The “unchurched” prefer churches that actually look like churches.
No kidding… So do many “churched” people.
Aesthetics have a lot to do with religious experience. After all, a large part of religion is just that: experience. It’s not just about what we think or what we say we think—it’s about what we do and who we are.
As a result of peer pressure from all of the cool kids, I signed up for a twitter account. I have no idea if/how much I’ll use it/be able to use it—but we’ll see…
I’m suddenly reminded of Prov 29:11: “A fool uttereth all his mind: but a wise [man] keepeth it in till afterwards.” How easy it is for Web 2.0 to help us prove Scripture right!
Things may be looking for us. After, what, four years or so of bad hands…
On the other hand…
The Elizaphanian has a post up collecting his theological responses to the environmental issue of peak oil. (h/t Dean Knisely)
Too, one of his recent posts deals with switching away from Windows.
This is pretty high on my list. My Linux machine is down at the moment but its a result of age finally catching up with it. The hardware was at least ten years old—if not older. Nevertheless, it ran Xubuntu just fine with no serious time lags. So (here’s the Earth Day tie-in—tenuous though it be…) I could get away with using hardware from the previous century without having to constantly junk and consume to keep up with ever-voracious demands from the Windows OS.
No, Xubuntu/Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Firefox, Eclipse are my new core suite. Since I do corporate computing I can’t entirely wash my hands of Windows and Office, but I can at home.
As much as I hope Open Source will catch on, however, I fear it will continue to find a home in a niche population than the true mainstream. M, for instance, will still retain a Windows machine. She’s not a computer person and hates when I tinker with things or when everything doesn’t work just as it ought. Many of the Open stuff still isn’t terribly user friendly—and some of it deliberately so, I think… Until that changes she’ll probably stick with Windows.
In his comment to my post below and in a new post on his blog, the Anglican Scotist takes issue with my suggestion that those representing the national church and those clergy with progressive political views remember that demands for justice in church flow best from acknowledging God’s call to humanity in light of what God has done for us through Jesus Christ.
He states:
Granted, loosey goosey lefty preachers might preach social justice and
be too dull to notice the sacramental context in which they preach is
soaked in political references, but there is also a loosey goosey
mentality perversely abstracting the Eucharist from the political, as
if real labor and real money and real paychecks and real exchanges were
not actually involved and actually sanctified, as if it were all just
symbolic or even pretend.
I can’t tell if he’s directly accusing me of holding the second “a loosey goosey
mentality [that] perversely abstract[s] the Eucharist from the political” or not… If he is, it’s a caricature and not an accurate representation of what I said or believe. I agree that there are some who have tried to make a hard separation between the religious and the political and that doesn’t make sense to me either. You can’t pray the Psalms and believe that “YHWH is king” has no political implications.
However, let me reiterate to clarify my position to the Scotist. The Eucharist is a powerful multivalent symbol. The Eucharist is misunderstood whenever we attempt to reduce its complexity. Our historic liturgy and architecture is designed to highlight these multivalent elements and the move in recent years to change things has resulted in just such a reduction. That is, an east-wall altar speaks of a table, a sacrificial altar, and a tomb. The bread, wine, and water speak of simple family meals, the fruits of the earth,and—yes—the products of human labor. The liturgical words speak of covenant relationships, political injustice, the triumph of love, and a God who choose to permeate human life through multiple modes of presence and incarnation. And these items that I have pointed out just barely scratch the surface…
I would not claim that the Eucharist is “simply religious,” abstracted from the political. That’s not how I understand “religious”—it can never be “simply” anything because it’s fundamentally not simple.
In a similar fashion, I would hope that the Scotist would shy away from reducing the Eucharist to the purely economic or even political and miss the full splendor of its spectrum of meanings.
As my readers know, I love the liturgy a great deal. I believe, in fact, that the liturgical cycle as it came to fruition by the end of the early medieval period is the greatest tool for Christian formation that the Western Church has ever produced. Much of the great writings of the medieval monks, mystics, and others could have only been produced in relationship to this cycle. It is a great and powerful engine for the formation of disciples.
But it is an engine that has largely gone untuned.
At the time of its creation, it was only accessible to a small number—namely those who lived within intentional liturgical communities, had the capacity to become fluent in a language other than their mother tongue, and had the temperament to turn their wonder, creativity, and intellect to its majesties rather than to other arenas.
At the time of the Reformation, the English Church was the only dissenting group that preserved the key elements of the cycle—the Mass and the Office—but even these were severely pared back, breaking, obscuring, and eliminating many of the connections that had bound the cycle into a harmonious whole.
For most of its history, the Episcopal Church has been an either/or body: either Office or Mass. With the coming of the ’79 BCP and Eucharist becoming the normative Sunday celebration, two hundred years of Office supremacy came to an end—but balance has yet to be achieved. Too, the ’79 book has recovered more of the classical links with its inclusion of seasonal material than any other BCP with the possible exception of the failed English ’28 text.
And yet the discipling inherent in, promised by, the liturgy has not appeared.
And it will not appear.
The experience of the liturgy is not enough.
Certainly there will be some who will start to see and make connections. Who will discover a hunger and turn to earlier and other sources to learn of the connections, to recover or recapture the mystery and the power they feel near its surface—but this is not “most”. Nor necessarily even “many”.
If the liturgy were enough, the discipling would be happening.
If it were enough, there would not be people in our churches who have stood, sat, and knelt through decades of liturgies and not been formed by them. If it were enough, there would not be clergy in our churches who have
stood, sat, and knelt through decades of liturgies and not been formed
by them.
The liturgy is not enough. And yet it is an engine of great power. It does not choose to sit idle; we allow it to do so.
What the liturgy needs from us are three things:
All of us who love the liturgy must be intentional about these things if we wish it to exercise even a quarter of its full power within us and within our communities. Through the centuries, I believe the Holy Spirit has crafted this great work as a faithful and true means of guiding humanity into the mysteries of God. But we have to be faithful and true to it as well.
The reported words of the Bishop of Durham found in the Lead today gives me pause. If letters are going out, I wonder whether they go to the “Southern” Cone or to New York & Friends. I’ll not waste my time nor yours speculating—I imagine if the words are true, we’ll know soon enough.
The girls and I went to M’s church yesterday where there were two preachers. The first preached at the early service which was a set of baptisms of great significance for the life of the local church. The preacher was a visitor from the area who now holds a role at 815. The preacher at the second service was M. I was struck by the contrast between the two.
I don’t like judging a person on the basis of a single sermon or liturgical encounter, so I’ll try not to do that. Let me just say that the first preacher completely met my stereotypes of someone who works at 815: much emphasis on social justice. The church was mentioned several times but I came away uncertain what the difference was between the church and a social services agency.
M’s sermon focused on Jesus as the gate through baptism and the sacramental life in the presence of God as the meaning of “having life and having it abundantly.”
No matter to whom the ABC’s letters go, now is the take for the Episcopal Church as a whole to think careful about who and what it is. My own focus and my own gifts are not those best suited for social justice, but I see that as an important component of what we do deriving entirely from God’s call to us. But we are not a social services agency or an advocacy organization. We are a church. The deep mysteries of life, the beauty of holiness, the life hid in God—these are our core mission and the other things we do proceed from there.
Exchanges like the one yesterday always put me in a pondering mood. Also yesterday I noted on my stats page that someone had visited this old post and I got to re-reading the comment thread. The discussion there kept my thinking going along these lines:
I’ve got some initial ideas but nothing terribly firm yet… What are your thoughts?