God in the things of everyday life together with fellow humans and all creatures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Old hat to some by now, humility is related to the Latin humus or earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Other translations of humility might include “down to earth” or “close to earth.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">To be humble is not to be a doormat for Jesus, a popular misconception too readily reinforced by too many Church authorities, who have misunderstood power as control rather than as compassion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Whereever control rather than compassion dominates an understanding of power, we have misuse and abuse in light of the Cross, in light of preferring Christ.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">To be humble is to shamelessly embrace ourselves as dust, clay, earth beings without flinching from our vulnerability, without fleeing from our capacity for passion (joy, pain, enthusiasm, despair), without turning away from facing death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">To be humble is to be an earth creature, endowed from our shared creation with all creatures with much intelligence and consciousness, called to lives of service by prayer, work, and play in community on Earth, our garden home.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">To be humble is to have a capacity for humor, to laugh at ourselves and with others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Not directly related to humus, humor derives from the Latin for body fluid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But I don’t think being of earth and being fluid filled are unrelated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>To be able to smile gently at ourselves and our bodiliness, and we are quite comical, is sign of health.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>To be able to laugh when we are less than perfect is sign of being close to earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Sr Hildegaard of Bingen would speak of our being wet, filled with fluid, as the Holy Spirit’s viriditas or greening power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The wet, living fluids of life are sign of God’s creating and sustaining us.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">This humility, this earthiness places us in relationship with our fellow creatures with our two arms and two legs and brain capacity oversized for trouble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Rather than leading us to flee from our shared flesh with rocks, plants, humility leads us to a delight in our shared creation, perhaps no more obvious than as voiced in several of the Psalms.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">We are of the same flesh, spoken into being by the same Wisdom, Jesus Christ; drawn into new life by the same Spirit, Holy and Life-giving; and beloved of the same Source of All Being, a merciful Father.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Abba Irenaeus once wrote, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Abba Athanasius later penned, “God became a human being that human beings might become divine.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Many Lutheran theologians I have read balk at these sayings because they suggest a quest for our self-glorification, for holiness, for theosis or sanctification.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But I think they misunderstand. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And I think, so do some of our spirituality enthusiasts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>After all, given Brs Irenaeus’ and Athanasius’ incarnational bent, the divinity revealed and given in Jesus Christ is one of embrace of the earthly, the dust, the clay—even the shit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Becoming divine is not about becoming airy-fairy, ethereal, far from earthly concerns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Becoming divine in our case is precisely about facing up to our createdness, our fleshiness, our dishonesties with ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Becoming divine is about our becoming more human. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And becoming more human is not to fly away on wings of Love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Becoming human is to walk into the tough stuff held by Love. That is the point on our end of the <i>communicatio idiomatum</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Br Cyril of Alexandria’s notion of the communication of attributes is useful in this regard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The attributes of God, such as glory or mightiness, are communicated to us through Christ, that is, on the level of human beings as humility or earthiness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Which vice versa reveals to us a God whose own glory is unlike our fallen notions and scripts, that is, unlike the hubris of Sin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Being embraced by God makes us more salty, not less.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Some would call this a reversal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I would call it what happens when the God Who Is Love reveals and gives Godself through, with, in, as flesh, the Human One.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">As an Anglican and Benedictine, I, of course, have to ask the theosis or sanctification question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What might better be called the ascetical theology question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How is it that my life is to be a response to Christ that shows forth the pattern of Christ’s faithfulness?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>A question that I tend to reframe from Br Paul as, “How is Salvation working Himself out in us and among us?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Or from spiritual direction, simply put, “How is God at work in my life?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How is Sin at work in my life?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Both of these sayings of Brs Irenaeus and Athanasius are intricately tied to the Incarnation, to Jesus Christ, who reveals Godself, gives Godsself in a manger, as a peasant teacher, on a curse tree, as the ordinary things of life—drink and food.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>God’s divinity embraces earthly beings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And makes us not less, but more earthly, accepting of our limitations, our fragility, our need for God so poignant in “keeping death ever before us.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>That is what it means to be “divine” on the level of human beings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">This is not a ladder of our glorious movement toward God, but a ladder of God’s glorious movement toward us, a movement that draws us deeper into the life of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For in this movement toward us, we are embraced (“caught up”) into the Life of the Triune God, ever at work in the life of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We are touched by God not for escape or denigration of this body, this world, this creation, these creatures, but for entering more deeply into skin, going into all of creation to proclaim the Good News of God’s embrace and to serve all flesh in need.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">May we do relatedness,</p><p class="MsoNormal">+ love blessing,</p> <p class="MsoNormal">and walk close to earth.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Amen.</p> <!--EndFragment-->Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-22703828591340330022010-11-05T16:20:00.000-07:002010-11-05T16:53:08.762-07:00Not Mere Subscription, But Wholly Formation<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:9;">I do not dip as much into Anglican controversies anymore.<br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:9;">I do have serious reservations about the proposed Anglican Covenant, most recently expressed in a two-part piece that my academese made incomprehensible.<o:p> In short, I do not think it adequately makes room for our peculiarly and messy contextual catholicity, what we have often called "comprehension." <a href="http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/anglican_communion/comprehensively_beautiful_not.php">Part I</a> and <a href="http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/anglican_communion/comprehensively_beautiful_not_1.php">Part II</a>.<br /></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:9;">A <a href="http://noanglicancovenant.org/index.html">coalition</a> formed to oppose the proposed Anglican Covenant is now underway.<span style=""> </span>There is much to commend it as Fr. Haller <a href="http://jintoku.blogspot.com/2010/11/richard-hookers-smiling.html">notes</a>.<span style=""></span><o:p><br /></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:9;">And I do share many misgivings about this proposed Anglican Covenent, not rejection of any possible covenant whatsoever, and while I will continue to raise questions of this proposal, offer my disagreement, and make common partnership, I cannot join this coalition for these words, <span style="">"</span></span>We believe in an Anglicanism based on a shared heritage of worship, not on a set of doctrines to which all must subscribe."<span style="font-size:9;"><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:9;"><o:p></o:p>We have here a misunderstanding, if not decoupling, of liturgy and doctrine as they function in Anglican tradition, as if the one can be divorced from the other.<span style=""> </span>Doctrine, especially that which we call Core Doctrine, in our tradition is not merely propositional or dry (or dead) teaching, but living and relational presentation and proclamation of Presence, more so, of Persons in relation to us.<span style=""> In that same way, liturgy is not merely a shared heritage, but some common sense and praying of Who God is, Who God is for and with us, and Who we are in God. </span>It is ironic to me that both many defenders of doctrine and many detractors of doctrine seem to fail to see their shared similarity of making doctrine something merely black-on-white, something objectified and cardboard, in contrast to common praying, to living relationship that is doctrine and liturgy. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:9;"><o:p></o:p>So, while we do not always agree, and we do not on the problems of the present proposed Anglican Covenant, Fr. Owen is right to point out <a href="http://creedalchristian.blogspot.com/2010/11/no-anglican-covenant-coalition-promotes.html">problems</a> with this divorce of doctrine and liturgy.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:9;"><o:p></o:p>That is, doctrine is a living reality of among others, God to us, us to God, we to one another, as liturgy.<span style=""> That is not to say that these central or Core presentations and proclamations</span><span style=""> cannot be expressed in different ways, languages, idioms, or even liturgies. They have been and will continue to be so, as we share these central with the Whole Church Catholic as summed in our profession of living trust in the God who is this way and this way with us, the Nicene Creed. </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-size:9;"><o:p></o:p>And so our liturgies, for each is a happening and more so for we have allowable variety, even in our set praying, present and proclaim precisely about Who God is, Who God is for and with us, and Who we are in God.<span style=""> </span>This includes language of Trinity, Incarnation, Creation, Consummation, Salvation by no merit of our own just to name a few.<span style=""> That is to say, Anglicanism does involve shared doctrines, which inscribe us.<br /></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-size:9;"><span style="">As an example, take the last, Salvation. To notice doctrine by contrast, just compare the collects for many Saints feast days as found in the Roman Rite (or <span style="font-style: italic;">Sarum</span>) to those found in Anglican liturgies. While the former often appeal to merits of the Saint, the latter always close on Christ's merits only. That is a peculiarly Anglican way of handling Reformation reforms, as is the Rite I Eucharistic Prayer. We did not throw out the Communion of Saints (all the living in Christ--i.e., the living and the dead), but we did make of it again a companionship and communion, even an intercessory companionship and communion, <span style="font-style: italic;">in Christ</span> rather than a patronage or mediation <span style="font-style: italic;">to Christ</span>.<br /></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:georgia;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-size:9;"><span style="">On the contrary, then, Anglican Christianity is peculiar precisely because we have the audacity to declare that our confession is praying. Our whole selves at prayer are formed by Who God is, Who God is for and with us, and Who we are in God: To you, O Christ.</span></span></span></p>Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2062663241506120266.post-4693438576341263822010-10-16T09:02:00.000-07:002010-10-16T09:11:12.468-07:00Ascending by Humility: The Hard Truths of Imprecatory Psalms<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal">Derek has offered a <a href="http://haligweorc.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/imprecatory-psalms/">post</a> on the retention of the imprecatory Psalms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>While there is merit to reinterpretations of these Psalms, I find these Psalms invaluable for self-examination and social-examination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We do not want to face ugliness in ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We would prefer to think of our sense of justice as untouched by Sin, as we go on (self-)righteous crusade devoid of mercy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Too much ugliness is accomplished in the name of the good, in the Name of God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The Twentieth Century is the bloodiest and most vicious in history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>With all of our advances, on the level of human relating, we are not any better than those desiring to dash babes against rocks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> And it could be argued that we are worse--sometimes because of our advances in technology. </span>The imprecatory Psalms are a wake up to face what is in ourselves, in our socialities—not just those of society that bugaboo "the world," but those of our Churches, a reminder not lost on me in the wake of so many suicides by lgbt young people. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Abba Isaac of Scetis reminds us that the passions are not themselves evil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>His was a revolution in desert understanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Previous teachers had taught that the passions were either evil or meant to be extinguished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Abba Isaac sees them as fallen, in need of bridling, so as to be redeemed and turned to the good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Anger, he tells us, exists to do justice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But God’s justice, seen through the lens of Crib and Cross, Resurrection and Ascension, namely, Jesus Christ, is not the justice of unbridled self-righteousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>God’s justice on the level of fallen humanity gently firmly says “no” to harm of others while staying close to earth, while recognizing “I too am a sinner.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For Anglicans, this should all be very familiar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Our Prayer Book ever holds before us the mirror of “sinner,” of which the imprecatory Psalms are a part, and reminds us repeatedly that our desires are created good, but fallen, in need of redemption, once-for-all accomplished in Christ, who now works himself out in our own lives if we will to face ourselves and face Reality nowhere more vivid than the Crucifixion, where we who would put to death God, find ourselves "within the reach of saving embrace."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">To face our ugliness personally and socially too is confession and profession of need for God. We leave out the imprecatory Psalms at our peril. In a manuscript I am currently working on, I write of the Psalms and their order,</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:35.3pt"><span style=" layout-grid-mode:line;mso-bidi-font-style:italicfont-family:Janson;">“All of us have favorites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I personally resonate with those that set our praise within the whole of creation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And some psalms horrify us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We do not want to face the possibility of God's anger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Or our own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>By neglecting nothing in the psalter, we cannot avoid wrestling with our own want to crush enemies or gloat over another's ruin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We cannot avoid our own alienation from God, one another, and all creatures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>A <i>continua</i> practice asks us to enter into the struggle of discipleship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:35.3pt"><span style=" layout-grid-mode:line;mso-bidi-font-style:italicfont-family:Janson;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:35.3pt"><span style=" layout-grid-mode:line;mso-bidi-font-style:italicfont-family:Janson;">For busy days and for ease-of-use in keeping up the practice, a psalm has been chosen and arranged in contemplative vernacular for each time and day as a beginning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>These are designed for this <i>continua</i> approach to making God's Work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>You will notice that the different types of psalms are not avoided. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The variety chosen is meant to give a sweep of the types of psalms, each of which reveals our dependence in a different way, a mini-<i>continua</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The effect of <i>continua</i> practice is maintained.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:35.3pt"><span style=" layout-grid-mode:line;mso-bidi-font-style:italicfont-family:Janson;"></span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:35.3pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Janson;"><br /></span></p> <!--EndFragment-->Christopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17176482447120453890noreply@blogger.com1