“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.
Category Archives: thoughts from reading
The Paths We Take
Thoughts from reading, quoting:
“I wish I’d had your head at my age; I would have spared myself many mistaken turns,” said my father.
“You, mistaken turns, Pro? Frankly, I can’t picture you ever imagining a mistaken turn.” [said Oliver]
“That’s because you see me as a figure, not a human being. Worse yet: as an old figure. But there were. Mistaken turns, that is. Everyone goes through a period of traviamento – when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.” (call me by your name, by Andre Aciman, p. 99)
I fear for those I know that never come back or that lead wrong lives all life long. My heart aches for some… I know. Then, I wonder about myself – what turns, wrong turns, unrecognized beacons, misplaced enchiridion. What might have been, and what will be. One only knows…
Then, how many parishioners and general people view those in Holy Orders as… figures, not human beings? Sets up a dynamic that when reality encroaches, disappointment and disillusionment set in. It doesn’t make life easy for the cleric, either. It can be a lonely life.
A good foundation
This morning, I attempted to read through a biblical commentary covering John, chapter 17, for our Home Group meeting, tonight. I came across a piece of paper with names and phone messages written on the outside – from my time as an undergraduate at Bowling Green State University. Inside, the sheet of paper was a bible-study outline neatly printed by one of my roommates who lead a small-group for our campus ministry at BGSU – Active Christians Today (ACT). ACT is a ministry of the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ fellowship/denomination, one of the historic results of the Campbellite movement.
So, as ease as it is to become distracted from one’s original intent when the Web is involved, I searched for “Cambellite” on google and came up with a website that dealt with a poster’s question of whether the Cambellite churches are cults or not. The person asked the question because Cambellite churches believe in a form of baptismal regeneration (as well as taking communion every week).
Then, an advert appeared at the top of the page: “Because a modest woman is a beautiful women.” It is an ad for “Modest Apparel” for women. I suspect a man could dress immodestly and get away with it??? Can we become any more distracted???
Anyway, back to the bible-study notes from college I discovered. A couple posts ago, “What the heck,” I woefully attempted to put into words thoughts about strong beliefs, about what Anglicanism or Christianity is not with regard to the prevailing culture (liberal or conservative) and all that. A train wreck, but I “process out loud” and it was yet another attempt to get at what I believe as I figure out what I believe.
On this bible-study outline was a verse from I Corn. 3:11:
“For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
Perhaps, all the stuff from “What the heck…” dealt with the question of foundations. What is our foundation upon which we build our organizations and our own faith?
It is easy to say, of course, “Jesus Christ.” Yet, I sense that for too many people in certain segments of The Episcopal Church and within parts of Anglicanism (and Christianity all together), we are attempting to lay a new and different foundation in reality. Subtly similiar, yet profoundly askew. On the ground, when most of what we hear comes along the lines of a Christianity or a Jesus that aligns with either, 1. materialism/consumerism, nationalism, and hyper-individuality or 2. the “inclusiveness” or “diversity” mantras born out of political-correctness and identity-politics, then it seems a new foundation is being constructed. These new foundations, at least with regard to living out the Kingdom of God as Jesus described bringing us “life to the full,” will, well… fail. And, they are failing. We see the results all around us as we attempt to justify our culturally subordinate religious opinions about what is and isn’t “Christian.” We see the results particularly at present as more and more people find nothing worthwhile in our organized religion.
When our modus operandi is to point accusing fingers at anyone other than our group and our determination to rebel and our demand for self, I don’t blame people for wanting to stay away. If we lived as Christians, in whatever knowable sense God might intend for those claiming his Son, I would guess that far more people might see something far more compelling in this thing called the Christian life than they do now. Those who do claim Christ just might find themselves living a far less deficient life in the Spirit, also.
What is our foundation? The more I think about it, really, the more I come back to the simple, yet profoundly befuddling, two commands of Jesus. Frankly, this is one of my favorite parts of Rite I and I am glad I get to say it so often,
“Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
So simple, yet so profoundly difficult that we chose to build other foundations so to attempt to justify our religion and our dogmatism. What shall come of the cause of Christ? What shall become of us?
Each One of Us
From “A Thomas Merton Reader,” edited by Thomas P. McDonnell.
Background – Thomas Merton had just arrived at Gethsemane, the Trappist monetary in Kentucky, as a postulant.
“In any case, the Father Abbott turned to us with just as much ease and facility as if he had nothing else whatever to do but to give the first words of advise to two postulants leaving the world to become Trappists.
“‘Each one of you,’ he said, ‘will make the community either better or worse. Everything you do will have an influence upon others. It can be a good influence or a bad one. It all depends on you. Our Lord will never refuse you grace…'” (p. 143)
In all of our communities, we must make a decision of whether we will be a good influence or a bad one, whether we will make the place we find ourselves better or worse. Our dispositions, our attitude, our words along with our actions will all contribute to whether we are a “smell of life” or a “smell of death.”
Which will it be? In all of our politicking, moralizing, and pontificating, what will it be? Are we an element that uplifts and encourages or an element that speeds the decent into banality, superficiality, hypocrisy, and idiocy?
Despite our person foibles and problems, we still have the ability to decide! Which will it be? How will we be known?
The coming confrontation
Here is the problem: Within the youth of this nation there is developing two distinct groups fundamentally different than the way these groups have been construed in the past, primarily due to the influence of adults (parents, youth leaders, the media). I starting thinking about this a bit more while reading an article in Rolling Stone entitled “Teen Holy War” about BattleCry – a radicalized movement focused on Christian youth for the purpose of compelling them be at war (literally) with those forces opposed to their understanding of the Christian faith and American society.
The first group comprises those who are “secular” in the sense that they have not been raised in any faith tradition. I’ve known many parents who claim that they do not want to involved their children in any particular faith tradition when the kids are young because they want their kids to be able to choose for themselves what faith to adhere to when they are adults. (It sounds all altruistic and modern on the surface, but it is a cop-out, generally, for lazy parents. Sorry, but that is my experience.) Then, there are those parents who themselves are “secular” whether due to being atheists or being honest and admitting that they just have no real interest in faith development. I have to say, I have more respect for the second group than the first, but that’s just me and it doesn’t matter who I respect or not.
These “secular” kids grow up not knowing the conceptual frameworks of “faith” in general and religious faith in particular. What they know comes from the media and perhaps some few friends who are able to talk about their own faith experience/expression. (One downside of this way of raising children is that it gives the kids no foundation upon which to make judgments about what is or is not legitimate religious expression, opening them to exploitation and recruitment by cults, which are still quite active on college campuses). Enabling kids to make sound judgments as adults does not mean we do not expose them to something while they are children.
The second group are those who might be called “religionists” and who are the type of youth that are raised within the radicalized segments of American Christianity, BattleCry being the prime example. I went to BattleCry’s website right before the official launch. At the time, I thought this may be an interesting and productive effort, but I think I’m changing my mind. While I don’t think there are any like groups on the radical-left side of the Christian faith, the same way of thinking is certainly evident among many “liberal†groups and people.
I understand the primary instincts and emotions of the adults who propagate this way of thinking and being concerning the faith, culture, economics, politics, and other religious expressions outside of Christianity. At the base level, the reasons are good – giving the kids the tools they need to be open and honest about their faith, protecting them from exploitation by unscrupulous marketeers and the like, giving them a sense of self-esteem even when ridiculed within the general culture, exercising their Constitutional freedoms of speech and religion, and passing on the faith to the next generation. All good things, frankly.
The problem is that the adults of groups that include the politicized Religious Right, radicalized leftist groups, and youth ministries such as BattleCry, is that they demand a form of the faith that is confrontational in the extreme, very narrow in its thinking, fundamentalist in its view and practice of the faith, uncompromising with anyone who holds differing viewpoints and beliefs, and then taking the next step of demonizing the other and declaring them “enemies” that must be properly dealt with.
So, in the coming years we will be confronted with the battle between these two groups as they grow into young adults. Of course, numbers of them will moderate their way of thinking and being and some will even crossover to the “other side.” Yet, patterns of understanding, thinking, and behaving will have already been imprinted. If something doesn’t change, and soon, the current “Culture Wars” will seem like a garden party in comparison. Radicalized Secularists vs. Radicalized Religionists. (Or, in the case of BattleCry, radicalized Christian Religionists vs. Everyone else) What will be lost is civility, the ability to live peacefully in a democratic society, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, and a culture that is free and respectful of difference.
What is lost is the middle group of balance and thoughtfulness. What will be/is being lost is the ability of the two extremes – “secular” young people growing into adulthood and the “religionist” young people growing into adulthood – to understand each other, to work together, and the ability to compromise within the over all system so to build a respective and civil society where freedom of thought, speech, and action are still considered inalienable rights.
What must be done, frankly and regrettably, is that the “middle-way” must be asserted forcefully enough to be heard and recognized but not so much as to become a third group within the radicalization. What must be done, too, is support for those forms of the Christian faith that promote intentional maturity into adulthood, intentional faith development and maturation, intentional programs that encourage respect and understanding of differences (without political correctness or identity politics), and those programs that allow students to have a firm foundation build strongly and yet allows them to question and search for themselves. This is readily possible within Conservative Christianity and within Liberal Christianity, but rarely possible in Anti-Liberal Christianity or Anti-Conservative Christianity (and this is where we are in most of American faith-politics right now).
Here is a YouTube video produced by BattleCry, and I think the message itself is important and good – we need to do something to reach our young people.
Here is a Nightline piece on “Teen Mania” and “BattleCry”
The Word of the Lod
Quoting Habakkuk 1:5, in The Acts of the Apostles 13:41 –
” ‘ Look, you scoffers, wonder and perish, for I am going to do something in your days that you would never believe, even if someone told you.’ ”
What may be the “something in our days” that the Lord is doing – something that we might hardly believe?
The exact quote from Habakkuk reads as follows:
“Look at the nations and watch—
and be utterly amazed.
For I am going to do something in your days
that you would not believe,
even if you were told.”
One might find it interesting to read further on in Habakkuk. My question above isn’t meant to follow the course of action found in Habakkuk, but to simply ask us to think about what God might have up-his-sleeve for our time – beyond what we can think or believe, beyond our wildest imaginations. God usually works beyond our imaginations, I think. We need to expand our expectations and hopes – to begin to understand and see through the perspective of God’s Way of things. There is another verse in the O.T. (don’t remember where right this moment) that says something like, “God’s eyes go to and fro looking for someone to prosper.”
Another Athanasius quote
Anthanasius, in On the Incarnation:
“But since the will of man could turn either way, God secured this grace that He had given by making it conditional from the first upon two things – namely a law and a place. He sat them in His own paradise, and laid upon them a single prohibition. If they guarded the grace and retained the loveliness of their origional innocence, then the life of paradise should be theirs without sorrow, pain or care, and after it the assurance of immortality in heaven. But if they went astray and became vile, throwing away their birthright of beauty, then they would come under the natural law of death and live no longer in paradise, but dying outside of it, continue in death and corruption. This is what holy scripture tells us, proclaiming the command of God, ‘Of every tree in the Garden thou shalt surely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ye shall not eat, but in that day that ye do eat, thou shalt surely die.’ [Gen. 2:16f] ‘Ye shall surely die…’ – not just die only, but remain in a state of death and corruption.”
Was the plan all along that man and woman would eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and learn what it means to face the consequences of one’s actions – thus being truly able to choose competently between one thing and another? Was this all a part of learning what it meant to be made in the very image of God, who can create freely and choose freely? Or, did we truly thwart God’s will for us as His creation, defying His good will and His command?
Why the Word made flesh
From “On The Incarnation” by Athanasius:
“You [Macarius] must understand why it is that the Word of the Father, so great and so high, has been made manifest in bodily form. He has not assumed a body as proper to His own nature, far from it, for as the Word He is without body. He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love an goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men. We will begin, then with the creation of the world and with God its Maker, for the first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it in the beginning.”
I just wonder about the development of the concept of the Trinity of God. How much of our acceptance of God as Trinity today carries a stigma or the weight (wrong word?) of coming from the very difficult endeavor of attempting to explain and make palpable to a Hellenistic society then such a very strange idea of a god being made real but different within a human – a composite? – and how much of it is accurate in today’s way of thinking?
In common life, are we really tri-theists (the egg example)? Are we really modalists (the ‘man’ example – father, son, brother)? Does “Trinity” of hypostases and ousia explain anything, really? Or, do we just throw up our hands and say it is beyond us? I accept the doctrine of the Trinity because it is accepted in the common life of the Church, but it is easier for me to believe in a tri-theistic God of complete unity of purpose and relationship or in Modalism. (I am Trinitarian, just in case someone later in life wants to accuse me of being a heretic!)
(“It was mainly under the influence of the Cappadocian Fathers that the terminology was clarified and standardized, so that the formula “Three Hypostases in one Ousia” came to be everywhere accepted as an epitome of the orthodox doctrine of the Holy Trinity.” – Wikipedia)
‘do not be’
I’m reading a book by James Alison, a British theologian in the ‘Catholic’ tradition, entitled Faith Beyond Resentment: fragments catholic and gay. Alison’s approach to theology and Scripture, particularly related to how it is all actually lived out, amazes and challenges me. I heard him speak at last year’s Trinity Institute. The one thing I truly appreciate about him is that he admits he could be wrong – and that fact can has significant consequences. In fact, that is one reason he converted to Roman Catholicism from British Evangelicalism – within the Catholic theological make-up, there is the freedom to be wrong.
This quote comes from his personal experience in dealing with false accusations from some Roman church authorities as they tried to get him expelled from a theology teaching position in Brazil over his honesty about being gay and his calling upon the church to begin an honest and open conversation about this issue. He then recognized his own complicity in the “mechanisms” that lead the whole affair. (There was never any accusation of behavioral problems. He remained chaste. It all revolved around hearsay and the openness of his beliefs.) What follows is his reflection and change of mind and heart that came during a Jesuit retreat right after the incident. What he describes happening to him and his way of thinking and being can be applied to any of us, gay or straight, for it is the process of dying and of rebirth within God’s way of being.
Here is a quote:
“Where denial, mendacity and cover up are forces which structure a reality, the search for honest conversation is, of itself, the worst from of militancy…
“Well, my reply, while formally correct, allowed me to hide from myself something which my various accusers had perceived perfectly clearly: that I was myself on a sort of crusade, that I had a zeal, and that this zeal of a prodigiously violent force, powered by a deep resentment. In fact, I was wanting to create for myself, taking advantage of the ecclesiastical structures which sustained me, a space of security and peace, of survival. Thus I hoped to avoid what I had seen happen to gay people in country after country: social marginalization, destruction of life projects, emotional and spiritual annihilation. That is to say, my brave discourse was a mask which hid from me my absolute cowardice of soul, for I was not prepared to identify myself fully with that reality, which I knew to be mine, with all its consequences. At root, I myself believe that God was on the side of ecclesiastical violence directed at gay people, and couldn’t believe that God loves us just as we are. The profound ‘do not be’ which the social and ecclesiastical voice speaks to us, and which forms the soul of so many gay people, was profoundly rooted in my own being, so that, au fond I felt myself damned. In my violent zeal I was fighting so that the ecclesiastical structure might speak to me a ‘Yes’, a ‘Flourish, son’, precisely because I feared that, should I stand alone before God, God himself would be part of the ‘do not be‘. Thus I was absolutely dependent on the same mechanism against which I was fighting. Hiding from myself the fact of having despaired of God, I wanted to manipulate the ecclesiastical structure so that it might give me a ‘self’, that it might speak to me a ‘Yes’ at a level of profundity of which the ecclesiastic structure, like any human structure, is incapable. For the ‘Yes’ which creates and recreates the ‘self’ of son, only God can pronounce. In this I discovered myself to be an idolater. I had been wanting to negotiate my survival in the midst of violent structures, and negotiation in the midst of violent structures can only be done by violence. The non-violent, the blessed of the gospels, simply suffer violence and parish, either physically or morally…
“And then, at root, what began this whole process of beginning to untie myself from the idols I had so assiduously cultivated, what I had never dared to image, the profound ‘Yes’ of God, the ‘Yes’ spoken to the little gay boy who had despaired of ever hearing it. And there, indeed, I found myself absolutely caught, because this ‘Yes’ does not take the form of a pretty consolation for a spoiled child. Rather, from the moment it reached me, the whole psychological and mental structure by which I had built myself up over all the previous years began to enter into a complete collapse. For the whole structure was based on the presupposition of a ‘No’ at the center of my being, and because of that, of the need to wage a violent war so as to cover up a fathomless hole. The ‘I’, the ‘self’ of the child of God, is born in the midst of the ruins of repeated idolatry…
“But it was exactly this that, at last, I was learning. [from Col. 3:1-3] The whole of my previous life had been marked by an absolute refusal to die.”
Oh, if we all would be willing to die to self and to die to the systems of this world, and to allow God to bring rebirth and renewal to our souls, to our ways of being, to our voices and lives, we might truly be able to change the world – or at least be a sweet smelling fragrance to the stench of a pain-filled and dying world.
Resentment?
I wonder how significant is the sense of resentment in all the troubles we find in the Episcopal Church and Anglicanism these days? If it is, what is the cause of the feelings of resentment? What can be done to change the situation?
James Alison, theologian, writes,
“Yet it was in the midst of these experiences that Joseph developed an awareness of being loved such that he recognized that none of the people against whom he might justly feel resentment were really worthy of his dedicating to them that weight of emotional involvement. And he moved beyond even that, to a position of such freedom that he began to be able to plot not vengeance, but sustained forgiveness as the gift of humanizing others.”
(From Faith beyond resentment, p. x)
Then, if resentment is significant, how much does vengeance play in the posturing and threats of schism and the demonizing of others?