integer+safari

newman

2010-09-19T22:34:00.002-05:00

[If anyone still follows this blog in rss or whatever, don't think it's really back.]

Heart speaks to heart -- so the several banners at today's beatification mass in Birmingham proclaimed. I don't know my own soul well enough right now to know its state; I know that I've recently moved, recently begun classes, recently been thrown into ecclesiastical limbo, and in all of it I feel more powerless, more overwhelmed, than I ever felt moving between continents.

And so this card that I got earlier today as a commemoration of Blessed John Henry Newman... I heard them earlier with no notice, but this time the words went straight to my heart:

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.
I have my mission--I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.

I have a part in a great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.

Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain; He may prolong my life, He may shorten it; He knows what He is about.

He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me--still, He knows what He is about.

From the Holy Saturday morning office

2009-04-11T07:59:00.000-05:00

Hebrews 4:1-16

Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest is still open, let us take care that none of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For indeed the good news came to us just as to them; but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said,
‘As in my anger I swore,
“They shall not enter my rest” ’,
though his works were finished at the foundation of the world. For in one place it speaks about the seventh day as follows: ‘And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.’ And again in this place it says, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’ Since therefore it remains open for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he sets a certain day—‘today’—saying through David much later, in the words already quoted,
‘Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts.’
For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not speak later about another day. So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labours as God did from his. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through such disobedience as theirs.

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.

Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

latest sermon

2009-03-30T06:40:00.000-05:00

Click here for the mp3 of yesterday. (Sermon for Lent 5, Year B.)

O Sacerdos!

2009-02-06T08:04:00.002-06:00

I like this, quoted in Michael Ramsey's The Christian Priest Today.

O Sacerdos, quid es tu?

Non es te, quia de nihilo,

Non es ad te, quia mediator ad Deum,

Non es tibi, quia sponsus ecclesia,

Non es tui, quia servus omnium,

Non es tu, quia Dei minister,

Quid es ergo? Nihil et omnia,

O Sacerdos.

[O Priest, what are you?

You are not from yourself, for you are from nothing;

you are not to yourself, because you a mediator to God;

you are not for yourself, for you are spouse of the Church;

you are not of yourself, for you are a servant of all;

you are not yourself, for you are a minister of God;

what therefore are you? Nothing and everything,

O Priest.]

A little Allegri

2009-01-25T11:33:00.004-06:00

Well sadly I've never had the chance to sing in Allegri's magnificent Miserere, but here's a nice recording of it, linked by NLM. We're not as good as the King's College choir, but if you like this kind of music, come hear compline every Sunday at 9:30 p.m. at Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill.

wheatberry salad with dried cranberries and fresh herbs

2009-01-20T21:13:00.002-06:00

Try this. Utterly delicious. Wheatberries: who knew? (They're available in bulk at Whole Foods and probably other places that sell grains in bulk.)

a sermon from last semester

2009-01-06T08:26:00.001-06:00

[I used this on 18 November in preaching class. We were assigned a single text, not a lectionary set, and that text is included below. I think it turned out pretty well, though my preceptor pointed out how I yet again ended with a lot of salad -- "let us" "let us" "let us." One tries.]

Matthew 23:1-12

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, ²'The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; ³therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. ⁴They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. ⁵They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. ⁶They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, ⁷and to be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have people call them rabbi. ⁸But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. ⁹And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. ¹⁰Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. ¹¹The greatest among you will be your servant. ¹²All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

What the passage is about: listening to the Word

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them; that, by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

For those of you who do not, like me, follow every jot and tittle of the Book of Common Prayer, that was the Collect from this past Sunday. It doesn't normally go with this reading, but I think it a fitting way to begin as we are sitting here wondering what this passage is really about.

Right away I want to take away one of our easiest options: the one where we think this is yet another place in Matthew where Jesus is criticizing the Pharisees. It is, of course, that; there's no getting around the criticism, and it gets even harsher as the chapter goes on. (Think, "brood of vipers" language.) But I suspect that we are tempted to make this particular passage a stamp of approval on our own modern liberal anti-authoritarianism. Americans don't like hierarchy. We find it deeply suspicious. And that suspicion has something to do both with the assumptions of liberal democracy and the assumptions of Protestantism. I do believe that Jesus is a radical—even, perhaps, a revolutionary—but let us not read into his radical message our own hopes for anti-hierarchical revolution, whether they happen to center on Martin Luther or Barack Obama.

This passage right away says something rather different about the Pharisees. Something different from what we've grown to expect from Matthew especially. "The scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses' seat. Therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it." What? You mean we're supposed to listen to those whitewashed tombs, that brood of vipers? What could they possibly have to offer? There's been a lot of scholarly debate about this passage: what is Moses' seat, what teaching does Jesus refer to? I hope you don't mind if I simply offer you one explanation that I've found convincing. You see, the Greek word translated "teach" in many translations is not actually the verb "teach," it's the verb "say" or "speak"—legw, for you Greek scholars. Some of the translations pick up on this, and it makes all the difference. The point is that the scribes and Pharisees are those who, in the synagogues, read the Torah. Not everyone had access to the Scriptures on their own, so they had to rely on the synagogue officials. Jesus is telling his disciples: "I've told you over and over again, the way that the Pharisees interpret and live the Torah is wrong, but that's no excuse to avoid listening to the words of the Scriptures that have been entrusted to them."

How are we implicated in the critique of the Pharisees?

Now maybe it's clear why I quoted this week's Collect. Jesus begins this passage with a very similar command: to hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the Holy Scriptures. The Pharisees do not do this. What do they do instead? They pile on burdens, heavy to bear. They put on airs. They go around making public displays of their piety. They give themselves fancy titles.

Now, parts of this passage present difficulties for those of us in the Catholic Tradition—isn't this kind of behavior precisely what we do? I mean, within the next year or two I will go around having people call me "Father." I just got back from my diocesan convention in which every statement begins with an address of the Bishop as "Right Reverend Sir." Are we implicated in the commands of this passage?

Well, yes and no. St Jerome and other earlier commentators saw no contradiction in this passage and the emerging practice of calling monks and priests "abba" or "Father." For Jerome the point is that there is only one Father of all—the one whom we address when we pray "Our Father"—and that any early fatherhood—whether religious or biological—is only derivative, and only properly called when it in some way imitates the fatherhood of God. In other words, I can call my priest "Father" not because he is somehow special and worthy of the title, but because in a sacramental way he is to me a figure of God. When St. Benedict wrote his rule he suggested that obedience to the abbot of a monastery was inextricable with obedience to God. To put this more theologically, the Incarnation has made it so that God and humanity are so closely tied that when things are ordered rightly, our obedience to authority on earth is the same as our obedience to our Father in heaven.

Aside from the Tradition, the New Testament itself should give us pause from interpreting this passage too literally: St Paul has no problem calling himself both a teacher and a spiritual father. If we take the canon as a whole we cannot see such forms of descriptive address to be incompatible with the message of Jesus.

But that doesn't mean that we're home free.

The Pharisees don't read the Scriptures rightly. But what makes us think that we do?

The dangers of interpretation

Here's where, I think, it's especially important to guard against an overly Protestant reading of this text. That is, it would be easy to think: Oh, ok, so the key is simply to do what the Scriptures say—and that's clear, right? There's a big word for this—the perspicuity of Scripture. It's the notion that anyone can simply open up the Bible and understand what it says if only they put in a little effort. But if it's so clear what the Scriptures say, then how in the world did the Pharisees get it so wrong? These were the most well educated men in Israel. They were the ones who spent hours every day reading and memorizing the Scriptures. If there was anyone who might be said to have heard, learned, marked, and inwardly digested the Torah, surely it would have been them! Do we really think that we, Christians in the 21^st century, are somehow more devoted to the Scriptures? Do we memorize the Scriptures like the Pharisees? Do we spend hours every day mulling them over and discussing them with our colleagues? Do we wear the Scriptures on our bodies and offer prayer several times a day based on the Scriptural traditions?

I just don't think that I can live up to those standards. Can you? So we are left with a mystery. How are we as disciples of Jesus to do what the Word says? How are we supposed to avoid the traps into which the Pharisees fell?

Jesus the Word of God

"The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted." How do we do what the Word says? Well Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, tells us. "Follow me." For Jesus, we know, was the one who humbled himself and was thereby exalted: he humbled himself to be born of a Virgin, to suffer and die on a Cross, to be buried: and on the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures. Jesus himself is the only way that we as the Church can ever read the Scriptures. He is the only way that we can avoid being an authority to ourselves: for it may be that I do not call anyone master or teacher of father, but if I think that I can read the Bible without Jesus—and more significantly, without his mystical Body in the Church—then I have begun to call myself father, teacher, master.

Should it be so surprising that what the Pharisees were missing was Jesus? They weren't missing devotion and piety; they weren't missing learning: they were missing the second person of the Holy Trinity. They were reading the Word of God, but when they met the incarnate Word of God they did not know him. They thought that it was their job to be teachers and masters, fathers and rabbis: but those things only make sense when we remember that we are all the children of the one Father, and that we are united to him through his Son.

Brothers and sisters, it is very easy to forget this. Whether we are pastors and priests, teachers, fathers, mothers, mentors, activists—wherever we are in the Church—we so often think that the important thing is to be something important: to preach the Gospel to those who haven't heard it, to care for those who need help, to make sure that the Church does what she is supposed to do, to reform this or that societal structure so that it reflects the kingdom of God. And all that is good, in a way. But we're not called to be important: we're called to be children of God, members of the Body of Christ.

"You have forgotten your first love." Do you love Jesus? It is easy for me, as a High Church Anglican, to get lost in the flurry of ecclesiastical vestments, of beautiful ceremonies and buildings, or that way that, in a Solemn Mass, the world is transfigured into something altogether more heavenly. Some months ago when I first met with my Commission on Ministry to begin the ordination process I gave a summary of my background in the Church. One older priest spoke up and said, "You've said a lot about the Church, but do you really love God?"

I was a little shocked by the question. Do I love God?! Well, part of the Catholic position is that devotion to the Church and devotion to God are inextricable, but, well, of course I love God, don't I? I mean I try: but when I look at my life, is it always reflective of that love?

All of us know that it can be a lot easier to say "I love you" than it is to mean it, to live it; and sometimes of course the opposite is true: we're so wrapped up in the display of love that we forget that it needs to be expressed.

How do we do what the Word says? How do we humble ourselves? How do we avoid making ourselves masters, rabbis, fathers and teachers? How do we give up our aspirations to importance? We can start by loving Jesus. He is the Word of God. He is the one whom we must hear, mark, learn and inwardly digest. Let us abandon ourselves to this love. Let us love our brothers and sisters who are fellow members of his Body. Let us eat his Body and drink his Blood in the mystical supper. Let us pin all our hopes on him and his love for us. And with his blessed Mother and all the saints, let us follow him to glory. Amen.

Happy Christmas

2008-12-29T11:44:00.001-06:00

nativity, originally uploaded by Musica Sacra.

Eight more days to go! (Or something like that. I can't count.)

all saints sermon

2008-11-11T21:29:00.003-06:00

Here's a link to a recording of my latest sermon (Nov 2) if anyone's interested.

(Or, I should say, if anyone is still reading this after months of inactivity!)

broken camera

2008-07-31T03:52:00.002-05:00

So there won't be any pictures of England for a while. What pictures I have so far can be found at the usual place, i.e., Flickr. But there won't be any more because my camera's LCD screen broke, and of course I'm in the worst place to fix it (financially speaking). Even if I weren't strapped for cash, a repair here would cost £66 (that's $130)! In the states it would cost about $90. I could get a new one for a bit more in the states, but here I can't, because a camera that might cost $200 in the states costs, well, £200 here, and thus $400. So it's annoying, but I'm going to have to rely on my steward colleagues to take lots of pictures over the next two weeks.

Mass in the crypt

2008-07-26T09:05:00.001-05:00

ACNS/Sweeny, originally uploaded by Lambeth Conference 2008.

That's me swinging a thurible in the lower part of Canterbury Cathedral (the chapel where St Thomas Becket's relics were before the upstairs shrine was finished, and of course before Henry VIII removed them). The stewards asked if we could have a mass of our own while we were here -- we have a handful of clergy among us, and a bishop as our chaplain. There were some liturgical oddities, but mostly it was wonderful, and probably the only chance that I will have to be a thurifer in an English cathedral (though you never know).

Yes, I know

2008-06-10T09:02:00.003-05:00

I've slowed down to negative ludicrous speed on blogging. So be it. There's still the other blog (which I'm equally slow at), and then there's life. (I'm about to go here and when I leave Texas in July it will be to go here.)

Anyway, read this article on modernist architecture and renewal.

another musical digression

2008-04-16T19:24:00.002-05:00

We started singing this last week. With just the two tenors, I thought we might flop, but we pulled it off decently, I think. (We'll probably keep singing it for a while if you're in Chapel Hill at 9:30 on Sunday nights until the end of the semester.)

confession

2008-04-03T22:18:00.002-05:00

If you're expecting me to make more regular posts, it's not going to happen anytime soon! But I keep running across these little gems that are worth sharing. This is from the ancient Ethiopian liturgy, said by the priest following the Eucharistic prayer and immediately before Communion.

I believe (three times) and I confess until my last breath that this (pointing) is the body and blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which he took from the Lady of us all, the holy Mary, and united it with his divinity, without mingling or confusion and without alteration. He truly made a good confession before Pontius Pilate, and gave up his body for us on the holy tree of the Cross, of his own will, for us all. I believe (three times) and confess that his divinity was inseparable from his manhood at all times, and that he gave it up for our sake, for life, salvation, and for the remission of our sins, to those that partake of it in faith. Amen. I believe. I believe. I believe that this is true. Amen.

from compline tonight (the regina coeli)

2008-03-23T21:24:00.003-05:00

O Queen of heaven, be joyful, alleluia:
Because he whom so meetly thou barest, alleluia:
Hath arisen as he promised, alleluia:
Pray for us to the Father, alleluia.

holy saturday

2008-03-22T13:39:00.003-05:00

In the midst of life we are in death;
of whom may we seek for succor,
but of thee, O Lord,
who for our sins art justly displeased?

Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty,
O holy and most merciful Savior,
deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;
shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer;
but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty,
O holy and merciful Savior,
thou most worthy Judge eternal.
Suffer us not, at our last hour,
through any pains of death, to fall from thee.

***

And from the Office of Readings:

Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all”. Christ answered him: “And with your spirit”. He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying:

“Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light”. I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated. For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image. On my back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See my hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.

I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell. The sword that pierced me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but I will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year A)

2008-03-10T09:22:00.002-05:00

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45
Psalm 130

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

Mortal, can these bones live? These bones which say, “We are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” Can these bones live?

Ezekiel gives the only answer that is humanly possible: “O Lord God, you know.” Is this a trick question? Because of course we know the answer: No, these bones cannot live. How callous of God to ask such a stupid question. What absurdity, what insensitivity to reality, would it take for someone to approach the remains of great violence—say, one of the mass graves recently discovered in Iraq—and blithely ask, “Can these bones live?”

But it should not surprise us to remember that God is not like us: in Psalm 50 God says, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you,* for the whole world is mine and all that is in it.” Is it at all difficult for he who created life in the first place to restore it?

In our Gospel reading today we see how our Lord Jesus brings to life a man dead for four days. This is not business as usual. This is not the world of simple cause and effect. Can these bones live? The people standing around the tomb say, Certainly not: “There is a stench.” And an older translation says, “He stinketh.”

After four days in the tomb, Lazarus stinks. Saint Augustine compares the corpse of Lazarus to the state of humanity fallen in sin: dead in our transgressions, we are utterly unable to save ourselves. In that sense Lazarus stinks, and so do we all, we participants in the culture of sin and death. We have fallen short of the divine image in which we were created; we have rejected the divine Light and turned in upon ourselves; we have forgotten the Kingdom of God and replaced it with our own kingdom: the world tells us that heaven is when everyone has access to Starbucks and cheap abortions, to easy divorce and suburban shopping malls. But, friends, that is a picture of hell, not heaven: for as much as we can try to perfectly piece our bodies together, to patch together the sinews, flesh and skin of our society, unless we have God’s Holy Spirit in us we are no better than a pile of dry bones, or worse—walking corpses. And we stink, because, as poet John Donne puts it, “…[our] feeble flesh doth waste / By sinne in it, which it t’wards hell doth weigh.”

Can we restore our rotting flesh to health? Can these bones live?

The answer is still no, but it is only through that no that we can arrive at God’s greater, more definitive yes. For observe the shortest verse of the Gospel that we heard today: “Jesus wept.” Many have pointed to this story as a reminder that Jesus is both God and man: human in his weeping, God in his raising Lazarus from the dead. But that is only part of the story, for in the Creed we confess that the Son of God became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and the holy fathers of Chalcedon remind us that in Jesus Christ both God and humanity come together “without confusion” and “without separation.” (You can look at that later in the back of your prayer book, if you’re interested.) In other words Jesus does not have multiple personalities. And thus we can begin to see the radical nature of this story: when Jesus weeps, both God and man weep; when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, both God and man raise Lazarus from the dead.

Christ weeps with us in our sickness and death and sin. But he weeps for Lazarus—and for us—out of love. “See how he loved him!” In the Gospel of John this is the last of Jesus’ miracles before his Passion, and in it we see a foretaste both of the sorrow and the glory to come. For his weeping, his love, carries him all the way to the Cross. But his love also carries him through the Cross and beyond it, to his glorious Resurrection. In Lazarus we get a glimpse of this definitive victory. The Eastern Orthodox Churches celebrate the raising of Lazarus next month when they will sing this hymn:

THROUGH LAZARUS, CHRIST IS ALREADY DESPOILING YOU, O DEATH.
HELL, WHERE IS YOUR VICTORY?

Christ’s love through his passion, death and resurrection is the source and content of our hope. It is why the “no” of death is not the last word. It is why the stink of the grave does not remain forever. It is why we have the freedom to stop our failed attempts at mastering our lives and say, with Saint Thomas, especially as we approach Holy Week, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

This is what it means to have life in the Spirit—as Saint Paul reminds us today. For hope is not some pleasant abstract feeling that “it will all work out in the end,” or that if we do things differently we can control our own destiny. True hope is belief in the God who has the power to “give life to [our] mortal bodies… through his Spirit that dwells in [us].” Or as today’s Psalm says, “I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; * in his word is my hope.”

Therefore let us use the time given us, praying that “among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” And as we near the end of our Lenten pilgrimage let us consider the ways that we have ordered our lives around the fear of death rather than the hope of life.

God asks, “Can these bones live?” But God knows that we can only respond to such a question with the knowledge of our own hopelessness. Thus the Father provides the answer himself: allowing his own Divine Son to suffer and die, rising again on the third day and ascending to glory. This same Jesus feeds us at this Altar with his Precious Body and Blood, filling our bodies of death with his eternal Body, drawing us into life empowered by the Holy Spirit. Let us approach in faith that we may die with him. And let us approach that in him we may truly live. Amen.

The music of heaven

2008-02-12T15:55:00.001-06:00

Take a listen of this track, the song that's been buzzing around in my head virtually nonstop. (We've been singing it at the close of compline on Sunday nights at Chapel of the Cross, if you're ever in Chapel Hill.) It's a Josquin des Prez setting of Ave Maria virgo serena, a lovely text, brought out transcendently in the music. Whenever I hear that serene final petition, "O Mater dei, memento mei," I wonder, in the phrasing of a good Catholic friend, how one can hear such beauty and not believe the Faith. (Though evidently such is possible.)

Ave Maria
gratia plena
dominus tecum,
virgo serena.

Ave cujus conceptio,
solemni plena gaudio,
coelestia terrestria
nova replet laetitia.

Ave cujus nativitas
nostra fuit solemnitas,
ut lucifer lux oriens
verum solem praeveniens.

Ave pia humilitas,
sine viro fecunditas,
cujus annuntiatio
nostra fuit salvatio.

Ave vera virginitas,
immaculata castitas,
cujus purificatio
nostra fuit purgatio.

Ave praeclara omnibus
angelicis virtutibus,
cujus assumptio
nostra glorificatio.

O mater Dei,
memto mei. Amen.

Hail Mary
full of grace,
the Lord is with thee,
serene virgin.

Hail, whose conception,
full of great jubilation,
fills Heaven and Earth
with new joy.

Hail, whose birth
brought us joy
as the morning star
went before the true sun.

Hail, pious humility,
without a man fruitful,
whose Annunciation
brought us salvation.

Hail, true virginity,
immaculate chastity,
whose purification
brought our cleansing.

Hail, glorious one
in all angelic virtues,
whose Assumption
was our glorification.

O Mother of God,
remember me. Amen.

seriously?

2008-02-09T09:34:00.000-06:00

Apparently there's a bill before the Mississippi House of Representatives suggesting that the state prohibit restaurants from serving obese people. Who could possibly be for such a proposal? I suppose while we're at it we should prohibit fancy stores from selling stuff to rich people, casinos from letting in poor people, and anybody having anything to do with stupid people. (Excuse me, sir, can I check your IQ card before I permit you to purchase this television?) If the state really thinks that it's the government's job to fix these issues, there are doubtless other, more effective, and generally less dehumanizing techniques...

(h/t Robert St. John's blog)

apple bourbon currant bread

2008-02-02T08:20:00.000-06:00

I haven't put up a recipe in a while, so here's one. This bread, as the above picture is meant to suggest, goes well with a cup of tea -- but it's a great snack anytime. The recipe is mostly from the Foster's Market Cookbook.

4 cups flour (I also used unbleached all-purpose)
1 tbsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground cardamom (I had to fry some cardamom pods and grind them fresh, but whatever...)
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 1/4 cups vegetable oil
3/4 cup bourbon
1 tbsp vanilla
4 Granny Smith apples (I used 5 small ones)
1 1/2 - 2 cups dried blackcurrants

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two loaf pans. Mix up the four, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, caramom and salt. Separately whip up the sugar, eggs, oil, bourbon and vanilla. Put the two mixtures together and stir until dry ingredients are moist. Peel, core and chop the apples (you can pulse several times in a food processor), and put them with the currants into the batter. Pour the batter into the pans and bake for about an hour -- the tops will be risen and slightly cracked, and you can do the toothpick trick.

why it is useful to know every language

2008-01-29T20:06:00.000-06:00

If Anselm wanted to talk about God as that-greater-than-which-nothing-can-be-conceived, I am tempted to think of the divine economy as he-who-is-beyond-language. And it's not just because, in my seminar on the seven Ecumenical Councils, multiple languages are helpful... although my very little French, Greek and Latin have come in very handy, and I get the feeling that some German would really make things wonderfully clear at times.

But let's take Greek for an easy example. It's hard to conceive of how much trust we've given translators for something as widely read as the New Testament. This morning I was working on the second chapter of Hebrews for my exegesis class, where one finds these verses quoting the Septuagint (LXX):

τί ἐστιν ἄνθρωπος ὅτι μιμνῄσκῃ αὐτο,
ἢ υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου ὅτι ἐπισκέπτῃ αὐτόν;
ἠλάττωσας αὐτὸν βραχύ τι παρ' ἀγγέλους
δόξῃ καὶ τιμῃ ἐστεφάνωσας αὐτόν,
πάντα ὑπέταξας ὑποκάτω τῶν ποδῶν αὐτου. (vv. 6b-8a)

The quote is from Psalm 8:5-7, the same quoted by 1 Corinthians 15:27. You're probably familiar with the Authorized version:

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
or the son of man, that thou visitest him?
Thou madest him a little lower than the angels;
thou crownedst him with glory and honour,
and didst set him over the works of thy hands:
Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet.

This is actually a fairly literal translation. But the New Revised Standard Version puts it this way:

What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
or mortals, that you care for them?
You have made them for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned them with glory and honour,
subjecting all things under their feet.

You can pretty easily see what's happened. Modern translators were uncomfortable with translating ἄνθρωπος "man" and so they tried to substitute "human being," which is fine and good in a lot of places (it is well within the range of meaning for ἄνθρωπος), but here they ran into quite a bit of trouble, theologically and hermeneutically speaking, when it became necessary to continue that subsitution for υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου -- "son of man." Now I'm all for gender neutral language when it's appropriate, and there's certainly a case to be made (though I don't know Hebrew) for the context of the Psalm referring to humanity rather than a particular person -- but it seems more compelling to me that the Psalm does actually have a messianic content, one that is brought out both by Paul in 1 Corinthians and by the author of Hebrews here. And that makes perfect sense, given Jesus' regular use of "the son of man" for himself. The writer of Hebrews would have been quite surprised at the idea of human beings -- plural -- having all things put under their feet!

I don't do this sort of thing every day. I mean, I have a lot of Greek reading this semester, but it's not every day that you encounter such an interesting translation issue without looking for it (i.e., I hadn't attempted any exegesis of the passage; I was just trying to figure out what it said on the surface). That experience, though, is enough to remind me both of how different it is to read the Bible (or anything, for that matter) in the original language. There are so many little nuances that can be lost -- or sometimes, even large themes that can be lost!

almost there

2008-01-29T20:05:00.000-06:00

Only two more days until the season premier of LOST!

wishing

2008-01-11T10:03:00.001-06:00

I really should be reading the canons of Nicea, but who am I to resist a blogger tag? Besides, it's been ages since I've put anything here (and that lethargy will continue, by the way, for quite some time).

So the gimmick is... honestly pretty dumb, but Jessie tagged me, and I like her, so I guess I'd better do it. You're supposed to make two wish lists (for me these are not ordered), one "materialistic," and one "spiritual." I will not tire you with the inadequacy of those categories. I'll just do it, and hope that I don't get struck down by Our Lady of Philosophickal Precision.

"materialistic" wish list (I'm not sure if these were supposed to be "realistic," but whatever)

1. That I could lose some weight and get rid of this stupid acid reflux (sorry if that's too much information).
2. A Wii. (What do you expect? I got to play Guitar Hero the other day for the first time.)
3. A sweet digital video camera with which to produce silly movies.
4. A ginormous walk-in refrigerator or a real wine cellar (you know, mold and all).
5. A villa on an obscure, roadless Croatian island with an awesome library and a tasteful little chapel.

"spiritual" wish list

1. To memorize the Psalms (hey, Orthodox monastics do it!).
2. To learn all of the classic Gregorian chant versions of the office anthems and canticles.
3. To pray the office and the rosary every day without fail.
4. To spend less time on the internet.
5. To fulfill my vocation in God's Holy Church.

I suppose all of those are both spiritual and material, and probably all of them reflect both good and ill (some more clearly than others) in my motivations. But there you have it.

I tag:
1. Matt (because he never blogs anymore either, but probably for good reasons)
2. Amy Mann
3. Elliot (who has a fancy new blog)

american food

2008-01-01T09:04:00.000-06:00

Arts and Letters Daily pointed out this article on a certain two-faced popular attitude about unhealthy food. Here's a summary quote:

Fast food makes such a savory scapegoat for our perpetual girth control failures that it’s easy to forget we eat less than 20 percent of our meals at the Golden Arches and its ilk. It’s also easy to forget that before America fell in love with cheap, convenient, standardized junk food, it loved cheap, convenient, independently deep-fried junk food.

That seems true enough. The article points out all those cable shows glorifying the independent and historical greasy spoons and dives (I ate at one of those yesterday... mmm), and wonders why the culinary police do not pay them as much attention. I don't think this is a very hard question at all, especially when you consider that the food critics come from a sort of weepy liberal elite in the first place: fast food is evil not just because it is unhealthy, but because it is big-business (which is of course bad).

So food has just as much to do with class and with economics as it does with health. Food policy is never going to be a straightforward idea (which is why I am not sure if the government has any business doing it). Anyway, as much as I make fun of the more puritanical tendencies of the food regulators, I admit I sympathize with this view of fast food. I don't think that big business is all bad; nor do I think that "unhealthy" food should be universally avoided. I do think that food may be too intimate of a thing to be controlled by a large company. If I'm going to eat a tub of saturated fat (which is probably delicious), I'd rather have it cooked by somebody I know rather than a faceless corporation.

happy new year

2008-01-01T09:02:00.000-06:00

It's been almost a month since I've posted anything here! I've been traveling around a bit, from North Carolina to Mississippi to Texas and, later today, back. But happy new year everyone.

sermon for advent 2A

2007-12-09T20:51:00.000-06:00

I preached this morning at the 8 o'clock Rite I service. I think it went well, at least as far as delivery -- I certainly need more practice. As far as the content, well... this wasn't the best week to deal with these readings, or to prepare a sermon period, but then that was good practice as well. So anyway if you read this, please feel free to make comments, especially critical ones.

****

Isaiah 11:1-10
Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
Romans 15:4-13
Matthew 3:1-12

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.

It appears that we have a choice of theme this morning.

Do we dwell on Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom, where a just ruler comes to set the world aright?

Or should we focus on Paul’s message of hope—that the scriptures and the tradition can, rather than turning us to the past, help us to think about the future fulfillment of God’s promises.

Or do we think about John the Baptist’s warning about the wheat, the chaff, and the unquenchable fire?

For most of us this is probably easy:
Given a choice between hope and judgment, most of us would probably choose hope.
It just sounds a lot more pleasant than this “unquenchable fire” business.

We don’t tend to like judgment very much, even if, in this passage, we could convince ourselves that it is not us being judged but those naughty Pharisees and Sadducees who tend to show up in our minds like bumbling cartoon villains.

So the gospel lesson might work if we read it like that. After all, Episcopalians are only judgmental about people who are judgmental, right?
—and for various reasons that’s what we think Pharisees are. We think of Pharisees as the sort of people who say mean things about “sin” and “law” only to be trumped by a loving, caring Jesus.

Jesus’s cousin, John the Baptist, hardly seems loving and caring here. And of course, the Pharisees, for once, are not the ones who appear to be “judgmental.” In this passage, at least, they just show up, and next thing you know, John is calling them “a brood of vipers.”

Why is John so harsh with them?
According to John they say, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor.’
In other words, they don’t see the necessity of personal repentance, but instead think themselves safe because of their ethnic history.
John makes it clear that there is no secure ground when it comes to God’s judgment. No matter who you are or where you come from, God has a claim on your life because, when it comes down to it, you didn’t make yourself.
We like to think that we are in control of things, that technology has helped us to influence history. But we still get sick, get stuck in traffic, and get lost—to name some small things. And we still die.

And so John may be telling the Pharisees, Abraham may be your ancestor,
but you will still die.

And remember that he says this in the context of baptism.

Could this possibly be about us?
We talk a lot about baptism in the Episcopal Church—especially since the 1979 prayer book— often as a reminder that all baptized people are included in God’s kingdom. But what John reminds us here is that baptism itself can be a kind of judgment. If you are going to be baptized, the Church says, certain things are going to be expected of you: If you want the new life, you have to say that your life, really, is no longer yours. Your old self has died. And of course the act of baptism itself is a way of acknowledging God’s judgment on our sin: in those waters we say, as we will say in our confession this morning, that our lives have “provoked most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.”

What does this vision of judgment—of unquenchable fire for those who do not bear the fruit of repentance—have to do with the peaceable kingdom that we see in Isaiah? What does it have to do with Paul’s hope in the epistle to the Romans?

In the Creed we say that Christ shall come again to judge both the quick and the dead. Then we say that we look for—in other words, we hope for—the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

How can we so confidently affirm both judgment and the hope of resurrection?
This is difficult because we so often think of God’s judgment as somehow opposed to the love present in the resurrection.
But the Scriptures and the witness of the Church tell us that it is precisely in judgment that we have hope. Pope Benedict, in his new encyclical, writes, “…faith in the Last Judgment is first and foremost hope” (Spe salvi, par. 43).

In other words, what judgment means is that history does not have the final word; God does. What this means is not that every story has to have a happy ending; that we have to go around ignoring the tragic realities of life. That’s not it at all.

What hope in judgment does mean, is that there is always time for restoration; no single event—even death—is ever the final word about our lives (Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology, 249).

There’s incredible freedom in the knowledge that time is in God’s hands.

Of course this freedom does not mean that we are freed from the responsibilities entailed by our baptism. It is right, for example, that the Episcopal Church has treated the Millennium Development Goals as worthy ways that we can live up to some of our baptismal vows. But we need to remember that these are, in a sense, not our goals to accomplish. Our work as the Church is not to make the world a better place. That is the sort of burden that we can never fulfill, the sort of burden of the Pharisees who saw salvation as a possession, something that needed to be grasped and not received.

The baptismal vows are not about changing the world;
they are the terms required for living in the completely new world initiated by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So this Advent we pray, “Give us grace to forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer.” You see, if we think that it is up to us, that the world’s salvation is in our hands—if we refuse, that is, to let ourselves be judged—we will miss the most important gift in the world, the king born in a manger who brings peace on earth.

This morning, as we receive his Body from this altar, let us pray, with John the Baptist, “He must increase; I must decrease.” Amen.

photo meme

2007-12-08T09:09:00.000-06:00

Jessie (sort of) tagged me, so here goes. (The idea is that you post the first thing that comes up -- within reason and discretion! -- when you search for the answer in Google Images.)

1. Age at my next birthday:

2. Place I'd like to travel:

3. Favorite place:

4. Favorite objects:

5. Favorite food:

6. Favorite Color:

7. Nickname

8. Place I was born:

Yes, that last one is rather sad.

I hereby tag Elliot, Matt, DF, and Libby (largely because I think they might actually both see this and think it amusing). If anyone else sees this and wants to join in, consider yourself tagged... and leave a comment.

a bit of unapologetic consumerism

2007-12-06T10:10:00.000-06:00

Trader Joe's is the best store ever. There's one open in Chapel Hill now... I got out the bike and rode over, which was great. (It was a bit more trouble on the way back, going mostly uphill with fifteen pounds of dried fruit -- I'm making mincemeat -- in my pack.)

holy days

2007-11-24T14:08:00.000-06:00

It's two days after Thanksgiving, and already you can see the "Christmas" (or perhaps "holiday") decoration going up. Just now I had to help my parents put up their Christmas tree. They protested that they were only doing it so early to prepare for a church Christmas party next weekend, on December 1.

I've garnered a reputation as something of a humbug around here for refusing to do Christmassy things before Christmas. I suppose I don't mind it. But I wish that all these evangelicals (and others) who completely buy into the Christmas-starts-in-early-November mindset would recognize that they are not celebrating a Christian holy day but a feast of Holy Commerce.

Of course, that may not make much a difference if you don't really believe in holy days to begin with. I said something about the Advent-Christmas cycle the other day at a family gathering (I probably sounded like a humbug), and one of my uncles made the point that there was nothing really holy about the days anyway, so why worry so much about it?

Why indeed. I don't really want to argue with Baptists about why days should or shouldn't be called holy (in my experience Baptists like talking about abstract "holiness" but they are rarely willing to call anyone or anything holy -- like a holy martyr, a holy apostle, a holy bishop, or the holy church). The point is that we all treat it like a holy day, whether we call it that or not. I wish I had a nickel for every time I saw, growing up, something about "remembering the reason for the season" or "keep Christ in Christmas." (To which I want to say, well yes, and let's keep the "mass" as well!) What I see in a lot of evangelical and Protestant churches is an attempt to take what is going on in the larger culture and make it Christian -- not a terrible modus operandi, to be sure, but I think we can do better.

If the Church is "God's new language," and we are to be a peculiar people, a holy people, why should we let the world tell us what our holy days are about? Why give up the traditions of the fathers and mothers for a cheap substitute? I love how Umberto Eco puts it:

I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together - as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions - which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.
I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that.

So if you're going to call yourself a Christian, there's no excuse not to take Advent seriously. I'm not saying you have to do the full Orthodox Nativity Fast (or "little Lent") where you go without meat, poultry, oil and wine for 40 days. But Advent, in both its Eastern and Western forms, is definitively not a season of celebration; it is a season of serious and penitential preparation for the Nativity of Our Lord. I know that situations with family and friends may prevent us from observing this season fully -- and we need to have charity about that rather than being rude or self-righteous. But we have to continually remind ourselves that Christianity is not simply about birth and resurrection -- it is also about a fall from grace, and about a cross. Without Advent, without the deep, longing melancholy in which we get a foretaste of Holy Saturday, the joy of the Nativity, of the Incarnation, only appears as something nice but not something we need -- it becomes a love that we feel we are due rather than a love that is pure gift.

mottos

2007-11-23T15:21:00.000-06:00

I thought this was an interesting piece at the Chronicle on college mottos and slogans. I know Duke's simply because it's on the ubiquitous logo: "eruditio et religio." I had to look up Richmond's, though -- and strangely enough it was easier to find on Wikipedia than on the UR website: "verbum vitae et lumen scientiae."

It's a fun exercise to deconstruct some of the religious ideas embedded in these mottos. Duke, for example, has a little plaque out in front of the Chapel that says,

The aims of Duke University are to assert a faith in the eternal union of knowledge and religion set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; to advance learning in all lines of truth; to defend scholarship against all false notions and ideals; to develop a Christian love of freedom and truth; to promote a sincere spirit of tolerance; to discourage all partisan and sectarian strife; and to render the largest permanent service to the individual, the state, the nation, and the church. Unto these ends shall the affairs of this University always be administered.

It would be easy, perhaps, for many a Christian to look at this and say, "Ah, well isn't that nice!" And it is just as easy, perhaps, for a non-Christian to see in it a parallel offensive particularity. But neither of these reactions deals very well with the real theme of the statement, which is basically that of liberal Protestantism. Notice that Jesus stands for an "eternal union of knowledge and religion" (Where does that show up in the Gospels, I wonder? It sounds a lot more like Harnack to me); notice the order of "the individual, the state, the nation, and the church."

The assumption is that truth is something out there that we discover and possess. We can discourage partisan and sectarian strife because there is such a thing as a human being without a particular story; there is always something behind peoples, languages, cultures. The point of Jesus, to borrow a phrase from Harnack, was to reveal the "brotherhood of man." (Jesus was useful for this, but there was nothing particularly necessary about the fact that he was a Jew.) The pursuit of knowledge therefore does not assume a particular way of life, as both the ancients and the Catholic Church have understood: the life of virtue.

"Union of knowledge and religion" then comes to mean simply "knowledge" when "religion" is without content or when "religion" simply points back to "knowledge." I don't think that this confusion should prevent religious people (whether Christians or Jews or others) from participating in the life of the modern university. But I think we should be seriously uneasy about both a knowledge abstracted from virtue and a Jesus whose life and message was simply (to borrow Rowan Williams' characterization of Maurice's description of the Incarnation) "a crown and consummation for a world whose patterns of relation are not fundamentally askew." (Or, as Sam Wells would put it -- and he is the one who fist brought Duke's aims to my attention -- in this model Jesus came not to save the world, but to tell the world that it was OK.)

just in case you were wondering

2007-11-20T11:42:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm not sure if this is good or bad. Because this test is based, I'm guessing, on vocabulary, I'm not terribly surprised (I do like to throw in the occasional apophatic remarks on soteriology and the the numinous aspects of the Anaphora). But I think the program also neglects to mention that many of my sentences are pretty stupid, and that my specialized vocabulary is relatively small. (If, for example, I were to try to talk to some of the engineering students sitting nearby me right now, I doubt they would see my discourse as particularly savvy.)

the world sounds better in anglican chant

2007-11-18T14:41:00.001-06:00

Thanks to Todd Granger's recommendation, I found this amazing set of recordings wherein a group called the Mastersingers sing both a weather report and the British Highway Code (Part 1) to Anglican chant.

There's an explanation here. MP3's of the two songs are at the following links:
The Highway Code
The Weather Report

Enjoy!

the middle of the week

2007-11-13T19:14:00.001-06:00

Oh my, it's been a couple of weeks since I posted anything here. Very busy with schoolwork, particularly with trying to come up with an interesting argument for the Wells/Hauerwas seminar. And what online time I have is mostly spent with email, trying to keep up with a little news (which is mostly not "news" in any meaningful sense), and helping with the other blog.

No food news. (Take that back; Dean and Deluca has a good recipe for goulash that I used.)

I can't believe that Thanksgiving is almost upon us. And then, soon to follow, Advent.

Oh, and if you're interested, here's a link to the place where I'm doing field ed this year. (The website is rather old, but anyway.)

one or two things to say

2007-10-28T21:46:00.001-05:00

Just so you know. I'm not an individual.

couscous with butternut squash and preserved lemons

2007-10-28T18:58:00.000-05:00

I've been on a preservation kick lately. Never mind the deep psychological resonances of that word: it's fun to can things. A few weeks ago (ah, I mentioned it here) I preserved some lemons (more on that below), and today I wanted to find a use for them.

(Beside the lemons are some pickled green beans.)

I found this recipe, which turned out very well. The only thing I did was add a chicken breast which I browned in butter with a cinnamon stick -- I chopped it up and tossed it with everything else at the end.

Word of advice on the lemons, though: make sure you get them spread evenly in the couscous. They have a wonderful flavor -- I think the only right word for it is "bright" -- but are overwhelming in more than small quantities.

Preserving lemons is really simple. You'll need a big glass jar, a bunch of lemons (a few bags), kosher salt, some peppercorns, and some bay leaves. Slice the lemons vertically into quarters, but do not slice all the way to the bottom -- leave them intact. Put 1-2 tablespoons of salt inside each lemon. Pack them into the jar as tightly as possible. Top with another 1/2 cup of salt or so. Then pour 2 cups fresh lemon juice over it all; top off with water if the jar isn't full. Add about 10 peppercorns and a few bay leaves. (I was using Cat Cora's recipe, but I didn't follow it exactly: it really depends on the jar you pick. Just know that there should be a lot of salt floating around. The lemon juice should probably come 3/4 of the way up, if not more, before you add water.) Close it up and let it sit in a cool dark place for a couple of weeks.

Now that's an idea

2007-10-27T21:40:00.000-05:00

I wonder if this sort of thing is common: the word-of-mouth, underground restaurant. But take a look at this story. Fascinating stuff. And conceivable in a way -- though I can't imagine myself ever going to the lengths required to cook sous-vide, and let's face it, I don't find molecular gastronomy appealing at all. Still, food is food, and good food is good food. I may not open up an underground restaurant in my apartment, but I hope I'll always be able to try new things.

funniest video ever

2007-10-18T15:17:00.000-05:00

Or so I am tempted to think this afternoon (and last Saturday):

another link of interest

2007-10-15T16:53:00.000-05:00

Again, I'm a bit overwhelmed by work, but I thought I'd put up a link to a new piece at Covenant by a couple of our contributors. It's an outline as to why they think it so important to guard our use of terms like "heresy." It is not, per se, a defense from the charges we've gotten of being "Vichy" and "collaborationists" from one corner of the conservative movement (which are in a sense ridiculous and not worth answering), but it does deal with some of the misunderstandings at play. Read the article here.

aren't these quizzes exciting?

2007-10-13T21:41:00.000-05:00

Apparently I can forgo R.C.I.A., formal reception, peace and full accord with the Bishop of Rome and all that. The Internet says that I am already Catholic. And when has the Internet been wrong?

What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Roman Catholic

You are Roman Catholic. Church tradition and ecclesial authority are hugely important, and the most important part of worship for you is mass. As the Mother of God, Mary is important in your theology, and as the communion of saints includes the living and the dead, you can also ask the saints to intercede for you.

Roman Catholic

93%

Neo orthodox

82%

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan

75%

Emergent/Postmodern

50%

Reformed Evangelical

43%

Charismatic/Pentecostal

36%

Fundamentalist

29%

Modern Liberal

21%

Classical Liberal

18%

what happens during fall break

2007-10-11T08:45:00.000-05:00

I suppose two months of hardly cooking will drive me crazy. So I have been in the kitchen the past few days, hoping to kill the cooking bug while I can; there's something brilliant about a whole week free. One can make soups and breads and meats to freeze for those times when time isn't so open. One can marinate things leisurely (like this). One can preserve lemons or make mincemeat in anticipation of the holidays.

(As you can see, I tend to go into hibernation at times like this; being in the neo-highschool environment that is Divinity School is draining.)

One of my new favorite recipes is Dean and Deluca's method of brining pork chops. It's incredibly easy; the only catch is that it needs to be started overnight or in the morning. But making the brine is all there is to it.

(Recipe from here and in the wonderful Dean and Deluca Cookbook.)

Ingredients:
8 cups water
1/4 cup coarse salt
3 tablespoons sugar
3 bay leaves
2 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
2 teaspoons black peppercorns
1 garlic clove, smashed
4 loin pork chops (each about 1 1/2 inches thick)
1/4 cup olive oil or vegetable oil

Directions:
1. Mix together the water, coarse salt, and sugar in a large pot. Bring to a boil over high heat. Add the bay leaves, cloves, cinnamon stick, peppercorns, and garlic. Simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool.
2. When mixture is at room temperature, strain it over the pork chops (they must be completely immersed in the brine). Marinate chops in the refrigerator for at least 8 hours and up to 12 hours.
3. When ready to cook, remove chops from brine and dry them with a towel. Place oil in a heavy sauté pan that's large enough to hold the chops in a single layer without crowding; place the pan over moderate heat. Add the chops. After a minute or so, using tongs, shift them slightly in the pan to make sure they're not sticking. Cook until well browned on the first side, about 8 minutes. Turn over and brown on the other side. Cook further, turning occasionally, until the chops reach an internal temperature of 130°F. Remove from pan, season, and serve immediately.

internet brain limit reached

2007-10-07T18:29:00.000-05:00

Folks, this has been a busy semester. I have hardly slept or cooked. (I like doing both those things.) Nor have I gotten all my reading done. On the upside, I have read some Milbank (see a few posts below) and brushed up my Latin (which is of course God's Holy Tongue).

Digitally, I have spent more time at Covenant than here. (What can I say? People actually read it.) So to my few faithful friends who still find me popping up in your newsreader, I apologize for my absence. This is fall break. I will spend a great deal if it not doing anything serious. That is important. But the rest I will spend reading those important books that I'm supposed to read.

By the way, there are a couple of things that might be interesting (even if you're not invested in this Anglican business):

A post that I put up a few days ago -- and that has had quite the comment area -- called "The Eschatalogical Yes." It was my way of thinking through the fact that there is no real good side to some of these arguments. (I'm still a ridiculously conservative "young fogey" and all that, but I don't think schism is ever right; I also needed to deal with the fact that both major sides of this argument are problematic in their demonization of others, and how I've participated in that.) Read it here.
Yesterday my very smart friend Fr Joshua Whitfield put up an essay on the centrality of worship in the formation of communal virtue and faithfulness. It is his way of saying, "Shut up and pray!" Which is not really an argument, nor a statement that any of the talking heads like, but is profoundly Christocentric. Read it here.

winter squashes are our friends

2007-10-01T17:45:00.000-05:00

I found a new vegetable friend. Meet Balázs, my new turban squash.

He looks a bit like a goomba, right? (Or a cross between a pumpkin and an octopus.)

I don't really feel a need to cook a turban squash anytime soon, so I figure this one will hang out for a while (they keep for months). Thus a name, and a Hungarian one at that.

another prayer

2007-09-21T21:08:00.000-05:00

Defend us, O Lord, we beseech thee, from all dangers both of body and soul: and at the intercession of the blessed and glorious Ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of God, of blessed Joseph, of thy holy Apostles Peter and Paul, of blessed Matthew and of all thy Saints, grant us thy saving health and peace; that being defended from all adversities and all false doctrines, thy Church may serve thee in freedom and quietness. Through the same...

The Anglican Missal is online.

pray for the bishops

2007-09-19T18:12:00.000-05:00

The next few days, through the weekend and into next week, are of great importance for the integrity of the Anglican Communion. I ask your prayers for the entire House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church as they meet in New Orleans, as well as for Rowan and the Primates.

The following is a section of the Psalm from this evening's office. If we are to move forward together, it will not be because the traditionalists/orthodox or the revisionists/progressives can see themselves in these verses (which is frankly easy to do in our pride), but because they see that only Jesus of Nazareth, the Israel of God, can pray these words. We must know nothing "except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2; today's epistle reading). We must lose our own identities so that we can pray this prayer together in Him:

My soul has longed for your salvation;*
I have put my hope in your word.

My eyes have failed from watching for your promise,*
and I say, "When will you comfort me?"

I have become like a leather flask in the smoke,*
but I have not forgotten your statutes.

How much longer must I wait?*
when will you give judgment against those who persecute me?

The proud have dug pits for me;*
they do not keep your law.

All your commandments are true;*
help me, for they persecute me with lies.

They had almost made an end of me on earth,*
but I have not forsaken your commandments.

In your loving-kindness, revive me,*
that I may keep the decrees of your mouth.

(Psalm 119:81-88)

talk like a pirate day

2007-09-19T18:09:00.000-05:00

Yes indeed.

Thanks to The Blue Boar.

milbank and me

2007-09-18T19:18:00.000-05:00

It's odd, really, that it is only now that I've encountered John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory. But it's not the sort of book that one picks up to read idly on a train ride across town (never mind that I don't ride trains these days). I'd say that I averaged 5 minutes per page. Really. It took that long. And even still, there are several pages where I wrote a big note at the top saying "I am completely lost." I wanted to make sure that I made that clear in case Hauerwas or Wells felt a sudden burst of cruelty and decided to cross-examine me about that page. My response would be to look at my note pitifully and say, "I tried, really I did. Look!"

I say that it's odd because, whether or not I agree with Milbank totally in the end, his project narrates some crucial turns in my own academic and religious life. Here is a chunk from the summary that I wrote for our reading today: Milbank’s thematic concern is to return theology to the status of a metadiscourse which alone can narrate and qualify all other discourses. There are two critical moments: a critique of social theory that reveals its ungroundedness in anything but a certain heretical mythos, and postmodernism’s continuation of this critique resulting in an “ontology of violence.” Milbank seeks to show the non-necessity of these moves, placing catholic theology as the one metanarrative that does not result in fascism.

One can hardly summarize such a dense book, but that's a start. The key part for me is that second moment that I compress above, postmodernism's "ontology of violence." This is shorthand for the Nietzschean genealogy which narrates history as a series of powers (and narratives) seeking dominance, out of which it seems we can do nothing but celebrate the eternality of Difference as the only reality. French thinkers--Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard--continue this line, though they seem to understand that this nihilist ethic leads us to facism; accordingly they each make attempts to argue for a kind of "emancipation," but, according to Milbank, these moves inevitably lapse into Kantian liberalism, which is precisely what Nietzsche so thoroughly destroyed.

Those French thinkers, add or subtract a few, are unavoidable in the contemporary English department. By and large most literary scholars would fit quite well either with them or with the science of "the secular." I knew from the beginning in college that Deconstruction wasn't going to work very well with my Christian faith, but I discovered fairly quickly that most forms of Christianity that I had known (which had subscribed largely to what Milbank describes as the pathos of modern theology--its false humility) had very little to offer in resistance either to the nihilistic tendencies of postmodernism or the atheistic positivism of the social sciences.

That is, by and large, one of the main ways, intellectually at least, that I stumbled into the catholic Tradition. I suspected that there was something true in the postmodern critique of rationalism, but I wasn't convinced that its conclusions were necessary. I even dealt with this indirectly in my honors thesis when I discussed Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Pullman makes a big deal about demythologizing Christianity, depicting it to be a big sham, a myth; but then he turns around and offers us a new myth centered on glorified matter. He only manages to provide another religion under the cloak of science. I saw in this modernity's tendency to conceal a new anti-Christian myth within its heightened discourse of rationality. Postmodernism has suggested similarly that we can never get away from these metanarratives (or myths); but in noting the multiplicity of such myths, postmodernism enshrines this competitive multiplicity as the original reality, thus the "ontology of violence."

Christianity, especially following Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, asserts in contrast an ontology of peace. Sin, in Augustinian terms, is no thing; it is the privation of the good. It is not an original reality. Christian theology assumes that there can be difference (even the primary difference of Creator and creature) without violence or dominance. But this ontology challenges the very existence of "the secular," which assumes that reality consists in struggle.

I didn't mean to give such a long description. But hopefully I've said enough to suggest why Milbank's main thesis--the arbitrariness of the "secular" and the primacy of theology--has been so influential to me, even before I read him.

wheel of time

2007-09-17T19:11:00.000-05:00

Robert Jordan died today + (h/t here). I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit that I've read all the Wheel of Time books, but I have. I started back in junior high and worked my way through them. They got worse and worse, unfortunately; I remember buying one in college and sitting on my couch talking to people and just turning a page every now and then because I couldn't handle actually reading it.

But what does the imagination care for bad writing? Well, I suppose it does. In this case, though, I still couldn't help but be interested; that's what happens when you encounter a fantastic world at the right time. It wouldn't do to abandon it and its characters simply because the narrator loses steam. Too much time has already been invested. There's no going back.

Like Madeleine L'Engle (who also died recently+), Jordan was apparently a serious Anglican/Episcopalian. I could complain about his writing (my friend Amy Mann called it the Wheel of Torture, more for her embarrassment at reading them than the books themselves), and the fact that the last book never came out, but at this point Jordan (although that was not his real name) probably isn't terribly concerned about those things. In pace requiescat.

not that you need more ways to waste time, but...

2007-09-12T22:25:00.001-05:00

This site is great. I'm almost afraid to share it lest it disappear. All sorts of shows, from 80's cartoons to Father Ted. If you want a good laugh, watch Series 3, "Speed 3." Where else can you find Mrs Doyle and here magazines with amazing cover stories like, "Brick enlivens dull room!" Stuck here in the graveyard shift at the library, it has just given me a pleasant break from reading.

tea and the art of sitting still

2007-09-09T18:20:00.000-05:00

I'm at the library tonight, "working" and working on my theology paper, accompanied by my trusty thermos of maté tea. I had this taste memory (one of my most reliable kinds of memory), when I took a sip just now, of one of my first visits to the Vörös Oroszlán (Red Lion) teahouse on Ráday utca in Pest. I'm allowed a small dose of nostalgia here from time to time, right? I miss that culture. I wouldn't call it carefree, exactly. Everyone had cares. But these are places whose primary purpose is conversation, people watching, and the cultivation of patience. They are only tangentially about tea or coffee or sweets. They range from the very hippy-esque, esoteric hangout of the Sirius Klub, to the formal old-world kávéházak like Gerbeaud (pictured below), where the waitresses will make sure you know how unimportant you are.

liturgical referee

2007-09-09T14:51:00.000-05:00

I meant to point this out earlier, but I'll do so now. These diagrams are hilarious. They exist on that wonderful border between the intensely serious and the absurd.

madeleine l'engle, in pace requiescat

2007-09-07T23:28:00.000-05:00

Let us pray for the repose of the soul of Madeleine L'Engle, and for the consolation of her family and friends. I am no expert on her writing, but I've loved it where I've found it. I remember sprinting through the Time books (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, etc.) when I was in grade school. They were wonderful; they made the whole world numinous. I am thankful for the subtle ways that her books influenced my childhood and inspired my later devotion to the conversation of fiction and faith.

Update: Take a look at the tribute over at Breakfast for Pandora.

turning a new page

2007-09-07T13:50:00.000-05:00

I want to invite all (three) of my faithful readers, especially but not just the Anglican ones, to a new site/blog that I'm associated with. (How I got involved, really, is still a mystery to me, but I won't dwell on that.) It's called Covenant. I won't try to explain it all here -- there is plenty of explanatory material on the site itself. But here's something of my take on it:

Q. Is this yet another Anglican blog?
A. Sort of. It exists self-consciously among other blogs, but I do think we're offering something a little different.

Q. What's different?
A. I guess I shouldn't dare to hope that it will be incredibly different; one shouldn't put too much on a blog, after all. But from what I've seen, most of the online discussion of Anglican life is incredibly polarized. We assume these poles to be false alternatives (i.e., either the "progressive" or the "traditional" purification of the Church), and we hope to work out an online space for a faithful center.

Q. What's this about "center"?
A. If we use a label like "the center," it should not suggest a synthesis (an unfortunate characterization of the via media) between the extremes, but a faithfulness to the message of the cross and resurrection of Christ. It does not mean that we are simply trying to get along and avoid our differences, or that it is intelligible to hold contradictory views within the same Church. To be faithful we can give up neither on each other nor on right doctrine.

The Lord have mercy on us all.

failure, or something like it

2007-09-05T21:55:00.000-05:00

Well I don't know if I'd say failure, really, but it feels that way. It turns out that I was a bit too ambitious with my schedule this semester. I have the normal 4-course load (Theology, American Christianity, The Pastor's Vocation, and Anglican Social Ethics), but on top of that I'm auditing Latin and a Greek reading seminar. I thought that I'd be able to audit another seminar (which would be what, seven classes? eight if I count Anglican formation? -- that does make it seem absurd now that I count them) because it so happened that it was on a book (Piers Plowman) that I've already read and know fairly well. And, I should say, that I really like and have a potential scholarly interest in.

It's going to have to go. Latin and Greek are too critical, too foundational, to drop. They are building blocks to other things. It makes me sad to give up Piers. It is such a weird, wonderful poem, and it is taught by an almost equally weird and wonderful professor. But we're only in the second week, and I'm realizing that (1) it's not going to get any easier from this point, and (2) if I keep going at this rate I'm going to collapse, not to mention go through the semester with no time for anything but school.

just an idle question...

2007-09-05T21:54:00.000-05:00

What percentage of Episcopalians are Mac users?

usus antiquior, altercationes antiquiores

2007-09-02T18:31:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about Latin masses and bishops. Well, let's be honest, what else do I think about? (A lot of things, actually, but, predictably, they are mostly edible -- wow that sentence had a truckload of adverbs.)

1.

This afternoon I drove out to Dunn, North Carolina, to the one Roman Catholic parish in the area that regularly celebrates the "traditional use" a.k.a. the Tridentine mass a.k.a. the mass of Blessed Pope John XXIII a.k.a. the 1962 Missal a.k.a. that-thing-those-freakish-trads-do to annoy the-rest-of-us-who-are-committed-to-making-church-exciting-and-hip.

It was weird. The kneelers were most uncomfortable, and for some reason the congregation knelt even in places where you're not really supposed to kneel (even in the kneel-happy Tridentine missal), like the Gloria and the Sursum corda. So my knees hurt. My mind was hardly stimulated by the paltry excuse for a homily. And my ears are a little bit numb from the lightning-speed Latin. These traditional celebrants remind me a little bit of CX (Policy) debaters in high school and college: they seem to think that the faster you talk the more you know what you're talking about.

But (you knew this was coming, right?) it was probably the one of the best Roman Catholic mass I've ever been to. Really. This says more about my abysmal experience with Catholic masses than it does the brilliance of this one.

(Quick aside there: even good liturgies I've seen have had their major problems -- the embarrassing prominence of the national anthem at the Latin Novus ordo mass at Mátyás-templom in Budapest, the intrusion of tourists in most Parisian churches, etc. I have never before been to a decently celebrated liturgy in this country, period. Are my standards too high? I don't think so. If a tiny Anglo-catholic congregation in Pest [10-15 on a good day] of mixed ethnic, national, and ecclesial background can celebrate the liturgy with dignity and beauty [albeit very simply], it frankly boggles the mind why a large, wealthy church in this country can't do it. End aside.)

You see, all those problems aside, this liturgy made it clear that we were doing something important. We weren't just there because we all thought it would be nice to get together on a Sunday afternoon and sing some songs and say some prayers. We weren't there because we thought we might get some "useful" tidbit from the pastor about our own lives. We were there to worship the living God, to stand before his altar and re-member and re-present the sacrifice of Christ which enables our prayer in the first place; we were there to be formed into who we truly are through the mystery of the great Sacrament, the true Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It wasn't the Latin that made the difference, it was the host of little things that constantly remind you what you're doing. There was none of the chatty "Welcome to St. So-and-so's parish!" faux-friendliness, none of the grammatical incoherence of praying to the Father while smiling and motioning to the congregation. Every prayer, from the first invocation to the last, was said facing East.

This was a great example to me of the general principle behind this post at the New Liturgical Movement. As I said, this mass could have been greatly improved, especially by singing, but its primary virtue was its avoidance of the main fault of the liturgical modernizers, who in a quest to make the liturgy "relevant" manage to imply in every way possible that the main point of the liturgy -- the miraculous presence of the risen Christ -- is "irrelevant." Yes, by all means let us guard against the weird privatized and clericalized excesses of the Tridentine form -- it has its own problems (thus the title of this post); let us make sure that the "liturgy" is truly the "work of the people." But in doing so let us not convince ourselves that this work is just an everyday task, a triviality no different from sticking something in the microwave or showing up to a boring job.

2.

Participating in the traditional rite today gave me more hope than I have had in a long time in the Roman Church. I'm still not there, for a variety of reasons (not to rehash at length, but those relate, theologically, to my inability to believe the Roman pontiff's claims about himself, and personally, to the lack of a good local Catholic parish), but as I left today I couldn't help but think that I could be at some point. (Again: if there were an Anglican Use parish around, I have almost no doubt that I already would be; and the confidence with which I make that statement certain begs some questions.)

[I have edited this post and removed the rest of this section in order to revise it and post it here.]

3.

Just one last note, of a more personal nature (as if the above were all of a heightened intellectual tone!).

There was an announcement after the homily this afternoon concerning some clergy changes in the area. Along with remarks on provision for the traditional use, the priest mentioned several times the priest shortage in the diocese and the need to pray for vocations to holy orders. In the middle of my Latin entrancement, these statements tugged at my heart. I half wanted to run up after the mass saying, "Father, Father! Pick me! Pick me!" Instead I sat there with a painful awareness of the division between our Churches. To me that simple prayer request was more powerful than any of the Baptist "altar calls" I knew growing up. It was a reminder of a future altar call, a hope to one day say, "Introibo ad altare Dei / Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam."

I wish that following that call was as straightforward as it seems at those moments. I think that if God is eventually going to bring me to ordination in his Church, he is probably going to lead me through a lot of other stuff first. Uncomfortable kneelers, if nothing else, might teach me some patience and/or some humility.

I don't have a lot of either of those things right now. I'm blogging when I should be reading a long, potentially boring book. Go figure.

time to breathe

2007-09-01T09:55:00.000-05:00

Getting to school every morning at 8 and staying late into the night some days takes its toll on you (and not in a fun Norman Juster style tollbooth). I haven't gotten enough sleep, and I haven't been in the kitchen. Hopefully some kind of balance will happen, and it will inevitably involve the faithful use of the long mornings (in between morning prayer and afternoon classes) and long evenings (when I work at the library) to get my work done.

Among other things, I have some great (or important) books to look forward to. Some are old friends, some are new enemies, but one way or another they will claim a large part of my life.

into great noise

2007-08-27T09:21:00.000-05:00

I said I would take a break from blogging until the semester started. And it's started, with a vengeance.

I'm not even sure what I mean by that. Today is normal. It's nice to be back to Morning Prayer (with all its Methodist idiosyncrasies).

I have nothing useful to say here: I'm tired and very focused on work.

a break, and a feast

2007-08-15T17:20:00.000-05:00

I'm going to take a break from blogging (and probably from at least some blog reading) until the semester starts on August 27. I've been looking at a syllabus for one of my courses, and I realized that there is a lot of work that I need to do in the next two weeks.

***

Today is a major feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary -- Assumption in the West and Dormition in the East. There are some good comments in some of the various religious blogs I read: here, here, and here. The collect in the Book of Common Prayer makes surprisingly direct, while veiled, references to Mary's bodily Assumption. And it expresses precisely why our devotion to the Blessed Virgin is so personal: her Assumption and Coronation are the foretaste of our glory in the eternal Kingdom. She is the example par excellence of what it means to follow Christ.

O God, who hast taken to thyself the blessed Virgin Mary, mother of thy incarnate Son: Grant that we, who have been redeemed by his blood, may share with her the glory of thine eternal kingdom; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

samosas

2007-08-15T09:45:00.000-05:00

This recipe worked very well. Tasty.

mad about peaches

2007-08-12T17:19:00.000-05:00

Peaches are so good, and they're in season. I was making a fairly traditional bruschetta tonight with tomatoes and basil, but then I saw this big sack of peaches on my counter, and I couldn't resist. I thought, if you can make peach salsa, you can certainly make peach bruschetta. It turned out very, very well. Mmm.

a pint of cherry tomatoes, or a few other tomatoes, diced (as you will; you can core them and only use the outside, but I hate doing that with fresh, local cherry tomatoes; mine were yellow-orange and red)
a peach, peeled, pitted, diced
3-5 basil leaves, chiffonade (thinly sliced)
a clove of garlic, minced
a dash of olive oil
salt and black pepper to taste

Mix it all up and let it sit for a few minutes. Put it on some grilled or toasted country bread. (Mine is a little overcooked, but oh well.)

signs of life

2007-08-12T12:42:00.000-05:00

A note of warning: these posts may begin appearing more frequently as I continue my Ecclesiastickal Quest. I fear that I may become something of a mystery worshiper, the main difference being that I am not just looking for the sake of looking.

Today I visited a second Roman Catholic parish in the triangle (the first I described here). I drove all the way to the other side of Raleigh to visit St. Joseph's, which had been recommended to me secondhandedly by the now-offline Pontificator.

I will say first of all that I could tell when I walked in that the church took itself more seriously (in a good way) than most of the American RC churches I have seen. They house a copy of the icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa (Poland's famous Black Madonna, I believe), which takes a prominent place in the nave. There were several other very nice icons, and a fairly traditional veiled tabernacle to the right of the sanctuary. There was a large group (5 or 6) of acolytes properly vested in cassock and cotta (not the cassalb of many protestant-influenced RC parishes), and they actually behaved like acolytes! During the Communion I noticed that the vast majority of parishioners received the Precious Body directly onto the tongue, and acolytes were there to hold patens (though there may be another word for this use) underneath to prevent anything from falling.

Alas, these good signs were accompanied by some expected unpleasantness. The music was bad -- not abysmal, mind you, and the congregation sung along quite well, but bad nonetheless. (I was quite surprised to here "Soon and Very Soon" as the offertory song; in some ways it was much more appropriate there -- because we really were about to see the King -- than it is in Baptist services where I've heard it before, but that doesn't make it a good song.) The sermon, in content, was fine, but in presentation left me wondering if any preparation happened before the processional hymn. The priest had an excellent voice, and it saddened me that the only thing he bothered to sing was the Kyrie.

One thing that continues to bother me about RC churches is their complete inability to welcome visitors. Welcome does not, mind you, consist in reducing the liturgy to something universally comprehensible. It consists of, first of all, personal interaction before and after the liturgy, and secondly, provision for what to do with visitors. If they are not welcome in the liturgy, then someone should be there to talk to them about the church; if they are welcome (and I think they should be), there ought to be some way for them to authentically observe -- and participate in a limited way if they are baptized Christians. I guess what I want is a prayer book. I know the prayers, because I know the Roman Rite; a lot of people don't.

I guess what I'm saying is that I regularly get the impression when I visit RC parishes that no one has any expectation that anyone who is not a RC will be there. They routinely talk of "visitors," but these statements always imply that visitors are simply members of another RC parish. Part of this is, of course, the unintelligibility within the American Catholic imagination of a visiting non-RC. Why would you visit another church? Conversion is simply not on the radar.

I don't think St. Joseph's was a bad place. After all, I only saw one Sunday mass. I have no idea what else they do during the week, or during other parts of the year. I'm glad I went. It didn't leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth like so many churches do these days. But there was a lot missing. And if that is more emotional and personal than it is theological, I'm not sure how to tell the difference.

who knew?

2007-08-12T08:04:00.000-05:00

I do what I am told. That is why I do not watch very much television. This morning I turned on Today as I was eating breakfast, and they were talking about controlling your online reputation, googling yourself, etc. So what did I do? (I'd done it before, but curiosity got to me.)

One finds the usual suspects: my dad, my comments on a few blogs, my div school blog from this summer (but not this one because I do not use my last name), and then a few amusing relics from high school and college. I didn't even remember these awards -- and I got three! Then there were some college poems, including this one. I specifically remember Dr. Barza (requiescat in pacem) saying that my diction was a bit too much. After all, who uses words like "fricatrice" and "atramentous"? I don't use them, so I guess he was right. But I do still like the poem (and the words).

goulash as indifference to summer

2007-08-11T21:38:00.001-05:00

I know, it's really really hot. (Temperatures have been around 104.) But for some odd reason I felt compelled tonight to make goulash. I am a big believer in seasonal foods -- almost too big; I hardly allow myself dark beer or red wine or non-grilled meats during the summer -- yet as I was shopping this afternoon I had this incredibly persistent urge to make some goulash soup. I don't know if it was a weird nostalgic thing, or a way of convincing myself that it's not as hot as it feels. I don't see any absolute reasons why one shouldn't eat hearty soups in the summer. But due to summer's decrease in appetite, one does have more leftovers. Here's a recipe.

Goulash soup with butternut squash (Gulyásleves sütötökvel)

Measurements are good-faith estimations. I didn't think about it too much, so if you're following this, feel free to adjust to taste. I saw a butternut squash, so I used it instead of potato, which is more traditional. But I'm not Hungarian, and I thought it was interesting.

3-4 tbsp fat (oil or lard), enough to coat bottom of pan
1-2 lbs chunks beef stew meat
1 onion, chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1 green pepper, chopped
3 small carrots, thinly sliced
1 rounded tsp paprika
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp caraway seeds
1 tsp red pepper flakes
1/3 cup cognac/brandy
1 cup dry red wine
about 6 cups beef broth
1 small butternut squash, cut into small cubes
1/2 cup (plus) flour
1 egg
salt and black pepper to taste

Heat a large stewpot/dutch oven over high heat; fry beef in the fat for a few minutes, turning to brown the outside as thoroughly as possible. Add onion, garlic, pepper and spices. Stir fry for 2-3 minutes until fragrant. Deglaze with brandy and wine, scraping the bottom of the pan. Add broth and bring to a boil, then lower to a simmer and cook for about half an hour. Add the butternut squash and simmer for another half hour. In a small bowl blend the flour, egg and some salt with a fork until it forms a stiff dough. Roll out on a floured surface and then pinch off small pieces of the dough into the soup and cook for 3-5 more minutes until dumplings are cooked. Salt and pepper to taste. (As usual, if the soup tastes bland, add more salt!)

If you have it it would be nice to swirl in some freshly chopped parsley at the end. But I never seem to have that. (Lacking an herb garden, as I do.)

last weekend

2007-08-08T12:20:00.000-05:00

I am incredibly thankful for these few weeks of respite between work and school. Over the weekend I drove up through DC (picking up some folks) and up to New York where we had a little reunion with some of these people who used to hang out in Magyarország.

Whilst we were on that famed island of ill-repute, Manhattan, we wandered into the park where one can find The Cloisters. On the way to that dwelling of ex-ecclesiastical treasures, we hid behind a tree.

The museum itself was most impressive. I particularly enjoyed the 12th and 13th century altarpieces. (This reconstructed sanctuary was truly a sight to behold.)

Back downtown, I made a sort of pilgrimage to Dean & Deluca. Now, living in the land of A Southern Season, I no longer had a terrible need to stock up on anything; but since I have elevated this cookbook to the rank of Prime Cookery Tome, the trip was obligatory.

Church notes:

I convinced Byron and Neal to go with me to St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, for the mid-morning mass. I had been there before for Evensong, but never for Eucharist; we would have gone to the main (choral) service, but we needed to get to Chinatown for some dim sum in time for some of us to drive back to DC.

St. Thomas is a huge old Gothic church in midtown Manhattan. It was a little sad how few people were there for the 9 o'clock service (I think a few more come at 11). The building is really glorious, the sort that inevitably gives one visions of heavenly splendor. But it makes it rather awkward to sing hymns when the 20 or so congregants are scattered all over the place. We spoke to the Rector afterwards, and he seemed like a very nice fellow.

After driving back to Washington, I got up very early on Monday morning to get to the 7 a.m. mass at St. Paul's K Street for the Feast of the Transfiguration. I am so glad I did. It is so, so wonderful to find a place that is both intensely serious about catholic worship and personally warm. As I sat down in the pew for the Angelus and Morning Prayer at 6:45, the Rector walked over and wanted to make sure that I knew my way around the service; the gentleman in front of me volunteered to help me out if anything unusual happened. Afterwards he turned around to me and said, "Now that wasn't too difficult!" As I was walking out another man came up and asked if I would join them for breakfast -- as it turns out they regularly have breakfast together after the morning mass (I get the impression that attendance is relatively uniform; there were about 10 people). It is really amazing how such a simple, direct invitation can warm the heart. I had a wonderful time with these people. If I lived in Washington I do not think that there is any question about where I would go to church.

passing and failing

2007-08-02T10:54:00.000-05:00

This story sounds a lot like (Central) Europe. (Where, however, the trend continues into the workplace, making it near impossible to fire anyone.)

beaucoup de chats à fouetter

2007-07-31T09:00:00.000-05:00

Having at last returned to the Triangle from the Triad (I am so amused by these little self-important regional titles, while at the same time recognizing their utility), I will have a busy few days: staining and finishing a bookcase, cleaning up the rest of my mess, reading for class, driving to New York for the weekend for a Hungary reunion, and generally trying to keep healthy and well before classes start.

My last day at Shiloh was wonderful. I had some trouble with the microphone during the sermon, but it turned out all right. The pastor / my supervisor presented me with lovely copies of The Imitation of Christ and A Manual for Priests of the American Church. Afterwards we had a big Methodist covered dish meal, with more desserts than I could count. A couple of people cried. It all felt very good -- good to know that despite all my flaws the Lord used me somehow this summer.

this morning

2007-07-25T10:41:00.001-05:00

I have to work on my last sermon. I'm kind of stalled, at the moment, with a lot of notes but no cohesive theme. The Lord will provide. But I am really not in the mood. (That's the last time I link to the field ed blog; only a few days remain!)

from st cyprian

2007-07-24T14:05:00.000-05:00

In a treatise on the Lord's Prayer:

New-created and newborn of the Spirit by the mercy of God, let us imitate what we shall one day be. Since in the kingdom we shall possess day alone, without intervention of night, let us so watch in the night as if in the daylight. Since we are to pray and give thanks to God for ever, let us not cease in this life also to pray and give thanks.

mediocrity

2007-07-24T09:20:00.000-05:00

Ack! I have a lot of work to do. But here's a link to a nice little piece by Mark Shea about converts to the Roman Catholic Church. I'll quote a bit:

So though I have been appalled by some of the sins that have been revealed in the ranks of the Church in the past few years, I've never been shocked. What did I expect? They're just sinners like I am, and I know what I'm capable of. In the same way, dreadful liturgical music, suburban "Church of Aren't We Fabulous" smugness, Our Lady of Pizza Hut architecture, and "True Meaning of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes is Caring and Sharing" homilies, and the other stuff that sometimes ails the Church has never turned me away. For averageness is just a reminder that the Church, thank God, has room for mediocre folk like myself.

h/t Sacramentum Vitae.

tis a mystery

2007-07-24T09:05:00.001-05:00

Why, oh why, can I read 750 pages of Harry Potter in little more than a day, when I cannot seem to read 250 pages of philosophy in a whole summer?

how things work in my head

2007-07-23T13:29:00.000-05:00

I guess I'm not normally the sort to start quoting song lyrics. (One, because I inevitably find all musical tastes embarrassing--it is unintelligible to me when people ask "what kind of music do you like" as if that says something interesting about you; two, because, let's face it, most lyrics, even some from pretty good songs, are banal, and quoting them makes you look like an idiot--or in the case of the example to follow, a weepy idiot; and three, because music is ridiculously personal and ridiculously meaningful in a way that by definition words cannot describe.) Anyhow, I had my iPod on shuffle in the car, and it played the Bright Eyes song, "Nothing Gets Crossed Out." I like Bright Eyes well enough in small doses, and I like the opening lyrics:

Well the future's got me worried
Such awful thoughts
My head's a carousel of pictures
The spinning never stops
I just want someone to walk in front
And I'll follow the leader

Cut out any emphasis on "awful" and you've got a pretty accurate description.

potter, etc.

2007-07-23T10:18:00.000-05:00

I'm done with The Deathly Hallows. No spoilers here--at least not for a while. I thought it was great. I have heightened appreciation for the whole series now that the story is finished.

I love BabyBlue's occasional comparisons between Harry Potter and the Anglican situation, e.g. here and here (at the end). And while none of us wish to tarnish Harry Potter with too close a comparison (i.e., some kind of ridiculous allegorical reading), the comparisons are often apt.

weird

2007-07-21T16:23:00.001-05:00

So it occurred to me -- for those of you who actually see this page and not the feed -- to change the description at the top. It has bothered me for a while that my little joke referencing 2 Esdras did not really work because while it is part of the Apocrypha (broadly) it is not "deuterocanonical." (I suppose when I first wrote that description three years or so ago I got a kind of giddy pleasure from just using the word.)

I have left the little quote -- for the moment. I am not actually sure where it is from. I ran a search and was shocked and dismayed to discover that, among various pages of quotations, it was also the descriptive line accompanying another blog by a person named Sam (or so I guess; I haven't the energy to really investigate).

Let this example confirm what most of you probably know: most of this is cant anyway. With that in mind I'm off to read some Deathly Hallows.

ann holmes redding and pi patel

2007-07-20T12:53:00.000-05:00

In the last few weeks there has been a lot of buzz both in the Anglican blogosphere and in general religion news about an Episcopal priest who has converted to Islam while claiming to retain her orders (and her faith) in the Episcopal Church. I am not particularly surprised by this development; a Church which can support the likes of John Shelby Spong can hardly claim to care much for what her clergy do or think.

Anyway, I am not going to repeat here all the well-played explanations of why Islam and Christianity are ultimately incompatible. Rather I want to think about this situation as an illustration of what conversion means in our era. I have a quote over on the left column here from Yann Martel's Life of Pi (in which the main character claims to be Hindu, Muslim and Christian). I hope that no one thinks that because I appreciate the quote I sympathize with a move like Ms. Redding's. I don't. But I find the literary comparison irresistible.

Let me first quote (extensively) from a paper I wrote sometime in 2004 on Life of Pi and V.Y. Mudimbe's Between Tides.

***

In Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Pi Patel describes his successive conversions to Christianity and to Islam. They are hardly conversions, for he never turns around; he treats them as logical steps along the same path. When he initially becomes a Christian, he does not give up Hinduism, and when he becomes a Muslim he continues to consider himself both a devout Hindu and a devout Christian. When a Catholic priest, a Muslim imam, and a Hindu pandit happen upon Pi all at the same time, they confront him with what they see as a necessary choice: “‘Mr. Patel, Piscine’s piety is admirable. In these troubled times it’s good to see a boy so keen on God. We all agree on that.’ The imam and the priest nodded. ‘But he can’t be a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim. It’s impossible. He must choose’” (69). Pi answers, “Bapu Gandhi said, ‘All religions are true.’ I just want to love God” (69). Pi’s father then smooths over the situation by offering ice cream to the three “wise men.”

Notably the priest, pandit and imam all agree that they must inevitably disagree; Pi seeks to avoid their insistence on choice by what his father interprets as a transcendent statement: “I suppose that’s what we’re all trying to do—love God” (69). Pi’s narrative undermines the validity of the father’s statement because Pi’s father is most notably not trying to love God—he was “as secular as ice cream” (65). Pi and Mr. Patel’s use of “God” in this scene parodies the way that he and others in the story—such as Mr. Kumar the Communist—view religion, as a superstition which somehow hides deeper, perhaps more disturbing realities; in this way “God” provides an escape from any actual discussion about God. The scene reflects Pi’s dissatisfaction with irresolution. Previously he writes, “But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation” (28). The end of the scene with the three wise men serves as a kind of leap of faith; all the characters know that they have not resolved their problems, but they agree to believe a convenient fiction for the sake of progress.

I call it a fiction because in reality (within this fiction) Pi’s struggles with religion are far from over. The three holy men are not the only ones who disagree with the “all religions are true” line. This disagreement forces Pi to give up one of the most traditionally essential parts of religious life: community. He simply has none. He starts going to a different church, he does not stay after prayer meetings, he goes to temple during crowded times so that no one will notice him (71). Pi is left with an extraordinarily individual faith. And this kind of individualized belief seems the natural result of his actions; each time he converts, he truly thinks only of himself: as he says on the beach to the holy men and his family, it’s only about him and God. He does not seem to care that his brothers and sisters in faith are sorely troubled by his syncretism.

Viswanathan calls the right to individual belief “the remaining, indeed only visible form of religion in modernity” (240). She continues, “The chief challenge lies in protecting that right without reducing religious subjectivity to sentiment or affect” (240). Pi comes very close to this kind of reduction; his religious conversions base themselves not in religious conviction or revelation so much as in his sensual attraction to the religion’s rites:

I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one’s arrival to God, because of the whine of the reedy nadaswaram and the beating of the drums, because of the patter of bare feet against stone floors down dark corridors pierced by shafts of sunlight, because of the fragrance of incense, because of flames of arati lamps circling in the darkness, because of bhajans being sweetly sung, because of elephants standing around to bless, because of colourful murals telling colourful stories, because of foreheads carrying, variously signified, the same word—faith. I became loyal to these sense impressions even before I knew what they meant or what they were for. (47-8)

Similarly, Pi joins Christianity because he finds that Jesus’ humanity was “so compelling” (58). He becomes a Muslim because of his sensory attraction to its prayer rituals (62).
Yet I do not see Pi’s religious devotion as simply a product of sentiment; it is that, but the above passages demonstrate Pi’s insistence on connecting the transcendent with the material. It is significant that he knows and acknowledges this connection. If he were unwittingly drawn in by sense impressions, fooled by them to accept doctrine, one might question his authenticity; but Pi, to the extent that the sense impressions are seeking to lead him astray, knows that they are leading him astray, and goes anyway. He sees no problem with following exactly where one’s senses take one. He does not ever seem concerned with whether a religion is true; if he is, he assumes that it is true when he finds it good and beautiful. Religion’s truth, for him, never comes packaged as reason-based argument for transcendence; it is always steeped in materiality, in physical, personal experience.

This argument for transcendence found within the natural echoes Pierre’s convictions in Between Tides concerning the connectedness of religion with locality. Neither of these characters desire religion to become an abstract set of propositions. The primary difference between them, however, is the setting of the novel. Life of Pi finds itself firmly in an era of globalization. Pi grows up in Pondicherry, India, boards a Japanese cargo ship headed to Canada, floats around on a lifeboat in the Pacific with exotic animals, and finally lands in Mexico before moving to Toronto. While the nation-state is very much discussed in the novel—for example, Mr. Patel’s frustration with Mrs. Gandhi’s government and his desire for a “New India” (75, 78)—it is also clear that nations have become fluid. The Patels have little difficulty deciding to leave one nation and join another. The remnants of colonialism are around—such as the Petit Séminaire where Pi goes to school—but they are not considered as such. There is no overt concern with before/after colonialism. This stands in contrast to Between Tides, where the before/after question persists; most of Pierre’s meditations and questions stem from the constant tension between European and African ideas.
Globalization in Life of Pi seems to mean the end of these tensions. As Pi’s family departs India, he realizes that his mother is taking their move the hardest. The father is ready to go, seeing only economic prospects ahead, but the mother hesitates:

She looked beautiful. And sad. For she was leaving India, India of the heat and monsoons, of rice fields and the Cauvery River, of coastlines and stone temples, of bullock carts and colourful trucks, of friends and known shopkeepers, of Nehru Street and Goubert Salai, of this and that, India so familiar to her and loved by her. While her men—I fancied myself one already, though I was only sixteen—were in a hurry to get going, were Winnipeggers at heart already, she lingered.

The day before our departure she pointed at a cigarette wallah and earnestly asked, “Should we get a pack or two?”

Father replied, “They have tobacco in Canada. And why do you want to buy cigarettes? We don’t smoke.”

Yes, they have tobacco in Canada—but do they have Gold Flake cigarettes? Do they have Arun ice cream? Are the bicycles Heroes? Are the televisions Onidas? Are the cars Ambassadors? Are the bookshops Higginbothams’? Such, I suspect, were the questions that swirled in Mother’s mind as she contemplated buying cigarettes. (90-1)

Pi’s mother realizes more than anyone else the significance of locality. She seems to understand intuitively Appadurai’s assertion that locality does not make itself. This scene dramatically shows globalization’s fight with locality: everything is available elsewhere, so why get it here? In fact, why do anything here when location ceases to matter? What passes for Mrs. Patel’s motherly nostalgia is really the understanding that she is leaving everything she knows. The tobacco in Canada is not the same. Nothing will be the same. India, indeed, is not Canada. Her thoughts are profoundly contrary to globalization’s drive to commonality. She does not seem to view Canada as being bad, but she understands that to deny its difference is to deny its potential goodness.

With Mrs. Patel’s questions in mind, do Pi’s conversion experiences truly account for the differences between his three religions? It strikes me that his experience with religion resembles his father’s experience of locality; Bapu Gandhi said, “All religions are true,” just as Bapu Patel says, “All tobaccos are one.” But the above passage demonstrates that they are not; saying they are the same reduces them somehow, makes them something they are not. There is no good in an abstracted, universal tobacco, just as there is no good in abstracted, universal religion.

***

I suppose my point here, in quoting this lengthy bit, is to say that when Ann Holmes Redding claims to be both a Christian and a Muslim, the problem is not that the two religions are contradictory (though they are). That assertion capitulates to the modernist reading of religion as one objective category among many amidst the "social."

The problem is ecclesial--communal. Marrying two people is not wrong because your marriage vows would be contradictory; it is wrong because it denies the humanity of the other; it makes not a relationship but a tyranny, in which one party asserts complete moral autonomy and primacy over the other. You cannot marry someone on your terms alone.

Similarly, the universalizing tendency denies the particularity of each faith. "God" becomes the goal rather than Jesus. This is like going around claiming that you have this wonderful father, whom you are very close to, but whose name you can never say. What good is having a father, a mother, a friend, a spouse, who is just a category and not a person? In the passage I quote above Pi goes on and on about the specific attractions of each religion. But then he undermines these attractions by saying that they are all the same. Imagine a husband giving a wonderful, sensual list of praises for his wife. Then he says, "But really the important thing is just that I have a wife; they are all the same in the end."

That is no way to handle any relationship, much less our relationship with (as a lovely old parishioner said to me the other day), "the one who made all this."

the old missal is more jewish than the new

2007-07-17T10:27:00.000-05:00

In partial response to some of the loud criticism of the pope's liberalization of the missal of 1962, Nicholas Frankovich has this excellent article in First Things.

jeepers! what will the bishop do next?

2007-07-16T12:08:00.000-05:00

I was amused to read BabyBlue's commentary on a letter sent out last week from +Peter Lee to the CANA priests in Virginia. And I agree that it is pretty creepy. That doesn't mean I think that CANA/AMiA were good ideas (in fact I still think they were terrible ideas), but I am not sure what these bishops think they are really doing besides clutching at property and some weird kind of American pride. Though the good bishop hasn't yet tried to claim that these priests' orders are "null and void," one gets the sense that he'd relish doing so, probably with a resolution of blessing from the Executive Council (which so longs to see those damned pestering conservatives get their comeuppance).

How, I keep wondering, does such a person (apparently a liberal Baptist at heart) get it into his head to so ruthlessly enforce the hierarchy which he has ignored in every other instance (particularly if it stretches beyond national borders)? If it is so blissfully virtuous for The Episcopal Church to be independent from her family (a.k.a. crypto-Papist "foreign prelates"), if in fact independence is the highest value--then why doesn't he praise the ingenious, revolutionary (radical, freedom-loving, etc. etc.) character of those churches which have thrown off the yoke of his self-contradictory episcopal power?

It's the sort of unintelligible broad-church nonsense that makes me want to flee to the hills (overlooking the Tiber) and pray in Latin.

dinner tonight

2007-07-13T00:23:00.000-05:00

I haven't made a food post in a while, but why not now? Tonight I made these tartlets, which were delicious. I also roasted a really big red snapper with fennel, which turned out well. And then I made--forgive me if it is not exactly a summer dish--coq au vin. I've made boeuf bourgignon many a time, but never coq au vin, which is somewhat similar, but made with chicken (ideally capon, but chicken does fine). I used the recipe in the Dean & Deluca cookbook, which was relatively straightforward, and probably a little quicker than the classic one. I like it because it's a nice, delicious red-wine stew-type dish that uses chicken (which, while, especially if you get it from Whole Foods, still isn't cheap, is cheaper than beef). For dessert we had a fresh peach pie on a cream-cheese crust (Sara Foster recipe). I'll post pictures if I get them (I didn't take any but I think Meredith did).

no need for an excuse, really

2007-07-10T13:25:00.000-05:00

In honor of Clerihew day.

This one is simply because I am still happy to have read The Baroque Cycle:

Daniel Waterhouse
Attempted to douse
The London fire
With a philosophickal choir.

They say that I
Make a decent pie
But have some trouble
Singing treble.

These said lingua dimidia in bucula:

Duke Divinity
Has a definite affinity
For abandoning Tradition
On behalf of personal volition.

The Anglican Church
Makes theological research
By supplying its vicars
With plenty of liquors.

Old news, but see here:

Chuck Norris
Said, “I abhor this,”
When young Hungarians in Budapest
Entered his name in a bridge-naming contest.

sermon for RCL proper 9C

2007-07-08T15:40:00.000-05:00

preached July 8, 2007, at Shiloh UMC in Lexington, NC, at a service of the Word with Holy Baptism

2 Kings 5:1-14
Galatians 6:1-16
(Luke 10:1-11, 16-20)

He came by water and by blood
to heal our lost condition;
he cleanses, reconciles to God,
and gives the Great Commission.
Then let us not heed worldly lies
nor rest upon our merit,
but trust in Christ who will baptize
with water and the Spirit
that we may life inherit. (The Hymnal 1982, 139)

Martin Luther’s hymn from another century reminds us of what happens at baptism. In baptism God marks us with water and the Spirit as his own so that we will have life. What a wonderful thing we have seen this morning! As part of the baptized People of God our new brothers have been “clothed with Christ”—which is precisely what it means to be “christened,” to be made a Christian. The heavens have opened, and in the presence of these new heirs of God we perceive a little more clearly his Kingdom because we can see Christ in them.

This baptism, this “christening,” is not something that we can do for ourselves. Nor is it even the minister who does it. Matt baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit because it is the baptism of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, not the baptism of Matt, the baptism of Shiloh, or even the baptism of the United Methodist Church. It is God’s baptism: the water sanctified by his Word.

Martin Luther says, “Note well...that baptism is water with the Word of God, not water and my faith. My faith does not make the baptism, but rather receives the baptism, no matter whether the person being baptized believes or not; for baptism is not dependent upon my faith but upon God’s Word” (Martin Luther, “Sermons on the Catechism” in John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings [New York: Doubleday, 1962], 232). And, as the prophet Isaiah tells us, the word does not return empty, but “it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isa 55:11).

“Now wait a minute,” I hear a voice somewhere in the congregation say. “I like baptism as much as the next guy, but is it really such a big deal, especially for an infant? I mean, isn’t it just a temporary thing until the child grows up and is able to understand?”

Let’s think for a moment about our Old Testament lesson for today. Did Naaman understand exactly how God was cleansing him when he took seven dips into the Jordan River? Somehow I doubt it. He was pretty angry going into it. Why couldn’t God’s prophet simply come out and “wave his hand over the spot and cure the leprosy”? That would be a lot easier.

It turns out God wasn’t looking for Naaman’s comprehension, but his obedience. God certainly could have healed him some other way, but God chose to use water.

The fact is, God’s healing—and more significantly, God’s adoption—is never ours to choose. We simply receive it. To those who question how infants—not comprehending it—can receive the benefit of baptism, John Wesley retorts, “Neither can we comprehend how it is wrought in a person of riper years" (John Wesley, Sermon 45, “The New Birth” IV.2, Sermons on Several Occasions). Wesley is right: while I hope many of us are in a position to know something more about our salvation than an infant, none of us has the ability to give an exhaustive account of the work of the Spirit. Scripture confirms this, telling us in Philippians 2:12 that we should be “working out our salvation with fear and trembling.”

As modern Christians we have convinced ourselves that we need to understand everything. We think that it is important to understand “what we are getting into” when we are baptized, when we are married, when we have children.

We think we need to know what we are doing because, quite simply, we believe that it is all about us. We think that we become Christians so that we can be saved—or maybe so that we can be better people. And while we are saved, that is hardly the point of the Gospel. When Jesus sends his disciples to preach the good news it is never to say, “Come follow Jesus so that you can be fulfilled as a person!” Rather, the message is blunt: “The Kingdom of God is at hand.”

Of course, this message about the Kingdom has personal implications, and that is where we can start talking about baptism and about understanding the way that each of us is by baptism “buried with Christ in death and raised to walk in newness of life.” This moment in which we join the Kingdom is not simply something that happens in our head: we do not “walk in newness of life” in our sleep. The water is not “just a symbol”—or at least that is not a very helpful way of talking about it. God gives us this sacrament—this physical sign—because we are not simply minds floating around. We have bodies, bodies that God will glorify one day because in baptism we become one with Christ. That is the hope that we have just expressed in the words of the Apostles’ Creed when we said that we believe "in the resurrection of the body."

But let us not focus on this individual work of grace so much that we forget the words that we have just said, for they are much more about us as the whole assembly of God than they are about the individuals being baptized.

We have affirmed that we worship the true God. Not just any God, but the God who is Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We have acknowledged that we are formed by the life, death, resurrection and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ. And in doing so we have said that we are part of something that is much larger than we could ever understand—much more than a decision that happens in our head—for belief in the Holy Spirit follows with the belief that the Holy Spirit is active in this world, in the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Today God has marked these children, and blessed these new members, as actors in this story. But today we have also remembered that we are all part of it; that though we are many, we are united in “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5). And as members of Christ’s church we have made certain promises.

First, we have promised to “order our lives after the example of Christ.” This commitment to holiness includes the earlier commitment to turn from sin. We are no longer our own, but Christ’s. This transformation in turn leads to our ability to confirm and strengthen others in the faith—in particular these children.

Let’s think about it this way: We are all parents. As one of my professors says, “Biology does not make parents in the church. Baptism does" (Stanley Hauerwas, “Abortion, Theologically Understood” in The Hauerwas Reader, John Berkman and Michael Cartwright, eds. [Durham: Duke UP, 2001], 612). Baptism makes us all parents and gives us the duty to introduce children to the Gospel. And remember: this Gospel of Christ is not fundamentally about salvation—though it definitely includes that—but about new creation, as our reading from Galatians this morning suggests. Our duty as parents is to form children as the holy people of God.

The second promise I want to point out is our promise to uphold the church “by our prayers, our presence, our gifts, and our service.” How do we do this? Hopefully we know what prayer is, and if not we can eventually learn. And we each bring different gifts to serve the community. But what exactly is our presence? It sounds like the easiest promise of all, yet I think for us it is the hardest.

Let me give you an example. When I was teaching in Budapest I would walk into the language teachers’ office every morning and go straight to my desk. Usually I would say hi to people, but I wasn’t looking for a conversation. I had work to do, after all. One day a colleague, Ildi, asked if I was mad at her or something. I was confused, and I said, “No, did I do something that made you think so?” It turned out that I hadn’t said hello to her when I walked in that morning. Now, part of this is a Hungarian custom of taking hellos and goodbyes very seriously. But part of it too was that Ildi didn’t understand how I could be in the same room with someone and--not be. I was there, but so often I offered nothing that was distinctively human.

It’s so easy to do this in church, so easy that we notice when people are really, unquestionably present. Last year I took a series of classes in order to join a local church in Chapel Hill. During the final class we had a kind of evaluation in which most members said that they had enjoyed the experience, learned a lot, etc. But then we get to this one woman who says, “You know, that Nicene Creed thing, I just don’t get it. I have a lot of doubts about believing in something that people wrote in the 4th century.” Her doubt was encouraging—not because doubt is good, but because her comment meant that she expected us to be the kind of people who could deal with doubt.

How can we even begin to live together if we are unwilling to be truly present to one another, to really share our joys, struggles, doubts and beliefs? I’m not saying that to be truly present we have to wear our hearts on our sleeves. But many times we keep things to ourselves because we do not want to be vulnerable. We want to make sure we appear strong and independent.

Did you listen to the reading from Galatians? “If anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.”

Now, I’m aware of how this passage tends to sound. We really don’t like it much, because it means that in the church there is no such thing as “my private life.” As Americans we place great value on privacy, and so there are a lot of things that the church is just not supposed to talk about. We think, who is the church to tell me what I should do with my money, with my family, or with my own body? And we say this because our culture has told us that independence is the greatest value.

How easily we forget our baptism. Brothers and sisters, independence is not a Christian virtue. We do not belong to ourselves; having been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit we belong to God; and because we are one in the Body of Christ we belong to one another. Again I quote my professor, “We must learn to confess that, as a hospitable people, we need one another because we are dependent on one another. The last thing the church wants is a bunch of autonomous, free individuals. We want people who know how to express authentic need, because that creates community" (Hauerwas, Reader, 612).

“Bear one another’s burdens,” writes Paul, “for in this way you fulfill the law of Christ.” And here, friends, is how Christian mutual dependence is very different from simply prying into one another’s business. It is never simply a matter of looking at my brother and telling him that he is wrong—for as his brother I share in his mistakes. Rather it is to help him bear his burden so that we may together order our lives after Christ. So while the church can indeed—and should—tell you what to do with your body, with your income, with your gifts, the church should never just tell you but bear these burdens with you.

Thus it is incomplete for the church to tell a member not to have an abortion if the church is not willing to raise the child; nor can we tell a member that they should not work for an unethical company unless we do everything in our power to support him. I’m sure that you can think of countless examples. We will never see what it means to be a Body until we treat every marriage and every child, but also every divorce, sickness, addiction, unemployment—the list goes on—not as his or hers or theirs or mine but ours. The church’s mission is not to make moral pronouncements but to be the people of God. Just as this water is a physical sign—a sacrament—of an individual work of redemption, so are we the assembled people of God the sacrament of the Kingdom for the world. That is not something that any of us can do on our own.

****

In our reading from Galatians Paul writes, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!”

As the Church we are God’s new creation, from water and the word. Remember the promises that you have made today. Remember that we are all parents, and that we are all responsible for one another. Be present to one another, so that you will know how to bear one another’s burdens. And know, when this task seems difficult, that you are part of a story that is much larger than us, and that depends neither on our knowledge nor our ability, but on the Lord. Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.

at last!

2007-07-08T14:26:00.000-05:00

Almost three years and 2700 pages after starting, I finally finished Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Talk about relief, and a sense of literary pride. I'm not sure why it took so long; it probably has something to do with my tendency to read way too many things at once, coupled with some rather dense chapters which caused me to put down the books for months at a time.

These were great books, and certainly unique. History, science, alchemy, politics, 18th century diction: how can you go wrong?

motu what?

2007-07-07T07:33:00.000-05:00

If you're unaware, today is a big day for traditional Catholics: Benedict XVI has finally released his motu proprio (read it here in Latin, and the pope's pastoral letter here in English) that allows the expanded use of the Tridentine mass. Many people have been longing for this move for years.

I think this priest has some good comments about what this decree does and doesn't mean. We are not, unfortunately, going to start seeing Tridentine masses right and left. Probably most of the RC parishes that have crappy liturgies will still have crappy liturgies. That said, if I have the opportunity to go to a Tridentine mass anytime soon, I'm there!

What could this mean for all the Protestants out there? It's a question worth asking, given how much Vatican II has influenced 20th century liturgical reform in practically every Western church (even the Methodists!).

did I say hamburgers, homemade ice cream and fireworks?

2007-07-04T21:52:00.001-05:00

Score: 3/3.

the fourth

2007-07-04T09:22:00.000-05:00

There are few days, I think, that American Christians are so prone to idolatry as today. My idolatry, however, probably takes the form of a more egotistical critique of this patriotic idolatry, as well as through the narcissistic nostalgia provided by blog archives.

So far (and we have only just begun), this is a pretty good Independence Day. I don't feel weird about being here. It's a beautiful day, and I have been in the country long enough to be able to view the festivities with a higher degree of affection than of confusion.

It is nostalgic, for other reasons: the last two fourths of July I was somewhere in the process of leaving Europe to come back here. Apparently upon arrival, both of those instances, I was compelled to make lists: 2005, 2006 (here too).

Anyway, happy Independence Day! I hope you get lots of hamburgers, homemade ice cream, and fireworks. I will spend a little time this morning working on Sunday's sermon, but later I will join some people from church for some kind of party.

+durham on heaven and hell

2007-07-01T19:14:00.000-05:00

I love the short little pieces that N.T. Wright has been doing in the Post's On Faith series. Here's the latest, which is one of the most concise answers I have seen to the hype (certainly present out here in Metho-Baptist land) about "where you will go when you die." Of course, the question isn't completely incoherent, but as the good Bishop argues, it often assumes faulty, unbiblical definitions.

(Just don't read the comment section, unless you have a lot of time and feel like getting annoyed.)

councils may err, but probably less than conventions

2007-06-30T18:46:00.001-05:00

Phew! You disappear to the Piedmont for the summer and look what happens: the Anglicans continue variously arguing, despairing, expressing outrage, and suing each other like nobody's business. Where to start?

The Anglican Church of Canada narrowly defeated a measure allowing local blessings of same-sex couples.
New bishops are popping up everywhere (interesting comments here).
The Diocese of Virginia expands its deliciously malevolent litigation and also makes clear that it will have nothing to do with a covenant, or else (commentary here).
Not precisely Anglican, except in its effects: Fr. Al Kimel stopped blogging at Pontifications, which is sad to a lot of people (myself included), who nonetheless can understand at least some of the pain he speaks of.
Unless something changes, several bishops will not attend Lambeth next year.
The Executive Council met with high priority towards obfuscating all signification, in the process of which it made a lot of noise (as usual) about polity, which is to say, a calculated discourse based on what the Chancellor dreamed up during his morning bath (see also here, here and here).

That's hardly all, but you get the point. I am really not sure who came up with the idea that one can innovate doctrine by vote. That may be the way civil authority works, but the Church is a different creature (or she is supposed to be). The Episcopal Church, while claiming to follow the Spirit, has actually calcified its practices by elevating personal feelings and Robert's Rules of Order (or, more specifically, this and this) over Holy Writ, episcopal authority, and the Deposit of the Faith. The structures in place are efficient means to administer the proximate ends of the Church (i.e., how will she pay the bills, and how will she work to pursue her received mission); but the simplifications of resolutions, pro and con speeches, and timed arguments are not the place for clarifying the very mission and meaning of the Church. For that, you need a real council.

For shame, I doubt that we will get one. We are far too happy with our bureaucracy--despite all the talk about being radical and progressive and whatnot. As I think Chesterton would say (I'm too tired to look up a quote), it is not the traditional Christians, but the "open-minded" ones who have made the Holy Spirit so very small that he can only fit into a little world framed by individualism and the abstract value of "freedom." The majority of creation--from the miracle of life in the womb to the salvation history of the church to the opinions of our brothers and sisters across the ocean--is all hands-off for the Spirit, who can only work in the social model that we propose here in 21st century America.

a shame

2007-06-28T13:37:00.000-05:00

Apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to take Bella Martha, a perfectly wonderful German film, and turn it into an atrocious American film called No Reservations. The preview is terrible (and reveals how they surgically removed everything that was charming about the original), so hopefully no one will see it. But if for some reason you are tempted, don't (for the sake of your eternal soul)! Why, why, why is it so difficult to understand that place is more than simply one part of a vast mathematical formula but the sine qua non of story?

not particularly feeling the office at the moment

2007-06-27T08:22:00.001-05:00

Who's annoyed to have a birth-day in the middle of the week in a town where he knows almost no one but his temporary pastoral charge? Not me. (Or, he says, he'll try not to worry about it, and proceed with the day's visitations.)

sermon for sunday, june 24, RCL 7C

2007-06-24T12:31:00.000-05:00

preached at Shiloh United Methodist Church in Lexington, NC

1 Kings 19:1-18
Galatians 3:23-29

One of the great lessons that I learned in high school was—and listen carefully, because this is deep—never call football players “bloated cockroaches,” especially not in a school newspaper that they can read. Of course, when I wrote those words in my monthly column, I was sure I was right. I had glimpsed a well-known truth—in the South, football is God—and, full of righteous indignation (and a certain amount of social jealousy), and convinced that the pen is mightier than, well, the pep rally, I wrote my prophetic judgment for all to see and soon found myself hiding in a corner as a protecting teacher told an angry mob that I was nowhere to be found.

Hiding is no fun. I confess I have little experience with it, but enough to give me some sense of how Elijah must have felt hiding from Jezebel’s wrath. In our text today, Elijah has just come from killing over 400 priests of Baal in one of the most dramatic showdowns in the Old Testament. And unlike in my personal example, here Elijah seems to have God on his side. The priests of Baal could do nothing to show the power of their god, but the God of Israel sent down fire from heaven, giving Elijah both the moral and military victory. But even after this great triumph, Israel is still in the hands of evil rulers—Ahab and Jezebel. It should have been a mortal blow, and yet afterwards Elijah has to flee to Beersheeba, which is as far as Elijah could possibly get from the grip of Jezebel.

Frustrated at his failure, and very lonely, Elijah makes a suicidal demand: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” No better than dead, that is. Or no more successful at reforming Israel to its true calling as the People of God.

Yet God does not seem to sympathize with Elijah’s pessimism. After feeding him and bringing him to a cave, the Lord asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Now, think with me for a minute about how silly this question is. You’re in the desert, you tell God you want to die, but he force-feeds you and leads you around for forty days until you get to Mt. Horeb, where you collapse in a cave, and then God has the gall to ask you, “What are you doing here?” Well, excuse me, I would have preferred to die, but you keep dragging me around aimlessly and asking ridiculous questions.

While God may have been asking a rhetorical question, Elijah takes it as an opportunity to remind God of just how awesome Elijah is and how tragic it is that people want to kill him. He has been zealous for the Lord while everybody else has abandoned the covenant.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that Elijah is right. Israel has abandoned the Lord, and Elijah has devoted his life to bringing Israel back. But in the scene that follows God suggests that this complaint—true as it may be—misses the point.

Elijah waits for the Lord to reveal himself, just as Moses waited, perhaps in this same place, amidst the cloud, the thunder and the glory. And Elijah likely expects such glory.

There is a mighty wind that splits mountains and breaks rocks. But God is not in the wind.

Then there is an earthquake, but God is not in the earthquake.

Then comes a fire, but God is not in the fire.

And finally there comes “the sound of sheer silence,” and Elijah “wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave,” for the Lord was present.

What are we to make of this silence? Clearly, if Elijah’s showdown with the priests of Baal is any example, God is sometimes present in fire, and the rest of the Scriptures are full of miraculous events, from the destruction of Jericho to the Red Sea crossing to the stopping of the sun. Indeed, in modern insurance parlance an “act of God” is a dramatic, unpredictable event that cannot help but be noticed.

By contrast, silence is easy to ignore. We’re not used to it. When was the last time silence made the evening news? Has a presidential hopeful staged a press conference only to whisper that he has nothing to say? When was the last time you actually heard silence? It’s probably easier to find it here in the rural South than it is in a lot of places, but do we recognize it as a divine gift? An answer to prayer? An example of God’s presence in the world?

Elijah must have hoped that God would reveal himself in a mighty way. The true faith—the good guys, as it were—appeared to be losing. God needed to protect his worship, otherwise the bad guys might win. But in our passage today God does no such thing. Rather, out of the silence he provides for the most mundane of things: the appointment of a new generation of leaders, including the king of Aram, who will eventually kill King Ahab. And it is under the prophetic ministry of Elijah’s successor, Elisha, that Jezebel will finally be defeated. Rather than the awesome drama of Elijah’s battle with the prophets of Baal, God will show his providence in the unspectacular and slow movement of history.

It would be tempting at this point—and not entirely wrong—to draw a moral to this story that goes something like this: “Just have patience, everything will work out in the end, even if it doesn’t look like it now.” But this sentiment makes too much of the immediate problem—Jezebel—and ignores the larger, even messier problems of Israel that are yet to come.

No—let us not use this passage as a way of telling ourselves that we will eventually get what we want, because that only reinforces the lie—and it is a lie—that we actually deserve something, that if we are suffering, if we have worked hard, if we have been through hell, God owes us an explanation. God owes us some sort of meaning that we can hold out against our experience of disease, of poverty, of death and defeat.

Elijah has done great things—risky things—for the Lord and yet still he appears to have failed. He cries out to the Lord for meaning, for justification of this failure. In fact for Elijah this gap between effort and result is so great that he cannot live in the failure. “Take away my life,” he says, “for I am no better than my ancestors.”

Elijah’s suicidal plea is his last attempt to protect what he sees as his possession—his life and ministry. He sees dying as a way to escape the horror of the desert that he is in—the dry, silent place that God seems to have abandoned.

But God is in the silence.

God is in the “sheer silence” after the roaring fire, and God is in the chaotic, meaningless silence of Elijah’s life.

As one of my favorite writers has said, “Only in silence, the word.” It is in this silence, this utter absence, when we know that we have absolutely no capability of making meaning for ourselves, that we understand that our very existence is gift. God does not owe us so much as the next breath, [pause ] and yet so often he gives it to us. God was not obliged to create the world, and yet he did.

You see, Elijah had no right to ask that his life be taken away, because it was never his in the first place. Elijah was concerned with protecting the integrity of his legacy. He wanted to be a hero, and if not that, a tragic hero. He wanted to make sure that the Lord’s side won.

But that was never Elijah’s burden to bear.

We are not so different from Elijah. We all want to be heroes. And our society has done a wonderful job of reinforcing that desire to be in the spotlight. We are even so concerned with democratic values that we want to make it clear that anybody can be a hero, anybody can be a leader—and you only have to look at the enormous number of “leadership development” programs, or one of the countless “reality” shows, to understand that most people think that they are.

And my point is not to say that these trends are entirely bad. I have my suspicions, but they are neither here nor there. The point is that God is not particularly interested in developing leaders or heroes, but in forming saints. God doesn’t want you to save the world—Christ has already done that. God wants you to be faithful.

A hero must succeed so that the story comes out right in the end.

I’m pretty good at seeing myself as the hero. I think: if only I could preach this awesome sermon then the folks at Shiloh would all become deep theologians who read Thomas Aquinas, who speak Greek and go forth to completely rid the world of ignorance.

Ok, you know how ridiculous that sounds, but is it any less pretentious to think: “I’m going to raise the perfect child” or “Without me, this community would never function?” or “I am going to lead this friend to Christ.” Or what about our heroic aspirations to self-improvement, the desire—and it is a good desire—to look at ourselves and say, “I will rid myself of all sin.”

“By contrast,” says one theologian, “the saint expects to fail. If the saint’s failures are honest ones, they merely highlight the wonder of God’s greater victory. If the saint’s failures are less admirable ones, they open out the cycle of repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration that is what Christians call a new creation” (Samuel Wells, Improvisation, 44).

Our New Testament lesson today reminds us of this new creation in Christ. In baptism we “clothe ourselves with Christ.” Other distinctions—rich or poor, slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female, old or young—are no longer meaningful in the Church, because in the Church God is speaking a new language to the world (see Wells, as above). It is not that all these distinctions cease—rather, they are not the primary way of determining who we are. We are who we are not because we have achieved some great and heroic victory, but because we have been baptized into Christ.

The world’s way of doing things—saving the day with fire, sword and storm—that has passed away. And instead we find ourselves in the presence of a God who, amidst the noise of our attempts to possess our lives, quietly enters the world from a Virgin’s womb.

***

I remember one of my first direct encounters with silence came at a prayer service in the crypt of a cathedral in Washington. I arrived late, and heard people singing this simple chant: O Poverty, Source of Riches: Jesus, Son of God, born in Bethlehem. I joined in, and I thought, well this is an interesting song. We repeated the chant over and over. O Poverty, Source of Riches: Jesus, Son of God, born in Bethlehem. O Poverty, Source of Riches: Jesus, Son of God, born in Bethlehem. O Poverty, Source of Riches: Jesus, Son of God, born in Bethlehem.

Come on! How long is this going to last? O Poverty, Source of Riches: Jesus, Son of God, born in Bethlehem. Again? O Poverty, Source of Riches: Jesus, Son of God, born in Bethlehem. After about fifteen minutes we stopped. And then there were twenty minutes of silence.

Now, many of you have probably noticed that I am a relatively quiet person, but I was not prepared for twenty minutes of silence. I’ve tried it again, and I never am. Keep in mind, we’re talking about a group of people sitting together and being silent together for an extended period of time. Now that takes discipline. And a certain amount of nerve.

What’s the point of silence? Why would anyone choose it? What is it for?

When we sit in silence we stop clutching, possessing, hoarding, guarding our lives. We acknowledge that the world does not depend on us, that God does not depend on us. That time will continue even if we stop counting it. That our relationship with God is not ours to control.

And we do like to control our relationships, to possess them. My best friend from college moved to France a few years ago to marry a French girl. Whenever I visit him I feel like there are so many stories to tell and so much information to convey because he needs to be up-to-date about me. But I keep having to learn that such information—important as it may be—is not the heart of a relationship. Especially in the middle of our busy lives it is so wonderful, so freeing, simply to sit quietly and enjoy each other’s company. I wish I had more friends like that.

The Lord of creation is a friend like that. His is the still, small voice that says, “Be still and know that I am God.” (Ps. 46)

And this same God—in the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—reverses everything that we knew about cause and effect.4 Like Elijah, we so often want to win. But the Gospel tells us that the only way to win is to lose—to die to self and become the Body of Christ. This failure is not the same thing as despair. When we despair we say that our failure matters more than anything. We say that we have the last word. But from the cross we see that the Resurrection trumps any failure we could possibly make.

**

Where does that leave us? While the incarnation and the crucifixion certainly remind us of how God works in surprising ways, the Resurrection does seem to bring us back into the territory of the dramatic action of God. Indeed on Good Friday the Gospels tell us that there was a loud sound, an earthquake, and darkness. And so we are back to Elijah’s expectation of divine intervention. Why, after the resurrection of the Son of God, should we not expect great things—the conversion of the masses, the healing of the sick, the explanation for our often difficult work in the Church?

Do not misunderstand me: I am confident that God does work in miraculous and obviously divine ways. And God will continue to do so. But we need to remember the fact of the empty tomb. In the oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark, that is how the story ends. And we need to remember the image of the empty hill where Christ left his disciples and ascended to heaven.

Those are in many ways images that define our life in the Church. There is a constant interplay between presence and absence, between the already and the not-yet of God’s Kingdom: the resurrected Christ is present in the bread and wine of this table, in the hands and feet that do his service here for the sake of the world; but we still find that people are hungry, sick and poor, and we still encounter sin in ourselves and in others.

But unlike the world’s heroes, we who are called the saints of God do not find these moments of silence, of lack, to be our failure; rather they are our triumph. While we long sometimes for the extravagant, the spectacular, the miraculous, the cross has told us that the silent and empty places in our lives are just as miraculous because there we are most aware of who we truly are, who we have become by baptism into the Body of Christ: the sons and daughters of a loving God.

As the Psalmist says,

O LORD, I am not proud;
I have no haughty looks.

I do not occupy myself with great matters,
Or with things that are too hard for me.

But I still my soul and make it quiet,
Like a child upon its mother’s breast;
My soul is quieted within me.

O Israel, wait upon the LORD,
From this time forth for evermore. (Psalm 131)

Let us pray.

O God of peace, who hast taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of thy Spirit lift us, we pray thee, to thy presence, where we may be still and know that thou art God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

incense

2007-06-23T11:46:00.000-05:00

Right, so while I and other newbie Anglicans/anglo-catholics/catholic-evangelicals (sorry, the descriptions keep coming) might warrant a "How they do go on about incense!" due to a certainly irrational but (one hopes) holy attraction to worship that actually involves the senses, there remain cogent reasons for such things. They are not justifications (for the love that demands evidence for the efficacy of a certain devotion may be a love that misses the point), yet they do offer a certain intellectual backdrop to what must seem, to many, an indulgent exercise in quasi-paganism. Read about such reasons here (first found here).

the schaeffers

2007-06-23T07:37:00.000-05:00

I was amused to discover this note from Rod Dreher about a new book by Frank Schaeffer, the late great Francis Schaeffer's son who had a notorious (in the evangelical world) and bitter departure from Calvinist evangelicalism and eventual reception into Orthodoxy. Honestly I doubt it's a book I'd read, though I'm sure it's interesting. Whatever Francis Schaeffer's flaws, L'Abri was and has been a really good thing, exactly what the name says ("shelter") for a lot of people. For the record, too, I got the impression when I was there about five years ago that many folks have moved beyond Schaeffer (but in the direction that he charted). And that is to say that while the tutors at L'Abri are unlikely to suggest that you read Thomas Aquinas (who, as I recall, for Francis Schaeffer somehow accomplished some dreadful move that led to the evils of postmodernity), they are probably much less likely to be Calvinist fundamentalists.

a favor

2007-06-22T14:54:00.001-05:00

If you're reading this, I should probably have you in my address book. Thing is, I just got a new computer and for whatever reason I haven't been able to import all my contacts--probably because I just didn't back them up like I did other things. So if you think I should have your email address, could you send me a quick message so that I can slowly rebuild? Either the Yahoo or the Duke one will be fine.

a trip, and an attempt at a pithy remark on friendship

2007-06-19T07:30:00.000-05:00

I know: long time no see, right? After last week (which I wrote something about here), I was ready to fly to sunny California (errr, not that it hasn't been sunny here) for a wedding. It was great fun--especially because I got to see a bunch of old friends from my Hungarian years: Erick, Neal, Danielle, Kevin, Soomi, and of course the happy mariés themselves. Although I have to say that after the festivities (most of) Saturday night, I was not in the best of shape to leave for the airport at 5 a.m. and travel across the continent. Bleh.

The best thing really was to remember that I have friends who are not clergy or almost-clergy. Once you're in this process, I see that it becomes more and more difficult to have plain old friends (whatever that means) who are neither your ecclesial colleagues nor your parishioners. And so those that remain from the before-time (how dramatic!) are to be treasured.

tanglewood, etc.

2007-06-11T15:09:00.000-05:00

I feel busy. Not in a bad way. But all of a sudden I have things to do. People are inviting me all over the place. It's nice.

Saturday I went with the people I'm staying with to the big North Carolina Wine Festival at Tanglewood Park close to Winston-Salem. Some folks in the family started the Weathervane Winery a few years ago, so I got to help out in the tent, moving boxes and sometimes pouring for visitors and explaining the selections for them. It was enormous fun. But it was a whole day of standing up in the heat, and I got home very tired.

This week is Vacation Bible School at the church, which means I'm up here every night. It's not hard, or even that tiring. The kids are really fun. I love being around them (yes I will risk sounding pretentious and say that they have such amazing joie de vivre).

mac and wine (updated)

2007-06-02T15:32:00.000-05:00

1. I am angry at my little iBook. It has served me well, but today it keeps randomly turning off. Will it stop, or will I be forced to take it to the Apple Store's Genius Bar to get advice? Tune in later...or don't. I suppose if something happens I'll be computerless, and blissfully free from blogdom.

Edited to add: The computer troubles continue. My poor little iBook. It's past all warranty coverage, and I fear that if repairs are necessary 'twould be more economical to find a new one. All hope is not not lost--perhaps there's something simple that will make everythng right. But I've used my iBook almost constantly for 3 years (that's a long time in computer years), traveling with it practically everywhere. It's had a good life. So anyway, all this is to say that I will take a break from blogging until this is resolved. Obviously I have computer access, but it's a bit more trouble. Besides, I need to get some non-electronic things done.

And furthermore: As of Tuesday, my iBook officially kicked the bucket. I could replace the logic board for around $300, but who wants to do that? That's a nice chunk towards a new one anyway. But in any case I'll have to wait until I get paid. If my first sermon is bad, I will blame it on the fact that I'm typing it on a Windows computer.

2. Yesterday Meredith and I went to several wineries: RayLen, Hanover Park, WestBend, and Flint Hill. With the exception of WestBend, they were marvelous. (WestBend is just a little too big and overpriced.) Hanover Park in particular was wonderful. I had no idea that North Carolina had such offerings. It's not like you're in the Rhône valley, but you could be fooled into thinking you're in Europe at moments. Yes, there are many wineries with the nasty Muscadine/Scuppernong sweetness, but there is also a delightful group of vintners who want to bring old world style to North Carolina, and they are doing a very good job in the Yadkin Valley (which is the closest thing that America seems to have to the highly regulated French A.O.C. system). Today I had lunch and hung out for a while at Childress, which is the new kid (but rich kid) on the block. They have some excellent wines, though the corporate Nascar-connection thing does scare me a bit.

where did my brain go? (or, why I remember what I remember)

2007-05-31T14:52:00.001-05:00

For some reason last night I spent some time looking through the more esoteric parts of my hard drive where I keep old essays, school assignments and writing.

While some of the papers I wrote in college make me blush, even sitting here alone, with embarrassment, others make me marvel at how dumb I've become. I mean, I didn't become a stunningly brilliant philosopher or critic, but at different points I had some very decent interaction with the likes of Plato, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Ariosto, Erasmus, Rousseau, Melville, Manzoni and Chaucer, not to mention the secondary and theoretical stuff from names I don't even want to remember (Appadurai? Who's that?).

Is it simply the quantity that makes my mind so muddy? I have absolutely no memory of reading Plato's Meno, even though I wrote something about it in Core class. Did that knowledge get shoved out when I read The Praise of Folly and Orlando Furioso? And did those move out when it was time to read postcolonial theory and write about V.Y. Mudimbe? Now it feels like I only have room for one thing at a time. I remember getting great enjoyment from reading Gregory of Nyssa, but unfortunately he had to make room for Teresa of Avila. A little sad, I think.

I do remember, I hope, the things that I spent the most time on. If I wrote a substantial paper (i.e., more than 10 pages) about something, I probably can still speak about it with some intelligence: Wolfe's Urth Cycle, Pullman's His Dark Materials, Le Guin's Earthsea books, Dracula, parts of The Canterbury Tales, City of God, Piers Plowman, Life of Pi, Between Tides, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It seems like a pitifully short list after 5 years of full-time higher education, though I bet it's relatively normal. Pedagogically, it says that I will remember very little of Church History 14, because I did not have to write any major papers. There's another factor, though: most of these longer assignments were matters of choice. I wrote about Dracula because I liked it. I took the City of God/Piers Plowman seminar because the idea excited me. But I wrote about Manzoni's The Betrothed because Givens said he would be impressed (and who wouldn't want to impress him?).

I don't know if this meditation will have a resolution. Was the relegation of my reading to oblivion accomplished by the dulling presence of television during my two years existing in Hungary? Did I subconsciously hold on only to those things that seemed communicable to my students? Did I have too much food and wine? Did I my liturgically reformed catholic sensibilities block out the years when I was more Protestant-minded?

It's a good thing that I have people to remind me of things:

Hauerwas: Have you read Augustine's Confessions?
Me: Yes, a few times. (He says, knowing full well the last couple were rushed.)
Hauerwas: Well read it again.

hymns are good

2007-05-30T15:37:00.000-05:00

If there's one thing to appreciate about the Methodists, it's their hymnal. Others have Charles Wesley hymns, of course. The first two stanzas of this famous one jumped out at me:

Come, O thou Traveler unknown,
whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
and I am left alone with thee;
with thee all night I mean to stay
and wrestle till the break of day.

I need not tell thee who I am,
my misery and sin declare;
thyself hast called me by my name,
look on thy hands and read it there.
But who, I ask thee, who art thou?
Tell me thy name, and tell me now.

oh so very lost

2007-05-24T10:16:00.001-05:00

Like Amy Wellborn, I have a million questions about Lost running through my head. Who was in the coffin? Who is the "he" that Kate needs to get back to? Who is Naomi? Where was Penelope and why does she have a direct connection with the underwater station? Will the next season go back and forth between the future and the end-story of the island? How many of the Others are still alive? And who the heck is Jacob? Where did Walt come from? Is Locke the new Ben?

This is a great show, but very frustrating. Like most, I'm glad we finally have an end date.

the vatican board game

2007-05-24T10:08:00.001-05:00

I am really amused by this. Has anyone tried it?

waaaa

2007-05-23T13:13:00.000-05:00

One of the marvelous things about my summer job is that I have less time to think about Anglican politics. People around here certainly don't care about it--they're rural Methodist folk who have many other things to think about. And that's healthy.

But I still have a computer, and I still have a sense of irony, so I'm getting quite a kick out of the reaction to this week's first Lambeth invitations. My first thoughts--as is normal, I fear, for these sorts of things--do not include the sort of gentle language that I wish to inhabit my blog. But I'll just say, humans are idiots.

Ruth Gledhill at the Times has an extensive roundup of bloggers and reactions. Bonnie Anderson, more pithily than I would have expected, says that the lack of invitation to Bishop Robinson "causes serious concern to The Episcopal Church." Ah bon? Who would have thought...? You mean...? Really?

Of particular absurdity were the reactions of Integrity and Marc Andrus (Bishop of California). Integrity, uttering its usual pontifications, suggests that +Cantuar has pluckily allied himself with the forces of evil incarnate, i.e., those bigots in Africa. (He's a witch! Burn him! Burn him! Canterbury has been polluted by associating with those unpleasant subhumans from the Global South! Cleanse this African savagery from the Communion as quickly as possible and return to proper civilization!)

Andrus actually makes a very good point: "If you touch one bishop of the Anglican Communion, you touch them all." Yes. He goes on to say, "The isolation and exile of Bishop Robinson rebukes the bright vision of the unity of the Church, and subsitutes the mechanism of the diabolic, the shattering of communion and integrity." That does not follow. The unity of the episcopate is precisely the point, precisely the reason that Robinson's consecration was an incendiary grenade thrown (with love and "deep longing" for unity!) from the American church to the Communion. How on earth can the American bishops expect anyone to take seriously their indignation at this action when they have looked at the indignation of the rest of the world with self-assured condescension.

The Lord help us. It's a long road to the end of September. And it would be nice for once to have a few bishops (on all sides) who acted like pastors and theologians rather than discontented schoolchildren-CEOs.

reminder

2007-05-21T13:39:00.000-05:00

I promise I'm not going to post here every time I post at the other place, but I just wanted to remind my few regular readers (according to the stats somebody reads this thing, he tells himself) that I will be more often posting here at the Divinity School's official Field Ed. blog.