'Psmith' Makes a Story

I happened to read P.G. Wodehouse's Leave It to Psmith the same week I saw my cousin's husband Jack for the first time in many years. This was helpful because in Jack I see something of a real life Psmith -- a man of expansive bonhomie who comes from wealth but likes the atmospherics of life more than the accumulation of possessions.

The protagonist Psmith -- the "P" is silent, he lets people know about his amended surname -- has lost his family money during post-World War I England and is unwilling to pursue a safe living in his uncle's fish business. So, he styles himself an agent for hire hoping to hook some sort of intrigue that it is at once adventuresome, well-meaning and profitable. As Wodehouse would have it, Psmith gets just that.

Psmith winds up at a country estate called Blandings Castle in pursuit of the lovely Eve Halliday, with a side mission -- for the best of reasons -- of heisting Lady Constance's jewelled necklace. And wouldn't you know it, with luck and charm, Psmith wins the day.

Psmith's charm -- his optimistic banter like my cousin Jack's -- is the real jewel in the book. When Eve discovers that Psmith lied about his identity in order to follow her to Blandings Castle, he rhetorically turns the deception into proof of his affection for her:

"Consider! Twice that day you had passed out of my life--may I say taking the sunshine with you?--and I began to fear you might pass out of it forever. So, loath though I was to commit the solecism of planting myself in this happy home under false pretences, I could see no other other way. And here I am!"

Eve responds that Psmith is mad to think he can pretend to be someone else while courting her for days and then just brush off the masquerade. Undaunted, Psmith proceeds to ask for her hand in marriage with this qualification:

"I merely say 'Think it over'. It is nothing to cause you mental distress. Other men love you. Freddie Threepwood loves you. Just add me to the list. That is all I ask. Muse on me from time to time. Reflect that I may be an acquired taste. You probably did not like olives the first time you tasted them. Now you probably do. Give me the same chance you would give an olive."

I think that's funny. I think it sounds like my cousin Jack saying his 70-year-old mother-in-law "didn't have much" when she was practicing the Macarena dance before the family party but that we should go ahead and play the song anyway. Jack can make a party; Psmith can make a story.

The Good Gang: Reflections on 'New Monasticism'

About all I can say in response to New Monasticism by Jonathan-Wilson Hartgrove is, “Amen.”

I say, “Amen,” because he articulates well implications of the Gospel to which I have been persuaded, e.g. pro-life, non-violence, the gift economy, visible unity and the discipline of regular prayer. But more than articulating them, Wilson-Hartgrove is living them with others in the city in which I live. This is what is so convicting about New Monasticism. The book less explains Christianity and more says to anyone who bends its pages: “Come, let’s be Christians, you and I.”

And to think this book could have been bad. It could have been schismatic, but instead cites Benedict and Antony, and privileges the local congregation over the para-church organization. It could have drifted into Utopia and yet it centers the Christian economic revolution in the household (note to self: post on God’s Economy). It could have waxed poetic without prophetic bite but that Jonathan and his wife Leah risked their lives as Christian peacemakers in Iraq during the war. And, there’s the story about how he kept getting arrested protesting the execution of criminals in Raleigh until he got his day in court and made a theological defense of actions that included testimony from Stanley Hauerwas.

Those stories stick in my mind as does this gem of a parable quoted from a man named John Alexander.

He asked people to imagine a gang member. Call him Jimmy. Say Jimmy has been running drugs for ten years and is headed straight for prison or the grave. What does he need? The fundamentalists John grew up with would say that Jimmy needs a personal relationship with Jesus. And they would be right. Jimmy needs a conversion experience and a personal transformation to become the person God wants him to be. But if all Jimmy gets is a sinner’s prayer and a church to go to on Sunday mornings, he’ll take his personal relationship with Jesus right back with him to the gang. And he’ll go on living the same way he has been. So what do the liberals say Jimmy needs? John said they may note that Jimmy is a victim of racism along with his neighbors and they may work hard to build a health clinic in his underserved community. And they would be right. Because if Jimmy stays in the gang, he’ll get shot and need someone to sew him up. But after the doctor saves his life, he’ll send Jimmy home to the same gang. The doctor doesn’t have anything more to offer Jimmy.

“What Jimmy really needs,” John would say at the end of this thought experiment, “is a new gang.”

This is the image I will take away from New Monasticism: Christian congregations as good gangs – fierce, localized, protective of their own, a subculture concerning to the powers that be.

To Be a Priest (or a Deacon)

Individual Christian priests don't exist.

This is a bit of discernment I gained while reading "To Be a Priest," a book from 1975 comprising essays from Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox teachers prompted by the controversy in the Episcopal church surrounding gender and ordination. The bulk of the essays are from Episcopalians, as that is the church of the two editors. Few of the essays directly "take a side" in the debate, although the editors intentionally solicited writers with varied views on the topic (the two editors being themselves split on the issue). The essays do, however as the book title indicates, reflect on the nature of the priesthood.

There are no Christian priests -- plural -- as there is only one great high priest, Jesus the Christ, in continuity with his body, the church. The passage in 1 Peter often quoted by Protestants about "a royal priesthood" refers to Christ comprising all believers into a single priesthood -- his own. More than one essay makes this case and I am persuaded by it.

This understanding has an important implication: One does not pursue the priesthood; it pursues you. Jesus initiated our current priesthood -- a fulfillment of the Hebrew one -- in Palestine two thousand years ago. Since them the Holy Spirit has been snapping up people, by baptism, to be a part of it. The priesthood is by God's design, not man's.

Early on the church came to see distinct ongoing functions within the one priesthood, that is the Christian community. Two of those functions were oversight and service. Oversight was the authority to keep a community going in the way the apostles had passed on from Jesus. Service, it seems, was both an administrative role under an overseer and the tasks necessary to support the church's mission of acting mercifully to neighbors. The latter is the place in the priesthood of the deacon; the former is the bishop.

Interestingly, we still haven't come to what we call today a "priest." That role's antecedent in the New Testament is "presbyter," which seems to have some of the overseeing function. It's translation is "elder" and one essay convincingly finds its heritage in the councils of elders overseeing local synagogues. After the age of the apostles, but still during the early church, the presbyter comes to be identified as something like the bishop's representative at the celebration of the Eucharist. A Catholic theologian writes beautifully about a priest being, essentially, the guy who facilitates the occurrence of the Eucharist.

Some essays in the collection stink. I won't dwell beyond this paragraph on what's not edifying, but one of the editors, Urban T. Holmes, writes about how there are limitations to sociological and psychological description of the priesthood and then goes on to give one himself, using a comparative-religion paradigm the model with an emphasis on a priest's duty to mediate an unspecified "transcendent reality". And then there is, of course, one obligatory essay with the oppression-equality-rights narrative. Such essays don't teach much about the priesthood, but they are helpful in the sense of laying out the diversity of thought within The Episcopal Church.

Most compelling in "To Be a Priest" is the opening essay by Robert Terwilliger, a co-editor of the book. He speaks with a holy authority about the nature of the priesthood with a faithful vision of the church I associate with Michael Ramsey's book "The Gospel and the Catholic Church". Terwilliger writes:

There is only one priest, Jesus Christ. He and he alone can bond God and man because of what he did for us, and because of what he is as the incarnate unity of God and man....

The priesthood of Christ is sent forth into the world. The commission of the apostles is part of the Gospel. Jesus projects what he is and what he does for man into history in the persons of other men. He chooses, definitely chooses and designates, the Twelve to go forth in his name. They are to be not merely teachers and examples but extensions of himself and his divine mission....

It is through this ministry of apostles that the Church is brought into being and built up. They do act as ministers of the Church and in the Church, but they are, above all, apostles to the Church. They represent the continual coming of Christ to the Church and the world.

There's a worldly voice that tells me after reading this book that I should express opinion about the relationship between gender and ordained ministry. And, I can say that the voices I find most instructive tend to see the offices of bishop and priest as male, although not uniformly so. But, I think I'll pass on saying anything more than that. What this book more substantially prompts in is a renewed vision of the expanse, beauty and power of the crucified Christ and his body with its particular functions, membership and mission.

Reading "To Be a Priest" has sharpened my discernment indeed ... about becoming a deacon. Oops, I guess that's a matter for another post.