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.

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.

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.

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.

'Where God Happens:' Rowan Williams' Handbook on Christian Mysticism

The Desert Fathers would not have blogged.

Pre-modern technical limitations aside, the blogger ethos of immediate self publishing and self promotion contradicts the anonymity, humility, patience and self-forgetting espoused in the sayings of these ancient Christian monks. That's my conclusion after reading Where God Happens by Rowan Williams.

Since I haven't read Williams' source material, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (which I must now put on my reading list), I can only assume he "got them right." Further, my lack of familiarity with the Fathers (and Mothers too, Williams stresses), turns my attention to Williams himself. In writing about ancient monasticism and the ensuing tradition of Christian meditation, Williams seems to be in his element -- a contemplative contemplating contemplation.

Some of the themes are monastic classics, expected and wise. There is obedience as a pathway to humility and a greater trust in silence than speech. The stark stability of a monk is coupled with his extreme hospitality to the one who travels to him. Asceticism in various forms is how the monk flees from ephemeral carnal pleasures to the reality of God. In one way or another in the sayings, masters training novices to parry devilish attacks of pride.

(For my own walk, I note that ordination is one such source of pride which the Fathers sought to ward off.)

A theme of the book is a philosophical distinction between the personal and the individual. Citing a theologian named Vladimir Lossky, Williams says the person is unique, a product of God's limitless creativity and a source of holy diversity. The individual is a unit, one of many of a perceived kind. From this Williams crafts a prism of Christian spirituality: contemplation of God leads us away from understanding ourselves as an isolated example of some ideal or fantasy and towards knowing ourselves as utterly particular in our being and our relationship with the Father and one another. He says:

There is no general type of Christian holiness. There is an infinite variety of different relationships to Jesus Christ, which also become relationships with each other.

This territory of Christian mysticism which Williams explores is, for me, charged. My own conscious relationship with Christ came via a path that wound through a type of generalized mysticism with an Eastern flavor (what I would now called gnosticism). Much of my thinking after my conversion was along the lines of, What is "Christian" about Christian mysticism? I can't say I came to a conclusion, although I'm sure it has something to do with the fully enfleshed particularity of Jesus of Nazareth. (I can also say the writings of Father Thomas Keating were immensely helpful.)

So, as I read Where Go Happens, I considered again these questions of self knowledge versus self delusion, cataphatic versus apophatic spirituality, commonalities of human experience versus the particularity Christ. (The specifics of Christ's life seem to be mentioned infrequently in the Sayings; how does that matter?) And again no answer has come in a form that fits neatly in a blog post, but I have found a wise guide in Williams. Because of that wisdom I could, in closing, choose any one of the many profound quotations in Where Go Happens. Hmmm, out of my unique personhood in this particular place and time with constraints of my given relationships, I think I'll choose ... this one:

If the heart contains the love of God, one may wonder where is the danger of being guided by it? It is confusing on the surface, but there is something intelligible behind this contradiction. It was Abba Isidore who expressed strong reservations about being guided by the heart. These reservations have to do with listening to what you think are the promptings of your feelings. He wants us to be clear that listening to these promptings is not a guarantee of getting it right. "How can I be wrong if I am so sincere?" is not a Christian principle.

"Resurrectioniness"

It's still spring so it's not too late to make a quip about how (some) mainline Christians mangle Easter.

I begin with Stephen Colbert's word "truthiness." The analogy to us mainliners is via my made up word: "resurrectioniness." Now, I don't hear people using that exact word but I do hear phrases such as "practicing resurrection." Practicing the resurrection sounds so odd to me, like "practicing dying." It's a one-time and final event, so how can you practice it? You can hope for the resurrection of the dead when Jesus returns -- or even prepare for it -- but I don't think you get to rehearse it.

The difference, of course, is in the definite article. "Resurrection" without it, instead of referring to Jesus rising from the dead or the day when God will raise believers, is a churchy way of saying "renewal." Since it's spring it sounds appropriate to speak of renewal and how we should all be cultivating it in our lives. My beef with this way of employing "resurrection" is that it obfuscates Easter by conflating God's definitive and supernatural intervention in the world (the Resurrection of Jesus and promised resurrection of his people) with the natural process of death and new growth (a sort of biological resurrection).

I call this conflation "resurrectioniness" because it parallels Colbert's "truthiness." Colbert meant to say that the Bush administration was not interested strictly in the truth but more in saying things that sounded like the truth. And so we mainliners (sometimes) are more interested in Christian-sounding pronouncements rather than the actual Christian proclamation of the Resurrection.

To Time: Bart Stupak as Christian of the Year

A few weeks ago I heard third hand that Time Magazine was preparing for its 100 Most Influential People issue and was looking for a “most influential Christian”. They weren’t, of course, asking me, but blogs are the great fantasy-indulgers, so I hereby give my unsolicited opinion to Time:

Bart Stupak.

The Democratic congressman from Michigan is my vote for a Christian hero of the year. I know only what I read about him in a couple of newspaper profiles and the numerous reports on the health care drama that mentioned him. As I understand it, he was the leader of the pro-life Democrats in the House who insisted on abortion restrictions in the House version of the bill and then held out for a compromise in the reconciled version of the bill such that he did not get all of those protections for the unborn but ended up with a promise of an executive order that would mandate the bulk of the restrictions. Considering the complexity of health care policy – not to mention all the ambiguity of governing in a representative democracy – that outcome is as about as Christian as I can imagine.

How he came to his vote was just as important. He could of followed his pro-life Republican colleagues and looked for any pro-life imperfection in health care reform as the basis for an excuse to obstruct the process and deny health insurance to those whom the bill would cover (mostly the poor, as I understand it). And of course he could have knuckled under to Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic herself, and invoked realpolitik an excuse. But my impression is that he was acting consciously as a Christian, putting that identity above electability and party loyalty, and, as a Catholic Christian, was submitting to the guidance of his bishop. Oh, that we Christians, would approach all matters that way.

Finally, Stupak probably can't rightly be counted among the most influential people in America, which should probably disqualify him from being on Time's list, but not for Christian. God does not rank people by their power in the world. He calls people out of the world and with them comprises the body of Christ. Each person has a role and a season. God's "heroes," as such, can be unlikely characters who emerge from obscurity and then seemingly fade away -- Ruth, Rahab, Peter. Shoot, Jesus is the prime example. Bart Stupak was not the most eloquent, clever or powerful congressman and yet he tilted the most important domestic legislation of the decade in the favor of mercy. For that, he's my Christian hero of the year -- and should have been one of Time's too.

Where was God in 1776?

1776 by David McCullough reads like a novel, but is in fact a historical account of that year in the Revolutionary War. Of course, I’m years late in saying so. The book was published in 2005 and McCullough is already well established as an excellent writer and historian (and from what I hear third-hand a very decent man in person).

The book is written in the classic historical style, with military battles as the main drama and generals as the chief characters. This might be a knock against it in a college history department, but I was snowed. I am convinced that George Washington and Nathanael Greene are men of great courage and integrity, and yet still human. Plus, some of my ignorance about the basic events of the war – the siege of Boston, crossing of the Delaware – was remedied. (Germans fought on both sides!)

My one reflection comes from having just read City of God. 1776 narrates an undeniably pivotal moment for the city of earth. 1776, the year, is when the mantle of world’s-most-powerful-empire began to pass from Great Britain to the then-emerging thirteen united colonies in America. My question is, what was going on in the city of God?

The primary answer 1776 gives is that white Christians were killing each other on the continent where they had recently killed off most of the Indians on the east coast. Exceptionally in 1776 , there was the pastor in New York who condemned the torture of a soldier, but most all other references to God and Christians are in the sense of imploring the creator of the principle of liberty to give victory to the colonists (or in the case of the British, that the God who created order would give victory to the king’s army).

So, I guess I’m now making a personal statement: I’m interested in church history. I also hope there's also a universal statement here, something like God is the ultimate arbiter of history.

Finding a Friend in the City of God

So I’ve finished City of God. I went in with an eye towards the parallels between the Roman empire of the fifth century and the American empire of the twenty-first – and especially the location of the church then and now. But, I’m coming away with something more intimate: a portrait of a Christian man concerned with the place and character of Jesus’ bride.

Augustine, I can imagine, in America, born in small town Iowa circa 1950. He moves to Chicago in the 70s, encounters Eastern religion and begins his intellectual ascent at the University of Chicago. Soon, he is rhetorical superstar, moves to Washington, D.C. and is immersed in the think-tank world of ideas and influence (his girlfriend and their child are conveniently left behind in Chicago). It is in the swirl of D.C. power that he has his conversion. As his faith unfolds, he retreats from Washington and secular power, returning to Chicago and accruing ecclesial authority. It is in his waning years, as the American empire begins crack under attack by raiding terrorists, that he writes his opus differentiating the church from America, apologizing against Enlightenment Deism, popular consumerism, and the Eastern religions he once embraced.

OK, I admit to already having this sketch of present-day Augustine in my head before reading City of God (having read Confessions a couple of years ago). But, City of God did nothing to disabuse me of it.

Augustine’s mind, as I come to it in City of God, is accessible. He is a pastor who cares to give his people political cover by answering the charge that the Christian faith was responsible for the sack of Rome. He is an intellectual evaluating the marketplace of ideas from Christian ground. He is a scholar determined to understand the truth in scripture through various translations and conflicting hermeneutical traditions. He is a contemplative who hears the words of the psalms echo in the quiet of his soul. He is crazy in the Christian way of believing that angels and demons are at war around us during this time before Jesus’ judgment.

I like this man. My sense at the end of City of God is of personal affection. I acknowledge there’s much to learn and say about Augustine’s wisdom (best done in a forum more demanding of rigor than this), but reflections now are of veneration.

Augustine the Liberal, Evangelical Contemplative

It’s an obvious game to play: If Augustine were around today – Twenty First Century America – in whose church camp would he be? Of course the answer is that he doesn’t fit easily into anybody’s, but the question provides an accessible frame for reflecting on his treatment of scripture.

He is one part liberal in his highly allegorical reading of Genesis. For example, he says the six days of creation should not be understood as 24 hour periods of time:

Of course, what we mean by the ‘days’ we know in experience are those that have a morning because the sun rises and an evening because the sun sets. But the first three ‘days’ of creation passed without the benefit of sun, since, according to Scripture, the sun was made on the fourth day. Of course, there is mention in the beginning that ‘light’ was made by the Word of God, and that God separated it from darkness, calling the light day and the darkness night. But no experience of our senses can tell us just what kind of ‘light’ it was and by what kind of alternating movement it caused ‘morning’ and ‘evening.’ Not even our intellects can comprehend what is meant, yet we can have no hesitation in believing the fact.

With this basis for an allegorical reading, Augustine is off and running to find figures for the cities of man and God throughout Genesis. Interestingly, he is sometimes quite concerned with textual criticism. In playing out the allegory of the two cities in the descendants from Adam to Noah, Augustine has a lot riding on the actual ages of the named men and women. Are these people truly of another age, living many hundreds of years? Or, should these years be understood by a measure other than the 365-day solar year? Augustine takes up point and counter, discrepancies in various translations, and the possible motivations of redactors. It all sounds very nineteenth-century-Germany (only the conclusion is different!).

Augustine is also an evangelical. When apologizing to pagans and philosophers, he leans heavily on Paul’s letter to the Romans, especially Paul’s contention that the splendor of creation is its own sufficient argument – to all – for the existence of one truth God. He has no problem calling competing gods “unclean spirits”. There’s no political correct impulse to call non-Christian religions and philosophies different-but-equal.

He is, though, at heart – according to my contention –, a contemplative so steeped in prayer that he slips into speaking with fragments of Psalms. It seems that as he writes he has ideas that are either inspired by pieces of psalms or confirmed by them. And so snippets of psalms appear in a pious mode – because they resonate with truth and elegance – without regard to literary criticism or even apologetic logic.

Augustine Attacks

So I’m up to book XI of City of God and here’s what I appreciate about it: Augustine is on the offensive. In a way, the whole book is a defensive reaction to the charge that Christianity caused the sacking of Rome; however, instead of wringing his hands over this charge for 600 pages, Augustine assails the failings of other religions and philosophies. No one escapes – Roman syncretists (popular and erudite), astrologers, Stoics, Epicureans and even Neoplatonists. It’s not that conflict is always good, but what I see in Augustine’s rhetorical pugilism is a refusal to give up the ground that matters most. He’s willing to give up the Christian claim on the Roman Empire but not its authority on what actually is – the truth.

Incidentally, Augustine is a great guide through Antique thought. He names his opponents and summarizes their views before delivering his blow, so the books thus far have been almost equally devoted to describing classical religion and thought as giving a Christian apology. That Augustine stands so squarely at the center of Christian tradition makes his judgments especially insightful and trustworthy. Here’s a nugget that must be useful in present-day discourse: “None of the other philosophers has come so close to us [Christians] as the Platonists have, and, therefore, we may neglect the others.”

Or, what about this one:

Natural theology cannot be discussed with men in the street but only with philosophers, that is, as the name implies, with lovers of wisdom [my note: that is "philo-sophia"]. Since divine truth and scripture clearly teach us that God, the Creator of all things, is Wisdom, a true philosopher will be a lover of God.

Ooooo ... Kapow!

Enter Augustine

My last couple of posts have been critical (first of an article by Barbara Brown Taylor and then of a book James Fowler). I’m breaking from that here, as I read City of God by Augustine of Hippo. I haven’t finished it (not even close), but I’m realizing it would be a long time before my next post if I were to wait until then.

Augustine wrote in a different time. Today, you simply couldn't say in print that some women (virgins, no less) had the pride of their virginity exposed when they were raped by an invading army. It wouldn't help to say that other virgins who were raped, truly humble ones, were not defiled in God's eyes because of their purity of heart.

My hunch is that Augustine is particularly relevant for the church today (not necessarily because of his analysis of pride and virginity). The analogy between the Roman Empire and the present-day United States I've heard a number of times. I'm just repeating it. The sack of Rome and 9/11 have to have some parallels.

The distinction between a powerful empire that is Christian in culture (Rome and America), and the City of God was a pressing one then, and now. Augustine writes from within the empire, even a place of some power. He writes to an educated reader and draws learnedly from the literary and philosophical canon of his reader. He writes of God's hope -- a political vision -- as the polity around him disintegrates. I look forward to hearing what he has to say....

'Stages of Faith' Book Belies Its Faith

The book Stages of Faith by James Fowler was recommended to me. My overall reaction is that it expresses what I believed – more or less – before I acknowledged Jesus as Lord. So, I have a rebuttal of sorts in mind, but I also am reminded by it, in a therapeutic way, of my own spiritual seeking.

Fowler’s intellectual project is to put Christianity and other faiths on a Freudian foundation. More specifically he takes Erik Erickson’s model for human development (as well as a couple other psychologists’) and layers it with an account of God and man from Reinhold Niebuhr. What comes out is a kind of humanistic Deism, in which people ascend a ladder of transcendence via an expanding perspective of their place in the world. To buttress his case, Fowler provides excerpts from the many interviews he and his grad students have done, in which they probe for people's life narratives and core beliefs.

One interviewee, the book's main case study, reminds me of my own journey in faith. The woman, called “Mary”, came of age in the late sixties and early seventies. She says, “I was involved in all sorts of things; you know Eastern religions, pop psychology, the occult, illicit drugs and sex, and all that kind of stuff.” Then at age 22, she has a conversion to Christ (spurred in part by an LCD trip) and begins bouncing around among Christian communities, some more faithful and filled with grace than others. At the time of the interview (1978), she is 28 with a child, recently separated from her husband, and still firm in her faith. My story follows a similar, but (at least outwardly) tamer, arc.

This is helpful: To be remind that, like Mary, I am a pilgrim. Many people are. My two boys are. They will no doubt struggle with the issues of identity, trust and independence that Fowler lays out, and I will help shape how they do that.

Fowler rates Mary a three, on a scale from one to six, for his “faith stages” of spiritual maturity. Here is where my sympathies break from the book. The faith stages chart is, to me, a predictable psychological model of increased appreciation for complexity and broadening of perspective. I’m all for recognizing complexity and expanding my horizons; I just don’t think it works as a religion. True religion is a person’s relationship with his heavenly father; it's hard to map out the course of a child-father relationship in six steps.

My real bone to pick with the book is in what Fowler describes as form versus content. In short, this is a tension he sets up between in what you have faith (Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, etc.) and how you live out your faith (prayer, alms giving, meditation, etc.). For most of the book Fowler wants to set aside the question of “what” and focus on the “how.” He claims true progress runs along the lines of maturing in how you practice a faith – from childish fantasy to fundamentalist literalism to a wise appreciation of symbol and ritual. Towards the end of the book he begins to grapple with the content -- the particularity -- of faith (he did, after all, get some training in theology). However, he comes up way short. The best he can do is:

The issue is finally not whether we and our companions are on this globe become Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, Confusionists or Christians, as important as that issue is. The real question is, will there be faith on the earth and will it be good faith—faith sufficiently inclusive so as to counter and transcend the destructive henotheistic idolatries of national, ethnic, racial and religious identifications and to bind us as a human community in convenantal trust and loyalty to each other and to the Ground of our Being?

To me now, this statement so obviously lacks intellectual integrity as to be boring. However, that wasn’t always the case. In college, I joined a group called the Self Knowledge Symposium, which espoused a philosophy along the lines of Fowler’s (“process over content”), only more Eastern/Gnostic in its goal of an all encompassing enlightenment experience (Fowler presents a blander Deist theology centered on an amorphous, impersonal Ground of Being). My conversion from this brand of Gnosticism to Christ could be material for another post, but I’ll summarize here the intellectual insight that accompanied it. The assertion that particular faiths – Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, etc. – rest on top of a deeper more ultimate structure of faith stages is itself a faith, a particular one. It is not a benign observation. It stands in conflict with, for example, the Christian claim that Jesus is the one true Lord of the universe in unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Pointing out the conflict (and there are many) does not immediately settle who is right -- the question of truth. But it does unmask the falsehood that one can smugly stand on neutral ground and point out “faith stages” of the world’s religions.

To illustrate my disagreement with Fowler, I’m going to rank the two of us on his stages of faith scale. They go from one (infantile) to six (saintly). Fowler never says it, but it’s clear he fancies himself a five. This is the proper rank for a professor. He understands the great complexity of the world and yet is able to navigate wisely through it. However, he is not a six because this is reserved for men of greater action – Martin Luther King, Gandhi, etc. (An engineer would be a four, with his logical mind, and a religious fundamentalist a three because of his literal interpretation of scripture.) I will give myself a one. That’s because the faith I admire most in the book is that of a boy call Freddy. He is Fowler’s interview subject who is used to illustrate the first faith stage. Freddy is described as “an alert six-year-old from a Catholic family.” Here is how Freddy articulates his faith.

Interviewer: What happens when you die?
Freddy: I don’t know. Never been up in heaven before, only when I was a baby.
Interviewer: When you were a baby you were in heaven?
Freddy: Yeah.
Interviewer: How do you know that?
Freddy: Well ‘cause I felt the cold.
Interviewer: It’s cold in heaven?
Freddy: Yeah, no, I think it’s warm, real warm.
Interviewer: Where is heaven?
Freddy: Uh, high, high, high up in the sky.
Interviewer: What’s it look like?
Freddy: Uh, high mountains, so I know about heaven.
Interviewer: Who is in heaven?
Freddy: God.
Interviewer: Just God? Is he by himself?
Freddy: No.
Interviewer: Who else is there?
Freddy: There’s, there’s the shepherds—the shepherd man—I mean the wise men that are dead.
Interviewer: Is there anyone else in heaven?
Freddy: Baby—no, not baby Jesus.
Interviewer: No?
Freddy: ‘Ca—yeah, baby Jesus is God.
Interviewer: He is?
Freddy: Yeah.
Interviewer: Okay. Is anybody else in heaven?
Freddy: There’s Mary. Saint Joe—that’s all I know.

May God give us the faith of Freddy.