I received an email the other day from the local On Faith editor of the Washington Post asking if I’d be willing to write a piece on forgiveness in the wake of the shootings at St. Peter’s and the diocesan response to them. It’s posted now on their website here. (And can I tell you how challenging it can be to write something appropriate, substantive, and edifying in just 400-600 words!)
Initial Thoughts on “Daily Prayer”
I’m still wrapping my head around the SCLM’s “Daily Prayer” offering in the Blue Book. My initial impression is: wow—have these folks ever heard of the concept of “stability” in prayer? I wasn’t aware that novelty was a theological virtue, let alone a guiding principle in liturgical composition!
I have to say I’m flabbergasted by the amount of variety here. I evidently misunderstood the title, first off. I assumed that “Daily Prayer for All Seasons” actually meant “[Stable] Daily Prayer for [consistent use within] All Seasons.” Boy, was I surprised. Instead, each liturgical season gets an entirely new set of materials. Everything is constantly changing and even the few elements that I’ve noted that are common—I’ve seen the Magnificat come up a couple of times—are in totally different hours as we move through the seasons.
When I look at it, it makes me feel anxious, reflecting what I find as a frenetic busy-ness. To take a stab at it, I think the driving concern here is edification—the compilers wanted to stuff in as much different stuff as possible so that you would know more and better stuff. To me, this flies in the face of the principle of formation which occurs through patterned repetition. You learn something and live with something by repeating it again and again in similar times and places. Repetition gives birth to internalization—muscle memory.
I can’t help but compare what we’ve been given here with the prymers. The Little Hours of the BVM and even their protestant cousins in the Marshall Hours or the Prymer of Henry VIII are marked by their stability. They have the same words at the same time, day in and day out. What makes them brief offices for the people as opposed to the full breviary hours of the clergy and monastics is their constancy. How well did that work for them? Well, the books of hours arose in the mid 12oo’s or so and, in England, achieved a massive penetration among the literate public. Around the time of the Reformation, the Marshall Hours sought to subvert the prymer for the protestant cause and succeeded well enough that Henry VII put out an official prymer. Elizabeth released a couple and it wasn’t until the Preces Privatae of 1564 that we see a break from the prymer pattern and the Hours of the BVM.
And it was a return to this pattern that Cosin offered in 1627 going back to the Elizabethan Orarium of 1560. Cosin’s own work was one of the very first devotional enrichments put back into print by the Oxford/Cambridge Movements in the 1830’s and successive prymer type patterned Hours have floated around in Anglo-Catholic circles to the present day.
Does a 700+ year use pattern suggest that maybe it has something going for it…?
Oh well—more later.
Go Read This
I’m working on a thoughtful post at Bill’s behest on the Daily Prayer items from the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music which should be up in the not too distant future. However, as wonderful as thoughtful posts are, sometimes we just need a good rant (which isn’t saying that rants can’t be thoughtful as well…). One Episcopalian has had enough and has an open letter to General Convention that includes some nice paragraphs like this one:
What we do seem to have is a bumper crop of bishops and priests who want to be prophets, but do not want to be bishops and priests (except that it helps them to be prophetic). We have clergy and laity who love to tinker with the liturgy, but are woefully or willfully ignorant of Scripture, Patristics, and the Anglican Reformers… the very wellsprings and sources of our Faith and Tradition. We have hundreds of parishes with interfaith services and not a few with the actual prayer services to other deities or from other faith traditions, but precious few that offer the daily offices on a daily basis.
A Time for Weeping
They say that deaths come in threes and they seem to be right.
Last week we had the funeral of M’s grandfather, the family patriarch. He was a saintly man who exemplified Christian fortitude in the face of some very difficult situations in life facing them with courage and a surprising quiet joy. He passed at the age of 93, still active and in control of his faculties. It was the inevitable end of a life well lived.
On the day of his funeral, we got word that one of the arch-deacons of the diocese had lost her fight to pancreatic cancer. She and M had worked together at M’s previous parish and they were pretty close. At the Holy Week Chrism Mass, M had made plans to get together with her next week. Heading into the viewing two nights ago, we passed a small knot of women clergy who were also M’s friends; we exchanged pleasantries as we passed them on our way into the parish house.
Late last night my blackberry started going crazy; the Cafe news team wanted to know if the family was ok. Googling to find out what had happened I quickly understood their concern: two women had been shot, one fatally, at a local historically Anglo-Catholic parish. One of the victims was the co-rector who is currently on life-support and not expected to make it.
I had just said hello to her the previous night going into the viewing. Now she lies at the point of death. [Update: I have received word that she has died from her wounds.]
Two things are fixed in my mind. The first is thinking about M. How often has she been alone in the church–or with just the parish admin beside her? Far too many. Just a slight shift of location and this story could have been one about her.
The second is resolve about our proclamation. Too often I see people in and from our church willing to soft-pedal or water down our teachings in order to appear more appealing and palatable to the “cultured despisers of religion.” We want them to know that we shouldn’t be lumped in with Young Earth Creationists and the like. I get that—I don’t want to be lumped in with those people either. On the other hand, we do proclaim some damn important things that we have no business being apologetic about.
Death is a reality. In a culture that wants to hide from it and disguise it as much as possible, it’s got to be said. I look at Grand-daddy’s death and I see the inevitable result of the natural process of life. We will (and do) miss him terribly, but his was a good death that respected the arc of the natural cycles of life and death in which our incarnate bodies are bound. I find it harder to see the arch-deacon’s passing in the same way. Yes, the cancer that took her was “natural” but I cannot help but see her arc sadly fore-shortened. There is nothing good or natural in the shooting. This is death as the enemy, death not as a completion of life but a mockery of it. And that leads to a crucial second point.
Sin is a reality. While we have no details around the crime, there is no doubt in my mind that at its root is the sin and evil that seeks to corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. The church must stand as an implacable enemy of this sin and its virulence. We dither about mission and budgets and lose sight of teaching the basic vocabulary of habits and grammar of virtue that form Christian character. For it is the formation of the character of the Body of Christ according to the Mind of Christ that is our best work against evil.
Lastly, resurrection is a reality. It’s not just a theory. It’s not something that we debate in salons to then set aside quietly when our skeptical friends look down on us with pity for our attachment to superstition. It’s something that we live and live with most perfectly in the face of both death and sin. Resurrection doesn’t mean pretending that death doesn’t exist. Resurrection is a hope that we proclaim as a fitting and natural correlary to a life like Grand-daddy’s; resurrection is a challenge and a defiance we cast into the face of sin and evil.
The secular modern worldview grounded in materialistic empiricism leads to nihilism at its worst and a sensible humanism at its best. Materialistic empiricism is a great way to explore the world but is insufficient for explaining it and making meaning from it. It is utterly tone-deaf to the deeper poetry of the life-in-God proclaimed in the catholic sacramental worldview that we have inherited. Our proclamation of resurrection in the face of sin and death is a witness to the truth of the greater poetry that love and life have the last word in the face of evil, death, and sin. Why would we willingly apologize the poetry away?
Please pray for the departed—those known to us and those unknown—and for us who remain.
Concerning Holy Women, Holy Men
I have a new piece out on Holy Women Holy Men. It’s not at the Cafe this time—it’s the lead story in the latest issue of the Living Church.
As those who have been regular readers for a while know, HWHM is a document I’ve struggled with for a while and this piece gives only a partial glimpse into the issues with the book. Some of my other thoughts were expressed in blog posts written while I was hashing out this article—others have yet to be written down. So—for further reading along this topic here are some of the previous posts:
The Liturgical Naming of Spiritual Communities
Another Issue with HWHM (Specifically on the collect issue)
Perspective on the Saints (a more poetic than analytical piece)
Naming Spiritual Communities in the Sarum Rite
On Liturgical Naming: Categories This piece plays with the ways that I think the conceptualization and identification of saints has changed between the ’79 BCP and the current practice including HWHM. I argue that we’re moving from the old “bucket” based paradigm to a “tag” and “cloud” based paradigm. This didn’t fit into the article but is definitely deserving of a follow-up.
Episcopal Budget Suggestion
There is a great deal of conversation going on at the moment amongst those who talk about such things around the budget of the Episcopal Church. I’ll let those wiser and better informed than I chime in on how to fix what’s wrong with things. Me, I have a different kind of suggestion…
The way things are trending is to suggest that more ministry “stuff” be done at the local or the network level. Ok…so how do you find out what the best stuff is, where the really good ideas are? Yes, good ministry is being done out here—so is the bad stuff. And statistically speaking there’s probably more bad and mediocre than good. How to separate the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats?
One option is to use a grant-leveraged process. That is, various “big” bodies that have funding invite grant proposals from local groups that think they’re doing good stuff. Then the big body staff folks sort through them and fund the ones they think are doing the best. I think this may be a step forward because it does provide a way to look at and work with efforts that are already going on the ground.
Another option is like the grant-driven model but with a free-market twist… One initial caveat: the kinds of things that I’m thinking of here are in a few areas—chiefly communications, web app stuff, and Christian formation programs. I think this approach will work well with them, maybe not so much for other areas.
I’d recommend not purely a grant-driven model, but also a contest-based model (and it probably would work best as a both/and rather than an either/or). Here’s an example of what I have in mind: A Digital X prize for the best Episcopal mobile app. The rules would be simple. Individuals or teams would create an app that would run on both Android and iOS platforms to promote Episcopal spirituality or identity—leaving it deliberately and broadly open. The app would have to be released into the actual marketplace by a deadline. Then, a month or two later, a board would meet and—factoring in comments from actual users–cash prizes in the low thousands would be awarded to the first, second, and third place apps with perhaps some honorable mentions as well. The apps that place could have the option of being picked up by Church Publishing (or another body if there’s one that fits…).
The same could be done for Christian Formation: A Digital X prize for the best 6 Session Class for Adults on the Sacraments (or what have you). All entries would have to be open source—freely available—and, again, cash prizes would be awarded.
The rationale here is that a contest-based system would inspire people to put the work in to create some really good programs (code-wise and education-wise) that would be of great benefit to the church as a whole. The good stuff would be used whether it wins or not and the bad stuff…won’t. The contests would serve as the impetus for their creation and circulation, but the enduring artifacts would remain despite the outcome. The church is the real winner. For what it would cost a publishing house to do one program, they could crowd-source (hopefully) quite a number of quality products that could be promoted widely.
It’s a thought…
Spiritual-But-Not…
I’ve been thinking a bit about the whole Spiritual-But-Not-Religious (SBNR) classification. Folks tell us it’s growing; anecdotally, I’ve got a number of Facebook friends who identify this way. As the Church writ broadly looks at mission/evangelism/formation, this is the group that looms largest. Have we done a decent job of asking who they are, what they want, and what will be necessary to communicate the gospel to them?
Since some exchanges at the Cafe a few days ago, I’ve been pondering exactly what the relevant subcategories are of this rather amorphous mass, because I think that we’ll make some serious mistakes if we try to treat “them” as uniform. I’ve come up with a few, but I’m sure there are quite a number to be identified. Here are some that I can think of personally (and these are cartoony caricatures, not nuanced psychologically informed portraits):
Spiritual-But-Not-Disciplined (SBND)
In my experience, this is the most common sort. The SBND are those who are attracted to spiritual things but hate the idea of someone telling them what to do. These are the folks who like to make it up as they go along—then change it all (or drop it all together) on a monthly basis. Thus, the “spiritual” part affirms that they think spiritual things are good; the “not religious” part affirms that neither a community or tradition can have authority over what they want to do and when they want to do it.
Spiritual-But-Not-Integrated (SBNI)
These are folks who may be highly spiritual but tend to experience spiritual practice as a “collect-’em-all” kind of enterprise. Yoga on Mondays, Kabbalah on Tuesdays, Centering Prayer on Wednesdays, Drum Circle on Thursdays…you get the picture. Related—maybe even overlapping—with the SBNDs, the differentiation here is not necessarily on a level of discipline or follow-through, but a lack of a big-picture framework that makes sense of the individual pieces. Thus, the “spiritual” part affirms that they think spiritual things are good; the “not religious” part affirms that they don’t see a single religious tradition that enables them to hold all the things together that they want to embrace.
Spiritual-But-Not-Bigoted (SBNB)
These are folks who tend to have a high regard for ideological purity. They may or may not be inclined towards spiritual practices, but they’re certainly not going to affiliate with a religious institution with nasty baggage. These are the people who like to remind everyone about the Crusades, the Phelpses, and abortion clinic bombings whenever the topic of religion comes up. They couldn’t possibly be part of something that promotes so much hatred. Their default stance tends to be that all religion is unreasoning fundamentalist religion and that therefore only unreasoning fundamentalists would be interested in religion. (Interestingly, I’ve seen this stance preached in some sci-fi books that my SBNR brother-in-law has loaned me recently…; a new missionary method for the New Atheism?) Thus, the “spiritual” part affirms that they may accept that there’s more to life than the flatly material; the “not religious” part affirms that they won’t have anything to do with a religious tradition that doesn’t pass their purity requirements.
Spiritual-But-Not-Committed (SBNC)
These are the folks who tend to affiliate with particular lines of thought and may even self-identify with a religious group but for whatever reason just don’t get there. It may be a plea of busyness on account of the kids and their activities or it may be that they prefer bagels & the Times on a Sunday morning than dragging themselves to church. Thus, the “spiritual” part affirms that they think spiritual things are good and they may even connect with a tradition; the “not religious” part affirms that they don’t or can’t commit to the actual obligations of a religious community.
Spiritual-But-Not-Satisfied (SBNS)
These are folks who also self-identify with a religion, maybe even a specific denomination, but are not satisfied with any of the local communities. They’re too high or too low or too stiff or too loose or whatever… In some cases, a lack of “fit” is a genuine reason, in others it may be an excuse–to others or even to themselves–that hides a more genuine reason. Thus, the “spiritual” part affirms that they think spiritual things are good and they may even connect with a tradition; the “not religious” part affirms that the religious communities on offer don’t meet their needs on the points they want meeting.
I see here that I’ve floated into the “‘Religious’ But Not Attending” realm as well, but I think that there’s sufficient relation between them that it makes sense to include them as well.
Looking across these groups (and imagining that there are more that I haven’t identified here) I can’t imagine that one strategy fits all. My hunch is that the SBNI are the ones who are most willing to have contact with a religious community or who would be most open to having a friend invite them to a religious “thing.” But trying to appeal to the SBNB the same way as the SBNI doesn’t strike me as likely to be effective…
I don’t know—what are your thoughts?
Brief Thought on Confirmation
I’ve been thinking about Baptism and about bishops for two entirely different purposes. What’s common between them, however, is that both touch on the subject of Confirmation.
Confirmation has become something of an issue recently in the Episcopal Church. The more recent material on Baptism comes down hard on the prayer-book understanding of Baptism as “full initiation…into Christ’s Body the Church” and I would agree (BCP, 298). But then, these folks tell me that Confirmation no longer has an important place—or perhaps not any place at all—in Christian initiation. The phrase most commonly used is that it is a “rite in search of a theology.” After all, if Baptism is full initiation, what is there left for Confirmation to do?
I don’t buy it.
Principally, I think we’re coming at the question from the wrong direction. The bishop is the focus of unity and the sacramental center of the diocese. The bishop’s blessing is literally present in Baptism through the Chrism that, if used, must be blessed by the bishop (BCP, 298). Confirmation, though, is the rite that reifies the sacramental relationship between the bishop and the laity of the diocese. We are baptized into Christ’s Body the Church—the invisible Church—but we are Confirmed into our diocese and the obligations of local incarnate church life. It’s our connection into the basic administrative and sacramental unit of the Church’s life—the visible Church.
Liturgical Encoding of Hermeneutical Practices
As I listened to the Exsultet and the Vigil on Saturday night and again to the lovely version linked to by bls, I’m struck again by what I often find when I dip into antiphons, responsaries, and many of the minor propers for feasts: they are modeling devices. That is, the way that they relate the Scriptures to one another is deliberate and intentional. I haven’t done a full enough study to say that it’s consistent.
What’s going on here is that the early medieval church in the West set up a cycle—perhaps curated is a better word—a liturgical cycle. At some point. McKinnon sets a significant part of this activity (at least for the Mass) in the late 7th century and since his book folks have been debating as to whether or not he was right.
In any case, they connected together pieces of Scripture that they thought fit, and wrote texts like the Exsultet that laid out how they understood theology and therefore the ways that Scripture ties together. Their understandings of what was normal and proper and fitting are grounded in the patristic material that they absorbed and from the ecclesial perspectives that they brought to it. When these texts are sung together by later generations, the connections are made and reinforced even if they are not expounded. That is, simply from singing the Mass year after year, connections between various biblical texts get made because of how they function liturgically. As a result, texts like the Exsultet and the way that the propers hang together both encode and transmit a very particular set of understandings about biblical interpretation and how it’s properly done. Modern Roman and Anglican congregations that are rediscovering the minor propers are moving back into a stream of transmission that has patterned the Western Church’s encounter with Scripture over centuries.
The Historic Western Liturgy itself transmits a patristically-grounded early medieval method for reading and praying Scripture.
Perhaps some day I’ll have the time to line things up properly and make a thorough study of all of this…
More on CWOB
To the amazement of both the far left and the far right in the Episcopal world, there is a growing vocal movement in the Episcopal Church explaining why Communion Without Baptism is a bad idea.
I’ve contended for some time that the push for it is driven by identity politics not sacramental theology; that is, proponents want to see themselves and their institution as inclusive and their opponents as exclusive. As a result, the rhetoric of the movement whenever possible seeks to link CWOB with both the ordination of women and queer folk and suggests that it’s a package deal.
The other day, Fr. Robert Hendrickson wrote a great piece that thoroughly demolishes the shoddy logic behind this linkage. If you haven’t read it, you should. M and I met Fr. Robert through the Society of Catholic Priests and we always enjoy our conversations with him whether deep, profound, or fun.
I’m aware that there are many who view a shift to CWOB at General Convention as a fore-gone conclusion.
I think they’re wrong.
There is a core of catholic minded, credally grounded laity and clergy who feel strongly about this matter and who are making our voices heard. Expect to hear more in the coming months.