I prayed this morning for the neighbors' chicken to return. It did.
I was reminded of the parable of the lost sheep but I don’t think it applies because mine wasn’t an altruistic prayer. The neighbors return today from vacation and I was going to have trouble getting the apology out of my mouth: “Thanks for trusting me to take care of your chickens. I left the coup open one night and one went missing. The fresh eggs were great.”
Reading Hebrews chapter 4 today – Holy Saturday -- gave me this insight: Jesus finished his work of re-creation on the sixth day, the same day The Word finished creation. He rested after creation and on Holy Saturday he rested in the grave. And thus the world shifted its foundation from Saturday to Sunday -- from the work of creation to the promise of re-creation.
This coincides with what a friend told me this week. He said Holy Saturday is the day God was silent.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The Eucharist: From Meal to Liturgy
It’s halftime for me in The Shape of the Liturgy. Gregory Dix has made his foundational arguments; I report them here to both readers of this blog. (Note: My sources indicate there are a different two people now reading.)
It all begins with the Last Supper. Despite its placement on the first day of Passover in the synoptic Gospels, Dix follows John, and apparently a number of scholars, in placing it on the night before the Passover meal. Instead of being a Passover meal, Dix argues, it was a Jewish ritual fraternal meal called a “Chabûrah.” The form of it wouldn’t have been unique to Jesus and his disciples, and was more a meal than a worship service. It was bounded by a prayer of thanks and breaking of bread at the beginning and at the end by a longer prayer of thanksgiving over a shared cup of wine (the traditional language of these prayers are given on pages 52-3). Here, Dix finds the events described by St. Paul in I Corinthians 11:23-26 – and the nucleus of the Christian Eucharist.
While Dix makes the case that the Last Supper fell within the established tradition of Chabûrah meals, there was something distinctive about this one. During the opening breaking of bread, instead of saying only, “Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, eternal King, Who bringest forth bread from the earth,” Jesus also tells his disciples: “This is My Body which is for you. Do this for the re-calling of Me” (1 Cor. 11:24). At the end of the meal, Dix assumes Jesus would have said the full traditional Chabûrah thanksgiving prayer before adding: “This is the cup of the New Covenant in My Blood. Do this, whenever you drink it, for the re-calling of Me” (1 Cor. 11:25).
Having claimed authority for the Corinthian 11 verses and set them in context, Dix makes his case about the fundamental character of the Eucharist. First, it was an event – an action -- that Jesus commands his disciples to do. Theological explanations are secondary to the activity itself; and in fact in the history of the church, the explanations will continually evolve while the action settles relatively quickly into a regular “shape.” The second piece of Dix’ thesis is that the word he translates as “re-calling,” the Greek anamnesis, should be understood as a powerful process of making present – not a mere remembering or recounting. QED, in being faithful to Christ’s command to do the Eucharist, Christians are making him present in them and them to him.
The shape the Eucharist takes is, of course, the topic of the book. I’ll name that pattern here but it seems most references to The Shape includes it (certainly the editor’s introduction does; I should check with respect to The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, which was my prompt to read Dix). Within a couple centuries of the Last Supper, Dix thesis goes, the Eucharist took the four-fold form of: The bishop or his designee takes the offering of bread and wine on behalf of the gathered community; the president then prays thanksgiving for the elements (and all God has done); next he breaks the bread; and finally the bread and wine are distributed.
How then do we get the present-day liturgy with hymns, scripture readings and a sermon (and no Eucharist at all in some Protestant churches)? This, Dix explains, comes from a fusion of the Jewish public synaxis meeting of Torah reading, commentary and sung psalms with the initially domestic Eucharistic gathering. In underscoring the domestic character of the original Eucharist, Dix describes a fascinating connection between the layout of Roman aristocratic houses where early Christians met and the floor plans of the first Basilicas, which were the blueprints for later Cathedrals and parish churches.
Perhaps most interesting is the relationship between Christian Eucharistic prayers and the thanksgiving prayer over the “cup of blessing” at the close of the Chabûrah meal. At one point, Dix juxtaposes a source for the Jewish thanksgiving prayer with a Eucharistic prayer from the early third-century Roman priest Hippolytus. The continuity seems to be there. Compare Hippolytus’ prayer with Eucharistic Prayer B in the Book of Common Prayer and you get a sense of continuous prayer from the Last Supper to present – and I believe some of the fruit of Dix' labor for liturgical reform and recovery.
It all begins with the Last Supper. Despite its placement on the first day of Passover in the synoptic Gospels, Dix follows John, and apparently a number of scholars, in placing it on the night before the Passover meal. Instead of being a Passover meal, Dix argues, it was a Jewish ritual fraternal meal called a “Chabûrah.” The form of it wouldn’t have been unique to Jesus and his disciples, and was more a meal than a worship service. It was bounded by a prayer of thanks and breaking of bread at the beginning and at the end by a longer prayer of thanksgiving over a shared cup of wine (the traditional language of these prayers are given on pages 52-3). Here, Dix finds the events described by St. Paul in I Corinthians 11:23-26 – and the nucleus of the Christian Eucharist.
While Dix makes the case that the Last Supper fell within the established tradition of Chabûrah meals, there was something distinctive about this one. During the opening breaking of bread, instead of saying only, “Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, eternal King, Who bringest forth bread from the earth,” Jesus also tells his disciples: “This is My Body which is for you. Do this for the re-calling of Me” (1 Cor. 11:24). At the end of the meal, Dix assumes Jesus would have said the full traditional Chabûrah thanksgiving prayer before adding: “This is the cup of the New Covenant in My Blood. Do this, whenever you drink it, for the re-calling of Me” (1 Cor. 11:25).
Having claimed authority for the Corinthian 11 verses and set them in context, Dix makes his case about the fundamental character of the Eucharist. First, it was an event – an action -- that Jesus commands his disciples to do. Theological explanations are secondary to the activity itself; and in fact in the history of the church, the explanations will continually evolve while the action settles relatively quickly into a regular “shape.” The second piece of Dix’ thesis is that the word he translates as “re-calling,” the Greek anamnesis, should be understood as a powerful process of making present – not a mere remembering or recounting. QED, in being faithful to Christ’s command to do the Eucharist, Christians are making him present in them and them to him.
The shape the Eucharist takes is, of course, the topic of the book. I’ll name that pattern here but it seems most references to The Shape includes it (certainly the editor’s introduction does; I should check with respect to The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, which was my prompt to read Dix). Within a couple centuries of the Last Supper, Dix thesis goes, the Eucharist took the four-fold form of: The bishop or his designee takes the offering of bread and wine on behalf of the gathered community; the president then prays thanksgiving for the elements (and all God has done); next he breaks the bread; and finally the bread and wine are distributed.
How then do we get the present-day liturgy with hymns, scripture readings and a sermon (and no Eucharist at all in some Protestant churches)? This, Dix explains, comes from a fusion of the Jewish public synaxis meeting of Torah reading, commentary and sung psalms with the initially domestic Eucharistic gathering. In underscoring the domestic character of the original Eucharist, Dix describes a fascinating connection between the layout of Roman aristocratic houses where early Christians met and the floor plans of the first Basilicas, which were the blueprints for later Cathedrals and parish churches.
Perhaps most interesting is the relationship between Christian Eucharistic prayers and the thanksgiving prayer over the “cup of blessing” at the close of the Chabûrah meal. At one point, Dix juxtaposes a source for the Jewish thanksgiving prayer with a Eucharistic prayer from the early third-century Roman priest Hippolytus. The continuity seems to be there. Compare Hippolytus’ prayer with Eucharistic Prayer B in the Book of Common Prayer and you get a sense of continuous prayer from the Last Supper to present – and I believe some of the fruit of Dix' labor for liturgical reform and recovery.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Gregory Dix: An English, Monastic Liturgist With Attitude
I realize I may overwhelm the readers of this blog, both of them, by posting twice in a day, but yet I press forward.
As threatened in my write up of the Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, I am now reading Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy. I've heard it referenced a few times as one of the most helpful explanations of the history of purpose of catholic Christian worship. After reading only the editor's introduction and the first chapter, I'm reassured.
Dix, I just learned, was a monk at a Anglican Benedictine abbey in Nashdom, England. His community remained within the Church of England but worshiped in Latin according to the Roman missal and breviary.
In explaining his approach in The Shape, Dix says:
As threatened in my write up of the Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, I am now reading Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy. I've heard it referenced a few times as one of the most helpful explanations of the history of purpose of catholic Christian worship. After reading only the editor's introduction and the first chapter, I'm reassured.
Dix, I just learned, was a monk at a Anglican Benedictine abbey in Nashdom, England. His community remained within the Church of England but worshiped in Latin according to the Roman missal and breviary.
In explaining his approach in The Shape, Dix says:
It must be admitted that the liturgists have largely had themselves to thank for the reverent disregard with which their labors are so generally treated. They persist in presenting their subject as a highly specialised branch of archaeology with chiefly aesthetic preoccupations, as though the liturgy had evolved of itself in a sort of eccelesiastical vacuum remote from the real life and concerns of men and women, who have always had to lead their spiritual lives while helping to carry on the whole muddled history of a redeemed yet fallen world. Archaeology is no doubt fascinating to specialists but it is a recondite business. And though beauty is an attribute of God and as such can be fittingly employed in His worship, it is only a means to that end and in most respects not a directly necessary means. The ordinary man knows very well that prayer and communion with God have their difficulties, but these arise less from their own technique than from the nature of human life. Worship is a mysterious but also a very direct and common place human activity. It is meant for the plain man to do, to whom it is an intimate and sacred but none the less quite workaday affair. He therefore rightly refuses to try to pray on strictly archaeological principles. And so he feels quite perplexed to leave what he hears called 'The Liturgy' to the mystery of experts, and is content instead humbly to make the best he can of the substitute (as he supposes) good enough for him and his like, viz. taking part in 'worship' as he finds it in the customary common prayer at his parish church, grumbling a good deal if the clergy alter the service with which he is familiar so that he cannot follow it for himself. This, of course, happens to be 'The Liturgy' in some form. And this attitude of the layman seems to me, not only justifiable but also very 'liturgical' in the strict sens of the word.I'm going to like this guy.
'Shantaram:' Tests of a Man
Despite being a work of fiction bound between two full-color, shiny covers, Shantaram is not a novel. It is an epic: three novels woven together with the needle of a single protagonist. That main character is called “Lin,” and his background parallel’s the author’s. Thrown into prison in Australia for violent crimes related to a heroin addiction, he escapes and flees to Bombay, India, where he begins a life mixing adventure, crime and altruism. The similarities between the character and the author, Gregory David Roberts, give the book a based-on-a-true-story aura, which worked on me.
It’s people, of course, who shape the story. And before saying more about Lin, another character stands out. Prabaker is the semi-educated guide Lin meets upon arriving in Bombay. “Prabu,” by his nickname, is India’s “American Joe.” He personifies the innocence, savvy, cultural mixture, privation and quirks of his country. He grew up in a village but has come to the city without a formal education to live in a slum and try to make a living in cash. He has learned the businesses of the streets -- drug deals and prostitution, as well as small commissions on myriad legitimate transactions – but his heart remains in his village with hopes of someday marrying. Most endearing is his speech. Raised speaking Marathi, he learned English on the streets and deploys it on foreigners with earnestness and a touch mischief.
In one scene Prabaker is taking Lin to his village by train. In order to get Lin a seat for the long, crowded ride, Prabaker hires a porter to push people out of the way. Lin follows the porter to an empty seat and Prabaker comes behind, enduring a tangle of shoves and knocks.
Lin arrives at Prabu’s bucolic family village where he finds refuge from the hustle of the city and the violence of his past. It is from there the book’s name comes. The village women give Lin the name “Shantaram.” It means, the text tells us, “man of peace, or man of God’s peace.”
Lin returns to Bombay after this inner healing and takes up residence in a slum, where he navigates the city’s dangers and temptations in setting up a free health clinic. This sounds like the end of a book and it could well be, but that is only novel number one of Shantaram. There is also the story of his involvement with a Bombay mafia, and then there is the tale of his missions with the mujahideen in the Afghan war with the Soviets.
A recurring motif is that our flawed hero is pushed to his physical, emotional and spiritual limits in a fight for his life (in prison, at war, in a gang fight) only to be carried through by a new friend or twist of fate. I guess that is a theme in many novels. In terms of the psychological intensity of the protagonist’s descent and redemption, I’m reminded of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. That said, Lin’s tribulations in the slum and in a notorious prison are not quite so confined to the soul – the action in Shantaram would be well suited to the big screen – but the drama is no less gripping. Always in the background of Lin’s suffering is the unnerving thought that maybe an episode just like this occurred in Robert’s life, at the hands of a prison bullies or during his own addiction to heroin.
The fights, the battles, the addictions, the killings, the diseases in Shantaram are violent. That may sound obvious given the nature of such occurrences, but in modern fiction (especially movies) I’m highly suspicious of violence being gratuitous, a substitute for the craft of storytelling and a pandering to a crass culture. However, for the first let’s say 600 pages of Shantaram, the blurb about Robert’s history trumped my suspicion. Here’s what I heard him saying through his descriptions of gouged eyes, lacerated skin, veins gushing blood and knife wounds described with the precision of a medical case study. “I grew up in an Anglo family in Australia that was at least anchored to, if not enmeshed in, the bourgeois world,” he is saying, “but my heart was broken, my marriage ended, my will taken over by addiction and I was banished from that world. I found myself a world that had been previously unimaginably: unimaginable in its cruelty, unimaginable in its grotesqueness and uninhibited in its display of evil and kindness.
“I want you to imagine this world,” Roberts says for 933 pages in Shantaram, “and I will not quit lulling, prodding and shocking you until there is at least a crack in your bourgeois sensibility that so casually assumes capricious violence is aberration in an otherwise efficient world.”
Oh but I’m wallowing, and Shantaram does not. The book is, as the blurb on the front cover from Pat Conroy says, “a work of extraordinary art.” There is tragic love and acts of honor. There is humor. The scene that may stick with me longest, the one during which chuckled along for four pages, goes back to our gentle friend Prabu. A group of street performers have brought a dancing bear named Kano to the slum neighborhood where he and Lin are living. But, the beast is not there for passive entertainment; it has been sent with a message. Prabu explains about the bear handlers: “They have it a message for you, Lin. But there is a vachan, a promise, before they will give it the message. There is a … you know … a catches.”
In the universe of Shantaram, this little moment is both believable and surprising. It is vividly funny.
Appropriately, as the book concludes, Kano the dancing bear returns for another wacky incident. Prabu is gone by the end of the book, having died in a gory car accident, but the final scene features his son and mother. The mother calls Lin by the name of peace she gave him, “Shantaram,” and the implication is that Lin will forgo his life of violence and return to serving in the slum.
I’m apt to remember a philosophy of a novel, its implicit theology. And, there is one in Shantaram. A mafia-don-cum-guru character provides it. It goes along the lines of this: The universe tends toward complexity. Humans have free will to act in accordance or against this tendency. Going with it is moral good; contradicting it is evil. There’s a bit more to it, but it is not substantial enough to inspire a reaction from me. Instead, my guess is that for me the abiding concept of the book will be the Borsalino hat test. The Borsalino, we learn in an exchange between Lin and bon vivant French friend of his, is a stylish rabbit-fur hat that for a time identified European gangsters. To determine if a Borsalino was genuine the gangsters had a test. They rolled it up tight enough to pass through a wedding ring. If the hat could pass through and regain its original form, it was a real Borsalino. The significance, the Frenchmen explained, is that sometimes people are put through a kind of Borsalino test.
Shantaram describes a series of Lin’s Borsalino tests. It seems to be inspired by Robert’s. And, while reading the book, I felt as if I went through a few of my own.
It’s people, of course, who shape the story. And before saying more about Lin, another character stands out. Prabaker is the semi-educated guide Lin meets upon arriving in Bombay. “Prabu,” by his nickname, is India’s “American Joe.” He personifies the innocence, savvy, cultural mixture, privation and quirks of his country. He grew up in a village but has come to the city without a formal education to live in a slum and try to make a living in cash. He has learned the businesses of the streets -- drug deals and prostitution, as well as small commissions on myriad legitimate transactions – but his heart remains in his village with hopes of someday marrying. Most endearing is his speech. Raised speaking Marathi, he learned English on the streets and deploys it on foreigners with earnestness and a touch mischief.
In one scene Prabaker is taking Lin to his village by train. In order to get Lin a seat for the long, crowded ride, Prabaker hires a porter to push people out of the way. Lin follows the porter to an empty seat and Prabaker comes behind, enduring a tangle of shoves and knocks.
“Well, what the hell did you think you were doing? I gave you money for the tickets. We could’ve sat down in first or second class, like civilized people. What are we doing back here?”
He looked at me, reproach and disappointment brimming in his large, soft-brown eyes. He pulled a small bundle of notes from his pockets, and handed it to me.
“This is the change from the tickets money. Anybody can buy first-class tickets, Lin. If you want to buy tickets in first class, you can be doing that all on yourself only. You don’t need it a Bombay guide, to buy tickets in comfortable, empty carriages. But you need a very excellent Bombay guide, like me, like Prabaker Kishan Kharre, to get into this carriage at V.T. Station, and get a good seat, isn’t it? This is my job.”
Lin arrives at Prabu’s bucolic family village where he finds refuge from the hustle of the city and the violence of his past. It is from there the book’s name comes. The village women give Lin the name “Shantaram.” It means, the text tells us, “man of peace, or man of God’s peace.”
Lin returns to Bombay after this inner healing and takes up residence in a slum, where he navigates the city’s dangers and temptations in setting up a free health clinic. This sounds like the end of a book and it could well be, but that is only novel number one of Shantaram. There is also the story of his involvement with a Bombay mafia, and then there is the tale of his missions with the mujahideen in the Afghan war with the Soviets.
A recurring motif is that our flawed hero is pushed to his physical, emotional and spiritual limits in a fight for his life (in prison, at war, in a gang fight) only to be carried through by a new friend or twist of fate. I guess that is a theme in many novels. In terms of the psychological intensity of the protagonist’s descent and redemption, I’m reminded of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. That said, Lin’s tribulations in the slum and in a notorious prison are not quite so confined to the soul – the action in Shantaram would be well suited to the big screen – but the drama is no less gripping. Always in the background of Lin’s suffering is the unnerving thought that maybe an episode just like this occurred in Robert’s life, at the hands of a prison bullies or during his own addiction to heroin.
The fights, the battles, the addictions, the killings, the diseases in Shantaram are violent. That may sound obvious given the nature of such occurrences, but in modern fiction (especially movies) I’m highly suspicious of violence being gratuitous, a substitute for the craft of storytelling and a pandering to a crass culture. However, for the first let’s say 600 pages of Shantaram, the blurb about Robert’s history trumped my suspicion. Here’s what I heard him saying through his descriptions of gouged eyes, lacerated skin, veins gushing blood and knife wounds described with the precision of a medical case study. “I grew up in an Anglo family in Australia that was at least anchored to, if not enmeshed in, the bourgeois world,” he is saying, “but my heart was broken, my marriage ended, my will taken over by addiction and I was banished from that world. I found myself a world that had been previously unimaginably: unimaginable in its cruelty, unimaginable in its grotesqueness and uninhibited in its display of evil and kindness.
“I want you to imagine this world,” Roberts says for 933 pages in Shantaram, “and I will not quit lulling, prodding and shocking you until there is at least a crack in your bourgeois sensibility that so casually assumes capricious violence is aberration in an otherwise efficient world.”
Oh but I’m wallowing, and Shantaram does not. The book is, as the blurb on the front cover from Pat Conroy says, “a work of extraordinary art.” There is tragic love and acts of honor. There is humor. The scene that may stick with me longest, the one during which chuckled along for four pages, goes back to our gentle friend Prabu. A group of street performers have brought a dancing bear named Kano to the slum neighborhood where he and Lin are living. But, the beast is not there for passive entertainment; it has been sent with a message. Prabu explains about the bear handlers: “They have it a message for you, Lin. But there is a vachan, a promise, before they will give it the message. There is a … you know … a catches.”
“A catches?” [Lin replies.]
“Yes, sure. This is English word, yes? Catches. It means like a little revenge for being nice,” Prabaker grinned happily…. “Lin, they won’t tell who is sending it the messages,” Prabaker said, suppressing his own laughter with some difficulty. “This is a big secret, and they are not telling it. They have some instructions, to give this message to you, with nothing explanations, and with the one catches for you, like a promise.”
“What catch?”
“Well, you have to hug it the bear.”
“I have to what?”
“Hug it the bear. You have to give him a big cuddles, like this.”
He reached out and grabbed me in a tight hug, his head pressed against my chest. The crowd applauded wildly, the bear-handlers shrieked in a high-pitched keening, and even the bear was moved to stand and dance a thudding, stomp-footed jig. The bewilderment and obvious reluctance on my face drove people to more and bigger laughter.
In the universe of Shantaram, this little moment is both believable and surprising. It is vividly funny.
Appropriately, as the book concludes, Kano the dancing bear returns for another wacky incident. Prabu is gone by the end of the book, having died in a gory car accident, but the final scene features his son and mother. The mother calls Lin by the name of peace she gave him, “Shantaram,” and the implication is that Lin will forgo his life of violence and return to serving in the slum.
I’m apt to remember a philosophy of a novel, its implicit theology. And, there is one in Shantaram. A mafia-don-cum-guru character provides it. It goes along the lines of this: The universe tends toward complexity. Humans have free will to act in accordance or against this tendency. Going with it is moral good; contradicting it is evil. There’s a bit more to it, but it is not substantial enough to inspire a reaction from me. Instead, my guess is that for me the abiding concept of the book will be the Borsalino hat test. The Borsalino, we learn in an exchange between Lin and bon vivant French friend of his, is a stylish rabbit-fur hat that for a time identified European gangsters. To determine if a Borsalino was genuine the gangsters had a test. They rolled it up tight enough to pass through a wedding ring. If the hat could pass through and regain its original form, it was a real Borsalino. The significance, the Frenchmen explained, is that sometimes people are put through a kind of Borsalino test.
Shantaram describes a series of Lin’s Borsalino tests. It seems to be inspired by Robert’s. And, while reading the book, I felt as if I went through a few of my own.
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