"....the very thing on which we have based our whole life."

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity:

"There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest – what we now call investment – is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong.  Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or 'usury' as they called it), they could not forsee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said.  That is a question I cannot decide on.  I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not.  This is where we want the Christian economist.  But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilisations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life."

"Awestruck adoration and penitent love, humble demand and inward assurance...."

From Evelyn Underhill's 1936 book, Worship, on what the Incarnation means for the "various phases of our human experience":

Again, Christian worship in its fulness should include and harmonize all the various phases of our human experience. It has room for the extremes of awestruck adoration and penitent love, humble demand and inward assurance. All levels of life and action are relevant to it; for they are covered and sanctified by the principle of incarnation. It can therefore weave every detail of the daily routine into the devotional life. It is thoroughly sacramental; and shows its true quality, not by an increasing abstraction and other-worldliness, but by an ever-deepening recognition of the sacredness and inexhaustible meaning of homely things. Especially a deep realism as regards human imperfection and sin, and also human suffering and struggle, is at the very heart of the Christian response to God; which if it is to tally with the Christian revelation of disinterested love as summed up in the Cross, must include the element of hardness, cost, and willing pain. It is this sacrificial suffering, this deliberate endurance of hardship for the sake of the Unseen, which gives nobility and depth to worship. The costly renunciations and total self-stripping of the consecrated life contribute something to the Church's oblation, without which her reasonable and holy sacrifice would not be complete. The "altar of the Cross" is no idle phrase; but reminds us that Christianity is a sacrificial religion, and that Christian worship is unintelligible if we eliminate the tension which is inherent in it, and the unconditioned self-offering by which it is crowned.

From all this it follows that the demand for a purely spiritual cultus is one that can never be made by Christianity; commmited by its very nature to a belief in the visible as vehicle of the invisible - to history, personality, sacraments, and sensible signs, as channels of God's communion with man, and body as well as soul as part of man's offering to God

"Aquinas and Materialism"

Here's another good one, from "Sublunary Sublime":

Terry Eagleton

From Terry Eagleton’s review of Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait by Denys Turner:

Aquinas believed in the soul, as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins do not; but one reason he did so was because he thought it yielded the richest possible understanding of the lump of matter known as the body. As Wittgenstein once remarked: if you want an image of the soul, look at the body. The soul for Thomas is not some ghostly extra, as it was for the Platonising Christians of his time; it is not to be seen as a spiritual kidney or spectral pancreas. The question ‘Whereabouts in the body is the soul?’ would to his mind involve a category mistake, as though one were to ask how close to the left armpit one’s envy was located. For Aquinas, the soul is everywhere in the body precisely because it is what he calls, after Aristotle, the ‘form’ of it, meaning the way in which it is uniquely organised to be expressive of meaning. The soul is not some sort of thing, but the distinctive way in which a particular piece of matter is alive. It is quite as visible as a club foot. To claim that a spider has a different sort of soul from a human being is in Thomas’s view simply to say that it has a different form of life. What distinguishes an animal body from a hat or a hosepipe is the fact that it is signifying, communicative, self-transformative stuff, in contrast to the meaninglessly dumb matter of so much contemporary materialism. It is, in Turner’s phrase, ‘matter articulate’.

Eagleton goes on to highlight that the mind’s natural object for
Aquinas was not God, but material objects; especially the material
object of Jesus.

Though he is often accused of bloodless scholastic rationalism, he is in some ways closer to the empiricists. The mind’s natural object, he insisted, is not God, the self or ideas but material things. Any knowledge we have of God has to start here, and in particular with that pathetic failure of a material object known as Jesus. (In a splendid flourish, Turner writes of Jesus as ‘extra-judicially executed on the majority recommendation of a corrupt committee of very religious people’.)

"Mythologizing Poverty"

Elizabeth Stoker is doing an excellent job these days, responding to some of the ideas out there about poverty in the U.S.  This is excerpted from one of her latest articles; it's important, I think, to note some of the statistics cited here. 

If poverty comes up, you can be guaranteed some right winger is going to propose that it doesn’t exist in the USA. The latest permutation of this silliness comes from this John Tamny character, who evidently writes for Forbes. Since he was interviewed on the Daily Show I thought I was watching some seriously bleak comedy, but I guess he’s serious. You can see the ‘interview‘ here.
....

It’s pretty easy to brush this kind of thing of empirically. There are homeless people, plenty of them, and they live in and amongst people who have stable housing. They can speak, and do, and we’re all well aware of them; where these people go when conservatives willfully declare there’s no poverty in America, I have no idea. But even beyond the most abject forms of deprivation, there are the working poor and the barely stable, and those whose lives hover precariously on or near the poverty line. How do we know that those distinctions matter, that they’re materially impactful? Lots of ways. To quote the response Bruenig and I put together when McInnes’ piece came out:

…we can imagine McInnes’ point like this: if ‘poverty’ is only nominal, we shouldn’t be able to see it as a label track with any significant indicators, such as health, mental health, life expectancy, early pregnancy, etc. If the label ‘poverty’ does track with indicators like those, we know those living in poverty are materially distinct from the rest of the population, meaning that McInnes’ argument that the poor are basically as well off as anyone else is nonsense.

Living at or up to twice the poverty line is correlated with a loss of 8.2 years of perfect health. The rate of unintended pregnancy among women at or near the federal poverty line is five times that of women at the highest income bracket. Poverty contributes significantly to mortality. Asthma is more common in people living below the federal poverty level than those living above it by a significant margin.

In other words, poverty tracks pretty consistently with signs of real suffering. In this way we can be sure it’s not a useless label constructed to further left wing agendas. It’s a meaningful descriptor of people’s actual lives.

So what’s at stake for conservatives who define poverty out of existence? We can see that people who live under a certain threshold suffer in ways those living above that threshold do not, so why continue to insist that their suffering is immaterial, and that only suffering that coincidentally exists outside of our sphere of influence is worthy of attention? The obvious answer is that the don’t want to be expected to aid poor people in any way, so they say the only ‘poor’ people worth aiding are those who just happen to exist solely in the realm of National Geographic pictures they’ve seen.

The morally horrible dimensions of this are probably immediately clear. But I think these people have a disturbingly good shot at convincing good-hearted people that there’s really no work to be done when they point out that poor families have televisions or two bedrooms or whatever, and so contrary to that project, I’d like to think for a moment about the Christian ethical implications of this kind of erasure of poverty.

For centuries of Christianity, the special station of the poor in God’s heart was linked with their experience of suffering. Nowadays, much work has been done to sort of cloud that link, but we cannot forget that the suffering of certain classes of people is uniquely important to God. When Christ feeds the four thousand, he does so because he worries they will collapse from hunger on their journeys home if he doesn’t. Both their privation and the pursuant suffering is important to him, and so it should be to us: it’s not enough to be concerned, therefore, with particular markers, but with real suffering.

And Christ himself speaks of this kind of context-based understanding of love. Consider Matthew 25:31-41:

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

"Honi soit qui mal y pense"

A great post - from two and a half years ago! - from Rev. Sam at Elizaphanian;  it discusses, I think, some of the same themes I meant to discuss in my post from yesterday, and others of the sort.  Christianity contains some extremely important content about human nature and how to deal with it, which I think goes unnoticed at this point quite a lot.   Worse:  I don't think the church itself recognizes or even notices this at this point, either.

Here's the whole thing, which I think is really worth reading:

The story goes that in the 14th Century, the King of England, Edward III was at court and dancing with his first cousin, Joan of Kent. Her garter slipped down to her ankle and there was sniggering amongst the courtiers at her embarrassment. The King then placed the garter around his own leg saying ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – shame be to him who thinks evil of it. In other words, show some humanity and respect, when you laugh in this context you are simply displaying a lack of nobility. Edward III then founded the Order of the Garter in 1348 in order to uphold this ideal of chivalry.

How far we have come from then: a society where human nature was clearly just the same as ours, but where the institutions and leaders of society sought to uphold a more honourable way of life. I have been reflecting on this in the light of the revelations about phone hacking carried out by the News of the World. The revelations first surfaced with regard to celebrities like Sienna Miller. This did not cause great controversy – there was no great outcry at the plight of a ‘celebrity’ – one might say that we enjoyed seeing their garters fall to the floor. Yet the lack of courtesy and kindness revealed there is also the reason why we had journalists contacting Gordon Brown to ask for his reaction to his son’s cystic fibrosis before the doctors had even confirmed that diagnosis to the parents.

Put simply the last few decades of our national life have seen a steady erosion of all the values and virtues that we had previously held up for emulation. When someone tries to stand up for those values – as with a recently notorious potential mother-in-law – they are exposed to vicious ridicule and derided as an archaic prig. Quite obviously those standards were not always maintained in practice but there is all the difference in the world between striving for greatness, recognising the difficulty of making steady progress, and giving up the attempt out of despair or moral laziness. Virtue is its own reward and there is nobility in the attempt, even if it fails.

We have exchanged that culture for one of prurience. Prurience is the delight in seeing somebody’s garter fall to the floor, enjoying the humiliation and embarrassment that follows. Prurience is what leads the tabloids to build people up and then tear them down; to turn a natural and desirable display of human ability and talent into a celebrity freak show.

I wonder when these changes really began to take hold in our national life. Any complex phenomenon like this clearly has many causes but, for want of a better symbol, I think of the Profumo scandal in 1963. Here there were at least some significant national interests at stake and yet we can see the prurient interests of the press emerging in all their smutty boorishness. The deference and respect for a social order – which is all that might protect those whose garters drop – is exploded by a ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’

Criminal behaviour has to be investigated, and that is the fig leaf behind which the press has perpetrated their recent moral barbarities, but the fuel keeping things going has been our own interest in scandal and gossip, our own inability to accept the exercise of authority by anyone who isn’t a moral paragon and saint. As our society used to be a Christian one there was a general and tacit acceptance that ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’. Whilst this did not excuse immoral behaviour it did at least minimise the sense of scandal when something untoward happened, and it gave a realistic edge to the desire to do better. What we have nowadays is a far more idealistic delusion that we are in a position to cast the first stones at the latest celebrities and politicians to find themselves in the stocks of public disgrace.

If we really believe that what the News of the World did – and indeed, what the rest of the journalistic profession has been up to – is seriously morally wrong then we need to examine ourselves rather than simply enjoy the novelty of seeing journalists get a rare come-uppance. We live in the society that we choose for ourselves and it is possible to choose a different way of life. It is possible to choose a society that shuns gossip and scapegoating, to not engage in a conversation geared around ‘did you hear about…?’ and ‘isn’t it shocking…?’ To not purchase the newspapers that profit from human misery, to turn off the television shows that glamourise immorality. To not laugh when someone’s garter drops to the floor but instead to set our hearts on things above.

(Originally written July 2011, but only posted on a now-moribund blog)

Christianity and "The Righteous Mind"

I haven't read the book, but have been thinking in a general way about the moral categories in Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion.  These categories are:

• Loyalty
• Authority
• Sanctity
• Caring
• Fairness

You can test your own ideas about these things at YourMorals.Org, at the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," which Haidt developed in doing this research.   Here's the results page from that site, including the bar graph below comparing my results with those of others:

The scale you completed was the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," developed by Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia. 

The scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of five psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. Each of the two parts of the scale contained three questions related to each foundation: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity. 

The idea behind the scale is that human morality is the result of biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made human beings very sensitive to many different (and often competing) issues. Some of these issues are about treating other individuals well (the first two foundations - harm and fairness). Other issues are about how to be a good member of a group or supporter of social order and tradition (the last three foundations). Haidt and Graham have found that political liberals generally place a higher value on the first two foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the ingroup/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations.

This difference seems to explain many of the most contentious issues in the culture war. For example, liberals support legalizing gay marriage (to be fair and compassionate), whereas many conservatives are reluctant to change the nature of marriage and the family, basic building blocks of society. Conservatives are more likely to favor practices that increase order and respect (e.g., spanking, mandatory pledge of allegiance), whereas liberals often oppose these practices as being violent or coercive.

In the graph below, your scores on each foundation are shown in green (the 1st bar in each set of 3 bars). The scores of all liberals who have taken it on our site are shown in blue (the 2nd bar), and the scores of all conservatives are shown in red (3rd bar). Scores run from 0 (the lowest possible score, you completely reject that foundation) to 5 (the highest possible score, you very strongly endorse that foundation and build much of your morality on top of it).

What's interesting to me about this goes back to something I read years ago in C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity; Lewis theorized that:

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no "swank" or "side," no putting on airs.

To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls "busybodies."

If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, "advanced," but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned-perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what one would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine.

I don't agree with some of what he says here - I don't really find the "wives obedient to husbands" thing terribly convincing (and I don't have a dog in that fight!) - but I do find interesting that it so neatly splits the difference between the categories people tend to think in, as outlined in the "five foundations" above.

It reminds me, too, of what Robert Farrar Capon wrote in Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus:

Christian education is not the communication of correct views about what the various works and words of Jesus might mean; rather it is the stocking of the imagination with the icons of those works and words themselves.

It is most successfully accomplished, therefore, not by catechisms that purport to produce understanding but by stories that hang the icons, understood or not, on the walls of the mind. We do not include the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, because we understand it, nor do we omit the parable of the Unjust Steward because we can't make head or tail of it. Rather, we commit both to the Christian memory because that's the way Jesus seems to want the inside of his believers' heads decorated. Indeed, the only really mischievous thing anyone can do with the Gospel is insist on hanging only the pictures he happens to like. That's what heresy really is: picking and choosing, on the basis of my interpretations, between the icons provided to me. Orthodoxy, if it's understood correctly, is simply the constant displaying of the entire collection.

And that helps explain, I think, what religion - Christianity in particular, since it's the only one I know - is actually about:  it's giving the whole picture.  It splits every difference, and fills us out into complete human beings.

It is filling in the gaps we all have in our genes and instincts, and in our minds and hearts; it is teaching a wholeness and an integration by we do not naturally come.   It's working against our negative tendencies and encouraging and reinforcing our positives ones.

That is what "orthodoxy" is.  The amazing thing, in fact, is that it is so comprehensive, and can take account of, and work for, every kind of person.  (In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if it doesn't, it isn't "orthodoxy" at all.)

I started to think about all this because of an online discussion about "natural selection," during which I realized that not only has politics become a totalizing worldview, but so, too, has science - both at the expense of the knowledge of human nature and the human condition itself.   People seem to be becoming more and more distanced from themselves as they really are.  More on that later, probably. 

"Did Jesus Preach the Gospel?"

I can't remember, exactly, how I came across these videos.  I don't know who Scot McKnight is - he says here he's an Anabaptist - but I somehow found my way here, and then listened to this talk all the way through, both videos.  McKnight is, as far as I can tell, talking about Evangelicalism to Evangelicals, and his purpose here is to ask the question, "What is the Gospel?" - and then to answer it.

I've wondered about this question, too - because awhile back, I came into contact with what I think of now as "Reformation Ideas" through a priest in the Episcopal Church.   The priest in question, when talking about another priest (a liberal one, very into what might be called "the social Gospel"), said to me:  "He really can't ever preach the Gospel, can he?"   I wondered at the time what that actually meant; I had always assumed "the social Gospel" was "the Gospel," and I was kind of at a loss to understand what was being said.  What was I missing?

Everything about the church is new to me, and so was this; I learned eventually that, at least according to that particular priest's understanding of Reformation Theology, "the Gospel" is "what Jesus Christ did on the cross for our sake" (AKA, "Justification by Faith"). 

Scott McKnight, in this video (and perhaps elsewhere?), says he started to wonder about this, too.  In a very interesting anecdote (in Part 1), he mentions to a pastor of his acquaintance that he's thinking about the question, "What is the Gospel?"  The pastor responds:  "Easy.  'Justification by faith.'"  McKnight then asks:  "Did Jesus preach the Gospel?" - to which the colleague responded:  "Nope.   He couldn't have.   No one understood the Gospel until Paul.  No one could understand the Gospel until after the crucifixion, the Resurrection, and Pentecost."   McKnight said:  "Not even Jesus?"  The pastor said:  "Nope.  Not possible."  (McKnight adds his silent, sardonic thought at this point:  "Poor Jesus.  Born on the wrong side of the cross....")

As I've said before:  there's something about Reformation Theology - particularly the American Evangelical version of it - that really doesn't sit well with me.  I couldn't quite say what until now, but McKnight's put his finger on it for me here:  the Gospel, in Reformation Theology, has become all about us, and really not very much at all about Christ.    And that - the self-regarding, self-referential thinking - is, for me, exactly the primary flaw in Evangelicalism.   I've written about this before, from another angle, after coming into deeper contact with Reformation Theology and the idea of "grace":

It’s true that we can do nothing to merit the Grace of God; it’s true that we don’t deserve it, and that we can’t earn it. And sometimes it appears to me that the Evangelical thing is a worry that somehow we’re going to lose God’s love by “improving”! In other words, unless we acknowledge at all times that we are bad, bad, bad – and that nothing we do can change that fact – God will abandon us. Because that is the basis of the relationship! But of course, that is – as they say in A.A. – “pride in reverse.” It still leaves us at the center of the universe; we’re still focused on ourselves! The point, really, is to let go of all that, and become “channels” or “instruments” of God’s will.

But this did not get at the heart of the problem, as McKnight's analysis does; the "what Jesus did for me" idea keeps people stuck thinking about themselves; this shows up, though, apparently, all the way through Evangelical theology.   The whole point of the thing, though, is to stop thinking about ourselves!  That is the sine qua non of all spiritual endeavor, and the heart of Christianity, too.   (I've always had a bit of difficulty with the "what Jesus did for me/justification by faith" idea anyway; it's always seemed to me way too much like a kind of quid pro quo - a bizarre kind of "Salvation Equation" - and one that, tragically, ignores the story itself!   Because the story itself is where all the power is.  McKnight talks about this in Part 2.)  

McKnight goes on to say, simply, that:  "The Gospel is the announcement that Jesus is the Messiah - and that he is the point, and goal, and telos of the narrative."

All that means, naturally, that yes, of course:  Jesus preached the Gospel.  He announced himself:  not just once, but many times.  As McKnight says:  "The Gospel belongs to the narrative.  But the text has disappeared under interpretation."

It's a strong talk - and I think a real broadside across Evangelicalism's bow.  I'm assuming this is part of the "New Perspective on Paul," but don't know for sure; I'm very glad, though,  to see the move away from things like "imputation" and "justification by faith," neither of which have ever made any sense, or seemed very real, to me.  And I'm glad that "the narrative" is being put back front and center here; as McKnight says:  "The Gospel, or to 'evangelize,' in the New Testament, is to herald the story of Jesus as Messiah."

Why I continue to love Sunday mornings....

Why "Sunday shakes the world," in other words:

• Where else can you hear stories from thousands of years ago - stories that are still vibrantly alive and still speaking to the deepest parts of the human psyche?    Where else can you finally cast off the oppression of the narrow mindset of what's happening now and what I feel like thinking about - and spend some time thinking in a different way, about a different reality, and a different kind of world and its people?   Where else can you get the big picture and the wide view - the huge picture, in fact, and the long view through the eyes of eternity?  
  
  Where else can you hear things like this, the call to remember and attend to the needs of the world:
  

  Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
      you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
  
  If you remove the yoke from among you,
      the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
   if you offer your food to the hungry
      and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
  then your light shall rise in the darkness
      and your gloom be like the noonday.
   The Lord will guide you continually,
      and satisfy your needs in parched places,
      and make your bones strong;
  and you shall be like a watered garden,
      like a spring of water,
      whose waters never fail.
   Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
      you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
  you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
      the restorer of streets to live in.
  
   If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,
      from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
  if you call the sabbath a delight
      and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
  if you honor it, not going your own ways,
      serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;
  then you shall take delight in the Lord,
      and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
  I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
      for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

  
  Where else can you hear from the prophet Jeremiah, called to speak the word of the Lord despite his protestations and feelings of inadequacy:
  

  Now the word of the Lord came to me saying,
  

   “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
  and before you were born I consecrated you;
  I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

  
   Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”  But the Lord said to me,
  

  “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’;
  for you shall go to all to whom I send you,
  and you shall speak whatever I command you.
   Do not be afraid of them,
  for I am with you to deliver you,
  says the Lord.”

  
   Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me,
  

  “Now I have put my words in your mouth.
   See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
  to pluck up and to pull down,
  to destroy and to overthrow,
  to build and to plant.”

  Where else can you hear - again! - about the Great Physician and his continuous work of healing?
  

  Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath.  And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight.  When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”  When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.  But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.”  But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?  And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”  When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

• The range of emotion you can experience during worship is quite literally endless - including some very fine and subtle shades and gradations of feeling.  That's because both repetition and variety work together to evoke the entire range of human experience, in infinite combinations.  For instance:  today we sang Hymn #8, "Morning Has Broken": it's a beautiful hymn that everybody knows (thank you, Cat Stevens) and can sing (almost) by heart.  It's warm and beautiful and evocative of things deeply human - and of things deeply holy:
  

  Praise for the sweetness
  Of the wet garden
  Sprung in completeness
  Where his feet pass

   And:
  

  Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
  Born of the one light, Eden saw play

  
  When the cross passes, I always bow; today it was with an easy, grounded feeling of being blessed to be alive in this beautiful created world;  it's a beautiful day here.  I'm sure anybody, believer or not, could have experienced the same feeling while singing that song.  (That's the wonderful thing about Christianity:  no special knowledge is required.  It can speak to anybody who's ever been born and lived in this world;  God himself has been here.   Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto; "I am human; nothing human is alien to me.") 
  
  For me, though, the music and the words of the song got mixed up with the bow to the cross, and I actually experienced it fully, and was aware of it, because that was the marker.  The music and the gesture - a gesture I've repeated thousands of times, but never in combination with this music and on this beautiful day - then combined to create and evoke a feeling different from any I've had before:  a particular fine and subtle shade of easiness with living the life of faith that I'd never experienced till now.   Other days, I experience feelings of deep reverence when the cross passes; at still other times - depending on the day or the season or the music - it might be a feeling of awe or surprise or confidence or sorrow.
  
• Where else can you look forward to hearing - for the first of many times this week - the special collect for the day:  "Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power among all peoples, to the glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."   Where else can you hear, immediately first thing in the morning, about power and glory and the mysterious and glorious Most Holy Trinity?
  
• Two young women sang Monteverdi at the Offertory:  Salve Regina:
  
  
  
  

  Salve Regina, Mater Misericordiae,
  Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, Salve!
  Ad te clamamus, exsules filii [H]evae,
  Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes,
  In hac lacrimarum valle.
  Eja ergo, Advocata nostra,
  Illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte
  Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,
  Nobis, post hoc exilium, ostende,
  O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.
  
  Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy,
  [Hail] our life, our sweetness and our hope!
  To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve,
  to thee do we send up our sighs,
  mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
  Turn, then, most gracious advocate,
  thine eyes of mercy toward us,
  and after this, our exile,
  show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
  O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

  
  So we get to hear some of the really beautiful music of the world - and two young women get a chance to sing the same great stuff publicly.  Where else does this happen as if it were the most natural thing in the world, for worship and the benefit of everybody involved - and for the rest of the world, too, if they wanted to be there? 
  
  (This Monteverdi anthem was immediately followed, BTW, by the congregational singing of "Rock of Ages"!   I actually laughed out loud - but dove right in and sang along anyway.)
  
  Marian devotions are an interesting thing to me; I don't really necessarily understand it - but I've learned to love the praying of the Angelus several times during the course of the day.  I first experienced this at monasteries and convents; people would stop and say the prayer wherever they happened to be at 6am, noon, and 6pm - and then just pick up their work again.  I loved hearing the bells; it really did seem to me as if the heavens had cracked open and there were angels all around.  I've added the Angelus to my Daily Office prefs, too, and it does make a difference in how the prayers feel.
  
  
• Then, during Communion, it was Taizé:
  
  
  
  Wonderful to have something simple to sing on the way to the altar and on the way back; you can make your own harmonies easily, too. The whole church fills with the sound of chant and footsteps and the murmurings of the priests and ministers as they whisper the prescribed words to each communicant. (Interestingly, the Taizé website gives the last line of the refrain as "Bless the Lord my soul, He leads me into life."  But today we sang, "Bless the Lord my soul, He rescues me from death."  I like the latter better.)

All of this - free for the taking, to anybody who wants it.  And you could go home later and spend hours, if you had them, investigating all the parts of the liturgy:  you could re-read the Scripture selections and then you could try to find commentaries on them; you could look up the old readings in the 1928 BCP if you wanted, to see what the differences might be; you could check out more Monteverdi online, and read his biography and what kinds of things he was trying to do with his music; you could go the Taizé website and find other chants you might like.  That's 2,000 years worth of history, and of things you might not know that you could learn - all of which will probably point you to other things you don't know and want to find out.

It's really quite amazing, actually; I'm very  sorry that more people don't find a way to lay hold of this and to have and use it as a base of operations - a place to return weekly for strength and solace, and simply for the sheer splendor of it all.  Because what a relief to have this way to learn, to experience and understand the world and your own life through this lens, and to detoxify!  What a wonderful and miraculous thing it is to be able to get beyond yourself to the real life - the fuller, larger life - and all set there right before you, the result of thousands of years of worship and thinking and writing and music.  It's part of your own system now, a way to investigate the world in its entirety, and an endless source of fascination and cause for admiration and amazement....

"Do this in remembrance of me...."

Dom Gregory Dix, in The Shape of the Liturgy: 

Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Communion

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. 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 for 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 amphitheatre; 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 canonisation 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.

"A path that tells us we are really going somewhere...."

For me, the single most wonderful and amazing benefit of sobriety in A.A. is this experience of growth, change, and movement - of a way of life that is truly dynamic.   (That word, of course, shares a root with "dynamite"!)

The title of this post comes from the opening section of Step 12 - "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs." - in the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.  My bolding.

The joy of living is the theme of A.A.'s Twelfth Step, and action is its key word. Here we turn outward toward our fellow alcoholics who are still in distress. Here we experience the kind of giving that asks no rewards. Here we begin to practice all Twelve Steps of the program in our daily lives so that we and those about us may find emotional sobriety. When the Twelfth Step is seen in its full implication, it is really talking about the kind of love that has no price tag on it.

Our Twelfth Step also says that as a result of practicing all the Steps, we have each found something called a spiritual awakening. To new A.A.'s, this often seems like a very dubious and improbable state of affairs. "What do you mean when you talk about a `spiritual awakening'?" they ask.

Maybe there are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who have had them. But certainly each genuine one has something in common with all the others. And these things which they have in common are not too hard to understand. When a man or a woman has a spiritual awakening, the most important meaning of it is that he has now become able to do, feel, and believe that which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone. He has been granted a gift which amounts to a new state of consciousness and being. He has been set on a path which tells him he is really going somewhere, that life is not a dead end, not something to be endured or mastered. In a very real sense he has been transformed, because he has laid hold of a source of strength which, in one way or another, he had hitherto denied himself. He finds himself in possession of a degree of honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind, and love of which he had thought himself quite incapable. What he has received is a free gift, and yet usually, at least in some small part, he has made himself ready to receive it.

A.A.'s manner of making ready to receive this gift lies in the practice of the Twelve Steps in our program. So let's consider briefly what we have been trying to do up to this point:

Step One showed us an amazing paradox: We found that we were totally unable to be rid of the alcohol obsession until we first admitted that we were powerless over it. In Step Two we saw that since we could not restore ourselves to sanity, some Higher Power must necessarily do so if we were to survive. Consequently, in Step Three we turned our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. For the time being, we who were atheist or agnostic discovered that our own group, or A.A. as a whole, would suffice as a higher power. Beginning with Step Four, we commenced to search out the things in ourselves which had brought us to physical, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory. Looking at Step Five, we decided that an inventory, taken alone, wouldn't be enough. We knew we would have to quit the deadly business of living alone with our conflicts, and in honesty confide these to God and another human being. At Step Six, many of us balked--for the practical reason that we did not wish to have all our defects of character removed, because we still loved some of them too much. Yet we knew we had to make a settlement with the fundamental principle of Step Six. So we decided that while we still had some flaws of character that we could not yet relinquish, we ought nevertheless to quit our stubborn, rebellious hanging on to them. We said to ourselves, "This I cannot do today, perhaps, but I can stop crying out `No, never!' " Then, in Step Seven, we humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings such as He could or would under the conditions of the day we asked. In Step Eight, we continued our housecleaning, for we saw that we were not only in conflict with ourselves, but also with people and situations in the world in which we lived. We had to begin to make our peace, and so we listed the people we had harmed and became willing to set things right. We followed this up in Step Nine by making direct amends to those concerned, except when it would injure them or other people. By this time, at Step Ten, we had begun to get a basis for daily living, and we keenly realized that we would need to continue taking personal inventory, and that when we were in the wrong we ought to admit it promptly. In Step Eleven we saw that if a Higher Power had restored us to sanity and had enabled us to live with some peace of mind in a sorely troubled world, then such a Higher Power was worth knowing better, by as direct contact as possible. The persistent use of meditation and prayer, we found, did open the channel so that where there had been a trickle, there now was a river which led to sure power and safe guidance from God as we were increasingly better able to understand Him.

So, practicing these Steps, we had a spiritual awakening about which finally there was no question. Looking at those who were only beginning and still doubted themselves, the rest of us were able to see the change setting in. From great numbers of such experiences, we could predict that the doubter who still claimed that he hadn't got the "spiritual angle," and who still considered his well-loved A.A. group the higher power, would presently love God and call Him by name.

As far as I can see, the reason for that feeling of really going somewhere  is the continued effort at acceptance of reality, self-examination, and repentance - all resting on a foundation of prayer and the seeking of "constant contact with God."  These things combined assure that a person can never become dead to life, or psychologically or emotionally stuck forever at a single stage of development.  They compel us to perpetually move on.  (This is why, in my opinion, it's so important for the church to reclaim them!)

The Twelve Steps graciously offer a tried-and-tested way to do something we'd never do on our own:  examine ourselves and our own motives on a continuous basis - and work on changing the things that imprison us (and others).  That, I think, is the entire key - and why A.A. produces a dynamic interior worldview, and continual interior change and movement.    And that is the reason the feelings described the last few paragraphs of this Step (again, my bold) are a source of such profound joy (and render utterly irrelevant the problem of "significance"):

Still more wonderful is the feeling that we do not have to be specially distinguished among our fellows in order to be useful and profoundly happy. Not many of us can be leaders of prominence, nor do we wish to be. Service, gladly rendered, obligations squarely met, troubles well accepted or solved with God's help, the knowledge that at home or in the world outside we are partners in a common effort, the well-understood fact that in God's sight all human beings are important, the proof that love freely given surely brings a full return, the certainty that we are no longer isolated and alone in self-constructed prisons, the surety that we need no longer be square pegs in round holes but can fit and belong in God's scheme of things--these are the permanent and legitimate satisfactions of right living for which no amount of pomp and circumstance, no heap of material possessions, could possibly be substitutes. True ambition is not what we thought it was. True ambition is the deep desire to live usefully and walk humbly under the grace of God.

These little studies of A.A. Twelve Steps now come to a close. We have been considering so many problems that it may appear that A.A. consists mainly of racking dilemmas and troubleshooting. To a certain extent, that is true. We have been talking about problems because we are problem people who have found a way up and out, and who wish to share our knowledge of that way with all who can use it. For it is only by accepting and solving our problems that we can begin to get right with ourselves and with the world about us, and with Him who presides over us all. Understanding is the key to right principles and attitudes, and right action is the key to good living; therefore the joy of good living is the theme of A.A. Twelfth Step.

With each passing day of our lives, may every one of us sense more deeply the inner meaning of A.A. simple prayer:

God grant us the serenity
to accept the things we cannot change,
Courage to change the things we can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I think this is why I've always so resonated so strongly with the 1979 BCP's All Saints' Day reading from Sirach (and why I was so disappointed that the RCL doesn't include it):

1 Let us now sing the praises of famous men,
   our ancestors in their generations.
2 The Lord apportioned to them* great glory,
   his majesty from the beginning.
3 There were those who ruled in their kingdoms,
   and made a name for themselves by their valour;
those who gave counsel because they were intelligent;
   those who spoke in prophetic oracles;
4 those who led the people by their counsels
   and by their knowledge of the people’s lore;
   they were wise in their words of instruction;
5 those who composed musical tunes,
   or put verses in writing;
6 rich men endowed with resources,
   living peacefully in their homes—
7 all these were honoured in their generations,
   and were the pride of their times.
8 Some of them have left behind a name,
   so that others declare their praise.
9 But of others there is no memory;
   they have perished as though they had never existed;
they have become as though they had never been born,
   they and their children after them.
10 But these also were godly men,
   whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten;

13 Their offspring will continue for ever,
   and their glory will never be blotted out.
14 Their bodies are buried in peace,
   but their name lives on generation after generation.

Do you see? Once again, we are looking at everybody in the world - and saying:  the church has a place for - and values - all people.   And the reading says something extremely important starting at verse 9:

9 But of others there is no memory;
   they have perished as though they had never existed;
they have become as though they had never been born,
   they and their children after them.
10 But these also were godly men,
   whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten;

13 Their offspring will continue for ever,
   and their glory will never be blotted out.
14 Their bodies are buried in peace,
   but their name lives on generation after generation.

This, to me, says much about faith itself, and How It Works.  Faith itself - and what it accomplishes in human beings - apparently has a hidden but powerful effect on history itself.  I mean, since "they have perished as though they had never existed" - what else can it mean to then say "But these also were Godly men, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten."?  

If people perish - yet their deeds have not been forgotten:  what can this be saying?   Well, that these unknown people have literally changed the world by means of ordinary righteous deeds.   And I believe this is exactly what those last paragraphs of Step 12 also mean to point out.

A.A., then, is pointing out something incredibly important:  that faith itself is the indispensable quality.  Faith has changed the world - and its results "are the permanent and legitimate satisfactions of right living for which no amount of pomp and circumstance, no heap of material possessions, could possibly be substitutes."   The human response to God is the One True Thing - the one indispensable thing - that makes all the difference in and to the world.  (This of course includes that "courage to change the things I can" clause in the Serenity Prayer.)

So here we have a way of life that "tells us that we are really going somewhere"; could there be anything more exciting than that?  In addition, it apparently offers us a really interesting collective kind of immortality, one composed of "service, gladly rendered, obligations squarely met, troubles well accepted or solved with God's help, the knowledge that at home or in the world outside we are partners in a common effort, the well-understood fact that in God's sight all human beings are important, the proof that love freely given surely brings a full return, the certainty that we are no longer isolated and alone in self-constructed prisons, the surety that we need no longer be square pegs in round holes but can fit and belong in God's scheme of things."

And, as far as I can tell:  that's just for starters....

"The practice of self-discovery"

Here's another very interesting citation from Wonderfully Created, Wonderfully Restored:

 “Our only available starting point for the practice of self-discovery is our wants and desires as we actually experience them. Therefore, Thomas [Aquinas] says, we ought to pray for what we think we want regardless. For prayer is in a certain manner a hermeneutic of the human will, so that by way of placing our desires as we experience them before God we are asking also that those desires be unfolded, explicated, thereby to release their real significance, the real want that is wrapped up in, implicated in all their opacity in their form as experienced. Therefore, says Thomas, we ought to pray, as Jesus did in the garden of Gethsemane, in response to our animal desire (secundum sensualitatem). For when we pray as Jesus did then, out of animal need and desire—for Jesus was scared of death, as naturally any animal is—we are placing that animal need and desire within the interpretative power of the divine will itself, wherein alone we will discover our own real will.”

- Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait

It's an interesting approach - one that does, in fact, weave self-examination and prayer tightly together as joint practice.  That's a good thing, from my point of view - and from A.A.'s point of view, too.  Here's what Step 11 has to say about this:

There is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation, and prayer. Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit. But when they are logically related and interwoven, the result is an unshakable foundation for life. Now and then we may be granted a glimpse of that ultimate reality which is God's kingdom. And we will be comforted and assured that our own destiny in that realm will be secure for so long as we try, however falteringly, to find and do the will of our own Creator.

I don't agree, though, that this is "our only available starting point"!   Another very effective starting point is the one A.A. uses:  confession - and, in fact, something even more striking:  public confession.  That's what A.A. meetings are all about; a recovering alcoholic stands in front of the assembled group and tells his or her own story of living:   addiction, decline, fall, recovery.   The story includes both  facts and, importantly, feelings; these stories are sometimes called "qualifications" - a word which comes from a long time ago, I suspect, and which means to suggest that the person telling their story actually qualifies to speak about alcoholism first-hand!

The reason for doing this is twofold, as far as I can see:  first, it reminds the person speaking about the facts of the case.  It helps us keep in mind "What we were like, what happened, and what we are like now."   This is a terrific help in staying sober, a day at a time; it reminds us that no matter how hard life may seem, it is, simply, infinitely better than it used to be.  It's straightforwardly a statement of facts - in particular facts about the past that have become impossible to deny, much as we might wish to (continue to) deny them.

The second reason is the social reason, and it rests on the fact that the story of addiction is always the same:  "the progressive deterioration of the human personality."   This means that a story told this way - openly and without shame or fear (and often with great humor) - can help people new to the program identify with what's being said.  This helps cut through the denial that's a central feature of alcoholism and addiction; alcoholics make an art form of refusing to acknowledge the facts of our own lives.  Everything gets shoveled under mounds of self-justification and/or baldfaced denial of reality, in order to avoid having to deal with the out-of-control mess we've actually made of our lives. 

(This is also what the "Personal Stories" section in the book Alcoholics Anonymous is about; the book was created expressly - before the internet! - so that it could reach alcoholics with the message and help with the process of identification.)

Now, I may be wrong.  Perhaps alcoholics are uniquely gifted in our abilities and talents in the areas of self-justification and self-deception.   Perhaps we are singularly dishonest with ourselves and others; it's very true that we're experts in this area.  But unique?  I don't think so, simply on the basis of observation.  I think most people are completely capable of pulling the wool over their own eyes any time they especially need to.  (Rowan Williams refers to this as the colosaal degree of human self-delusion.)

In other words:  in (I suspect) a rather large number of cases self-justification and self-preservation will do everything possible to cover over and try to disguise "our wants and desires as we actually experience them"!

There is something else, too:  it's hard doing this by yourself.  It's hard to admit to certain feelings (and failings); it's hard to recognize motives your ego doesn't want to recognize; it's hard to understand your own feelings sometimes.  It's just plain damn hard - and often frightening - to try to face all this by yourself; we need the help of others who've been through it themselves.  In other words:  we need identification coming back at us, too - and we need to be able to laugh with somebody else about the absurdity that is human life on earth, and about our own absurdity.

This, I think, is another reason - though hardly explored at all - that faith is a social phenomenon.   We really can't do these things alone; we really do "have to bring somebody else into it":

Though we may at first be startled to realize that God knows all about us, we are apt to get used to that quite quickly. Somehow, being alone with God doesn't seem as embarrassing as facing up to another person. Until we actually sit down and talk aloud about what we have so long hidden, our willingness to clean house is still largely theoretical. When we are honest with another person, it confirms that we have been honest with ourselves and with God.

The second difficulty is this: what comes to us alone may be garbled by our own rationalization and wishful thinking. The benefit of talking to another person is that we can get his direct comment and counsel on our situation, and there can be no doubt in our minds what that advice is. Going it alone in spiritual matters is dangerous. How many times have we heard well-intentioned people claim the guidance of God when it was all too plain that they were sorely mistaken. Lacking both practice and humility, they had deluded themselves and were able to justify the most arrant nonsense on the ground that this was what God had told them. It is worth noting that people of very high spiritual development almost always insist on checking with friends or spiritual advisers the guidance they feel they have received from God. Surely, then, a novice ought not lay himself open to the chance of making foolish, perhaps tragic, blunders in this fashion. While the comment or advice of others may be by no means infallible, it is likely to be far more specific than any direct guidance we may receive while we are still so inexperienced in establishing contact with a Power greater than ourselves.

Perhaps what's needed is some process of Christian qualification.  We do have plenty of "conversion" stories; there are many such stories in the Book of Acts and in the Epistles.  We also hear them in the lives of the saints:  St. Monica, St. Augustine, St. Martin of Tours, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius of Loyola, etc.   (And here is another reason to ask questions about HWHM; some of the people chosen simply cannot qualify. That is, they don't permit us to identify in any way that helps us in our spiritual formation.)  But there isn't much in detail in many of these - or is it that it's difficult to understand or identify with the facts of living in long-ago eras?   In any case, there's not much discussion of the process, either.  And of course, this leaves out people who weren't adult converts, but whose faith is no less deep.

I think really we need to talk about what good literature talks about:  the human condition itself, and the human experience of living.  Perhaps righteousness talk ought to be put to one side; it doesn't seem to help much.  I think maybe using a list like the "Seven Deadly Sins" was a better system; it's a way to name  character defects precisely and to be consistent about it.   Things like this also take into account the human experience in living; the Seven Deadly Sins aren't theoretical, after all - and why throw out wisdom and experience of this sort?

Think, too, about Greek tragedies - and about the notion of the "fatal flaw."  That's something that can bring a person to ruin - and isn't that exactly what we're concerned with here?   If we really believe - and I do - that Christ redeems us, then we need to talk about "before and after":  our own defects - and the redemption of those defects, and what that entails.  That means getting specific - and learning from other peoples' experiences.  We need to talk about How It Works, just as A.A. does. 

And we maybe need to talk more publicly about what sorts of character defects our faith actually addresses in ourselves.  The church honestly hasn't been very good at this, always seeming to prefer the "you" form (AKA "scolding") to the "I" form ("reportage," that is).....

The cost of human shortcomings - and the basic evangelical mission

From "Wonderfully Created, Wonderfully Restored," originally a quote from Sarah Ruden (a Quaker, apparently): at ‘Instead, Joy’.  My bold.

The problem Judaeo-Christianity is supposed to address is human shortcomings, the cost of which becomes more horrifying by the decade. But how can a privileged, self-satisfied American (say, a Yale professional student—or, um, me, writing books for publishers in Manhattan, New Haven, and Boston), without special intervention, grasp the life-giving idea of sin, in a modern culture designed to hide even basic cause and effect? Isn’t the task, then, to shock that person out of his complacency, not with stories of hell (which he’ll sneer at as mere stories), but just by inducing him to look around and persuading him that he, like everyone else, is a sinner, but could bear to acknowledge it because he also has hope? That’s the basic evangelical mission.

This realization is, to me anyway, a source of great joy: I think our new Great Awakening will be from a deep and deadening sleep. Technology makes previously laborious, choice-heavy acts quick and easy and concentrates our minds simply on doing more of them. Highly automated, super-convoluted marketplaces hide what goods and services cost, in every sense of that word. The media’s presentation of things going wrong normally stimulates no responses but Schadenfreude and the impression that experts are fixing whatever fragmentary, temporary difficulties—and these must comprise all difficulties, right?—they notice between commercials. Politicians and pundits fast-talk past how our functionaries actually do things like “securing our borders”—and past every other big question. And work is so complex and rushed and competitive that a pompous busy-ness fights against any curiosity about the generality of current sin, which is that other people’s distant, disregarded agony gives us huge benefits, so that we can effortlessly do evil and yet feel good.

To my mind, the fundamentally alarming thing isn’t that someone trained to face the suggestion of his own and his society’s sinfulness with disbelief or indignation doesn’t understand or accept a metaphysical principle. It’s that he doesn’t even have a grip on physical reality.

That's a wonderful phrase: "grasping the life-giving idea of sin."   And the fact that "other people’s distant, disregarded agony gives us huge benefits, so that we can effortlessly do evil and yet feel good" hits especially close to American home, I'd say.

"The foundation of the apostles and prophets...."

I liked today's collect very much:

Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

I've loved the "chief cornerstone" image for forever - and nowadays I always think of  Derek's long-ago (and truly wonderful) article on the New Jerusalem, when there's talk about "the foundation of apostles and prophets."  The Revelation passage he quotes there (Rev.  21:9–22:5) has recently come up in my reading, too - although I can't find it in the Office or the Eucharist Lectionary for this time of year, so I'm not quite sure where.

I did think about it, though, this past week when writing about the hymns for S. Mary Magdalene, and wondering whether or not Angularis  Fundamentum (i.e., "the chief cornerstone") has anything to do with them. 

I wondered why the collect was here, though; why "apostles and prophets" in the middle of summertime/Ordinary Time?  Hatchett's Commentary on the Prayer Book provides the answer:

This collect, composed for the 1549 Prayer Book, was formerly associated with the feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude.  It is based upon Ephesians 2:20-22 and 4:3.  The 1662 Prayer Book, following the precedent of the Scottish Book of 1637, substituted "Church" for "congregation" because of the Puritan connotation of "congregation."  In the present revision "chief cornerstone" replaces "head cornerstone."  Because of its reference to the apostles the collect was deliberately placed on the Sunday closests to the Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

And so there's another resonance - and another way the tides of the Great Church Year ebb and flow, stories and words and ideas in waves lapping on the shore of the conscious and subconscious mind. 

Also interesting today was the correspondence between the Elijah/Elisha story in II Kings:

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14

When the LORD was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. Elijah said to Elisha, "Stay here; for the LORD has sent me as far as Bethel." But Elisha said, "As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you." So they went down to Bethel.

Then Elijah said to him, "Stay here; for the LORD has sent me to the Jordan." But he said, "As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you." So the two of them went on. Fifty men of the company of prophets also went, and stood at some distance from them, as they both were standing by the Jordan. Then Elijah took his mantle and rolled it up, and struck the water; the water was parted to the one side and to the other, until the two of them crossed on dry ground.

When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, "Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you." Elisha said, "Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit." He responded, "You have asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not." As they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven. Elisha kept watching and crying out, "Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!" But when he could no longer see him, he grasped his own clothes and tore them in two pieces.

He picked up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. He took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and struck the water, saying, "Where is the LORD, the God of Elijah?" When he had struck the water, the water was parted to the one side and to the other, and Elisha went over.

And the story from the Gospel of Luke: 

 Luke 9:51-62
When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village.

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." To another he said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home." Jesus said to him, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."

Central to both is the idea of being "taken up"  - and then there's the strange use of the image of fire.   And of course the Old Testament reading had to be a prophetical story, tying in nicely with the collect, too!

(Of course, in the other, non-continuous, track, the Old Testament reading (1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21) is even more resonant with the Gospel story:

1 Kings 19:15-16,19-21

The LORD said to Elijah, "Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. Also you shall anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over Israel; and you shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place."

So he set out from there, and found Elisha son of Shaphat, who was plowing. There were twelve yoke of oxen ahead of him, and he was with the twelfth. Elijah passed by him and threw his mantle over him. He left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, "Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you." Then Elijah said to him, "Go back again; for what have I done to you?" He returned from following him, took the yoke of oxen, and slaughtered them; using the equipment from the oxen, he boiled their flesh, and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out and followed Elijah, and became his servant.)

What's really interesting is that I notice these kinds of correspondences much more often these days - and am continually amazed at what a rich and deep and fascinating structure Christianity offers.    There seem to be no end to the resonances - and again it's so interesting that all of this arises out of historical events, and comes to us as revelation.

On days like this I wonder how anybody could possibly not find this stuff fascinating - and then I remember that I was such a person not that long ago.  I heard maybe 20% of what was going on - I did like the music a lot, and heard most of that - and thought of the Bible as "an old dusty book" (I'm quoting myself there) - or else as The Enemy.

I had no sense that underneath it all there existed this remarkable structure - that there was so much going on, and such an interesting conversation happening between the writers of these texts (and the people who thought about them later, and those who put the liturgy together - and then the people who wrote the music to talk about it, too).

I mean:  you don't really have to be religious to be impressed with all this.  Think of the man-hours and be amazed....

(I still have a million questions about the readings, too.  Why didn't the Samaritans receive Jesus because he had set his face to Jerusalem?   Why is it a "hard thing" to wish for a double share of Elijah's spirit?  What's with the chariot of fire - if Elijah is going to be taken up in a whirlwind instead?

Well, that's all for next time, I guess....)

"The splendor burning at the heart of things...."

This comes from Edward Feser's blog:, and a post in which he's continuing his (now 10-part!) series on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  Here he's again reviewing reviews (by "Plantinga and Moreland"); these are people who agree with at least some of Nagel's conclusions in the book - and are "coming at the book from a theistic direction."  Here are some introductory paragraphs:

Plantinga writes:

As for life, God himself is living, and in one way or another has created the biological life to be found on Earth… As for the diversity of life: God has brought that about, whether through a guided process of evolution or in some other way.  As for consciousness, again theism has no problem: according to theism the fundamental and basic reality is God, who is conscious...

And so forth.  Moreland’s approach is more detailed (since he is writing for an academic journal) but very similar.  He speaks of making a “cumulative case for God” on the basis of the same “evidence” that Nagel tries to explain in non-theistic terms, and says that “the theistic argument can be understood as an inference to the best explanation.”  Continuing in this vein he writes:

[T]he alleged limits of appealing to theistic intentions are, in fact, what characterize an appeal to any unobservable, theoretical entity (for example, a quark) -- we attribute to that entity what and only what is needed to explain the data.  This alleged limitation is also characteristic of personal explanation.  We attribute to a person those and only those intentions needed to explain his behavior.  Moreover, in the case of God, we have other factors -- for example, religious experience, revelation, other arguments in natural theology -- that allow us to fill out God’s intentions for bringing our cosmos and us into existence.  (p. 432)

Then Feser goes on to say (my bolding here):

Now the way all this strikes me, and I think the way it would strike any atheist reader, is as follows.  There are, Plantinga and Moreland seem to be arguing, several phenomena which might at least in principle be given a non-theistic explanation but for which theism is in fact a better explanation.  And “theism” is understood as a hypothesis postulating an unobservable theoretical entity which instantiates such properties as the property of being a person, the property of being alive, the property of being conscious, etc.  But it instantiates them in a way that is different from the way that natural things do, making it a member of the class of “supernatural beings.”  But it is not just any old member of this class, but the “premier” member.  The way this is supposed to explain the evidence in question is as follows.  Since God, like us, instantiates properties like being alive and being conscious, he could plausibly be what imparted those properties to us if he had the intention of doing so.  That he did have such intentions is something Christian revelation and the like tells us.  And so on.
 
Now I am not certain that Plantinga and Moreland would accept this summary without qualification.  Perhaps there are aspects of it that they would rephrase.  And obviously they would add a great deal in the way of argumentation for theism so construed.  But as I say, this is what strikes me as a natural reading, and how I think it would strike the typical atheist reader.  And with all due respect to Plantinga and Moreland, I have to say that if this is what I thought theism and the “case” for theism really amounted to, I wouldn’t find theism any more philosophically interesting or challenging than Nagel and his critics do.  (Indeed, it pretty much is what I thought theism amounted to in my atheist days.)
 
The main reason is not so much that I think Plantinga and Moreland fail to show that the existence of God, so understood, is sufficiently probable, though their remarks do smack of a “god of the gaps” approach.  The main reason is that God so understood is in my view not terribly philosophically interesting, and in particular not terribly God-like.  Certainly the approach just sketched has nothing to do with the way Augustine, Anselm, Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas, and classical theists more generally have historically approached these issues.   For the classical theist, God is not “a person” or “a being” -- not because he is impersonal or lacking in being, but because he is not “an” anything.  He is not an instance of any kind.  He is not in any genus.  He does not merely participate in or “have” mind, life, existence, or anything else, the way we do.  In that sense he doesn’t “have properties.”  Indeed, he has no parts of any sort, but is absolutely simple.  If he were not, then he would be just one more piece of furniture in the universe among all the others, requiring an explanation of his own -- an explanation of why he instantiates the properties he does.  Even if he instantiated them in every possible world, if he were a substance distinct from his properties, or had an essence or nature distinct from his existence, he would not have the absolute metaphysical ultimacythat, for classical theism, is definitive of God and that only what is absolutely simple can have.  For the classical theist, God is unparticipated being or subsistent being itself, unparticipatedgoodness or goodness itself, and whatever else we can attribute to him can be attributed only in an unparticipated sense rather than as the instantiation of a property.
 
Furthermore, the main arguments for God’s existence in the classical theist tradition are not mere “arguments to the best explanation” or “cumulative case” arguments, and the reasons have to do precisely with what God is for classical theism.  The Aristotelian approach to arguing for God’s existence holds that whatever is a mixture of potentiality and actuality -- and thus less than fully actual, and needing actualization -- can in principle be explained only by reference to that which is, already as it were, pure actuality and thus need not and could not have been actualized by anything else.  The Neoplatonic approach holds that whatever is in any way composite -- and thus in need of some principle to account for the combination of its parts -- can in principle be explained only by reference to what is absolutely simple and thus need not and could not have any parts needing combination.  The Thomistic approach holds that anything whose essence is distinct from its existence -- and which thus could have failed to exist and requires something to impart existence to it -- can in principle be explained only by reference to that which just is existence itself, and thus need not and could not have had existence imparted to it.
 
God is, in short, precisely that in which everything else participates for its actuality or being.  To say that what is pure actuality or being itself is not the only possible explanation for the existence of other things but is still “the best explanation,” for which we might make a “cumulative case,” is a bit like saying of a certain triangle that its instantiating triangularity-as-such is not the only possible explanation for why it is a triangle, but is still the “best explanation,” for which we can make a “cumulative case.”  This gets the nature of both the explanans and the explanandum just fundamentally wrong.  The relationship between a particular triangle and triangularity-as-such is not a contingent one, and not something we know of via empirical hypothesis formation and the weighing of probabilities.  And neither is the relationship between the world and God -- between that which has participated existence and that which just is subsistent or unparticipated being -- of that sort.

James Alison says the same sort of thing:

And this, of course, is part of the genius of monotheistic Judaism: the realisation that “one God” is much more like “no god at all” than like “one of the gods”. In other words that atheism, which is untrue, offers a much less inadequate picture of God than theism, which is true. For monotheistic Judaism, as for monotheistic Catholicism, which I take to be universal Judaism, the principal temptation is not atheism, but idolatry.

The reason I'm writing about this is that current God-language has for a long time seemed inadequate to me.  It's very easy, for instance, for me to say that "I often don't believe in God - but I always believe that Christ is the Son of God";  this seems absolutely sensible to me, and not at all contradictory.  But of course it is contradictory!  And I think the ideas above are where that contradiction comes from and ultimately gets resolved.

The hard thing, of course, is that people don't (and can't) really think about God this way - as "much more like no god at all than like one of the gods"; this idea simply doesn't come naturally to mind.   Who would, on their own, decide that God is "absolutely simple" and "much more like nothing at all" - and, further:  who can easily make any sense of these ideas once they're expressed?

So:  there's a gap between ideas about God that make philosophical sense and how ordinary people need to think about God.   This problem, it seems to me, explains current attitudes towards religion better than anything else.   And I think this is going to continue to be a problem going forward - especially for Christianity - a universal monotheistic faith.   Christianity means to appeal to all people; in this way it's not like Judaism - basically an inherited religion, and so one that doesn't depend on converts.  It's not like Hinduism, which is a regional faith.  It's not like Buddhism, which doesn't speak of "God" natively at all.  (Christianity is, in fact, most like Islam.)

This kind of faith seems irrational to people who don't have any fluency in the "more like no god at all than like one of the gods" idea; that's perfectly normal, since this isn't a natural way to think.  It has to be talked about and worked through - or else, discovered through contemplation, as so many mystics have discovered via apophatic theology.  (Remember, too:  A.A. doesn't ask anybody to believe in God - but in "a power greater than ourselves."   This is an excellent example of an entree into the spiritual life by avoiding the problem of "how to think of God" entirely.  My "power greater than ourselves" was simply "the life force" at first; one day I looked out the window and saw a tree and realized that whatever created it was certainly "a power greater than myself.")

Here's a great quote from Heinrich Heine - one that explains, I think, why many people find Christianity emotionally and psychologically accessible.  It's why I can believe in Christ as the Son of God, even when I have problems believing in God; again note that the Crucifixion is at the heart of it:

"So all day long until the sun went down

they spent in feasting, and the measured feast

matched well their hearts' desire.

So did the flawless harp held by Apollo

and heavenly songs in choiring antiphon

that all the Muses sang. [Heine is quoting the The Iliad here.]

"Then suddenly a pale, bloodstained Jew came panting in, with a crown of thorns on his head and a great wooden cross over his shoulder; and he threw the cross on to the gods' high table, so that the golden goblets trembled, and the gods fell silent and turned pale, and became paler and paler, till at last they entirely dissolved into mist.

"... Anyone who sees his god suffering finds it easier to endure his own pain. The merry gods of the past, who felt no pain, did not know either how poor tortured human beings feel, and a poor person in desperation could have no real confidence in them. They were holiday gods; people danced around them merrily, and could only thank them. For this reason they never received whole-hearted love. To receive whole-hearted love one must suffer. Compassion is the last sacrament of love; it may be love itself. Therefore of all the gods who ever lived, Christ is the god who has been loved the most."

John Orens supplies some other answers in his wonderful article “The Anglo Catholic Vision” [PDF] (my bold):

The question we ought to be asking is “What does the world need?” And the startling answer is that the world needs us in that commonness which bespeaks divinity. This is why God has preserved our little Anglo-Catholic family through tempest and storm. In the secret places of their hearts, modern men and women are seeking themselves. They sense, although they cannot believe it, that they have enduring value, that there is more to themselves than their employers, their accountants, their government, or even their families can possibly know. What the world craves is the assurance that there is “a splendor burning in the heart of things.” 32 Naked dogma cannot supply this need, nor can empty ritual. Only the Catholic vision will suffice. But if the world is to find that vision it must be found in us, clothed in living thought and embodied in holy lives.

How then do we nurture this dream of flesh and spirit? How do we share it with the Church and with the world? Here I find myself almost at a loss for words. The answer to these questions can come only from profound meditation, common prayer, and from fearlessly and carefully listening to one another and to the world outside our doors. What I can offer are suggestions—signposts if you will—for our journey into the future. The first is that we must be willing to entertain troubling questions even about our most sacred beliefs. History, philosophy, psychology, above all the daily business of being human, call into doubt the goodness of God, the immortality of the soul, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. If, like some of our conservative brethren, we try to exorcise these doubts, we will exorcise every honest man and woman out of the Church. And, as we have already seen, if we do not win back the mind of the age, we will never gain its heart. We must make it clear that orthodox Christianity is not a closed system which must be swallowed whole or rejected altogether. Rather, it is a matrix within which doubt and uncertainty can be expressed and even sanctified. Indeed, to question God can be a holy vocation. It is sometimes frightening to confront the unbelief of others, if only because it forces us to face our own. But there is reassurance in the knowledge that there would be no orthodoxy, perhaps not even the Church, if the Christians of the patristic age had not wrestled with the doubts of pagans and heretics.33

("The splendor burning at the heart of things" is from Evelyn Underhill's poem Corpus Christi, says the footnote.)

There are some of the same ideas I noticed on that website for the local Catholic organization (see "The art of living, as taught by Christ"):  that the point is to invite people to a discussion of faith in God, and to accept and talk about doubts.  ("Listening to others and acceptance of doubt" has also been a meme in the Episcopal Church over the past decade, I should note.  The problem has been a serious lack of effort at discussion of what "orthodox Christianity" itself actually consists of.  Instead, "doubts and questions" were thought of as the point of the exercise - and in some places, they even became a watered-down theology in themselves.  Episcopalians continue to fall back on "liturgy" as if it were an idea in itself; it's not.  Liturgy is a means, not an end.)

I think it's very to-the-point that "If we do not win back the mind of the age, we will never gain its heart."    Christianity is dealing with some of the most crucially important aspects of the human predicament:  the meaning and purpose of existence, the fact of suffering, how people can best live.  To me it's of central importance to understand these things ourselves - and then to be able to communicate these things to the mind, heart, and soul of the world.

I have to say that I think Pope Francis by himself is going to have a tremendously positive effect on the way the world views the Christian faith.  I have a very strong hope for this, anyway....