Author Archives: Derek A. Olsen

Cat’s in the Doghouse and Other News

  • My cat is so in the doghouse right now. I have two computers by my bed—my work laptop and a PC I use for my other work. Connectivity is made possible by two fifty-foot ethernet cables running down the hall to the library. The cat chewed through one of them… So now I have to alternate between one and the other. And I’m (successfully so far) fighting the temptation to hack one of my neighbors’ unprotected wireless networks…
  • Just returned home from my daily IV treatment at the doctor and got an update. There are still no plans for surgery but the daily IV treatments will continue through the end of March. I think I’m going to have a pick(pic?) line put in. That’s an IV site that is implanted in my arm and snakes through a vein to the heart. It can stay in for up to a year and means I won’t need a new IV site every couple of days like right now. The pick line will be a good thing because I don’t think the veins in my arms will last another month…

The Bible Meme

Here’s a meme from bls:

1. What translation of the Bible do you like best?

My favorite translation is the Vulgate. Every act of translation is an act of interpretation, and I really like Jerome’s interpretive choices. Once upon a time I was part of a group that read through Genesis, reading each verse in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. I was quite fascinated with the way that Jerome navigated between the Greek and the Hebrew.

As a result, my favorite Bible for study and reading is a facing page NT that has the eclectic Greek text on one side and the Vulgate on the other.

When I need an English language Bible, I prefer the RSV. We managed to get some of the last sets of 2 vol. Daily Office books that use the RSV rather than the NRSV.

2. Old or New Testament?

It’s impossible to understand one without the other. Christians have always contended that you need the NT to understand the OT properly, but what so many of us today have forgotten is how thoroughly the NT is saturated by OT images, thoughts, and themes. As Augustine and Jerome both insisted, the best way to learn to interpret Scripture better is to read more Scripture; I’d put a finer point on it and say that the best way to understand the New Testament better is to read the Old Testament more.


3. Favorite Book of the Bible?

Well, I love the Psalms.

I’m also a big fan of the Gospel of Matthew—which is good since that’s what my dissertation is on…

Deuteronomy is a classic. That’s the book that starts talking about intention—that the Law is about a way of being, a fundamental orientation towards God, not just things you do and don’t do. I see it as the inspiration for a lot of people in our tradition including Jeremiah and Jesus himself.

Recently I’ve been caught up again in Ecclesiastes; I’ve read through it several times since my spider bite. I hear in it a call to humility: all our works, wealth, learning, and accomplishments are ultimately vanity. What is important—and it underlines this by presenting it several times throughout the book, returning to it like a touchstone—is the recognition and enjoyment of the simple facts of reality: good food, good drink, good companionship, and the sun on your face.

Of course, I can’t forget Ephesians, Colossians, 2nd Peter, and Revelation. And the Song of Songs.

4. Favorite Chapter?

That’s hard to say. Rev 21-22 have always been favorites of mine… I’m also quite partial to Ps 107. And Ps 1. And Ps 18. Colossians 1 is also not to be missed. I could keep going for a while but I think I’ll stop there…

5. Favorite Verse? (feel free to explain yourself if you have to)

There’s no way I can answer this one; I have so many favorites. I’ll point to just two: Ps 70:1 (O God, make speed to save me; O Lord, make haste to help me) and Eph 5:2 (Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an fragrant offering and sacrifice to God). The first is commended by Egyptian monks as the ideal breath-prayer in John Cassian in The Conferences. Given Cassian’s recommendation, it’s no surprise that Benedict uses it to start the Offices as we do today. The second, in the words of a wise man of my acquaintance, can be considered the heart of Pauline Spirituality.

6. Bible character you think you’re most like?

I’d like to say David but my life’s not nearly that exciting. I aspire to be more like John of Patmos.       

7. One thing from the Bible that confuses you?

Hey—that blessing that Jacob gave to the twelve tribes this morning (Gen 49:1-28) totally boggled the mind. I’m suspecting some serious textual corruption in the transmission of that passage because some of it seemed to make no sense at all. It made me wonder what the Fathers did with it…

8. Moses or Paul?

Paul.

9. A teaching from the Bible that you struggle with or don’t get?

Teachings around obedience are always hard for me. That’s one of the reasons why I need to follow a Benedictine path. [And one of the reasons why I’m Anglican…;-)]

10. Coolest name in the Bible?

I’ve always been a fan of the three young men: Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.

I won’t formally tag folks, but if it looks like fun, give it a rip…

What I Did Yesterday…

Since I’m supposed to keep my foot elevated and not drive, I didn’t make it to church yesterday. M was going to take both girls to church with her (which I really hate to make her do—as she’s suggested , perhaps I should try taking them into the office with me one of these days…) but since Lil’ H has pink eye she stayed home with Daddy. The, M went out with a best friend from middle shool who dropped into town for such much needed r&r. Once I put the girls down I had some spare time on my hands.

In between the other stuff, I wrapped up a little project: it’s a web page (currently only locally hosted) that uses PHP and a SQLite database to calculate the temporal cycle’s liturgical date in both a long and a short form (i.e., L4Mon/Monday after the Fourth Sunday in Lent), gives both Proper numbers and Sundays after Trinity for the post-Pentecost period, assigns a relative rank for both the morning and the evening, and determines the daily office lectionary year for every day for the next ten years…

Next up: cross-referencing it with the sanctoral cycle and weighing temporal vs. sanctoral ranks to determine sanctoral celebrations/commemorations/etc.

Once it’s working properly, it’s just a matter of switching between database tables to move between assessing modern and early medieval kalendars.

Insights with M

M and I were having a discussion last night about my situation that wandered into the territory of theodicy–how we explain the presence of evil in a world created good by a good God. In particular she was going off on those who believe that if you pray enough, or are good, enough, faithful enough, or a “good enough Christian” that bad things won’t happen to you.

We came to the conclusion that this whole line of thought is fundamentally at odds with traditional Christian theology. We live in a faith that was founded on the blood of the martyrs. To say that God will keep all “real” Christians from physical harm is clearly and thoroughly refuted by the very facts of our beginnings. The promise we’ve received is not that everything’s going to be ok—rather, it’s that in whatever we face, we will never be alone.

A Purposeful Meme

This one’s from the Young Fogey…

Rule 1) List three reasons for your blogging.
Rule 2) List the rules.
Rule 3) Tag three others with the thread.

Why I Blog…
1. The original purpose of this blog—see the first post—was to serve as a kind of public accountability for dissertation progress. That didn’t work! Although, the dissertation is drawing to a close… I suppose it’s good that that didn’t become its central purpose; if it had I suppose I’d have to stop blogging once the dissertation was done.

2. As a forum for discussing religion/spirituality/theology that is liturgical, biblical, traditional, yet meaningful to a postmodern, post-Constantinian world. My firm conviction is that the Gospel—the Good News of what God has done for us in Christ—does not change, but the way we proclaim must be ever renewed and reformed from the distortions and misunderstandings that inevitably occur when we frail humans try to communicate it. (Thanks be to God that the power of the cross speaks even through our failures…) As a result, it’s not enough to repeat the words and principles of the past. However, the past is a key repository of Christian wisdom and for examining how the Spirit has worked amongst us in different times and places and that show us how to proceed—and how not to proceed—today.
3. Shameless Narcissism. I get to make all the stupid comments I want about whatever I want… :-) Especially the Anglican Communion. But there’s been less of that recently. I really do want to get back to talking about medieval things, especially medieval liturgy (see point 1…). Hopefully that’ll be coming soon.

Tag Three People
bls
Christopher
LutherPunk
and, of course, anyone else who’d like to play along…

Spider Bite Update

Got back from the doctor; the news is not good.

After almost three weeks afterward—and two weeks out of the hospital—my foot is still swollen and in pain. The doctor explained the results of yesterday’s MRI to us; the infection has moved into the bones of my feet.

He’s going to explore surgical options with a friend who’s an orthopedic, but is of the opinion that another two weeks of daily visits (and co-pays…) for IV antibiotics ought to do it.

So–more IVs, more hours out of M’s day when she has to drive me out to the doctor, and lots more co-pays. Please keep us in your prayers…

Mission and the Mainlines

There’s been some interesting talk recently that I’ve only half been able to follow: Christopher had something on the Daily Office as the core of a new way of doing Church, and on what mission could look like in his area which was a riff on what LutherPunk was talking about here in a look at the practical issues of growing a community.

Add into the mix Andrew Gern’s piece yesterday at the Cafe on the Mainlines and the recent Pew Report…

It’s clear we’ve got a problem. And by “we” I mean people in churches, people who call themselves Christians, people who care about encountering God and helping others find the same God.

I like the notion in Gerns’s piece that we have to have a sense of who we are and that we have to be open at the same time. I certainly have a vision for what that should look like—and I doubt it will be a surprise to anyone. I also get a liitle nervous when we start using marketing language because of its connotations of manipulation. Our marketing vision has to match with what others see when they encounter us; if the marketing vision doesn’t have integrity and authenticity, it will be obvious and all the work in the world won’t fix the credibility gap.

Who do I see the Episcopal Church being? I see us as a community that understands the search for God as pre-eminently rooted in the corporate liturgical cycles of Mass and Office and in the theologies of those texts.

Furthermore, I see us not just holding those boundaries but encouraging play within them. That is, we are a people who accept the scientific study of Scripture as well as the scientific study of the universe in all its splendor. We firmly believe that we need not be afraid of the answers and new questions we find, knowing that faith seeking understanding is a better path than either understanding seeking faith or faith hiding from understanding.

In many ways I think we fail on both counts. We don’t do full justice to our heritage of worshiping God in the beauty of holiness nor—as was taken up after the rant yesterday—are our clergy and people as rooted in the traditions, liturgies, and Scriptures of our church as I would wish them to be. These are the groundings that making the second part possible and fruitful. Faith must be our starting place—only then does the understanding have a framework within which to fit. Recognizing the proper place of understanding is one of our current problems–personified by Spong and his approach which is to say if there is any potential conflict between a scientific worldview and a traditional Christian worldview, the scientific wins. That’s not right either.

There’s a lot to be said for recognizing that all of our worldviews are just that—models that we use to function constructively on a day-by-day basis. What some seem to find so hard to understand is that a scientific worldview is not scientific fact, rather it is a construct based on a host of facts, theories, and assumptions that proceed from a scientific understanding of the universe. As such, I suggest we wear our models lightly and recognize that we live in the midst of several, and not require that we force resolution between them.

(I might add that when we talk about worldviews, Scripture itself contains not one but several, some that are compatible with one another and some that conflict more or less violently. Ditto for Christianity throughout the centuries…)

So that’s my vision for us. We need to be the church that worships God in the beauty of holiness and that encourages dialogue between the worlds of faith, science, and technology. To get there we need to work on our beauty, and our holiness, and our groundedness.

Spirituality Rant

The place I attend has an interest in talking about “spirituality”. It’s got an outdoor labyrinth and time set aside for an indoor one and hosts a Taize service once a month (that is hosted in other local places in other weeks).

I like Taize stuff and it formed an important part of assuring that I remained engaged and interested in Christianity when I was in college because I found through it a contemplative side of Christian worship I hadn’t experienced before. (I’ve since found it in many other kinds of Christian worship, both personal and public.)

Even labyrinths aren’t bad things when properly understood. When we understand that it grows out of the pilgrimage concept and recognize it as an imageless form of the stations of the cross/journey to the cradle/etc., then it plays a useful if occasional role in cultivating Christian spirituality. Too often to my mind, however, it becomes overly focused on the “personal journey” and the place of God as both companion and telos is lost, robbing it of its potential for specifically Christian formation.

I’m no opposed to these kinds of things–but neither should we mistake them for the heart of Christian spirituality!! From where I sit, I often see churches promoting spiritual practices of this order (throw in “Celtic” spirituality et al.) it seems to me we’re majoring in the minors and leaving the center by the wayside.

What is the center of Christian Spirituality? I’d argue it’s exactly the same as a correct definition of liturgy: the ordered and bounded encounter with the entirety of Scripture and the God described therein.

As such, the central practice of Christian spirituality is grounded in the public liturgies of the Church: the Mass and Office. They serve as an inexhaustable sources of spiritual richness because of their interpretive methods and mechanisms. That is, the liturgy functions through the simple principle of juxtapostion; the liturgical cycles put different texts together, then the liturgical compositions for the day/season use a decidedly underdetermined approach to relate them. That is, the colleects, hymns, propers, never come right out and explain the connections, rather they simply hint at them or draw attention to one aspect of them. The power of the liturgy lies in this underdetermined interpretation–the liturgy never tries to fully explain itself or its ways, leaving us always capable of finding new and more connections between and throughout the texts brought together.

This is what we need to teach. This is what we need to promote.

Sure, the other stuff is good too—in its place. And its place is the recognition that even all the ancillary forms of Christian spirituality can not and should not be seen apart from the center. To tease this out a bit, embracing—say, medieval spiritualities like the Rhinelanders or the anchorites—is all well and good, but we misinterpret it if we don’t see it arising from the established public forms of spirituality.

The center is the key. The ordered and bounded encounter with Scripture and the God who animates, breathes, and speaks through it is what we fundamentally need to be about.

————–

When Spiders Attack…

Or at least we think it was probably a spider…

In any case, on the morning of Lent 1 my foot hurt. By the afternoon it was swollen and had a little black mark on the side. I thought it might be a bruise or that I’d kicked something the night before.

Sunday night I tried to get up in the middle of the night and it wouldn’t support my weight.

The next morning, M took a look at my foot. Not only was it swollen and hot to the touch but there was a rash all over it that was heading up my leg.

By the time we were seen at the Urgent Care Clinic the rash was up both legs; by the time I left in an ambulance for the nearest hospital it had spread to my chest and back.

They tell me my body was in a state of septic shock when I arrived at the Emergency Room but that something they did there gave it the chance to overcome the sepsis (If you ask me, it was putting in the catheter; I’ve learned that “you may feel a little pressure now” is medical jargon for “we’ve developed this fascinating new way of infliting pain and want to give it a try on you…”)

After that I spent three days in the ICU and another four on one of the regular medical floors before being discharged. The central problem throught was a strep infection that entered my body in my foot and moved into the bloodstream. The ambulance crew id’d it as a brown recluse spider bite right off. My infectious disease specialist says that’s likely, but it could have been a strep bacteria on the foot already that made its way in through some kind of puncture.

In any case, that’s why I haven’t been around recently. M has been doing a tremendous job taking care of me and tending to the girls while in the midst of dealing with a pretty nasty sinus infection herself. Having her in the hospital with me was wonderful; Despite the pain, the inconvenience, the IV meds and everything, I think this Valentine’s Day was the best we’ve ever had because I got to spend the whole day there with her–and I knew (and know) just how lucky I was to get to spend the time with her.

Although I’ve been out of the hospital for five days, the foot is mending slowly at best. It’s still swollen (though not as much as it was), and there still some infection lurking in there. We’re trying to knock it out with IV anibiotics. The doctor’s hopeful that I’ll be able to walk and drive on the foot by the end of next week, but he’s continuing to monitor it.

Thanks for to LP and Anastasia for helping with food and children and bls, the Lutheran Zephyr, Fr. Chris, Christopher and other for your thoughts and prayers. We’re better, but not out of the woods yet, so we’d appreciate y’all keeping our family in your prayers.