Six Signs: Two Years Later

I still think this has punch: Six Signs. 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.

Communion Without Baptism (CWOB): A Follow-Up to Derek Olsen

Though 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.

Read his three-piece concerns on the subject:

Communion without Baptism I

Communion without Baptism II

Communion without Baptism III

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:

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: Baptismal Calling

Here are some of my previous posts that relate to the matter:

Questions on Communion Without Baptism (CWOB): Real Presence

Prefer Nothing to Christ or Keep Death Always Before You: CWOB and Patterns of the Cross

Focus of Unity? Inclusion?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To quote from F.D. Maurice:

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.”

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]

[1] F.D. Maurice, “Sermon I,” The Prayer Book (London: James Clarke & Co. Ltd., 1966), 6-9.

Forget "Contemporary" and "Traditional": Other Directions

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:

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.

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.

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".

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.

_____

[1] "meets us" is language I received from two students, Holly Johnson and Michael Larson.

Marriage as Discipleship

My friend Lee points us to a piece http://thinkingreed.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/traditional-marriage-hasnt-existed-for-a-long-time/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.

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)?

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.

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.

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.

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.

As I wrote in comment to Lee's post:

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.

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!

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.

The Rhythm of the Days and Seasons of our Church Year

One 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 Derek, reminds us again and again, the lectionary is a key to understanding the formation of us by the Church Year.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

At the Heart of Anglican Catholicity is the Incarnation: Devotion to the Theotokos

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:

Anglo-Catholic 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.

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 Ave Maria 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.

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.

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 theologia incarnationis 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 Magnificat 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...

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:

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. And then will come the end. The presence of Christ, which has been silently accruing in things, will suddenly be revealed—like a flash of light from pole to pole. 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....[1]

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 cutdown without thankfulness or purpose when others would scorn:

Blessed are you, O God, Creator of the universe,

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.

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:

Mother of Christ, hear thou thy people's cry

Star of the deep and Portal of the sky!

Mother of Him who thee made from nothing made.
Sinking we strive and call to thee for aid:
Oh, by what joy which Gabriel brought to thee,
Thou Virgin first and last, let us thy mercy see.

---

[1] Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 266.