What's Popular Fiction to do with a Christ Figure?

The answer to the question posed in the headline of this post is: Either martyr him (without a resurrection) or have his love come to full blossom in a romantic relationship. In Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann does both with his Christ-like character Corrigan. Corrigan -- or Corrie to the prostitutes whom he serves -- is an Irish monk who comes to the Bronx to live among addicts, pimps and the elderly poor. He is wonderfully limned as humane, at times conflicted and genuinely in love with Jesus. Did McCann know such a priest growing up in Dublin? I hope so.

In the end -- or really the middle of the book -- Corrie falls in love with a woman from Guatemala and shortly thereafter is killed in a car crash while giving a young woman a ride home from a prostitution-related court case. To me, it seems McCann's imagination about the religious life ran dry so he terminated the Corrigan character using both of Hollywood's endings for Christ figures. There is something of a resurrection with one of the young woman's orphaned daughters being adopted and "making it" with a Yale education.

But I quibble.

Let the Great World Spin is a novel that does it job. I came to recognize the characters' voices; I became invested in their outcomes; I laughed out loud a couple times and felt a lump grow in my throat as I took in the scene of a meeting of mothers whose sons were killed in Vietnam (Lord, let all my sons bury me!).

The structure of the novel is epic, although not quite it's length (it has a Loc count of 6532 on the Kindle running on an iPad mini, whatever that means). It follows about a dozen protagonists whose stories swirl around a historical event -- Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the (former) World Trade Center's twin towers. I give McCann credit for developing each one so quickly. People who actually read more than two novels a year could probably name the genre for such writing, along with numerous examples. I will give one similitude. I read it in a college English course 15 years ago. It's E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime. From what I remember, it's kinda similar. There, I'll end my literary criticism.

Corrie is just one "main" character among many, so my opening critique says more about me than the book. Another character is also delightful. Gloria is raised in an educated, working class black family in the Midwest. She comes to New York for college. After two marriages and the death of her son in Vietnam, she ends up poor in the Bronx. With the financial support of a rich white friend, who also lost her only son in Vietnam, she adopts the daughter of the prostitute killed in the car crash with Corrie (see it all comes together!) and raises the girl to go to Yale (the small resurrection in Corrie's story). It's a great mini-plot, but even more compelling are the thoughts and words of this woman, Gloria, who navigates the world of white people, tragedy and eight (I believe) muggings in her life. In the end she is used by God to redeem many lives -- at least that's how I read it. Her name is, after all, Gloria.

Contextualizing Urinization: A Topic Worthy of a Dissertation

As English professors have admonished, context is everything. And, as I observe in this blog post, it's hard to teach four-year-olds.

Fresh back from a weekend camping trip, Levi stood at the edge of our front porch, pulled down his shorts and peed into the the hedges.

On one hand, the proper parental response is straight forward enough: "Look Levi, now that we've left the campsite, you can't pee outside anymore." On the other hand, it's worth acknowledging that there are complicated culturally concepts here: nakedness and clothing, the civilized versus the wild, nature and our attempt to return to it through the stylized activity of camping.

Then, once you've introduced camping, you'll have to note that black people don't do it much, poor white people to it differently than wealthy whites, and men and women have differing norms for urinating while doing it. So, you've got race, class and gender -- the essential ingredients of any dissertation. Just add "modernity" and stir for your dissertation topic:

"Contextualizing Urinization: A Critical Analysis of Modernity's Production of 'Camping'"

Quote of the Week: Christian Prison Love

And the quote of the week -- via a New York Times story on the effects of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship -- goes to ... Robert Perkinson. The Times tells us, Perkinson is a historian and the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire.”

In setting up the quote the Times writer Mark Oppenheimer explains that, "Dr. Perkinson once visited the Carol S. Vance Unit, a Texas prison that subcontracts with Prison Fellowship for programming.... "He was both discomfited and amazed by what he saw."

And then follows this gem from Perkinson:

On the one hand, it was flagrantly unconstitutional. If you didn’t believe God created the earth in seven days, and not just that same-sex relations were a sin but so was masturbation, you couldn’t graduate from this program. It was almost Taliban-style. But it was the only prison of all that I visited in Texas that was permeated with love.

Behind on Books

Dear readers, I've been remiss in not posting about books I've read these last few months. You are due a final post on The Shape of the Liturgy, plus summaries of Simply Christian, What is Anglicanism?, Much Obliged Jeeves, The Heart and the Fist, Living Without Enemies and Many Servants. To either of you whom I might have offended in being so tardy, I hereby apologize.

Case of the Missing Prunes

The other day Samuel wakes up in the middle of the night and needs to defecate. Then again in the morning he needs to go again. The following evening at dinner, he smirks and says he had taken prunes from the pantry. We’ve been telling the boys that sneaking food from the pantry is a no-no, so I pressed Samuel for more details. He said Levi was involved, but Levi denied it. To make his case, Levi begins acting out just how Samuel snuck the prunes. Levi tiptoes down the hall from his bedroom and peers into the kitchen. He glances either way, turns the corner into the kitchen and slinks to the pantry. This he explains is exactly what Samuel did while he (Levi) was sleeping. Now, I’m no prosecutor, but…

Dr. Samuel

I'm in the kitchen the other day and hear Samuel ask Levi if he wants to play doctor. Levi agrees and heads down the hall to join Samuel. They play peacefully for a spell until I hear Levi running back down the hall laughing. Samuel is upset and shouting after him, "Stop! You forgot your blood pressure! You forgot your blood pressure!" (In the boys' toy medical kit is a strap and pump for taking blood pressure.)

Well, I thought, their drama is pretty true to life. At my last doctor's visit, I scooted out of my doctor's office with a smirk on my face while he called after me, "Wait! You forgot your Lipitor. You forgot your for Lipitor."

OK, I've stylized my interaction with my doctor, but that was the spirit of it.

A Four-Year-Old Speaks

Levi is all into superheroes these days. At dinner he asked an astute question: "Would it hurt, if we shot heat out of our eyes?"

I didn't have an answer, but Annmarie said it would, although I've never seen her do it.

This afternoon, Levi and Samuel were wearing hats and playing Stormtrooper on the porch. Annmarie thought it was cute and asked Levi for a hug to which he replied, "Stormtroopers don't give hugs."

I haven't seen the new Star Wars, but from the ones I have seen, I think he's right.

Dix Takes the Church Public

Dear readers -- both of you! -- I've now finished the meaty middle chapter of The Shape of the Liturgy, and as such you deserve a post.

The chapter, "The Sanctification of Time," picks up where the last post left off: The establishment of the Eucharist as the central service of the mostly underground pre-Nicene house churches. As all three of us know, the rite's context changes with the conversion (or at least political shifting) of Constantine. The Christian assembly moves from the home to the basilica. The church goes public. It is "established." It settles in for the long haul.

The consequences for worship are many. The Eucharist loses its secrecy as the practice of dismissing before it the (adult) catechumens wanes (because everybody has already been baptized as infants). This initiates the fusion of the synaxis (the Jewish practice of scripture reading and chanting psalms) with the Eucharist. The leaders of the liturgy adopt the customary Roman dress for public events (although initially nothing more fancy than that). Other aspects of public ceremony creep in as much for necessity as anything else -- the clergy process in and out, candles provide light for reading and vestments signify the various liturgical roles. These developments, Dix is eager to say, rarely begin by papal decree. Rome, he emphasizes, is conservative and often a late adopter of such innovations made elsewhere in Christendom. But once a practice is widely adopted it becomes set, e.g. the Roman [tunic] worn by clergy long outlasts the Roman empire, and then layered with theological meanings.

More fundamentally, Dix says, as the church's posture towards the world changes so does it's relationship with time.

As the church came to feel at home in the world, so she become reconciled to time. The eschatological emphasis in the eucharist inevitably faded. It ceased to be regarded primarily as a rite which manifested and secured the eternal consequences of redemption, a rite which by manifesting their true being as eternally 'redeemed' momentarily transported those who took part in it beyond the alien and hostile world of time into the Kingdom of God and the World to come. Instead, the eucharist came to be thought of primarily as the representation, the enactment before God, of the historical process of redemption, of the historical events of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus by which redemption had been achieved.

As might be expected from a monk -- and rightly so, I'll add with my own limited understanding -- monasticism is described as swooping in as a kind of hero for the post-Nicene church whose leadership is tempted with power and luxury. Asceticism is the response of a few Christians to their brothers' worldliness. As Dix tells it, the monks give the church prophetic judgment, a reminder of the world to come and the development of the Divine Office. In turn, the established church gives the monastics the Eucharist, the corporate nature of prayer and the church year.

The development of the church year is the central tale in "The Sanctification of Time." Before Nicaea, the church celebrated only Pascha (Easter) and Pentecost, and some local martyrs. However, the subsequent development of other feast days did not follow their current hierarchy of (more-or-less) Christmas, Lent, Epiphany, Advent and days for All Saints, Mary and the apostles. The church calendar is first populated with various martyrs, often local, some of whom develop a catholic following. Next come confessors, Christians who, it is believed, given their holiness would have become martyrs if circumstances had dictated it. Only later does the church come to celebrate the apostles (beyond Peter and Paul), Mary and major events in the life of Jesus. Having a full 365 days of lections, collects and propers is a still later development.

Alas the preceding paragraph is a dry summary compared to Dix's learned and detailed account of which Christian communities came to celebrate what feasts when -- and how such celebrations spread. For example, does the transposition of the sabbath from Saturday to Sunday come about from the efforts of a grand bishop or determined monk? No, Dix says, it is Constantine who declares Sunday a day off, and then theologians who follow with sabbatarian explanations. In another case, Dix credits St. Cyril with singlehandedly creating Holy Week. As bishop of Jerusalem beginning in c. AD 350, Cyril has both a flare for liturgical embellishment and claim to the entire territory of Jesus' last week before death. By 385, Dix can cite a source, Etheria, reporting a Holy Week in Jerusalem with Palm Sunday, Maunday Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and the Paschal Vigil. Cyril, Dix argues -- not any Pope -- is the key actor in post-Nicene liturgical development.

Cyril's Holy Week and Easter cycle is at the basis of the whole of the future Eastern and Western observances of this culminating point of the christian year. He gave to christendom the first outline of the public organisation of the divine office; and the first development of the proper of the seasons as well as of the saints. He was certainly the great propagator, if not originator, of the later theory of eucharistic consecration by the invocation of the Holy Ghost, with its important effects in the subsequent liturgical divergence of East and West. In the Jerusalem church in his time we first find mention of liturgical vestments, of the carrying of lights and the use of incense at the gospel, and a number of other minor elements in liturgy and ceremonial, like the lavabo and the Lord's prayer after the eucharistic prayer, which have all passed into the tradition of catholic christendom.

A further influence on the liturgy after Nicaea is folklore. In a way it is obvious -- once the common man becomes a Christian, his customs are incorporated into the life of the church, superstitions and all. Thus, practices involving candles, incense, shrines and -- shoot -- fur trees show up in the liturgy. Beyond noting this trend, Dix wishes to make two points about it. First, such practices are rarely encouraged by church leaders; some documents show their official condemnation. Second, these popular forms of devotion are decoration on top of core forms of worship already in place. This second point is important for Dix because he wants to refute scholars who claim that the development of the liturgy is heavily influenced by pagan mystery cults. To that view he says: "Those aspects of Christian worship with parallels to paganism are NOT part of the early church or even the post-Nicene church, which might have been able to borrow them from active cults. Instead those supposed marks of paganism are really a continuation of folklore that began long before the church and entered it mainly in the Middle Ages, long after paganism was serious alternative form of worship."

With his argument about the effect of folklore on the liturgy, Dix has completed his fascinating description of a kind of archeology of the liturgy. The most superficial layer contains the folk customs: incense burned to ancestors, Christmas trees, Easter bunnies and candles burned as prayers. Next comes the influence of Roman public ceremony with its dress, stage directions, basilicas and amenities for public performance. Beneath that is the Jewish community meeting tradition known to the apostles -- chanting psalms, corporate prayer and reading and interpreting scripture. Finally, at its deepest level is, of course, the Eucharist, which itself traces its origins to the Last Supper held in the tradition of the ritual Chabûrah meal (see my previous post).

And with that Dix has done it again. In the early chapters of The Shape, he sifted through three centuries of manuscripts to come up with his fourfold outline of the Eucharist: Offer, pray, break and distribute. In this middle chapter, he extends his study another, say, seven centuries and gives us a four-layered history of the liturgy: Domestic Eucharistic event, Jewish community meeting, Roman public ceremony and folk customs variously present throughout Christendom. It's another exceedingly helpful lens for seeing our worship today.

Holy Chicken/Holy Saturday

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.

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.

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:

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.

“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.

The Making the of 'The Preacher King'

Richard Licscher writing in The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and The Word That Moved America begins by quoting King:

"In the quiet recesses of my heart,” Martin Luther King, Jr. often said, “I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher.’’

Thus begins the book and the rest, Lischer says, “may be read as an extended commentary on that confession.”

By the end of this first paragraph, I found myself agreeing with the book’s thesis: King was essentially a Christian, specifically a black Baptist preacher who, although he often used the language of mainline liberal theology, increasingly took on the voice of a Hebrew prophet. That’s about what I’d thought before picking up the book.

But The Preacher King gave my assumptions heft and detail. For example, at the first church he pastored (Dexter Avenue Baptist in Montgomery), King followed one Vernon Johns. Lischer describes Johns as having erudition combined with “militant eccentricity.” Lischer relates this about him:

Sitting on wagons of fresh vegetables and other farm produce was his way of preaching the gospel of black agricultural capitalism. One of his favorite expressions was “If every Negro in the U.S.A. dropped dead today, it would not affect significantly any important business operation.” Toward the white power structure of his city he turned an angry prophetic face. After a lynching he once posted as his sermon topic on the bulletin board outside the church, “It’s Safe to Murder Negroes in Alabama.”

The words on that sign stay with me because of their dual import. King stepped into a world in which, more-or-less, it was safe to murder his congregants. And, he stepped into a preaching tradition that – before it was safe or popular -- was bold enough to say so.

Another striking image for me was the seminarian King, together with the few fellow black students at Crozer, gathered at the home of Pius Barbour for the informal training in black preaching they weren’t going to get in class. “Barbour University” was name the students gave to the senior pastor’s parsonage, Lischer tells us. Lischer uses the juxtaposition of King’s two educations in preaching to give a theological account of the intersections of, and distinctions between, liberal and African-American Christianity.

No matter how many times he repeated the liberal platitudes about the laws of human nature, morality, and history, King could not be a liberal because liberalism’s Enlightenment vision of the harmony of human nature, morality and God skips a step that is essential to the development of black identity. It has little experience of the evil and suffering borne by enslaved and segregated people in America. Liberalism is ignorant – even innocent – of matters African-American children understand before their seventh birthday.

I’m tempted to quote more in this vein. Lischer is so impressive in giving an intellectual narrative of liberal theology that knocks it off the prized position it seems to hold by contrasting it with the African-American theological tradition, which he seems to give equal if not greater weight. Instead, I simply note there’s an excellent history lesson in American theology in pages 51 to 66.

The final image I carry from the book is King addressing a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church in the early days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He has recently been elected president of the movement, the Montgomery Improvement Association. He is young (26 years old) and unprepared to give a speech. His preaching to date, Lischer says, had been liberal and philosophical.

But in this speech he invokes the meaning of “history” with a way of knowing, a vision, that can only be called prophetic. “We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and equality.

And thus begins the powerful, lonely, complicated ministry of the Preacher King.

A Marriage with the Poor

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat makes the case that the practice of marriage is crumbling among America's poor and working class, while educated Americans -- liberal and alike conservative -- battle over the definition of marriage
(see The Changing Culture War).

The article is insightful and I like Douthat's columns in general. Beyond that, this essay points up to me that it matters not only what position you take on an issue of the day, but even more so where you are standing -- your friendships and allegiances -- when taking the position. In this case, the article says to me that your position on marriage -- "progressive" or "orthodox" -- is tinged with hypocrisy, at least in the light of Christ's blessings for the poor, if it is not combined with a solidarity with people possessing little money.

Now, I still think it matters deeply to understand marriage in the context of God's good creation, his covenant with Israel, the God-person of Jesus and his coming again. Given this foundation I just can't see marriage comprising any two other than a man and a woman (although that's far from the only aspect marriage!). The lesson I read in Douthat's column is that even this truth can't be divorced from the Beatitudes without becoming something of a betrayal of Christian marriage.

Thomas Cranmer was a Protestant!

This was the realization I had reading The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer. This probably says more about my ignorance of Anglican history than it does about the essays collected in the book, but it was nonetheless, for me, both helpful and surprising.

I base this on some pretty basic information. First, Cranmer inserted this anti-Catholic “Black Rubric” in the 1552 Prayer Book regarding the reception of communion: “We do declare that it is not meant thereby, that any adoration is done, or ought to be done, either unto the Sacramental bread or wine there bodily received, or unto any real and essential presence there being of Christ’s natural flesh and blood.” Second, the essay on Cranmer in The Guide ("Cranmer and Common Prayer” by Gordon Jeanes) summarizes his theology by saying, “Probably he was sympathetic to Lutheran views in the later 1530s, but by the time the Prayer Books were published he was closer to the views of the Reformed theologians like Bucer and Bullinger.”

These two quotes are, of course, insufficient for an analysis of Cranmer’s theology, but they are enough to make clear that Cranmer was not an Anglo-Catholic. That burst my bubble. The narrative I had swimming in my silly little head was that Cranmer was an essentially Catholic bishop given license/ordered -- because of Henry the VIII’s political battles -- to renew the prayer life of the Church in England. So imagined, Cranmer set about to bring a measure of Catholic monastic life to all of England, which is why Anglicans claim a Via Media that sympathizes with some reforms without altogether leaving the church Catholic.

Wrong! Cranmer’s sympathies were, as quoted above, exclusively with the Continental Reformers, I discovered. Reading between the lines, the check on Cranmer’s reforms -- which Protestants in the rest of Europe didn’t have – was the fact that, within England, he was not splitting from the established church but leading it. Cranmer had a substantial existing bureaucracy with which to content, so some continuity with Catholicism would be inevitable given all the priests, parishes, coffers and buildings he was trying to change.

This modest bit of history I learned would be bound to the sixteenth century but for one thing: My ignorance about Cranmer was the starting point for my ignorance about the Prayer Book’s past. I had lionized Cranmer as an Anglo-Catholic (probably in the image of my own priest) and then proceeded to assume that Prayer Book revisions had over the centuries drifted towards Protestantism and then liberal Protestantism.

Wrong again!

The most heartening history I learned from The Guide was that of the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Turns out, it does have some flimsy moves toward so-called inclusive language and the addition of the particularly embarrassing Eucharistic Prayer C, but by-in-large it trends in a thoroughly catholic direction with an overall form drawn from ancient liturgies, recovered early Eucharistic prayers, a lectionary based on the Catholic church’s, a more poetic Psalter, and a renewed commitment to the centrality of the Eucharist for Sunday Worship.

Praise God!

Digging more deeply, the essay on the Episcopal Prayer Book (“The Episcopal Chruch in the U.S.A.” by Lesley A. Northup) credits the inspiration for the 1979 revisions to the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement. As told in another essay (“The Liturgical Movement and Its Consequences” by John F. Baldwin, S.J.), this ecumenical trend of liturgical scholarship and renewal is a thing of beauty. At its core is a set of theologians seeking continuity in worship with the ancient church, and the reforms of Vatican II.

With the Liturgical Movement, I see an important avenue for learning what is good and holy in God’s church. In terms of specific books, one title recurs: The Shape of the Liturgy by Gregory Dix. Poignantly, Johnson quotes from it about Jesus’ command to celebrate the Lord’s Supper:

Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby ampitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.

Amen. It’s time to read Dix.

Sermon Idea: Holding the Coats of Those Who Kill

Paul said that as Stephen was stoned to death, he (Paul) was "standing by, approving and keeping the coats of those who killed him" (Acts 22:20).

What a powerful image of complicity in evil: "keeping the coats."

Holding someone's coat is such a gentile, courteous act and yet in the situation Paul describes it is participation in such wickedness.

There is a word here for us who are American, who have means, even ample means. We would never stone someone to death. That is something we read about in the newspaper, while eating breakfast with a cup of coffee in an air-conditioned room. Stoning happens far away or long ago, in locations that lack air-conditioning.

But "standing by", "approving" and "keeping coats" are things we may well do.

Now we live in a complex world and there aren't stonings in this country. But there are executions of men and women, some of them baptized Christians who have repented of their sins. There are brothers and sisters in Christ -- neighbors of ours -- who live and work in a state of semi-bondage under threat of deportation. There are people nearby -- and maybe you are one of these people -- whose refrigerator sometimes goes bare near the end of the month.

You may well not be directly involved in these situations, but are you "standing by" as they happen? Are you "approving"? Are you "keeping the coats" of those who are directly involved with enforcing such punishment?

Now we live in a complex world and there aren't stonings in this country. And, maybe you think the analogies I've drawn miss the mark. And maybe you disagree with what you take to be my politics, but keep in mind that Saul was "standing by" and "approving" and "keeping coats" in a complex world and for what he thought were all the right reasons.

Saul was doing it until he encountered the risen Christ and his physical eyes were blinded and his spiritual eyes were opened and he was given a new name and a new mission.

Risen Christ, come into our lives. Open our eyes to injustice and persecution. Transform us into disciples of you. Send us off this day with a mission for you.

Timothy Ware's 'The Orthodox Way': A Clear Guide to a Mysterious God

Writing in "The Orthodox Way," Bishop Kallistos (Timothy) Ware is not attempting to highlight the history and distinctive features of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He is interested in God. The chapter titles are indicative: "God as Mystery", "God as Trinity", "God as Creator", "God as Man"....

With its divine focus, the book is, in a way, an extended meditation on the Trinity. And in being so, the message is, to this reader anyway, that that is the Orthodox way -- set your heart, mind and soul on the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Ware is clear. For example, in the first chapter he gives three broad "pointers" to God common to all humanity -- order in creation, the depth of each person's inner life, and love among people. That's not a bad summary of how man comes to perceive God.

Elsewhere, he describes the relationship among creation, creator and science with these five sentences.

As creator, then, God is always at the heart of each thing, maintaining it in being. On the level of scientific inquiry, we discern certain processes or sequences of cause and effect. On the level of spiritual vision, which does not contradict science but looks beyond it, we discern everywhere the creative energies of God upholding all that is, forming the innermost essence of all things. But, while present everywhere in the world, God is not to be identified with the world. As Christians we affirm not pantheism but "panentheism". God is in all things yet also beyond and above all things.

Near the end of the book, Ware sets out three types of union in the economy of divine love: union according to essence characteristic of the relationship among the three persons of the trinity; union according to hypostasis (personhood) as seen in God the Son being one person, fully man and fully God; and union according to energies as seen in mystical communion between God and a person.

His treatment of mysticism is clear, but not simplistic. He describes the Orthodox tradition of using the Jesus Prayer in contemplation (a contemplative being called a "hesychast" in Greek).

So the Jesus Prayer begins as an oral prayer like any other. But the rhythmic repetition of the same short phrase enables the hesychast, by virtue of the very simplicity of the words which he uses, to advance beyond all language and images into the mystery of God. In this way the Jesus Prayer develops, with God's help, into what Western writers call "prayer of loving attention" or prayer of simple gaze", where the soul rests in God without a constantly varying succession of images, ideas and feelings. Beyond this there is a further stage, when the hesychast's prayer ceases to be the result of his own efforts, and becomes --at any rate from time to time--what Orthodox writers call "self-acting" and Western writers call "infused". It ceases, in other words, to be "my" prayer, and becomes to a greater or lesser extent the prayer of Christ in me.

It is in this mystical territory -- communion between God and man, the life of the Trinity, the overflow of energy from creator to creation -- that I find Ware most helpful. I sometimes hear the Orthodox tradition cited in these matters but in defense of suspicious-sounding theology. However, with Ware, I sense I have a good guide.

'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.