January 31, 2006
Episcoup
Our diocese plans to elect a new bishop right soon. There’s been the usual search committee made up of worthies said to have considerable capacity for discernment.
Quite a few of them, however, are either members of or fellow travelers with one or more of the myriad of self-appointed groups whose current goal is to orthofix the church. Whenever we question just how those kinds of associations might affect their choices for our next leader, they lament, “just trust us.”
Well, they’ve recently announced proudly three of their candidates they’ve turned into nominees. They’re all, surprise, men. The sadness is that nobody seems to be asking about the spiritual maturity of these nominees nearly so much as about their church politics. At any rate, the answers are not all that reassuring.
Out in Minneapolis a few years ago, the church struggled like it does every three years to incarnate grace into resolutions and canon law. Scripture repeatedly suggests such an endeavor is a dead end and never works, of course, but it’s all we’ve got. We ain’t God, and God would be the first to remind us.
But we weren’t all that caught up in what would Jesus do about it so much as how would Jesus be about it. It got him crucified, of course. And it looks a lot like some of our colleagues are trying to return the favor. When those commissioned to episcope us episcoup us instead, there’s some considerable doubt about how much churching is going on.
January 30, 2006
Serendipity
It was like the best of times back in my naval aviation days when the instructor would taxi us up to the end of the runway, climb out of the plane, and say, “Okay, it’s time you took her up by yourself.” The other day I was sent on a rare solo mission to our green grocer’s. Being free like that, I wandered out of the usual meat-and-three and routine household aisles over into the display in the gourmet corner.
Whenever CP and I are in tandem at the market, which, as I’ve implied, is more often case, it’s usually less gourmet and more gourmet not. That is, we rarely, if ever, frequent this area, but it always tweaks my curiosity. Being thus more or less free, and also, like a good wannabe investigative journalist always looking for a story — with dreams of maybe a by-line — I simply couldn’t resist. The corner was dripping with serendipity, and I was not to be denied.
The first thing I discovered was more than enough to reward my enthusiasm. The Schmaltz Brewing Company of New York, keeping pace with this increasingly faith-based society, has come out with an appropriate lager: “He’Brew — The Chosen Beer.” The type in stock is “Messiah Bold — a rich and robust dark brown ale.” The label, not to lose a single messianic how-long stroke, continues, “It’s the beer you’ve been waiting for.” On the other side of the demo kiosk, one goes even further back in time to find “Genesis Ale.”
I have never enjoyed my seminary education quite so much since my first day in Bible 101 when we were asked to take out a sheet of paper and write the names of all the books in the Old Testament — in order. I could think of only five, and two of those were First and Second Corinthians. Seminary, not altogether unlike old Sisyphus’s saga, as you might imagine, was pretty much uphill from there on.
January 27, 2006
Deodar
Deodar’s a native Indian tree called “timber of the gods.” Ours is planted just out front of the library end of the kitchen at our house and at the head of the driveway whose steep few trucks have ever dared. Some time ago, it replaced a devilwood tree that was not satisfied with its reservations, got moved elsewhere, and promptly went on, as they say, to the great forest in the sky.
Not so, deodar. Starting at about ten feet, it’s now fourteen or so. Its prognosis claims a height of a hundred and fifty with a forty foot spread, but doesn’t bother to say when. Likely, its venue will not allow all that.
At any rate, it bears not the burdens of orthodoxy nor any anxiety about the Network and, like God, just be’s itself, glorifying in the highest. May it keep peace this weekend while we wannabe stewards wrestle with trying to incarnate grace into law at the annual diocesan convention, all the while knowing we really can’t.
January 27, 2006
Deodar
Deodar’s a native Indian tree called “timber of the gods.” Ours is planted just out front of the library end of the kitchen at our house and at the head of the driveway whose steep few trucks have ever dared. Some time ago, it replaced a devilwood tree that was not satisfied with its reservations, got moved elsewhere, and promptly went on, as they say, to the great forest in the sky.
Not so, deodar. Starting at about ten feet, it’s now fourteen or so. Its prognosis claims a height of a hundred and fifty with a forty foot spread, but doesn’t bother to say when. Likely, its venue will not allow all that.
At any rate, it bears not the burdens of orthodoxy nor any anxiety about the Network and, like God, just be’s itself, glorifying in the highest. May it keep peace this weekend while we wannabe stewards wrestle with trying to incarnate grace into law at the annual diocesan convention, all the while knowing we really can’t.
January 26, 2006
Walk
Epiphany 4B Mk 1.21-28
“And the people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes. And immediately there was… (in his audience) a man with an unclean spirit; and he cried out… ‘I know who you are…’”
There is a confounding ubiquity about spirit, a simultaneous and inclusive presence one simply cannot avoid, no matter where one turns or runs. Furthermore, one can never quite be sure whether that presence is good or bad, for spirit is inherently neutral, that is, until one engages it, embraces it, incarnates it. For it is then that the rubber meets the road.
One who has authority knows that reality intimately. For it is the very nature of authority to engage and elicit spirit, to inspire, and furthermore, to order it, shape it, and in the classic sense of the word, inform it. The daemons in Jesus’ world do us a great service, for they are often the first to know this about him. They already know it about us and in our blindness, frequently have their way with us. But they’ve met their match in Jesus — and ultimately in all those who truly serve God.
This marvelous little story in the early verses of Mark’s gospel illustrates his urgency in telling the Jesus saga by starting right off with the truly critical effect of Jesus’ presence. There’s no beating about the bushes here, and the rest is, in its way, downhill in the rush to climax.
The people in the synagogue are almost instantly “astonished at his teaching… (with) authority,” but they are only “amazed” and driven to murmuring among themselves. Whereas the “man with the unclean spirit” who was also there at worship (remember C S Lewis’s Wormwood at busy work in church in The Screwtape Letters?) knew instantly in abject fear of who confronted him and, I should hope, to his relief at the demise of his possessors.
Authority meets and elicits, draws forth the spirits of those it would lead and incorporates them in accomplishing their goals. Power commands, power overrides our spirit with its own. One need but recall the World War II leadership of a Churchill or a Roosevelt to discover a brilliant illustration of authority. And then to lay it over and against the dictators of the Axis to find the momentary clash and destructive results of authority when construed as power.
Authority reaches out of its own spirit into our spirits and enjoins us to its cause. Power manipulates our spirits and cripples them. One remembers the story of the lame man, lying by a pool at the Sheep Gate for decades waiting for someone to take him to the waters to be healed. When Jesus saw him there, he simply asked the man the obvious question, “Do you want to be healed?” (If so, then) “Rise, take up your pallet and walk” (Jn 5.1-9). Jesus met the man’s will, the weakened implement of his lagging spirit, and the man stood and walked.
Some confuse authority with power and construe teaching with manipulation. Authority, we often hear — and rightly so — is truly the critical turning point in the church’s current demise within itself. And strangely, the critics of the Episcopal Church’s use of its own ordered political authority, turn inevitably to the use of power and chastisement in their frustrated confusion over their own. It is no easy task to incorporate grace and justice into law. And yet that’s what any creative legal system must attempt. It is true of our American Constitution and its call for balancing powers to achieve authority. It is true of the way the church strives to be faithful to its commandment to love and to its commission to baptize and enlist disciples. It is true of any attempt to order holiness.
We are spiritual beings by virtue of God’s creating us. How we enlist that spirit determines the ultimate effect of our humanity. The daemons know that, for they are pure spirit, lurking to be incarnate in us, to move Jesus aside. Jesus simply asks us if we want to be healed, if we want to walk. Then he says simply, his words enriching our spirits, “Then get a life — and walk.”
January 25, 2006
Faithiness
“Truthiness,” says a panel of linguists, is the neologism that best reflects 2005 in general. They define it as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than simply stating the facts.
Not to be left behind and to keep the church altogether relevant, we Anglicans have come up with “faithiness,” our own new 2005 word that means the quality of stating concepts one wishes were so but aren’t. Faithiness might be taken to mean faithy, but not necessarily faithful. Furthermore, we went to great length and expense in what we’ve called the Windsor Report (a so very quaintly and appropriately British name) to do this.
Now one needn’t anticipate actually to find the word in the Report or go searching for it. It’s only there by the kind of subtle nuance and implied clarity so very typical of Anglicanism. But we do expect the word to catch on anyhow and perhaps even be a way of avoiding — for those with any sense of irony at all — the severe kind of confrontation so common to all those Reformation sects who took themselves so seriously as to overlook what they might first have looked over had they been more attentive.
January 24, 2006
Quirk
I recently called up my old friend and mentor, the Revd Canon Father P D Quirk, D D, whose predicates are longer than his name, for his opinion about prayer and whether our kind of country really needs a law so people can talk to God.
He said why ask him, that he was retired and didn’t pray as much as he used to, but that it was not because he no longer gets paid for it, even though the money was never all that great, and even though prayer had been more or less his major line of work.
I said that’s why I called him, having been in the same pursuit, myself. Actually, I was feeling ambivalent about hoping people might pray more than they seem to and was also wondering whether making them do it might not be somewhat counterproductive, so I wanted to know what did he think.
He chortled some and asked whether I’d heard that the Primates now making a case about whether we might be heathens or not have almost 95% of the same DNA as the rest of us. For him, a primate is a primate is a primate. He makes no distinction.
And come to think of it, I guess he’ll do almost anything to avoid talking about prayer for fear the conversation will get around to the subject of centering prayer. I’m not sure why, its being so in vogue and all, but I suspect it may be, as we’ve wondered here before, just that he’s altogether too eccentric.
January 23, 2006
Pretense
John “Honest to God” Robinson, the British bishop who brought such fresh air into the church in the 1960s, often said that the pulpit is too much already six feet above contradiction. These words come back today as we remember Bishop Phillips Brooks, one of the church’s outstanding preachers for whom pretense was poison.
Would that it were so for more in these times. Servant leadership, both in church and state, seems a thing of the past. Episcopal arrogance and the clones such posture raises up in the presbytery approaches pandemic stages altogether contrary to our Anglican collegial heritage. The notion of a presidency immune from the checks and balances so wisely built into our constitutional government must be debated in the Senate judiciary committee in the fear that it infect our whole system.
Brooks was said to be a moderate churchman, not given to puffery. A probably apocalyptic, but no less real story is told of an occasion when he was to speak at a parish fund raiser in one of his more “high-church” congregations. He arrived in the rector’s study attired in a dark suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. The rector lamented, “Bishop, I’d so hoped you’d wear your clericals on this occasion.” “By all means,” the bishop said. Then, opening his brief case and taking out a black tie, he promptly re-vested.
January 21, 2006
Packing
CP got us a handheld cordless vacuum for Christmas. She said the easier and better to keep books clean and asthma under control. We haven’t tried it out yet. The box it came in was so attractively well-designed and seem to fit so well, that we were altogether reluctant to dismantle it.
If the cleaner inside works as well as its container, we wondered, then we probably wouldn’t have to worry about the usual planned obsolescence that fills our junkyards with old cars and plastic. I regret to tell you, however, that we did unpack it, not without some considerable effort, but we’ve not hooked it up and charged it out of respect for any possible letdown we might have to face.
We churchers often come across as terribly well-designed and boxed in with our neat liturgy and vestmental puffery and all. The experience for a newbie trying to figure out as to what might be all covered up inside us probably can be as off-putting as enticing. It’s when they finally get in and find all this “did-so, did-not” foolishness currently going on that the whole thing may not look so good, after all.
Maybe that old Anglican Divine Richard Hooker himself had some planned obsolescence in mind. The way we’ve banged that three-legged stool around, he surely didn’t expect it to last forever.
January 20, 2006
Doves
Canon Edward West of St John Divine, New York, once commenting on the rather ragtag state of the clergy, said, What else can you expect considering we only have the laity from which to choose. That didn’t go over so big since his comment was made at an annual diocesan laymen’s conference.
On the other hand, it hasn’t always been like that. All the way back in 236 AD, an assembly was scruffling around in Rome trying to elect a pope. All the sudden, as the story goes, a dove flew down and lighted on the head of one Fabian, a more or less innocent Italian who just happened to be in town touring the sights and wondering what all the fuss was about.
Nobody had got around to background checks in those days. There was no College of Cardinals, no episcopal search committees, and no white smoke. So the folk decided that if a dove was good enough for Jesus, it was certainly good enough for picking a perfect stranger for pope. So without any further question they hustled Fabian through the process — aspirant, inspirant, perspirant, postulant, etceterant — and rushed him on into the episcopacy.
Well, it was probably as good a way as any. For Fabian turned out to be one of the better pontiffs up to that time. He subdivided Rome, instituted the veneration of martyrs, and condemned some heresies. It was not long before he came up against the Emperor Decius who was somewhat less than enthusiastic about his community organization and soon had him promptly and properly dispatched. Fabian got today on the calendar as his reward, not a bad deal for an altogether innocent tourist who, at least, was an Italian.
Apparently in these days, God has given up on doves and turned the whole thing over to a rather self-perpetuating system that leaves a lot to be desired. But like Eddie West said, What else can you expect?