A Prayer

Flurries this morning. The flavor of winter as I breathe. Thank you, God.

Immanence and Transcendence

Celebrations of the Eucharist facing the people vs. celebrations facing East...

Altars separated from the people vs. altars closer to the people...

The simple idea is that turning the celebrant around and bringing the altar closer to the people is about emphasizing God's immanence and that the celebrant with his/her "back to the people" and leaving the altar against the wall is about emphasizing God's transcendence.

But... not so fast...

What really is immanence and what really is transcendence?

Despite my liturgical inclinations,* I don't think that the reality or "validity" (such an ugly, unhelpful word) of the celebration of the Eucharist requires absolutely the celebrant facing one direction or another or the position of the altar.

What is much more important is some clarity about the REALITY of what's happening...

What could be more distancing of God than worship that becomes merely sign--words and images about God? Reducing the Holy Eucharist to an audio-visual aid to understanding or to edification or to generating affection/piety pushes God further away. Worship as a way to help us think or to be moral or to make us feel, even if its thinking or feeling about God, pushes God further away.

It's as if we gathered-human-beings are talking to each other about someone (God) who isn't there (even if we're saying great and smart and emotion generating things).

But if the Holy Eucharist is the actual encounter/communion with God, then no matter what direction the celebrant faces and no matter how far away the altar, it is REAL immanence. God is there.

So, my (probably over-) simplification:

• Protestantism = indirect encounter with God--only his qualities, his norms and our thoughts/feelings about him.
• Catholicism = direct encounter with God's very self (whether we can "feel" it or not, it is a REAL encounter).
  
  
  *See the caption under the picture of Grace Church to the right to see my bias.

Style

At Saint Martin's the main problem was lack of coherent content.

L., H. and I (the three priests of the parish) refused to go too deeply into or push each other much on questions of theology, etc., but we tried to carry on with work that had to be determined by theological commitments (even if we tried to do it in a theologically 'neutral' way), so everything necessarily became style.

Is this the problem with the Anglican Communion (or with Anglicanism) in general?

life itself...

Merton in 'the Pasternak Affair' writes about Pasternak as someone opposing Communism not with ideology or dogmatism, but with life itself... (Disputed Questions, 15-16)

...the most dangerious kind of Christian to be...

The priest is expected to KNOW.

But that's the most dangerous kind of priest to have... the most dangerous kind of Christian to be...

Pray the Bible

Wouldn't it be nice if we could put Biblical studies, critical or otherwise, in their place, and PRAY the Bible instead? Wouldn't it be nice if we could pray it and not just pull it apart and put it under a microscope?

Scotist vs. Thomist

I am no expert on either Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas...

But if I read John Milbank correctly (and if he is reading his late Medieval theology correctly), Scotus' God is characterized as an arbitrary tyrant imposing his (however benevolent) will upon creation (including us).

But Aquinas' characterization of God is one who is deeply connected to us (or, rather, to whom we are deeply connected)--a lover who wants what's good for us. (Eros rather than raw power--drawing us to him rather than imposing himself on us).

Scotist: God outside of us and us outside of God.
Thomist: Us participating in God.

What does it mean to say, "I believe?"

What does it mean to say, "I believe?"

Doesn't it mean something like finding a way into the reality that the Church is describing in her doctrine? Not that we have to find our own truth, but that we have to find THE truth AS true within us, in our lives, etc.

I remember trying to will myself to believe in Santa Claus* when I was young enough, but just barely, to believe in him... trying to tell myself--almost desperately--that he was REAL. While there may be moments of that, Christian faith can't be some adult version of a child's need to believe.

Likewise we can't just say, "The Bible (or the Church or some other authority) says it and I believe it and that's that." That's just laziness and extrinsicism. It doesn't take root. We have to wrestle with these truths... the gospel truths... and make them ours--to find them in the living room, in the grocery store, in the parking lot, on the baseball field, in the daily life of marriage and family, work, play, etc.

But we tend not to do that. We let all of these (living room, grocery store, parking lot, baseball field, etc.) be in their own area and the propositions of the Christian faith exist in their own priveleged field without letting either touch or be touched by the other. No wonder "faith" is dying. What we call faith these days is a lie because it has nothing to do with reality.



*Now of course I know myself to be in communion with the Bishop of Myra as part of the communion of saints and so have regained Santa Claus, but I suppose that's another post.

Less holy...?

In Brad Warner's second book on Buddhism (Sit Down and Shut Up) he mentions the tactic of the Japanese political authorities allowing (requiring) Buddhist monks to marry in order to take their aura of holiness away... to make them less powerful... less holy... more human... (146-147).

I wonder if the same has happened with Anglican priests (intentional or not).

Broken Open

We could learn more about theology, about how to read scripture, about prayer by meditating on a Japanese painting (or even painting one ourselves) or reading poetry than a thousand Christian Ed. curricula.

It's not how much is said to us or even how someone uses words to teach us. It's how we are broken open--laid bare--how we lose ourselves and have everything that we have been holding onto be exposed as the idol it is.

It can happen with a movie, a poem, a painting, a Koan, a saying of the Desert Fathers (and Mothers), lectio divina...

This is my problem, I think, with program in parishes, with so many attempts at formation, with vestry meetings, etc. We keep ourselves so busy and think we're accomplishing something. We'd be better off reading poems, painting, etc.

From my journal...

From my journal, April 2008:

Nirvana playing as the background music in the airport (Newark). Everything is co-opted. Everything is sold. Everything succumbs to the cancer that is capitalism.

Later--from the plane:

Indescribable cool richness of the blue-black night sky fading into burning reds at the horizon and the flat black of the land broken with the occasional glitter of scattered city lights...

nibbling at the difference between true and false religion...

False religion is to love God as ideal more than God as God reveals himself in the world:

• in the story of his relationship to Israel, his life in Christ and in the Church;
• in the sacraments;
• in creation in general;
• and especially in other human beings.

It is religion that forgets the last especially that makes possible things like terrorism, genocide, war and cruelty of all kinds(and I'm not just talking about Islam--we Christians are experts at this).

True religion sees the divine image already present, however hidden, in the imperfect human being and also recognizes that love cannot wait for or even seek to create perfection--the perfect object for our love--but must begin already in our imperfections (like God did with us sinners) and must be willing to risk loving the subject (which, this side of the Kingdom, is alwasy a risk precisely in his/her impredictability, fallen humanity, etc.)

...no words...

Barnes and Noble in Union Square... amazing philosophy section. New York City is an amazing city for reading. I suppose for writing, too.

Also--the sense that we're together even if we're not talking. Just being there together. In the subway, in the "Beyond Cafe," on the street. Even in a city with so much movement and activity one can learn something about prayer. The most important and most difficult thing about prayer is learning to just be with God. But its sort of like just being with people on the subway. So much communication. But no words...

LIFE

The thing that keeps grabbing me... the reality that keeps reaching out to claim me is LIFE.

Here I am in Madison Square Park, near the north edge looking downtown, the top of the Flat Iron Building poking out from behind the trees in front of me... rollerbladers zipping by, young girls with feet dangling in the water of the pool, lamp-posts lying quietly in wait for the sun to set, pigeons eyeing me with demanding eyes, the sounds of children laughing in the playground to my left, a young couple sitting at a cafe table at the edge of the pool reading, occaisionally to each other, people in suits, people in shorts, beautiful people of all shapes and sizes and hues--LIFE!

[Even as I write this across my path comes an older, gay man, head shaved with a Franciscan beard, skinny legs and less skinny belly, in black tennis shoes (no socks), black jean shorts, a black t-shirt with a faded logo I can't read and black leather-boy suspenders with chrome studs, with great pride and affection leading a beautiful grey medium haired cat on a leash... perfect! And across the pool, a young woman, blond, in a sun dress, legs shining white in the sunlight, surveys the scene with some intensity. He is alive... she is alive--and God is glorified in their living...]

And I rejoice in this gift of God... I rejoice in this many splendored world that God has created... I give thanks for it...

And as I become convinced that THIS... recognizing it, pointing it out, helping others to see it, blessing it... is what the Christian life is about... I wonder if I'm missing something essential.

Is it also the Church's job to point out how creation falls short of LIFE? How we, in countless ways, work against the Life of the World (see A. Schmemann)? How even the LIFE in the scene I describe there is so much working against that same LIFE? What is our role? Social justice is such a small thing next to this glorious vision of life. But so might pastoral care seem and I am sure that's part of the Church's mission.

What is our role here? Whatever it is, though it may be more, it is certainly not less than recognizing God as the source of this rich, abundant LIFE... and giving thanks to God for it.

Reasons to stop reading theology #1

The things I want (need?) to say I can't say in a way that anyone else can understand.

What I can say in a way that people can understand isn't worth saying.

immediate--direct...

The idea is that people want worship that is immediate--direct. And the claim is that the Mass is somehow disconnected (to our lives, culture, whatever)--that it needs interpretation.

But is that really true?

The Mass, it seems to me, is direct. It is immediate. It needs no interpretation. What could be more direct than

1. gathering
2. hearing and responding to the Word
3. sharing a meal (and receiving that Word made flesh in that meal) and
4. going out into the world to be what we've just received?

Maybe we need to eliminate clutter and silliness, but the Mass is direct. It is immediate.

Hard News...

From my journal in January 2008:

Clay Aiken has the nerve to complain about (the apparently fluffy/personal) questions Newsweek is asking him because he thought Newsweek was a hard news magazine. Hel-lo! How much of a hard news magazine can they be if they're interviewing Clay Aiken?

Like disciples to the master...

In "No Direction Home" (the Bob Dylan documentary by Martin Scorcese), Bobby Neuworth says:

"'Like a Rolling Stone' originally had about fifty something verses as I recall... People who think it's long now should have had a look at it when it was raw. I think he always made exactly the work he wanted to make at exactly the time he wanted to make it. The audience came to Bob. And that's one of the things that makes him so unique in the history of American music. The audience came to Bob Dylan."

Like disciples to the master. Something REAL in him... in his work. And so they came... drawn to something real.

Can the Church be that real? That honest?

Status quos and alternatives...

Does replacing "the" status quo with a variety of "status quos" really improve anything?

It's the early 80's and I walk into a record store. The first thing I notice? 3/4 of the store is labeled "alternative."

...tidbits and spiritual candy...

Mostly people want from priests some practical tidbits and spiritual candy. They want the take-home, not even caring about how you get there. Whether you are neo-Thomist, neo-orthodox or radical orthodox doesn't matter. Tell me what to think/believe/do (or at least what you think/believe/do so that I know whether or not to pay any attention to you).

That's not even what I mean, really...

Mostly, people aren't interested in the substance. It is seen as extra and the 'what do we do' is what they want to hear. But the reality is the opposite.

To most people, how one gets to the stance for or against same-sex unions (for example) isn't important. Just YES or NO. But that's backwards. And dangerous. So, my frustration (why are people NOT interested in the theology of marriage/sexuality, etc., that leads to my answer about same-sex unions (again, as an example), but instead just want to get to my answer?) is about something more, I think:

1. The reduction of the theological to the political or moral.
2. The loss of even the desire for a common (theological?) language.

Reductions of Life in Christ #1

To what do we reduce life in Christ? How many ways do we make it less than it is?

Christianity as

• a get out of hell free pass.
• morality (ethics).
• a relationship between Jesus and me.
• not saying bad words or having sex.
• a particular worldview.
• a set of beliefs.

Good liturgy is worth 1000 words (or maybe 2000-2400 words)

The number of words necessary for a sermon is inversely proportionate to the richness of the liturgy...

Entering the Kingdom

The liturgy begins...

Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And blessed be his Kingdom, now and for ever. Amen.

Because that's where we're going in the liturgy... entering that Kingdom. Entering that life. God's life--the Trinitarian life: Movement, love, infinite depth... creation, not out of necessity, but out of love, joy, delight.

I wonder if I can even go there. I wonder if I can even write these words. Yes, but only to say right away that they are inadequate beyond measure. And yet we have to go there, right? Because in the liturgy that's where the Church goes.

Entering the Kingdom, or rather, the Kingdom coming to us (is there a difference? Maybe). The important thing is this: Whatever the liturgy is, it's not less than a taste of the Kingdom here and now (even if it's only a taste because it's fullness lies in our future where Christ stretches out his arms to draw us to himself).

Why, then, do we want less? Why do we settle for cheap entertainment, interesting words, maybe a spark of insight and even (usually) less than that? Cheap thrills are regularly recognized as the lure away from real communion with God outside the Church. Why should we expect it to be any different in the Church?

We don't even know who we are...

We don't even know who we are until Christ shows us to ourselves... And still we spend so much time and energy asserting a self that we don't even know.

Un-spontaneous

In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Benedict XVI says that liturgy is un-spontaneous… Maybe that’s a little awkward, but it's right on. The point is that “creativity” in the liturgy in the sense it’s usually meant is exactly wrong. The liturgy is a gift from beyond us. Not that it doesn’t grow and change and develop, but it does so organically—over time—under the guidance of the Spirit, not according to the idiosyncratic sensibilities of individuals or dioceses or national Churches. Episcopalians (in seizing on the liturgy as our “added value” over other churches while at the same time losing confidence in the truth and power of the received forms as evidenced in its need to “tweak” it*) have largely forgotten that.

Anyway, see the section called “Rite” in The Spirit of the Liturgy. Benedict says it much better than I did/can.


*I'm not talking about the 1979 Prayer Book, BTW, which I think is a very Catholic book overall, restoring the Triduum (and the rhythms of the Church year in general) and Baptism and Eucharist to their proper, central place.

Modernity and Post-modernity

What has modernity (and post-modernity) brought us? What is so good? That we live a little longer? But what if we aren't living at all?

Between Ascension and Pentecost

Jesus in heaven. Spirit on the way. Still in Easter season. Getting ready for mission. We are it... Well, not exactly. It is the Spirit who comes and enlivens us to be the Church, Christ's Body.

Easter as the remaking of creation... of human nature... in Christ. But now, moving toward Pentecost, we're at the point where we're about to receive that LIFE into our lives--to be enhypostasized into God's life (see V. Lossky).

The fact of what Christ has accomplished... we celebrate that during Holy Week/Easter. Now, how will our particular lives be reshaped to become a new version of it? This is what Pentecost is. The Paschal Mystery transforming us (and all of creation) into it.

Sola scriptura

Codes. Symbols. Text. (Don't even images function in this way today?)

Text based culture wants to turn everything into a text so that we can read it as individuals. So that we can own it. The world as Book. Sola Scriptura.

The alternative? Catholicism of course.

My excuse...

I really don't care about so much of the stuff that seems to be the life-blood of the Church these days.

One of the problems for me of being a priest in this time is that I'm just not a program type of guy and right now the Church is all about program (still?--yes). I want reality, not programs.

I wonder if this is just the cost of doing business (and even that kind of talk is already deadly, BTW)... I wonder if it's just necessary in our time and place... Or is it just some by-product of the true religion of our time (What do we want to name it? How might we describe it?) that the Church has been (too easily) assimilated to... the religion that we really practice... a bowing down to the god(s) that we really trust? The kind of religion that has no problems with language like "the cost of doing business."

In any case I don't get it and I don't want to. The Church can only be retarded by it. It certainly isn't a neutral phenomenon.

I suppose this could all just be an excuse.

When it comes down to it, I just want to pray, to study, to celebrate the Mass (and the other sacraments) and preach, to teach, to offer spiritual guidance and pastoral care, and to be re-made by the Holy Spirit operating in these things and in the community that the Holy Spirit is re-making through them into the Body of Christ. Is that so strange for a priest?

promised land...

Have you seen it? The cross or the fish (ichthys) sticker on one side of the car or truck bumper and the flag sticker on the other? Even worse, the cross and the flag somehow made into one image?

When will we learn?

America is not the Christian promised land. Our promised land (the Kingdom of God) doesn't have geographical or cultural or ethnic boundaries.

"...with your blood you have redeemed for God, from every family, language, people, and nation, a kingdom of priests to serve our God."

(A Song to the Lamb, Dignus es--Revelation 4:11; 5:9-10, 13)

Something true...

How many books written to the brain... the intellect? How many written to the heart (not in the rich Biblical sense, but in the modern, emotional sense?)... to sentiment? Thiness... too much of it.

The very real problem of the Christian life and faith cut off from everyday people and yet the very real problem of people cut off from God.

Those who too easily claim to be in relationship to/with God (all "Jesus" this and "Jesus" that) usually make it harder for the rest of us (not to mention themselves) to really get to know him... the real him... because their "Jesus this" and "Jesus that" is an idol.

Libraries--certainly my bookshelves--are full of theology books. I don't know how many more we need. How many books do we need about God? How many words? Theology shouldn't be a matter of learning facts or ideas about God. Theology should lead us to union with God and to transformation in (and into) Christ.

How many years did I want to write big and serious theological treatises and join the ranks of the greats? Now I just wish I could be half as honest as Flannery O'Connor. I just wish I could write something true.

...like marriage without sex.

A Church without sacraments (especially the Eucharist celebrated in its full richness) is like marriage without sex. It might be church, but not the way it was meant to be...

Reflections on Authority

B. was the great artist one year ahead of my class in college. We all wanted to draw as well as he did. We all tried. It was our goal.

Near the end of my junior year (B.'s senior year), talking to Pat Schuchard (painter/professor) while looking at our work hung on the wall during a break in one of those long studio classes... looking at B.'s in particular... Pat says, "It's good."

"Very good," I agreed. Still in awe, I guess.

A pause.

"You know, he was that good when he was a freshman."

I did know that.

Silence between us (where the real communication happens). I got what Pat meant. B. had spent nearly four years here and to what end? All this time, energy, money and B. had never allowed himself to be a student... never allowed himself to submit to a master... never grew.

The theology of dogs playing on the beach

On the beach in St. Augustine, Florida:

There must be a theology of everything because I am pretty sure I was watching God’s hand, God’s joy in the play of two dogs on the beach… in the water and on the sand…

Whatever the theology of dogs playing on the beach, I’m sure it’s a beautiful one.

Apologetics

My heart just isn't in apologetics--in proof or arguments for the Christian faith besides transformed lives or (better) a transformed community. Apologetics just seems like a nicer way to coerce.

The truth is the truth. Some people get it. Some people don't. Just like some people get Quentin Tarantino, some get the Sopranos, some get Bob Dylan and some get Picasso. Most of us only half get it at best. And who does and who doesn't get it and how much any of us really gets it changes over time.

+

Disneyland. For whatever reason, very uncrowded. Lisa and I on a boat in Pirates (years before Johnny Depp found his way there).

Watching the animatronics when the attraction was quiet (the skeletons), not such a big deal...

But then the room when the song starts up in earnest... "Yo ho yo ho..." Spectacle. Energy. Ingenuity. Semblance of enthusiasm. But no one is on the boats in front of or behind us. When we passed through, no one would be in that room. No one watching, but those figures keep singing and moving. The hint of sadness as the spectacle continues and no one is there to enjoy it.

Maybe that sort of thing is about as close as I get to 'traditional' apologetics.

Too much Baez. Not enough Dylan.

Anglicans are so polite. We almost never get near the gospel. Why can't we worship with the seriousness and abandon of snake-handlers? We've domesticated God's grace. Not by "creating" sacraments or rites as too many evangelicals and pentecostals want to claim. Not by the fact of sacramental mediation. We've domesticated (Christ's giving of himself to us in) the sacraments themselves.

We're too much Baez. Not enough Dylan.

Between spits, the painting...

I’m in the dentist’s chair. The hygienist leans over me. She’s talking. She’s describing a painting she saw at the art museum. She doesn’t like it. It’s ugly, she says. It’s big. It dominates the room. It’s all black and grey and brown paint. It’s thick. She hates it.

As she describes it, I recognize it as an Anselm Kiefer painting. I love that painting. I remember standing in front of it for some time on more than one occasion. Ugly? Maybe. But beautiful in the ways that matter. If you stop, you can spend time with it. You can live in it a while. You can come back to it and not have exhausted it. That makes it a good painting in my book.

Between spits into the bowl, I tell her I know that painting. I like it. I think it’s good.

She gets all worked up. It just seems like a mess, she says. Why do you like it? she wants to know.

And here is the problem. Words. Because a painting isn’t about words. If it were, it would be a poem or a story or something like that. It’s a painting. But she wants to know why I like it. She wants words.

She asks, What does it mean?

I don’t know. What does the Grand Canyon mean? What does the ocean mean? What does freshly mowed grass mean?

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., Martyr

No matter how many times we say he was assassinated... No matter how much the secular left and the religious right (each for their own reasons) prefer to minimize the role of his Christian faith in his mission and ministry, we Christians should remember and insist that the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was not assassinated... he was martyred. There is a difference and it matters.

...on April 4, the feast day of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Deadwood--What we were to be and what we actually are...

Watching Deadwood. Season 2. Episode 4. EB Farnum is frustrated… humiliated… And he says to Richardson, his chef, who is simpleminded… (roughly—a paraphrase) “You don’t know yourself.” And I can't shake the impression that this is true about all of us—we are all as wretched as Richardson. Made for glorious lives—a glorious creation filled with God’s glory… And yet we end up fallen, broken… I am struck by the discrepancy of what we were to be and what we actually are. Hightened, I guess, by the show’s depiction of such a grim, dirty, stinking camp and the beauty of gold sufacing here and there only to be lost again... squandered...

This is not a blog...

This is not a blog.

It's a collection of fragments...

...and since I am not an expert in theology or philosophy or cultural criticism, and since I have neither the brains nor the vision nor the discipline to make them into the essays or books they might become, fragments they will remain... like the broken pieces of the body of Adam that struggle against each other and yet ache for communion.

At least I'm not alone:

Fragmentary writing is, ultimately, democratic writing. Each fragment
enjoys equal distinction. The most banal one finds its exceptional reader. Each,
in its turn, has its hour of glory.

Of course, each fragment could become a book. But the point is that it will
not do so, for the ellipse is superior to the straight line. It is also a
matter of laziness: one has no right to waste time to no good end, any more than
to exploit oneself to no good end. And a matter, too, of compassion for words,
which have done so much work already.

By contrast with those who place all their hopes in the indigestion of
ideas and arguments--the abuse of ideas, the prostitution of words and the
textual harrassment of language would be an interesting subject for debate--you
will be judged on the brevity of your intuitions and arguments.

Jean Baudrillard--Fragments (Cool Memories III, 1990-1995)