Monthly Archives: September 2016

Brain Foggy

Between things at work, things at home, trying to promote a book, trying to write two books, and fulfilling other writing/programming obligations, my brain hurts…  I owe a number of people emails as well that I’m very behind on. If you’re one of them, I apologize!

I have things to say on a number of church-related links floating around right now, but don’t have the time to actually say them. So let me issue this as a general thought on things in the church right now.

If you see something that needs doing, don’t wait on a committee or a process. Just do it. Some of the very best stuff for the church that I’ve seen in the last decade or two wasn’t produced by committees, dioceses, study groups, or well-funded organizational structures.

 

They were all done by regular people and their friends who gave a crap.

 

It’s your turn.

 

Dinner Table Verbatim

Setting: The family dinner table with reference to the girls’ school, a nondenominational Christian school populated largely populated by Roman Catholics and conservative Evangelicals with a sprinkling of mainliners and two hardcore Catholic Anglicans. H is now in 5th grade; G is in 8th (!).

H: Dad, do the Roman Catholics have Rite I and Rite II?

Me: Umm… Not really, what do you mean?

H: Well, when we did class prayer in 3rd grade we used Rite I, in 4th grade we used Rite II, and now in 5th grade we use Rite I again.

Me: Oh, and your 3rd and 5th grade teachers are Roman Catholic while your 4th was nondenominational, right?

H: Right. Before we started class I asked [teacher] if we were going to use Rite I or II and he didn’t seem to know what I meant.

Me: [Realizing that she was referring to the Lord’s Prayer] Ah—no. They don’t call things Rite I and II. We do that. They’d call Rite I “traditional language” and Rite II “contemporary language.”

H: Oh. Why are Rite I services usually the early services?

Me: Well, usually the people who go to the early service are older people. There’s this idea that Rite I is for the older people and they’re more comfortable with it since it’s closer to the sound of the ’28 prayer book that a lot of them grew up with. I think some people in the Church were hoping that Rite I would just die out as the people who grew up under ’28 did, but I’m not sure that’s what we’re seeing…

G: So—as the people Grandmommy’s age [Baby Boomers] become the old people does that mean that we can make the early service Rite II because that’s what they like, and we can have Rite I back for the main service?

 

For the record, the church the girls and I attend now uses a mix of Rite II and EOW (we’re currently slogging through “EOW 3 season”). However, when we go to M’s church the first service is Rite I and that tends to be their preference. This isn’t something that we have consciously directed them towards—it just seems to be what they like…

The Amazon Edition!

People have been asking about an ebook version of the new book and it now exists—at least on the Kindle platform. You can get Inwardly Digest on the Kindle now from Amazon. The Forward Movement folks have entered the paperback version into the Amazon catalog as well, but apparently Amazon hasn’t figured out that they’re linked yet and that the information on the two formats should be shared… I guess these are the hoops and perils of the new publishing environment!

Interview and Giveaway on GrowChristians

So—the new book (Inwardly Digest: The Prayer Book as Guide to a Spiritual Life) is out now, and Forward Movement is shipping physical copies. To promote it, I’ve got an interview up on GrowChristians. I’ve been writing with them for a while now, posting in an on-going series called “Secrets of a Pew-Whisperer,” and Nurya and I did an email interview on how my book connects with the work I’ve been doing over there.

Also, they’re giving away a free copy! All you have to do is comment on the thread to be entered.

Daily Regula

An important part of any decent, sustainable Rule of Life is its regular review. You gotta keep checking in to make sure everything is still working. In my case, given my home situation and the age of my kids, there are two points of the year where I review my schedule, my regula, and take another shot at getting it right. They are—predictably—when the girls get out of school and when they go back to school. Well—they’re back! This week was the first half-week of school consisting only of half-days is it was a weird liminal period that was neither fully on or off. The other piece of this is that Mother M is now a rector. (Yay!!) Since she’s got her fulltime work schedule and the girls have a new schedule and their activities have new schedules, I have to sit down and figure out how to make everything work again… (And this will take a little bit to come up with something fully functional…)

A Rule of Life or regula to me is fundamentally about living out (or attempting to) what we ask help doing in Ps 90:12: “So teach us to number (or, maybe, “reckon” and hence “organize”?) our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” It’s making sure that the things that I say matter are actually present in the things that I do and the way I arrange my daily schedule. Of course, doing all of the crazy things I do, there’s *never* enough hours in the day to do all of the things I want to do balanced against the things I must do including the day-job, the extra work, the books, driving to and from ballet, and giving my wonderful wife the attention she deserves.

Typically in churchy circles regula is about fitting in “spiritual” stuff. And—yeah—it is. Prayer, meditation, and lectio certainly are included here. But the physical stuff has got to be included here too. Not being disembodied souls, maintenance of the body is simultaneously care of the soul. Not only that, some of the things I do, like tai chi and running, are definitely part of my spiritual life. My focus, attention, and clarity suffer when I’m not doing them.

One interesting aspect of all of this—how I set up my time, how I give daily progressive time to those activities that maintain and improve physical and spiritual health, and the relation between the physical and the spiritual—has been given new energy from an unusual direction… For my birthday, M gave me a book I’ve been lusting after for a while, Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey.  It’s got a fascinating discussion of the importance and ubiquity of weigong training which is quite frequently forgotten in many modern western interpretations of the classical Chinese martial arts. To clarify, weigong is the “external” physical muscular strength/aerobic capacity training stuff while neigong is the “internal” training. The latter gets a lot of press especially in the so-called Internal Styles (particularly in some of the more New Age-y Western interpretations of tai chi) because this is where qi gong and meditative practices and other exercises to develop the qi, the body’s internal power, fit into the schema. The authors emphasize, though, that this is a fundamentally skewed perspective:

Neigong and weigong are the two halves that when put together equal achievement in the Chinese martial arts. All skilled Chinese martial artists have both weigong and neigong abilities, and well-designed Chinese martial arts systems make use of both categories of training exercises. Oftentimes, especially in the West, there is an overemphasis on the more esoteric neigong side of training, but without a weigong basis, neigong is largely useless. (pp. 18-20)

Physical conditioning, basic technique practice, set routines, and sparring are the four corner-posts of traditional Chinese martial arts practice. (p. 26)

(And I’ll just note here that the principal author of this section is a xingyi practitioner and thus hardly in the anti-internal camp!) Too, I’m reminded here of the great discussion in Paul Gallagher’s Drawing Silk where he expresses his bewilderment at those who want to study aspects of a pretty effective and hardcore martial art (tai chi) without doing or having the physical cultivation in terms of strength, power, and flexibility that are proper prerequisites. (If you just want to do qi gong, just do qi gong—don’t do qi gong and call it tai chi!)

((It’s also occurred to me recently how good moving qi gong exercises (like the Eight Pieces of Brocade or the Five Animal Frolics) are for either cultivating and retaining basic mobility and flexibility. Whether you believe in qi or not,  the gentle movement and joint work is becoming increasingly more important to me as my body continues its slide into middle age!))

This trap—of isolating one aspect of training, especially the one that seems the most interesting and the most cool—isn’t just a phenomenon in the Chinese martial arts… I suspect we do it quite a bit in our spiritual lives too. And this, again, is why the concept of regula—patterned, disciplined habits—is so important. We have to take the periodic opportunity to stop, step back, and assess what we’re up to to make sure we’re not skewing our practice. Or, better yet, we make sure that we are adjusting our practice as needed (with the help of a spiritual director as needed?) to realize the long-term goal of a perspective that is healthy, mature, and well-grounded.

Conveying Psalm Commentary?

Ok, y’all—I need your help…

As I’ve been saying, I’m working on this book on the Psalm commentary of Cassiodorus. Right now I’m wrestling with how to present the way that he structures his commentary and give readers a sense of the experience of reading his commentary. He goes about things in a very novel way (especially for an early medieval exegete!) in that he has a four-part structure that he always uses: an introduction that discusses the superscription, then a breakdown of the psalm into its divisions (often grouped by speaker), then a phrase-by-phrase analysis (which is all that most typical patristic/early medieval exegetes do), then a summary that often underscores a moral or doctrinal point.

In particular, I want to make sure that readers get a flavor of the phrase-by-phrase process, but—honestly—I think people are only going to want a limited taste of this stuff. I’m intending to do a fairly close reading/exposition of five or six psalms to convey a complete sense of what he’s doing. Right now I’m trying to gauge how in-depth to go on each one.

So, I could do this a couple of ways. The one I’m leaning towards is to take a “representative” psalm and do a really thorough breakdown of it in excruciating detail to give my readers a sense of how he does what he does. Then, when I discuss other psalms just do a summary of the main points. However, another option would be to do something like that but also to include a chart on the 5-6 psalms that show what he’s doing with each phrase and then the narrative summary.

What do you think—do the extra psalm structure charts/outlines sound like overkill or a helpful way to grasp this rather alien reading strategy to modern lay readers?