The highlights:
“This brings me to the fundamentals, Doctor,” replied the Rector. “If you will permit, let us pass by the particular things for a moment and try to understand the principles that govern the methods of our worship…”
“…To understand the public worship of the Episcopal Church, you must grasp three principles,” said the Rector. “They will serve to interpret practically all of its practices and habits. You may not approve of these principles but at any rate you can understand that the Church has reason for adhering to them. These principles of the Church are the basis of its practices.”
“The first principle is that the Church attempts to appeal to the eye as well as to the ear…”
“The eye is the gateway to knowledge,” continued the Rector… “The Church for a 1,000 years or more attempted to instruct the people by education through the eye.”
“For that reason our churches are furnished so that each great function of the Church has some article of furniture which constantly suggests that function…”
“… I think I see,” said the Doctor seriously. “Your Altar then is like a great picture which sets forth the religious teachings of the Church.”
“Exactly,” affirmed the Rector…
“Did you ever go, alone, into an Episcopal Church?” asked the Judge.
“No, I think not. Why should I?” asked the Doctor….
…The Doctor was clearly impressed. “I thought churches were for public gatherings,” he said quietly.
“They are,” agreed the Judge, “but they are likewise for individual edification. The mistake you may make about the Episcopal Church is in thinking that it is an organization having as its object public assemblies, in which a general effort is made to promote goodness. It is more than that. It is a great Mother who teaches you so impressively that its influence and control endure throughout the week. The idea of righteousness and the idea of salvation are often too abstract. The Church is the embodiment of these ideas. You know the spirit of college?” asked the Judge.
“Class of 1905,” said the Doctor. “Best college on earth.”
“That’s loyalty,” affirmed the Judge. “The college stands for education. Its activities tend toward the development of the student. It expresses great ideas and trains men in a score of ways. Do you keep your old text-books?”
“Shelf full of them, ” confessed the Doctor.
“Pretty dry now, aren’t they?” questioned the Judge. “Yet they have the heart of the substance of your education in them. But it was the college that made those books live. You were part of all that. So the Church is a great living organization to which loyalty and love and devotion respond. You are proud of it, and you carry the thought of it with you constantly. On days when services are held the people come to pledge anew their faith, to refresh their spiritual life. They come not as chance spectators of a service, or accidental listeners to a moral lecture, but as part of the whole body of the Church.”
“That is a fine idea,” admitted the Doctor, “but the Church never impressed me in that way.”
“You have misunderstood it,” said the Judge simply. “It is our spiritual home. So we keep it orderly and furnish it gloriously. We like that picture of the Altar and the Cross, even as you like the warmth and glow of your hearthstone…”
[The Episcopal Church: Its Message for Men of Today, George Parkin Atwater; New York: Morehourse-Gorham Co., 1950; 6-12.]
more to come…
I keep hearing that “the Church no longer has anything for men…” This isn’t a nostalgic longing for an imagined time past, but a recognition that we are now fairly empty of any real focus on the development of the moral, spiritual, devotion lives of men, as men and not as some androgynous entity that does not recognize that there are honest differences between women and men.
To some degree, the focus over the past 30 years has been on providing women the ability to enter into an equal place in the leadership structures of the Church. And, that kind of focus is needed. There continues to be Episcopal Church Women (ECW) that existed in times pass to give women some level of real involvement in the structures of the Church, even if they were not allowed within the greater leadership. ECW is, for the most part, still the focal point for the development of the lives of women within the Church.
The younger generations do not carry the baggage of hard feelings or ill will that still inhabit the minds and attitudes of many people who fought for their right to be a real and honest part of the leadership of the Church. Younger women or gays do not automatically jump to the conclusion that if men want a men’s ministry that is made up of men and for men, that it will not by its nature be misogynist or homophobic.
Yet, I think that like ECW has not lost its purpose as a ministry for women, there needs to be a ministry of some sort for men. Well, actually, I think that the current generation of leadership needs to exercise the spirit/demon of “liberal, while, male” guilt out of its Psyche that tends to denigrate men or a particularly male way of fellowship or leadership. Already, I can hear howls of opposition. That’s my experience, whether it is normative or not.
Now, the above quotes come from a book published in the 1950’s. The attitudes of the authors, of men and women within the Church, and of course society in general were terribly different. Yet, there is not an embarrassment to be men gathering and saying things that actually sound like men in ways other than barbaric, aggressive, loudmouth posturing.
Are there ministries for men within the Episcopal Church? Perhaps, but, I don’t think there is much going on, and there needs to be.
Category Archives: quotes
We must take time…
“We must take time, take pains, have a plan, form spiritual habits, if we are to keep our souls alive; and now is the time to begin. A man to whom religion is a reality, and who knows what is meant by “the practice of salvation,” keeps his balance, because the living center of his life is spiritual. He cannot be upset, not shaken. The same hard knocks come to him as to others, but he reacts to them by the central law of his life. He suffers deeply, but he does not sour. He knows frustration, but he goes right on in his kindness and faith. He sees his own shortcomings but he does not give up, because a power rises up from his spiritual center and urges him to the best.”
Joseph Fort Newton (1880 – 1950; Baptist minister and masonic author)
HatTip: Andrew Sullivan
The Narrative Character
The Narrative Character of our Faith
“Too many Christians are just pious versions of Ulysses Everett McGill protagonist in the movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou]; that is, too many Christians have bought into the modernist valorization of scientific facts and end up reducing Christianity to just another collection of propositions. Our beliefs are encapsulated in ‘statements of faith’ that simply catalog a collection of statements about God, Jesus, the Spirit, sin, redemption, and so on. Knowledge is reduced to biblical information that can be encapsulated and encoded. And so, in more ways than one, our construal of the Christian faith has capitulated to modernity and what Lyotard calls its ‘computerization’ of knowledge, indicating a condition wherein any knowledge that cannot be translated into a simple ‘code’ or reduced to ‘data’ is abandoned. But isn’t it curious that God’s revelation to humanity is given not as a collection of propositions or facts but rather within a narrative — a grand, sweeping story from Genesis to Revelation? Is there not a sense in which we’ve forgotten that God’s primary vehicle for revelation is a story unfolded within the biblical canon?”
James K.A. Smith, PhD., Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?; pp. 74-75.
Lyotard’s “computerization of knowledge” reminds my of Polanyi’s “Tacit Knowing.”
“This is why the Scriptures must remain central for the postmodern church, for it is precisely the story of the canon of Scripture that narrates our faith… The narrative character of our faith should affect not only our proclamation and witness but also our worship and formation. …we need to know the story, and that story should be communicated when we gather as the people of God, that is, in worship. That is why the most postmodern congregations will be those that learn to be ancient, reenacting the biblical narrative. Just as Lyotard’s account of narrative knowledge shows a link between premodern and postmodern, so worship in postmodernity (which appreciates the role of narrative) should signal a recovery of liturgical tales — the narrating of creation, fall, redemption (as well as crucifixion, burial, and resurrection) in the very manner in which we worship.” (pp.75-76)
They kept saying, “Show us a sign. Give us proof. Then, we will believe.” And He responded always, “No.”
Kerygmatic Vocation
“Our Christian faith — and correlatively, our account of apologetics — is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in recognition of truth. (We also end up committed to ‘Constantinain’ strategies that, under the banner of natural law, seek to build a ‘Christian America.’
“To put this in more familiar terms, classical apologetics operates with a very modern notion of reason; ‘presuppositional’ apologetics, on the other hand, is postmodern (and Augustinian!) insofar as it recognizes the role of presuppositions in both what counts as truth and what is recognized as true. For this reason, postmodernism can be a catalyst for the church to reclaim its faith not as a system of truth dictated by a neutral reason but rather as a story that requires ‘eyes to see and ears to hear.’ The primary responsibility of the church as witness, then, is not demonstration but rather proclamation — the kerygmatic vocation of proclaiming the Word made flesh rather than the thin realities of theism that a supposedly neutral reason yields.”
James K.A. Smith, PhD., Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?; p. 28.
I wonder whether a lot of this modern/postmodern stuff is a replying anew the differences between Platonic and Aristotelian thought? Between Augustinian and Thomistic thought?
The latter is being played out in this new world of Post-Christendom, particularly within the context of the American Culture-War dynamic. What do we make of this?
Frankly, as I continue to move into the idea of re-formation out of the “Systems” (City of the World) and into some sort of “other than” (City of God) — perhaps a move out into the desert, metaphorically speaking — the rethinking of how we perceive and live out this Christian Life in our changing national context (really this ground shift of perceptional foundations within the culture), the more I am drawn to pre-Constantinian examples of Christianity. A “kerygmatic vocation.”
Stuff
“… I want to suggest that, quite unlike the anti-institutional mentality of postmodern “spirituality,” it is actually a robust, vibrant, liturgical church that speaks meaning in and to a postmodern world.”
James K.A. Smith, PhD., Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, Series Preface, p.9
The future looks like the past…
“The future is around all of us, and it looks very much like the past.” – Mother Superior Sheeana, at the founding of the Orthodox School on Synchrony
[From: Sandworms of Dune, by Brian Herbert & Kevin Johnson; pg. 539.]
In the context of the book, the above is a positive statement. Again, in my mind, it brings up aspects of our present culture that work contrary to our future well-being. One of those aspects is a generation’s disposition to believe that the past is bad or a least a negative. I keep coming back to this 2,009 year-old thing we call Christianity. The past is full of horrific atrocities and glorious accomplishments, but all that humanity has been through over these past millennia within the Christian experience presents to us today, from that which has survived and still speaks, a wisdom that we need to pay attention to.
In my context, with our gasping attempts to save this Church we flail around with the same attitudinal mistakes that led us to this place. We think that in our modern and sophisticated age we can create with our own new thoughts in our own way the solutions for a new dawn, a new order, a Utopian vision of our own making. We fail to realize that the Tradition provides us with what we need as a solid foundation upon which to build, because within the lived experiences of people over thousands of years is wisdom. That which speaks to the deepest part of us remains, survives, and calls out deep to deep despite our tendency to look upon past understanding and experience as pedestrian, antiquated, primitive, unenlightened, and not up to the challenges of 21st. century existence. What has survived for 2,000 years will survive another 2,000 years. Technology changes (and I’m glad of that), but the human “heart” remains the same.
Our challenge is to see the wisdom in and understand the ancient-future process of steady re-formation within ourselves as we give ourselves to this faith, die to ourselves and live to the life God sustains. How do we do it in this time, within this culture, recognizing that our lives are of an ancient-future dynamic – we receive from ages of ages and pass onto world without end.
Oh, those Moravians
The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops is meeting. On the agenda is the subject of full communion with the Moravian Church. They are an interesting Church. According to their history, they began 60 years before Martin Luther and 100 years before the establishment of the Anglican Church (CofE). I first remember seeing the Moravians when I helped a graduate school colleague move to Allentown/Bethlehem, PA. The Moravians have a school and seminary, as well as their U.S. headquarters, there.
Like religious Quakers and Anabaptists, there is something that I am drawn to in Moravian “systems” or disciplines or ways of thinking and doing.
From the Wikipedia entry for them:
Spirit of the Moravian Church
An account of the ethos of the Moravian Church is given by one of its British Bishops, C H Shawe. In a lecture series delivered at the Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Shawe described the Spirit of the Moravian Church as having five characteristics. These are simplicity, happiness, unintrusiveness, fellowship and the ideal of service.
Simplicity is a focus on the essentials of faith and a lack of interest in the niceties of doctrinal definition. Shawe quotes Zinzendorf’s remark that ‘The Apostles say: “We believe we have salvation through the grace of Jesus Christ ….” If I can only teach a person that catechism I have made him a divinity scholar for all time’ (Shawe, 1977, p 9). From this simplicity flow secondary qualities of genuineness and practicality.
Happiness is the natural and spontaneous response to God’s free and gracious gift of salvation. Again Shawe quotes Zinzendorf: ‘There is a difference between a genuine Pietist and a genuine Moravian. The Pietist has his sin in the foreground and looks at the wounds of Jesus; the Moravian has the wounds in the forefront and looks from them upon his sin. The Pietist in his timidity is comforted by the wounds; the Moravian in his happiness is shamed by his sin’ (p 13).
Unintrusiveness is based on the Moravian belief that God positively wills the existence of a variety of churches to cater for different spiritual needs. There is no need to win converts from other churches. The source of Christian unity is not legal form but everyone’s heart-relationship with the Saviour.
Fellowship is based on this heart-relationship. Shawe says: ‘The Moravian ideal has been to gather together kindred hearts … Where there are “Christian hearts in love united”, there fellowship is possible in spite of differences of intellect and intelligence, of thought, opinion, taste and outlook. … Fellowship [in Zinzendorf’s time] meant not only a bridging of theological differences but also of social differences; the artisan and aristocrat were brought together as brothers and sat as equal members on the same committee’ (pp 21,22).
The ideal of service entails happily having the attitude of a servant. This shows itself partly in faithful service in various roles within congregations but more importantly in service of the world ‘by the extension of the Kingdom of God’. Historically, this has been evident in educational and especially missionary work. Shawe remarks that none ‘could give themselves more freely to the spread of the gospel than those Moravian emigrants who, by settling in Herrnhut [ie, on Zinzendorf’s estate], had gained release from suppression and persecution’ (p 26).
In all of our Episcopalian and Anglican fighting over the last 6 years, what battles within me comes from two angles. The first comes from my American-Evangelical-Holiness and Arminian upbringing that says that belief in what we know as traditional Christian teaching and concepts are vital to real faith and relationship with God. There can be corruption of belief and a self-caused falling away from grace and salvation. We must guard against such corruption and be holy as much as it is possible with us.
The second comes from my knowledge of the effects of cultural inculcation upon our ability to understand Scripture and God’s instruction to us, and of the co-opting of the Way of Christ by the Systems-of-this-World. We so easily mistake cultural conviction for the Gospel. The Culture assimilates the profoundly contrary message and call of Jesus Christ and warps it so to justify its own existence. We fall prey to its allure. So, most of the Christian experience in most of our churches tends to be profoundly deficient. (And one wonders why fewer and fewer people find the Church to be compelling or a something worth much attention.) Given all that, our human fallibility, and our tendency to need to justify our own desires and proclivities, we tend to want to impose our myopic concepts upon all, demanding that all others capitulate to our sectarian theological precepts (or our national interests). We tend to loose trust that God will be God, God will be judge, God will be saviour, God will be sustainer, God is perfectly capable of managing His Church, and that the immediacy of NOW does not impinge upon God’s ability to do as He pleases, when He pleases, how He pleases. We are so short-sighted. We are so insecure in our faith. We lack trust in the very God we proclaim.
I fight between wanting to demand people believe “this way†(force acceptance of a check-off list of doctrines or tenants that makes things nice and neat) and the freedom realized from a willingness to allow people their own way and for God to make His own judgments about who is in and who is out. (Surely, God does make decisions based on His criteria alone about who is in and out – the choice is given to us and by our decisions we opt out ourselves.)
What do I want to say? I find it hard to let go! To let go of the fear I have of being wrong, the fear I have of the corruption of the Gospel, the fear I have that other souls will be lost because false teachings concerning the necessities of the Gospel overwhelm us. There are reasons for such fear, truly. But the question is the response to the reasons! The battle for the right response rages within me. Sign this covenant, this declaration, use these exact words, accept this precept, or else… or realizing that God works beyond my ability to rightly categorize, philosophize, theologize, and all that.
Beyond my Evangelical background and the experience of God I discovered through it, I have learned of the vital importance of the Tradition. That which survives over time, over millennia, among a vast array of cultures, can be trusted. I am becoming a Traditionalist, not because I demand conservation of prior institutional systems and doctrines of the Church catholic, but because that which lasts and changes lives is worthy to be proclaimed and intensely listened to.
We are too American. We are too haughty. We are too insecure. So, of the details of the Moravians above, I draw into myself ideas of a quite simplicity, happiness, un-intrusiveness, fellowship, and add to it Anglican comprehensiveness and a willingness to trust God that He will sort out our differences – differences that are probably based on internal stuff that doesn’t really come close to Jesus’ simple and profoundly difficult command to love God with all of my being and to love my neighbor as God enables me to love myself.
It isn’t that I have a problem with the traditional beliefs of the conservatives or the latitude and rebelliousness of the liberals, but I have a problem with either side demanding that they “really know,” that they are “absolutely right,” and their propensity to condemn outright the other side. The joy of the Lord is my strength, not my ascendancy to the 39-Articles or the Jesus Seminar. Anglicans used to strongly believe that “fellowship is possible in spite of differences of intellect and intelligence, of thought, opinion, taste and outlook.” We are loosing our ability to be in the via media. I fear that in full-communion with the Episcopal Church, we may infect the Moravians with our disease of vainglory, division, and hatred.
The Noble Purpose
“And what if it was true that the Sisterhood no longer heard the music of life?” (342)
“Without noble purpose we are nothing.” (344)
Quotes from “Heretics of Dune,” part of the Dune series by Frank Herbert.
What is the Church? What is the noble purpose presented to the Church? Has the Church lost its ability to pursue the noble purpose? Does it no longer understand what resonates within the hearts and desires and pain of the world? Does the Church no longer hear the music of life?
Again and again, when we so entangle ourselves within the systems of the world, mistakenly thinking that they are the conveyors of the noble purpose, the justifications for the noble purpose, or the reasons to continue in the noble purpose, we have already lost, already failed.
It is first the discovery of the One behind the noble purpose, and in so discovering firstly we will understand true and not contrived justifications of, reasons for, and ways for conveying the noble purpose that prove that we have not lost the ability to hear the music of life.
There is no real solace in thinking that our purpose rests in purely temporal form or purpose. The Cure of Souls is the first priority. All else, while vitally important to the noble path, are secondary. The second cannot occur without the first, and the first cannot be fully realized without the second. We try and try and try to reorder the process differently according to our own design born of limited understanding, but in the end we get no where. The noble purpose is clouded and diminished, stripped of its power, and we are left deaf.
Six things, no seven
Proverbs 6:16-19 (English Standard Version)
There are six things that the LORD hates,
seven that are an abomination to him:
haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
and hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked plans,
feet that make haste to run to evil,
a false witness who breathes out lies,
and one who sows discord among brothers.
Patience
“In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.”
— Paul Harvey
Whether times like these in our national, cultural life or our ecclesial lives.
Patience, patience, patience.