Author Archives: Derek A. Olsen

Traditional and Contemporary Revisited

Donald Schell has a piece up at the Cafe that sounds a whole lot like what I posted a bit back. These were written completely independently of one another and I’m amazed at the similarity of themes that run through them. Especially when one considers the very real difference that exist between Donald and myself.

I actually believe that we have similar philosophies here but there are very real differences in how we put them into practice and would wager that the central difference is what we here the Spirit calling us to do.

But where do you go from there? Do you argue that one is hearing the Spirit right and not the other? Or do we suggest that the same Spirit is calling us in different directions based on our different social/spiritual locations? Certainly I prefer the latter to the former but–let’s face it–that raises as many questions as it solves…

However it continues, I think that the whole relation of “tradition” and what we do with it to our liturgy/public worship is an essential discussion and will have implications on our future shape.

What Father Are You?

You’re Origen!

You do nothing by half-measures. If you’re going to read the Bible, you want to read it in the original languages. If you’re going to teach, you’re going to reach as many souls as possible, through a proliferation of lectures and books. If you’re a guy and you’re going to fight for purity … well, you’d better hide the kitchen shears.

Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

(h/t Texanglican)

How amusing I should get this response with this verbiage… Since I’m finishing up a PowerPoint presentation for a lecture I’m doing at a local church tomorrow…

Epiphany Hymns Note

Several of us at various points have noted the interesting Gospel Antiphon for Second Vespers of the Feast of the Epiphany:

We keep this day holy in honor of three miracles: this day a star led the Wise Men to the manager; this day water was turned into wine at the marriage feast; this day Christ willed to be baptized by John in the Jordan for our salvation, alleluia.

What I had never quite realized until last night is that this seasonal understanding is further reinforced by the Office hymns: Iesus Refulsit Omnium and Hostis Herodes Impie (known in these latter days in the Urbanized hack-up version Crudelis Herodes).

Thus in Iesus Refulsit Omnium, stanzas 2 and 3 discuss the arrival of the magi and their gifts to the Babe, stanzas 4-6 deal with the Baptism of our Lord, and stanza7 recalls the miracle at Cana.

In Hostis Herodes Impie, stanza 2 presents the magi, stanza 4 the Baptism of our Lord, and stanza 7 the miracle at Cana. Furthermore stanza 5 points to other miracles that take their place within the old lectionaries Epiphany season by noting “he healed sick bodies and revived corpses”.

Crudelis Herodes is similar but the versions in my Liber and ’62 Missal contain fewer stanzas; in this case stanza 2 is the magi, stanza 3 is the Baptism, and stanza 4 is the miracle at Cana.

Suddenly I find myself wondering the chicken and egg question—which came first: did the antiphon produce the hymns, the hymns the antiphon, or do they all derive from an earlier common source?

New Cafe Piece

I’ve got a new piece up at the Cafe. A little background—this one came directly albeit obliquely out of on-going conversations that I’ve been having with Donald Schell (yes, that Donald Schell)  about liturgy, faith formation, and the place of tradition in our reflection.

Christopher will also recognize some key items on liturgy and tradition that we’ve been discussing together for quite some time…

Too often discussions about liturgy and worship fall into a set of stale rhetorical traps that pit binaries against each other: traditional/contemporary; Spirit-led/rubric-driven, spontaneous/over-planned, etc. The simple fact is that these are not helpful as blanket categories any more (if ever). What I’m expressing here is a understanding of Christian theology and liturgy that is a contemporary appropriation of traditional materials rooted in a pneumatology that understands the spread of human history as the playground of the Spirit. “Listening to the Spirit” doesn’t just mean cocking your ear now—although that’s an undeniable part of it.  Furthermore, while liturgy’s principle aim is the praise and worship of God, we must also attend to its secondary purpose of communal Christian formation.

The bottom line is that if our corporate worship is not playing a major role in our transformation into the mind of Christ than there’s a problem. And the problem isn’t necessarily the liturgy, either—sometimes it’s us!

On Love

Lee has pointed to some very good pieces, the first written by bls against the contention made by Philip Turner in “First Things” that a theology suggesting that” God is love, pure and simple”, is “unworkable” (You can read the excerpts she provides there). The second is from Christopher working off of bls’s piece and some questions asked by Lee himself.

I don’t have a whole lot to add that they haven’t already said, and will only offer another bit of gooey liberalism no doubt from a source that no self-respecting “First Things” author would recognize:

221. But St. John goes even further when he affirms that “God is love”:44 God’s very being is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed his innermost secret:45 God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.

In my short life, I have learned a few things about love. Most of them have been learned since I got over the shallow notions of romantic love that I was taught by the culture and have been truly formed by my on-going relationship with my wife and my children. For it is through those relationships that I am taught ever more deeply what this little four letter word that we take for granted really means.

Love is hard—because genuine love is always transformative. It changes you: how you think and how you act. Sometimes we pull away from that pain and change whether it comes from God or the humans closest to us.And that leads me to my second point.

I think for many of us, the hardest thing to do with love—is to receive it.

We say that God is love. And we are absolutely right.  Now all we have to do is let it into our lives…

Putting the Tech into Home Ec

I’m thinking that the perfect tech app for the up-to-date New Depression kitchen would be a recipe cost calculator.

It shouldn’t be too hard to build a database that contains:

  • the ingredients for the family’s most commonly cooked meals
  • the quantities needed for the recipe
  • the quantities in which the ingredients must be purchased
  • an average cost for the ingredients

A basic html/php interface would allow you to:

  • select a meal from a searchable drop-down
  • do a one-time exclusion of any of the ingredients from the total if you already had them in the pantry
  • handle basic substitutions (say sausage for hamburger, etc.)
  • allow you to enter a one-time or permanent price modification (to account for sales or price increases)

Of course, it would be optimum if there were a readily accessible and continuously updated dbase of grocery store average prices out there that you could periodically download but I doubt such a thing currently exists.

Thus when it came time to plan menus for the week, you could use the tool to get a more precise sense of how much everything is going to cost before you get to the grocery store. I’m always amazed when I do a one-off trip to see how much a basic meal can run you…

Such a thing may already exist. I don’t know; I haven’t checked yet. But it sure would be cool if it did…

More on Religious Art

M is teaching Sunday School again tomorrow and didn’t like any of the activities listed in her curriculum. So we did some brainstorming.

After considering some interesting options like Playdough, etc., she said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do a Where’s Waldo kind of picture search? Kids that age like that…” (We’re dealing with a whole group together split about half-n-half between those who read and those who can’t so coming up with an activity for all of them can be tricky.)

So one thing led to another and a nother and now we’ve got a slideshow of images of the baptism of Jesus from the Renaissance to the present and an accompanying sheet with ten little snippets for them to locate. The plan is to go through all of the pictures slowly first—everybody look and don’t say anything if you see something—then go through them again, point out the “found” items, and talk a little bit about the picture and what it does with the story.

I absolutely fell in love with one of them and given the earlier discussion on religious art decided it had to be posted. So, without further ado, a triptych despicting the baptism of OLASJC by G. David (1505):

baptism_of_jesus-008

Now I just need to figure out what I’m going to tell the adults about the Revised Common Lectionary (and try to keep it civil…)

Torture Testing

The list of “phrases you’d rather not hear your spouse say” includes this one which I just heard:

“Hey, honey—I just found your iPod in the dryer. With a load of towels.”

Now, there’s no way that my iPod Shuffle got into the dryer with a load of towels which means that this must have been its second trip around the drum after a romp in the washing machine.

It still works. Needless to say, I’m quite pleased…

The Case of the Crucifix

I’ve recently seen a story floating around of a C of E vicar who took down a large crucifix from the front of his church and replaced it with a shiny modern thing; I rolled my eyes and assumed the worst.

However—over at bls’s place I’ve now seen a photo of the removed crucifix. and I’ll reproduce it here:

creepy_crucifix

Ok, I’d probably take it down too. What bls’s analysis captures though is entirely absent in the Telegraph article that she includes and needs to be said more loudly:

  1. It should be removed not because it’s a crucifix but because it’s bad art.
  2. The reason that it’s bad art is because it’s bad theology.
  3. The reason it’s bad theology is best captured by bls herself:

The problem with this piece is that it’s merely horror-movie scary; the figure on the cross does not look human, but is a monster. You forget the crucifixion entirely because you’re too focused on the hideous monster creature up there.

It doesn’t look human – and that’s the worst thing you could do to Christ on the cross, I think.

Bingo!

Crucifixion is indeed a horrific act and a terrible way to die and, no, we shouldn’t diminish that. However, this crucifix does not look like the suffering of a human and precisely the point is that the God-incarnated-human died a human death.