Retro-church

2010-06-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

Archbishop Haverland replies to some of the questions and points made in comments on his post.

The Anglican Catholic Church does not ordain subdeacons, though the liturgical function exists in parishes that celebrate Solemn High Mass. The function may be performed by layreaders or deacons or priests. Ordination of subdeacons, like the mandatory vow of celibacy taken before that ordination (as in the Roman Church between Trent and the post-Vatican II reform), is a matter firmly covered by the principle of desuetude, to which I made reference in the posted articles. I am unaware of any ACC bishop purporting to 'ordain' subdeacons. If one did so, it would be little more than licensing a layreader or an acolyte.

Trent occurred after the reign of Henry VIII.

Trent rejected medieval Pelagianism also, of the sort exemplified by Gabriel Biel, and asserted the unelicited character of prevenient grace. As I believe Ronald Knox once observed of his Anglo-Catholic days, the one element of the Roman system which no Anglican that one has ever heard of, no matter how spiky, ever felt the least attraction to is indulgences. The notion that any lingering elements of the indulgence system in the Henrician Church require explanation by any modern Anglican Catholic is not serious. This matter too is covered by desuetude. Indulgences have not existed in any Anglican Church for centuries, and the formularies of the ACC do not revive them. This issue strikes me as a red herring.

As for the idea that a reconstruction of late medieval vestment color schemes is important, much less central, to the identity of any Church: well, that too does not seem to me to be very serious. As Percy Dearmer and many others demonstrate, late medieval English usage in the matter was various and flexible. Many parishes did not have full sets of vestments, and the rule was that one used the best that he had for important occasions, whatever the color. Dearmer also notes that as best one can now reconstruct a color sequence in strict accordance with the Ornaments Rubric, the result 'would differ but very slighty from the Roman sequence which is so well known at the present day.' Which suggests that the ACC's critic in this case need not be so worried.

Anglicanrose is mistaken in thinking that my seeking a consensus of East and West even today assumes that 'one of the two (likely the East) have [sic] no innovation.' On the contrary, the obvious purpose in seeking consensus (a good, Hookerian exercise) is precisely that matters of agreement are much more likely than either the East or the West alone to avoid erroneous or dubious innovations. This implies no Anglican self-negation but rather an Anglican refusal to confuse a part for the whole.

Anglicanrose's liturgical questions simply ignore what I actually wrote about the relevance of Henrician Catholicism for the ACC. I explicitly said that in many matters, including liturgical, desuetude and positive legislation have altered matters since Henry's reign.

+MDH

More From Archbishop Haverland on ACC Formularies

2010-05-20T09:41:00.000-07:00

Archbishop Haverland kindly sends an occasional note, which I gratefully use (with his permission, of course) as blog material while I am mired in the busyness which keeps me from blogging regularly.

I mentioned in a previous post on Retro-Church some examples of things clearly present in the Henrician Church but not found in the Anglican Catholic Church now due to authoritative ACC formularies to the contrary or due to desuetude. In that category I mentioned 'mandatory clerical celibacy, legally-enforceable tithing, mandatory Latin liturgy, and many other things which the ACC does not retain'.

Likewise I mention positively a number of things from the Henrician Church that the ACC does keep. These include 'rejection of the papal office in its late medieval form; episcopal and synodal Church government; three-fold Holy Orders; the doctrinal and credal orthodoxy found in the large number of patristic authorities named in the C&C; the sacramental system which the Henrician Church retained; and large chunks of the Corpus Juris Canonici and the custom and common law of the Church'.

Some have wondered about the significance of the ACC's canonical starting point in the Henrician, rather than Elizabethan, settlement of religion. To explain that significance it might help to expand the list of positive elements in the ACC flowing from Henrician Catholicism. An expanded list might include the permissibility of the invocation of the saints; the objective (though not magical) efficacy of the seven sacraments; baptismal regeneration; and a high doctrine of the Real Presence. These beliefs are all features of the faith of the Universal Church which were preserved in the Henrician Church and are believed in the ACC. Such beliefs are not authoritatively contradicted by anything that binds us in the ACC, whatever contrary views one might cite from some in the Elizabethan Church of England. If the Articles seem to teach something to the contrary, either the Article in question has been misunderstood or is not authoritative, since it contradicts the more central and authoritative tradition of Christendom to which it is the purpose of the Articles to bear witness. Tract 90 and Bicknell and Father Robert Hart generally would say that the Article would in such a case have been misunderstood.

I try to be an ecclesial thinker. I joined the ACC as soon as it formed and have never looked back. I begin with the actual faith and actual formularies of the actual Church in which I actually find myself. I think the faith that I hold is Anglican in a variety of ways which are very important to me. However it is much more important to me to maintain the faith of my Church and to be squarely within the consensus of the central tradition of Christendom on controversial matters. If that approach is insufficiently 'Anglican' in the minds of some, I am not too worried. I am more interested in being a faithful Anglican Catholic and in standing within the central tradition of Christendom than in meeting some criterion of Anglicanism that is not itself firmly rooted in the ACC's actual formularies.

For the most part the central tradition of Christendom can be identified simply by looking for the consensus of East and West even today. I see nothing in the actual faith of the ACC which contradicts anything actually held by both the East and West. The only exception might be the marriage of bishops, but on that matter everybody admits that our position is in fact consistent with Scripture and the earliest Church, while the contrary position is a disciplinary matter rooted in no doctrinal necessity. The supposed agreement of East and West against Anglican Orders is clearly contradicted by actual Orthodox positions in the 20th century. Is there anything else held by Rome and the Orthodox but rejected by the ACC? Perhaps that there is One True Church. But as the Two One True Churches disagree about which is True and which Not, I am content with our charitable position that both are True, as are we.

Another advantage to a doctrinal starting point in Henrician Catholicism is that it historically antedates the most revolutionary claims of Roman Catholics and Protestants. Everyone now agrees, I think, that the late medieval Western Church had many serious problems, practical and doctrinal. For instance, the late medieval Church had a powerful Pelagian strand which Trent, a reforming synod in many ways, rejected as did Luther, Calvin, and the Articles. Everyone also agrees that all early modern monarchs sought to control their national Churches and to limit papal authority therein. But both the continental Reformers and Trent responded to the problems of the late medieval Church and the challenge of the monarchs by a radical abandonment of the Conciliar movement. Both radically abandoned Erasmian and Conciliarist reason, one for fideism and the other for the authoritarianism of an absolute ecclesiastical monarchy. The Henrician reformation at its best may be seen as an attempt to reform rather than revolutionize. Henry's bishops only abandoned the effort when forced to choose between the Romanism of Mary and the new-model revolution of Edward's later reign. But already with the Elizabethan anti-Puritans and Hooker the moderate, reasonable spirit began to revive. We in the ACC combine unambiguous doctrinal Catholicism (looking back to the Henricians and reasserted in the Affirmation of Saint Louis) with the riches of the later Anglican patrimony (literary, musical, architectural, spiritual), and the liturgical glories of the Prayer Book tradition. We have the best of all theological worlds.

The Individual, The Church, and the Holy Ghost

2010-05-03T15:42:00.000-07:00

Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth… John 16:13.

There is a real haziness about the Holy Ghost which infects great numbers of Christians, and the main cause is that teaching on the Doctrine of the Trinity is sorely neglected. As Catholics, we have a wonderful patrimony of such teaching in the Ecumenical Councils which officially formulated the Doctrine of the Trinity, and in the Fathers, both before and after the Councils, who wrestled with, proclaimed, and defended the doctrine.

Protestants, relying as they claim on Scripture alone, are somewhat hamstrung when it comes to clear teaching on the Trinity. Once one is aware of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity as fully proclaimed by the Church, one may go back into Scripture and see that the doctrine has a firm Scriptural foundation. But leave aside the Holy Tradition of the Church, and Scripture alone is rather vague about the Trinity. No matter how exhaustive a Bible concordance you have, you will search in vain for the word “Trinity”, which nowhere occurs in Scripture. There are several fundamentalist denominations which deny the Doctrine of the Trinity precisely because it is not explicitly stated in Scripture. In the end, there are two things for which almost all Protestant denominations are inescapably indebted to the Catholic Church: the canon of Scripture and the Doctrine of the Trinity. However, neglect of the Catholic context in which the canon of Scripture was proclaimed also leads to a neglect of the Doctrine of the Trinity.

However, if Protestants are hazy about the Holy Trinity, they tend to have very definite ideas about the Persons who make up the Trinity, and especially about the Holy Ghost. In the context of Protestantism, and especially in its evangelical and charismatic branches, the Holy Ghost has a central place in the practical task of daily Christian living. If there is a problem among Catholics, it tends to be a downplaying of this centrality of the Holy Ghost, or on the other hand, a sloppy adoption of charismaticism and its doctrinal haziness. There are those who flee from the emotional craziness of charismatic worship by embracing the comparative stillness of liturgical worship, and there are those who want to rescue liturgical worship from its comparative stillness by importing the emotional craziness of charismatic worship.

Among those who concentrate heavily upon the Holy Ghost, there is often a very facile connection made between one’s own definite feelings and convictions and the promptings of the Holy Ghost. I grew up in an evangelical setting where strong feelings regarding any aspect of the spiritual life were taken definitively to be the work of the Holy Ghost. Most often, this didn’t do any real harm, but my favorite Sunday School teacher from high school left his wife, divorced her, married a much younger woman, and believed that this was what God wanted him to do. I once had a lady in my office who said, “God has finally shown me the man he wants me to be with for the rest of my life, and I can’t help it that he’s married to my daughter”. All of this comes from a misunderstanding of the Person and work of the Holy Spirit.

Now it’s interesting to note that “Holy Ghost” or “Holy Spirit” is really not a Proper Name at all in the way that “Father” or “Son” is. “Father” and “Son” tell us something about the relationship of the First and Second Persons of the Trinity; “Holy Ghost” does not tell us anything about the relationship of the Third Person to the First or Second. In fact, since God is holy, and God is spirit, “Holy Spirit” could apply with equal accuracy to the Father or the Son. The Name of the Holy Ghost tells us nothing about His essential subsistence within the Trinity.

This anonymity, if you will, is by design. Our Lord tells us that the work of the Holy Ghost is to glorify the Son, and that the Holy Ghost does not “speak of himself” (Jn. 16:13). At Pentecost, when the Apostles were filled with the Holy Ghost, they did not spill into the streets to speak of the experience of being filled with the Holy Ghost; they did not, like so many in the Pentecostal movement, concentrate on the feelings and sensations which were the result of the action of the Holy Ghost. Under the influence of the Holy Ghost, and with His inspiration, they spoke of Christ, and were able to communicate the Gospel to all those who heard their voices. The Holy Spirit is God, and should of course be worshipped and adored as God, but He does not, as it were, draw attention to Himself, but ever calls to mind Jesus and enables us to love Christ more and more. “I will not leave you comfortless,” Jesus tells the disciples early in the Farewell Discourse; “I will come to you” (Jn. 14:18), and this coming of Jesus is none other than the coming of the Holy Ghost, so closely is the work of the Holy Ghost associated with glorifying Jesus and calling to mind the things of Christ.

The works of the Divine Nature as they are manifested in creation are referred to by theologians as works of economy. Most of what we know about the Holy Ghost, then, is economic: that is, we know about Him through His acts within and upon the created order. And one of the chief of these acts is, Christ said to the Apostles, “to guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16:13). Notice that this promise is given to the Apostles assembled together. It is not a guarantee of individual infallibility applied to any one of them alone. St. Peter, we are told in Scripture, went astray in siding with the Judaizers and requiring new converts to be circumcised and to keep many of the dietary restrictions of the Mosaic law. He maintained this error and was confronted by St. Paul. The two of them then submitted themselves to the authority of the Council of Jerusalem, detailed in Acts Chapter 15, in which St. James, speaking for the Council, declared the truth of the matter. The declaration of the Council, sent to the churches, identified the teaching of the Council with that of the Holy Ghost: “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things” (Acts 15:28). This is an early example of how the Holy Ghost guides “into all truth”. There is a direct identification with the teaching of the Apostles and their successors, the Bishops of the Church, with the work of the Holy Ghost. For the great truths of the Faith, for doctrine and for dogma, the voice of the Holy Ghost is the voice of the Church speaking through time in the office of its Bishops. And this is for our comfort, so that we don’t have to fret about what is true and what is not, and so that we can proceed with the serious business of our journey to salvation with confidence that the road-map set before us is accurate and reliable.

This is not to say, of course, that the Holy Ghost does not illuminate individuals with certain truths applicable to themselves. This He certainly does, especially as one prays or meditates upon Scripture. In fact, without the aid of the Holy Spirit, neither our prayers nor our time spent in Holy Scripture is of any use to us. We are expressly told in Scripture that our prayers have efficacy because the Holy Spirit assists them with “groanings deeper than words”. And yet, it is important to state emphatically that the Holy Ghost never inspires or directs individuals to do or think anything contrary to what He has revealed in the teaching of the Church. If more people were aware of this, there would be a lot less individual anguish, and a lot less nonsense of the sort I heard from my old Sunday School teacher or from the lady in my office. St. Paul warned the Galatians that even if an angel from heaven delivered a message contrary to the teaching of the Gospel, he would be accursed; and he told the Corinthians that Satan can appear as an angel of light. If Satan and his angels can do these things, it is no surprise that they can lend a spiritual power to the misguided thoughts of our own hearts so that we mistakenly believe we are hearing the Holy Ghost.

In fact, in our individual lives, the work of the Holy Ghost is almost always hidden and quiet. The Holy Ghost tends not to call attention to Himself, and because our souls are infused with His presence at Baptism, we would be in some danger if it were otherwise. Our souls are weak from sin, and so God usually treats us gingerly, allowing awareness of His presence in us and of his leading to grow gradually, almost imperceptibly. Were it otherwise, our weakened natures would be tempted to fasten on God’s manifestations in us, rather than on God Himself. And when  for some reason we didn’t feel anything at one time or another, we’d tend to believe that God had gone from us. And so the Holy Ghost normally operates in hidden and quiet ways within us.

But if we give ourselves to God, and allow Him to have His way with us, the Holy Ghost will invariably be operating within us. Even if imperceptibly, He will be guiding us, leading us, ad comforting us. Our Lord repeatedly calls the Holy Ghost “the Comforter”. More specifically, He calls the Spirit “another Comforter”. The word “Comforter” is the Greek word “Paraclete”, which has the sense of one who comforts by interceding for or acting as advocate for another. Jesus is our Paraclete, and the Holy Ghost acts in his stead, not replacing or supplanting, but fulfilling and completing the mission of Christ. When Jesus walked this earth, he could reach only those people who had access to Him: he was willingly constrained by the limits of His human nature. But after the Ascension, when he is seated at the right hand of the Father, the Holy Ghost can make him manifest to all people, everywhere.

He does this most sufficiently and most excellently in the Eucharist. Every liturgy of the Church acknowledges the role of the Holy Ghost as the agent of the Eucharist, as the One who makes present the Sacrifice of Calvary and makes that Sacrifice efficacious for us. It is perhaps in the Liturgy that the role of the Holy Ghost as Comforter is most plainly set forth for us, just as it is in the Sacraments generally that we see the most objective signs of the Holy Ghost’s operations in our lives. I am convinced that there is no better way to discern the operation of the Holy Ghost within you than by devout reception of Holy Communion and by the practice of sacramental Confession.

In all of His works, the Holy Ghost shows us, not Himself, but Jesus Christ, and testifies of Him. The best way, then, for us to be open to the working and operation of the Holy Ghost is to be open to Christ, to be always thinking of Christ, to be dwelling in heart and mind in the company of Christ. We need the Holy Ghost even to be able to make a start, but if we offer our feeble, storm-tossed wills to God, the Comforter will lift us up and make possible for us what we could never accomplish on our own. And the more we abide in this mindful, loving attention to Christ, the more the Holy Ghost will do the work of our sanctification, by showing us the truth in Christ’s Church, by leading us into that truth through personal illumination, by enabling us to come into Christ’s real Presence in the Eucharist, and by enabling us to make a good Confession. We cannot see the Father, and we cannot see the Holy Ghost; we can see the human face of Christ, the Son of God, and when we fix our gaze on that face, the Holy Ghost will sanctify us and fill us so that the Son may present us, perfect and finished, before the Father.

Easter

2010-04-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. Colossians 3:4

“Christ is risen!” With this cry the Apostles greeted one another with the spectacular news which Peter and John brought back from the empty sepulcher, and with this cry the early Church made known its central and most profound doctrine: that Jesus Christ, who was fully God and fully man, and who died on the cross “for us men and for our salvation”, rose from the dead on the third day.

With this cry the succeeding generations of Christians continued to greet one another, and with this cry they challenged the world and called men to conversion. “Christ is risen”: this is the message of the Church, whole and entire.

So central is the Resurrection to the life and teaching of the Church that Easter Day is the preeminent Feast of the Church Year and the font from which all other feasts flow. Every Sunday, the Church tells us, is a Feast of the Resurrection, a little Easter, a picture of this Day of days, the Sunday of Sundays, the Feast of Feasts, the Glory of the Church. The world has taken Christmas, the Feast of the Nativity, and utterly secularized it, more or less with our consent, and has set it up as the great Holiday. But as Christians we must always bear in mind that, great though the Nativity is, it is the Feast of the Resurrection which is the greatest of all Feasts. The world has secularized Easter, too, though with somewhat less success, and has usually been content to classify this day as one of the lesser Hallmark Holidays. One can be lukewarm or even fairly antagonistic toward Christianity and still believe that the birth of Jesus marks a time when all men should think vaguely of the angelic message of “peace on earth, goodwill toward men”. One can believe that Jesus was a good man, or even a prophet, and celebrate Christmas in light of those beliefs. But such a person can do nothing with the Feast of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, for this marks him as something more than a messenger of goodwill, more than a moral teacher, more than a prophet: it proves his assertion that he is God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and utterly deserving of all our loyalty, service, and love.

The earliest witnesses to the Resurrection insisted on the literal, physical nature of the Jesus with whom they had contact on Easter Day and for forty days thereafter, and it was precisely this which St. John intended to emphasize when, a few verses on from today’s Gospel, he shows Thomas placing his finger in the wounds on Jesus’ hands and his hand in the wound on Jesus’ side. The presence of the death-wounds was proof to the disciples that this risen Body was the same which died on the cross. When St. Peter preached the Gospel to the household of Cornelius in Acts chapter 10, he emphasized that the Apostles ate and drank with Christ after he rose from the dead (Acts 10:41). The early Church carried on the testimony of this proof in the response to the Easter greeting: “Christ is risen”; “He is risen indeed”. He is risen indeed: not in a metaphorical or allegorical sense, not in a spiritual sense, but in an actual, physical reality which could be touched.

The physical reality of the Resurrection has a host of important ramifications for us. First, Jesus’ Resurrection is not merely an instance of an individual coming back from the dead. As marvelous as that would be, there are a few others who have travelled that road: we know from Scripture of the widow’s son raised by Elijah, of the young girl and of Lazarus, both of whom were resurrected by our Lord. St. Paul once preached so long that a young man named Eutychus dozed off and fell from the loft where he was sitting and was killed by the fall. St. Paul raised Eutychus from the dead (which might be some amends for having contributed to his death in the first place). These were all raised from the dead and restored to their natural life, a life transformed surely by their sojourn into a country unknown to all the living, but a life still subject to the death which is the first and surest result of the sin of Adam and of our continuing participation therein. These all were raised from the dead to die again some day.

But Christ did not simply come back to life: he utterly overcame death. Death is the fruit of sin and by dint of our sinfulness death holds sway over all of us, but because of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead, death does not hold eternal sway over us. We live in a world which is utterly beset by illusion. We’re told that death is the end of life, and that there’s nothing out there beyond it. We’re told that there is no God, or if there is, He is not involved in our affairs. We’re told that the Resurrection of the Lord was a fable. And this isn’t just a problem for non-Christians. I knew a woman who spent 30 years in a Christian denomination and was never taught the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The new life which the Christian receives at Baptism operates in a hidden fashion, at least at first, much as a seed planted in spring does all of its initial growth out of the sight of the gardener. Unfortunately, a great many Christians never put themselves to the difficulty of becoming more and more immersed in the Christian life of prayer and worship and so never really see much growth above the surface. A great part of that growth is the transmission to us, through grace, of greater faith and of more refined spiritual vision and understanding.

One of the things one comes to understand is that God did not make man for death. “For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity,” we’re told in Wisdom chapter 2. We’re told in the same place that those who do not understand this are “deceived”. Death is a very unnatural separation of the soul from the body. We are not souls using bodies in the way that people use cars or computers: each of us has a body which was made for our soul, and a soul which was made for our body. They are completely intertwined and interpenetrate each other. The body relies upon the soul for life and growth, and the soul relies upon the body for the information from the senses which forms the normal basis of all the soul’s knowledge and understanding. Death, in this sense, is utterly unnatural, and involves the separation of things which were never meant to be separated. This is one of the great consequences of the Fall. However, because Christ in his Resurrection overcame death, it has been limited in its scope: death, to put it simply, has become no more than the temporary separation of the body from the soul. Death has been put within limits and constraints; our souls will not be its prisoners, and our bodies will be remade. This is what St. Paul means when he writes in I Corinthians that, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (I Cor. 15:22). Because Christ has overcome physical death, everyone who ever died will be reunited with his body at the general resurrection associated with the Second Coming of our Lord.

If our resurrection is to be a resurrection to glory with Christ, we must now unite ourselves to him; he must be, in the words of the Epistle, “our life”. Because of sin, we suffer not only physical death, but spiritual death as well. We are blind to spiritual realities, and forgetful of God. But Christ’s Resurrection has reversed death utterly, and we can live not only in hope of future resurrection, but in current spiritual victory. We do this by making Christ our life. First, we are joined to him in Baptism, which is itself made powerful to save us by Christ’s own death and resurrection. Next, we ask for grace to commit ourselves wholly into his hands day by day, moment by moment. The Lord who took human flesh, who lived, who died, who rose again for our salvation will not leave you as you make your way through life. His Resurrection from the dead gives not only future hope, but meaning and purpose here and now.

There are two direct methods by which Christ becomes our life once we have been joined to him in Baptism. The first is prayer. If you are not praying, the life of Christ is not growing within you. If you are not seeking him as the pearl of great price, in comparison to which nothing else matters, if you are not moving all the furniture of your life to find him, sweeping the remotest corners in confession, then this wonderful new life will lie unrealized within you.

The next way of making Christ our life is by reception of him at the Eucharist. If Christ is risen indeed, if he has taken his physical, human nature with him into the very heart of the Most Holy Trinity, then the radical possibility of the Real Presence presents itself to us. If Christ is physically present at the right hand of the Father, then his transformed physical nature, still and forever united to the Second Person of the Trinity, becomes available to us here and now in the Eucharist. That’s why Christ tied his feeding of the disciples at the Last Supper to his coming Sacrifice: “This is my Body; this is my Blood”; and that is why his death-wounds remained visible in the glorified flesh he bore after the Resurrection. St. John, for whom the episode with doubting Thomas is so important, is later shown the continuation of this reality in Heaven. In the 5th chapter of the Revelation, St. John is shown a vision of the ascended Christ, whom he describes as “a Lamb, as it had been slain” (Rev. 5:6), that is, still bearing the marks of his Passion even in the glory of Heaven. It is this “Lamb that was slain” (Rev. 5:12) who the Angel says in Rev. 7:17 will feed the faithful. He does this by giving us Himself, his glorified flesh and blood, but still his real flesh and blood, in the Sacrament of the Altar. And that is why every Sunday is a Feast of the Resurrection, a little Easter, because the Risen Christ becomes present for us in his very flesh and very blood, in all his humanity and all his divinity, under the veils of bread and wine.

And we, partaking of him, become partakers in his Resurrected Life, in his reversal of death. As the Prayer Book puts it: “…that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us” (p.82). The full message of Easter is that Christ has risen to become our life, the Life that is the light of men. The world is compassed about with death, both physical and spiritual, but Christ lives to give us life in Baptism, in prayer, in the Eucharist. Heaven is union with the risen Christ; when he becomes our life, and especially as we approach his Altar, we have a pledge of heaven now, and the death in us is overcome by his life.

1662 And All That

2010-03-09T10:37:00.000-08:00

I received the following in an email recently, and it seems a nice riposte to the "More-Anglican-Than-Thou" attitude one encounters so often.

Some would like the 1662 English Book of Common Prayer and strict conformity to the rubrics of that common Prayer Book. What would the result be from this 1662 strictness?

There would be no ashes on Ash Wednesday, no palms on Palm Sunday, no candles on Candlemas.

There would be virtually nothing seasonal or variable in the Eucharistic celebration - no sequence hymns, no varying minor propers or postcommunion collects, very few Proper Prefaces, no omission of the Gloria in excelsis in Lent or Advent. Only the collect, epistle, and gospel would change on the average Sunday, though the Ornaments rubric at least might allow some change in vestments to relieve this Holy Monotony. There would be very few feast days observed liturgically, no propers for Lenten ferias until Holy Week, no Christmas Eve gospel from Saint Luke's gospel. No Christmas Eve, in fact.

There would be one or two very long Exhortations read on all Sundays or holy days prior to the celebration of the Eucharist - which would be every Sunday if celebration is every Sunday. AND there would also be read another long Exhortation in the course of the celebration itself. Both of these two long, mandatory Exhortations would be read in addition to the Prayer for the Whole State and any other notices, in addition to the sermon, and in addition to the Decalogue. The Prayer of Consecration would end abruptly with the dominical Words of Institution.

Of course the 1662 book is seldom used in this strictly correct manner. Most people who think they want 1662 in fact want and are familiar with something else - with a rite that uses 1662 as its base, but rearranges the elements of the rite, omits much or all of the Exhortations, and supplements the propers with material from other, later books.

Does anyone think that 1662 strictly used would attract people to our parishes? In fact people are not longing for rubically correct Prayer Book fundamentalism, particularly when the Prayer Book in question is the inflexible 1662 book. People are looking for what Archbishop Cahoon used to call 'plausible liturgy'. Either a missal or any of the ACC's authorized Prayer Books can provide the basis for such plausible liturgy. For Continuing Anglicans such liturgy should have at its core the language of Cranmer and Coverdale, and the bulk of the rite should derive from their translations and compositions. Beyond that, no particular edition of the Prayer Book or set of ceremonial and rubrical accompaniments is likely to have much significance for most laymen, except for the rapidly diminishing set of laymen from an Anglican background who have a strong preexisting attachment to a particular book.

Also, and as important, people are looking for carefully prepared, brief, plausible, preferably expository sermons. They are looking for clergy who are kind and pastorally concerned, not rude, compulsively eccentric, or uninterested. They are looking for solid Bible study, good music, some outreach and charitable work in the wider community, warm and welcoming congregations.

Here's To The Stale Old Vision

2010-03-03T10:19:00.001-08:00

I think message boards in front of churches are lame. Unless your church uses its message board simply to announce service times, or unless the person responsible for your pithy messages is Samuel Johnson, your church is probably broadcasting inanity. There was a church where I used to live which for a long time had the following message on its board: “Drive friendly”. 2,000 years of Christian enlightenment and struggle, and this is all they’ve got?

Recently, a church I drive past frequently has posted the following: “God is giving us a fresh new vision. Come check it out.” Christianity has a name for fresh new visions, and that name is “heresy”. Not really the sort of thing you’d want to advertise.

Of course, these people probably aren’t formally heretical (but who knows anymore?); they’re probably jumping on the neo-church bandwagon of the Emerging Church movement. The primary tenet of EC seems to be that the way things have been done is bad because, well, it’s the way things have been done. The past is practically anathema for these EC folks, and while there’s a good deal of stupidity mixed in with “the way things have been done”, this view neglects the Catholic consensus that Holy Tradition is the voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s not usually the Catholic consensus that the EC folks are trashing; it’s usually the Protestant consensus (if there is such a thing).

Evangelical Protestantism seems to have been stuck for about a century in the end of the 19th Century. When Evangelicals talk about “that old-time religion”, that’s what they mean. They’re not talking about incense and icons, but about brush-arbor revivals and teetotalism. They’re basing themselves within a certain web of assumptions and practices the most consistent application of which is found among the Amish.

These assumptions and practices have left Evangelical Protestantism open to a lot of attacks from what we might call the left and the right From the left, it has been riddled by and reacted against biblical criticism, and by social pressure to accept divorce, homosexual practices, female ministers, and contemporary worship schemes. From the right, it has been attacked by Calvinists for its lack of theological rigor, and by pressure to embrace contemporary worship schemes.

Contemporary worship is urged upon Evangelical Protestants by everyone, and the practice has been more or less fully accepted. This is probably the greatest inroad into the orthodoxy of the Evangelicals. The feminization of the Evangelical clergy got its start in the feminization of Evangelical worship, and a whole host of assumptions and practices fell in its wake.

From the Catholic point of view, the undoing of the 19th-century mindset of the Evangelicals can be a good thing if it drives them to re-examine the “old-time religion” in ways that makes them more open and sympathetic to the Catholic consensus. It can be destructive if this undoing takes with it the underlying orthodoxy once held by the Evangelicals, and so removes our points of commonality.

Lent is a good time to think about these things. Lent is anything but a “fresh new vision”; it’s a hoary old vision, as old as fallen human nature. Lent is very un-contemporary, in that it involves an acknowledgment of our wretched sinfulness, our lack of penitence, and our absent-mindedness regarding God. These are acknowledgments that contemporary culture not only refuses to make, but from which it strives to keep us distracted.

The search for novelty is one of the hallmarks of our culture’s mortal illness, and it has infected many, many formerly orthodox Christians. The stale practices of Catholic Orthodoxy are powerful antidotes against this symptom. I say “stale”, because that is how the cure appears to our jaded, wounded vision: our spiritual cure looks tedious and troublesome, and it’s so much easier simply to ignore it, pretend we need no cure, and spend our time searching for fresh new visions.

No one who is truly immersed in Catholic Orthodoxy can mistake the old, the tried and true, the ancient cure of souls, for something stale and hidebound. The twitchy innovators may make this mistake, and as they appear entrenched in their restless quest for novelty, perhaps it’s best to raise against them the standard of the stale, the dusty, the hoary, the old. They won’t get it, of course, but it’ll make a good talking-point. So here’s to the stale old vision. It’s probably best contemplated in the company of an old, old whisky.

Archbishop Haverland on the Formularies of the ACC

2010-02-21T16:30:00.000-08:00

The following is an article by the Most Reverend Mark Haverland, Ph.D., Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Anglican Catholic Church.

What are the Formularies of the Anglican Catholic Church?

What are the Formularies of the Anglican Catholic Church? What documents and authorities have the greatest weight for the ACC in determining debated issues of doctrine and morals? The question should be of interest, of course, to members of the ACC in particular. The question also may be of some interest to some others.

In such matters one often has to distinguish intrinsic and formal authority from practical and material authority. For instance, most Christians would agree that Scripture is intrinsically more important than a Conciliar formula, say the Tome of Saint Leo. However, often as a practical matter a less intrinsically important authority may provide the practical lens which brings the more fundamental, greater text into focus. Roman Catholics, for instance, certainly would acknowledge that Saint John’s gospel is more fundamental and important than a papal encyclical. However, as a practical matter Roman Catholics view, for instance, S. Matthew 16 or Saint John 21 in the light of developed assumptions and teachings about papal authority which have a kind of practical, interpretive priority. The lesser authority as a practical matter determines the meaning of texts which can be and are interpreted in widely different senses by different sincere, intelligent, and learned readers.

So while no sane or sensible person would assert that the Constitution and Canons (C&C) of the Anglican Catholic Church have any profound intrinsic authority, they have a kind of priority in any attempt to identify the authoritative formularies of the ACC.

One approach to the question before us is to apply to the ACC a line of argument following from the term ‘Continuing Church’. On this theory the ACC is a Continuing Church; what the ACC continues is classical Anglicanism; and the formularies of classical Anglicanism are, in the reckoning of the late Father Peter Toon, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (with its Ordinal), the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, and the Homilies.

As an approach concerning the formularies of the ACC the obvious problem for this theory is the fact that none of the documents mentioned in the previous paragraph is established in the ACC’s Constitution and Canons. The Articles are not given any authority at all, for the C&C do not mention them. The Homilies are not given any particular authority. And the Prayer Books explicitly authorized for use in the ACC do not include 1662 but rather are the ones in use in the U.S. (1928) and Canada (1962) at the time of the ACC’s formation, along with the first book (England 1549) and the traditional books in use in places to which the ACC has later spread, namely the South African book of 1954 and the Indian book of 1963 with its official Supplement. The C&C also explicitly authorizes the use of the American, Anglican, and English Missals.

Whatever one makes of the difference between the Toon list of authorities and the C&C’s list, any correct answer to the question posed in this article has to begin with the actual formularies mentioned in the C&C rather than with various other possible lists of documents which have been given some authority by various commentators in various places and various times in the many centuries of Anglican history.

The actual authorities recognized in the C&C, in addition to the Prayer Books and missals already listed, include:

1. The Affirmation of Saint Louis. In the light of the collapse of Christian orthodoxy and Catholic Order in the Churches of the official Anglican or Canterbury Communion (in 1975 in Canada, 1976 in the Episcopal Church, and in the early 1990s in England), the ACC correctly asserts the need to fix and establish definitely our teaching concerning many matters that long were debated in the Anglican world. Some of these matters were the precipitating issues at question in the late-20th century collapse: the male character of Holy Orders, the sanctity of unborn life, and the inadequacy (or worse) of the modernist liturgies. But other issues which the Affirmation settles were long debated in Anglican circles. The Affirmation does not debate, but affirms and asserts, for example: that there are seven sacraments, not two; that there are seven Ecumenical Councils, not four; and that valid sacramental marriages are simply indissoluble. The Affirmation also asserts that all Anglican formularies and authorities are to be interpreted in accordance with the clarified, definite teaching of the Affirmation and its basic principles. In short, within the ACC many long-standing Anglican debates are definitely and clearly settled by the Affirmation.

2. The ‘Henrician Settlement’. On a number of basic matters of doctrine, polity, and Church law the C&C fix as authoritative the state of English Catholicism in the reign of Henry VIII after the break with Rome but without the Royal Supremacy. The teachings of the Fathers and of the Councils are accepted ‘as received in the Church of England through the year 1543' (Canon 2.1). So too canonical matters not determined by the ACC otherwise are to be governed by the state of affairs in the Church of England ‘in its estates in convocation assembled as specified by the Acts of Parliament of 1534 and 1543’. (Canon 2.2) This is not quaint antiquarianism. Rather the ACC establishes as its default assumptions the Henrician rather than the Elizabethan Settlement. However, the liturgical fruits of the Elizabethan Settlement, as improved by later Prayer Book revision and as viewed through the lens of the Affirmation, are also established. The ‘Henrician Settlement’ would include: the rejection of the papal office in its late medieval form; episcopal and synodal Church government; three-fold Holy Orders; the doctrinal and credal orthodoxy found in the large number of patristic authorities named in the C&C; the sacramental system which the Henrician Church retained; and large chunks of the Corpus Juris Canonici and the custom and common law of the Church. This starting point looks much more like the Church consensus of the first millennium than it does Protestantism in the common meaning of the word.

3. Subsequent, positive Anglican legislation insofar as it is consistent with the Affirmation and the ACC’s C&C. The Henrician Church included mandatory clerical celibacy, legally-enforceable tithing, mandatory Latin liturgy, and many other things which the ACC does not retain. The Henrician Church also did not include many things which the ACC establishes, such as a house of laity in all Synods. Desuetude and explicit or positive canonical legislation explain the differences in question. I am not asserting that the ACC is governed in detail by Henrician norms. I am asserting that Henrician Catholicism is a more authoritative starting point in many, particularly non-liturgical, matters than is the state of the Elizabethan Church. But desuetude and subsequent legislation affect almost all matters since the 16th century. For the ACC the most significant locus of such normative legislation is the C&C.A quick review of the official footnotes of the C&C is instructive. Scripture, the Prayer Book, the Ecumenical Councils, and the Fathers are the authorities most often cited. John Cosin is the only individual Anglican theologian or Churchman cited by name. The C&C are not some odd invention of canon-mad Continuers, but a fairly workable set of rules which limit lawless bishops and help regulate most of our affairs. These rules are explicitly drawn from Scripture, the Prayer Book, the Councils, and our own past.

So, given this information about the ACC’s formularies and authorities, what are we to make of some of the other authorities sometimes cited?

A. The Articles. The Articles of Religion, as I have said, are not an ACC formulary, though they are undoubtedly an historical Anglican formulary. From this I conclude that when the Articles are useful they may usefully be quoted. When they are understood so as to harmonize with the actual formularies of the ACC they may be very useful. There is great apologetical and historical value in careful reading of the Articles in the manner familiar to readers of The Continuum in the writings of E.J. Bicknell or Father Robert Hart. But the Articles themselves have no independent authority within the ACC: like it or not, there it is.

B. The Tudor and Stuart theologians. C&C quotation of individuals after the Patristic era is very rare. John Cosin is quoted. Saint Thomas Aquinas is quoted. That’s about it. As a general matter I would suggest that particular theologians of the 16th and 17th century have to be read and judged as individuals. I would agree with A.M. Allchin who once wrote:

...The position of the seventeenth-century Anglican theologians is,...and must remain, of real importance for all Anglican theological thinking. But this emphatically does not mean that we have to follow them in every particular, nor that we are limited by their positions and conclusions. What it does mean is that we may find in them certain attitudes, certain approaches to theological problems, which are still valid for Anglican thinking to-day and, we would dare to say, still of value for Christian thinking as a whole. By their constant appeal to “the Scriptures interpreted by the perpetual practice of God’s Church”, to use the words of Herbert Thorndike, they provide us with a method and a starting point for our own researches. But they do not give us a complete and finished system. (Our Lady in Seventeenth-century Anglican Devotion and Theology, 1963)

I wrote a master’s thesis on Richard Hooker and a doctrinal dissertation on Henry Hammond. Obviously I see a very great value in understanding the great writers of our own Church and tradition. Modern Roman Catholic scholars have argued that in moral theology the Caroline divines better preserved the great medieval synthesis than did any of their Roman contemporaries. Nicholas Lossky has argued something similar in the case of Lancelot Andrewes, whom Lossky sees as a better synthesizer of the Fathers than his 17th century Eastern contemporaries. But in any case what we gain now from these classical Anglican writers builds on firm foundations established by our own formularies.

C. The Anglo-Catholic movement. If the main impetus for early lay membership in the ACC was Prayer Book loyalty, the main impetus for early clerical membership in the ACC was partisan Anglo-Catholicism. These two obvious facts of our history are such that any wise ACC leader will incline towards American rather than English Anglo-Catholicism. At the risk of oversimplifying, I think it is true that American Anglo-Catholics were more loyal to the Prayer Book than English Anglo-Catholics. We also were less inclined to be Anglo-Papalists. In both cases our greater confidence in our own Anglicanism may have come from the fact that our disestablishment limited the power of our bishops to persecute and to suppress the positive developments of the Tractarian and Ritualist revivals. It also comes from the fact that the 1928 American book is much more adequate than the 1662 English book. Americans did not feel as great a need to fiddle with what was in place. In any case, in matters liturgical I know of no ACC bishop who would attempt to foist a missal or any addition therefrom on a parish that is happy with an unadorned Prayer Book rite. It also is clear that no ACC bishop could get away with an attempt to stop a united priest and parish from doing anything liturgically which can be clearly supported by any authorized missal. There is a spectrum of accepted liturgical usage, and I think we have achieved a broad agreement on that spectrum.

In brief, then the Affirmation of Saint Louis is the lens through which we view all Anglican authorities. This place for the Affirmation is established by material provisions of our Constitution and Canons. The particular Anglican authorities actually received in the ACC are not what they were in the Churches from which we came. Nor are specifically Anglican authorities a razor for trimming the basic affirmations of the ACC as found in our actual formularies. We are not a Church in which Catholic opinions (e.g., that there are seven sacraments and Councils) are tolerated. We are a Catholic Church in which all opinions are subject to correction on the clear basis of our formularies.

The Lenten Rule

2010-02-17T09:43:00.000-08:00

“Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway." I Corinthians 9:24-27

When I first converted to the Catholic Faith, I dreaded the approach of Lent, and would sort of mentally grit my teeth just to get through it. Now, having the benefit of time and, I trust, grace, I see Lent as something akin to taking a bad-tasting antibiotic: it’s hard to swallow, and leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and it’s a pain to try and keep the dosing schedule in mind, but in the end it literally helps save your life and so it’s something to be truly thankful for.

We’re all aware of how an antibiotic can contribute to our health and even save our lives, but I think we’re less aware of how the sorts of undertakings we make in Lent can do the same thing for us spiritually. Our sickness has two aspects: concupiscence and actual sin. Concupiscence is the inclination to sin that we receive as a result of the Fall; concupiscence is not sin, but is the thing that makes sin attractive to us instead of repellent and abhorrent. Concupiscence also involves the rule of our instinctive, animal nature over our spiritual nature; it is a reversal of the order of things God intended when he made mankind. Sin is what results when we listen to concupiscence, when we agree with it, and give in to it.

There’s a line in a Bob Dylan song which says, “What I got ain’t painful / It’s just bound to kill me dead”, and that’s a great description of what happens when concupiscence and actual sin combine in our lives. We are on the road to spiritual death, but we’re deadened to it -- we don’t feel it at all. In fact, our word “anesthesia” comes from the Greek word anaisthēsia, which means indifference or insensibility and which is a technical theological term in the Greek Fathers for our numbness to God caused by concupiscence and sin.

The idea of Lent is the undertaking, for a defined period, particular ascetic efforts designed to help us overcome our anaisthēsia, to help us wake up spiritually. Ascetic effort is our part in the cooperation with the cure that God is providing us for the disease of sin. While we’re talking about Greek words, we might mention that “ascetic” comes from the Greek askēsis, which is merely a word for exercise. Just look at I Corinthians 9:24-27 and you can see this idea in action. St. Paul uses a vocabulary taken from foot-racing and from boxing, both of which require special training, and both of which have the definite goal of winning a prize. Each of these kinds of training involve the whole person and affect everything one does.

There are two things to note about our askēsis. The first is that Lent is not the only time in which we’re called to ascetic efforts: the assumption is that each of us has a rule of life, a considered course of treatment for the general sinfulness and specific sins which make us numb to God. Read the Prayer Book and you will find that it assumes that you are undertaking a considered course of spiritual treatment, that is, that you are working systematically to overcome your sins and your general sinfulness. This is, after all, the specific and repeated exhortation of Scripture. “For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live,” St. Paul tells the Romans, and the course of action commended in Scripture and embodied in the Prayer Book where in fact the normal approach to the spiritual life in the Catholic and Orthodox churches until fairly recently. In recent decades, however, many churches have de-emphasized the spiritual training St. Paul recommends in I Corinthians 9, and have instead adopted a sort of minimalism which lends itself to the question, “What’s the very least I have to do to slide into Heaven?”, and this is a very damaging approach. It’s like asking, “What’s the very least I have to do to get over this sickness?” without bothering about a return to full and robust health. The problem with this approach is that Scripture assumes that we are all, each and every one of us, called by God, not just to get by in the Christian life, but to become saints.

One way to fall into this way of thinking is to forget that Christianity is not a moral system for earning our way into Heaven, but is a personal relationship with the living God, who made us for the sole purpose of this relationship. We have no other point than coming to know and love God, and everything in our lives must be subservient to this end. The question is not, “What’s the least I can do to get by?”, for that is not a question anyone in a relationship of love would ever ask. The question is, “What can I do to get closer and closer to God, what can I do to become more and more intimate with him?”. So it only makes sense that we are expected to approach this relationship in a methodical, systematic fashion, and that is where our rule of life comes in. Our rule of life is the minimum expectation we set for ourselves in pursuing our relationship with God, and it will of course contain attendance at the Liturgy on all Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation, as well as some reading of Scripture and set times for prayer. Though the rule is a minimum, we will expect, as we grow in our relationship with God, that we will over time add to our rule, and that it will grow along with our relationship with God. But St. Paul makes clear in I Corinthians 9 that each of us is expected, both in and out of Lent, to consider ourselves as spiritual athletes in training, and that this is to be our way of life. We may intensify our training in Lent, but it goes on year-round.

I said earlier that there were two things to note about our ascetic efforts. The second is that our cooperation with God’s grace is something of a mystery. Failure to understand this has led to some very dangerous and wrong-headed teachings, the two extremes of which are Pelagianism and Calvinism. Pelagianism teaches that we can achieve moral perfection through our own efforts unaided by divine grace, that we are sufficient moral actors in our own right; Calvinism teaches that we can achieve nothing at all, that we are incapable of any moral action and that God overcomes the will of every person, leading some of them irresistibly to Heaven and leading some of them irresistibly to Hell.

In starkly contradicting these horrible doctrines, we must emphatically state that though we can do nothing to earn our salvation, that though our good works and ascetic effort can never gain us entry into Heaven, our failure to undertake ascetic effort can certainly cost us Heaven. The mystery is that we can’t earn our own salvation, but we can lose it; that we can always trust in grace, but we must never presume upon it. If so great a Christian as St. Paul was concerned lest he be cast away, then all of us should look to his example.

Ascetic effort is, in St. Paul’s terminology from I Corinthians 9, our training, but it is never training, never labor, for its own sake. It is the way in which we undertake to cooperate with God in healing our relationship with him. Everyone who’s ever been in a relationship of love will realize that there are rough edges which must be worn away, pet peeves which must be surrendered, and selfish instincts which must be overcome. It’s no different in our relationship with God, except that in this relationship the need for improvement is all on our side. If we are to grow in grace, and growth in grace is growth in our nearness to God, then we must cooperate actively with grace, and through our daily rule of life and through our Lenten discipline, seek to weaken all those things in ourselves which are opposed to our relationship with him, which seek to place ourselves at the center of the universe, on the throne of our lives which belongs rightfully to God.

“So run, that ye may obtain,” St. Paul tells us. If we will undertake this labor, we will find that we never do it alone, but that grace goes before us and behind us, making of our own clumsy efforts something truly grace-full. Now is the time for us to consider our daily rule of life and our Lenten discipline, preparing ourselves so that we may run, not as uncertainly, but trusting God to give us an incorruptible crown which is nothing less than union with him.

Confession and Spiritual Direction

2009-11-08T16:35:00.000-08:00

I want address two very important and immensely practical things: how to avoid sin and how to overcome sin. But first, we need to put sin in its correct context in the scheme of salvation. You’ve heard it many times before, but it bears repeating that we can do nothing to earn our salvation. No matter how good we are, we can never be good enough to merit heaven. If we approach the vital question of salvation and try to answer it with a list of good deeds, we are going to be in trouble. This is one of the favorite themes of St. Paul: righteousness can never be wrested from deeds alone, otherwise there would have been no need for the Incarnation, Life, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord. The whole point of the law, as St. Paul reminds us in the Epistle to the Romans, was to show that no one could keep it, not so that men would despair of their salvation, but so that men would recognize their need for the Savior.

Heaven is not our reward for good behavior; heaven is not our reward for anything. Heaven is the result of our joining ourselves, through faith, with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. And yet it is not true that our actions or inactions have no relation at all to our spiritual state. Grace comes first: “And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect” (Gal. 3:17). The promise comes before the law; grace also comes during our actions, and after them. Grace is God’s uncreated energy working for our salvation, and grace comes first and last, and our works are merely our cooperation with grace. We can’t provide ourselves with grace, we can’t earn it; but we can turn away from it, close up the channels of grace by sin, and ultimately alienate ourselves from grace and from God who is the Source of grace.

It follows that we need to pay attention to our spiritual lives. The Christian life is not a flight on autopilot, but a pilgrimage on foot, one we have to undertake anew with each step, and one with many obstacles, many distractions, and many false turnings. We can’t simply assume we’re progressing as we ought to. We need to learn to identify sin in our lives, to avoid it, and to overcome it. Two great helps in this regard are confession and spiritual direction, but surprisingly, these are things we don’t talk about much.

Let’s look first at the question of sacramental confession. The proper name for this is the Sacrament of Penance, though it’s commonly called simply “confession”. As in all his priestly acts, the priest does not act in the Sacrament of Penance in his own right, but in the place of Christ and through his authority. The penitent making his confession is speaking to the priest, but his words are addressed to God. And the priest does not forgive the penitent his sins, but pronounces God’s absolution on behalf of Christ. God forgives the sins of the penitent; the priest’s words, “I absolve thee” constitute the vehicle for the grace of the sacrament, and they are spoken on God’s behalf. As such, the Sacrament of Penance is extremely comforting, and it removes any doubt as to our spiritual state, for the sacrament remits all sins and restores us to the state of grace we enjoyed at the moment of our baptism. It also gives us grace to overcome sin and to grow in the life of Christ. Sacramental confession, though, is not the only way we can receive forgiveness of sins. Baptized persons can be forgiven even the most serious sins by making an act of true contrition and repentance, and when we do this, we’re forgiven even without using the Sacrament of Penance. We need to be clear about this, but more on this later.

Now, the Anglican Catholic Church is a bit different from, say, the Roman Catholic Church when it comes to these matters. Regarding the Sacrament of Penance, Canon 989 of the Roman Code of Canon law puts it this way: “After having attained the age of discretion, each of the faithful is bound by an obligation faithfully to confess serious sins at least once a year”. The ACC canons contain no such requirement. Of course, there’s no rite for sacramental confession in the Prayer Book, but this is because the Prayer Book is a book of “common” or public prayer, and Penance is a private rite. Still, the supposed silence of the Prayer Book and the lack of external compulsion give many of the faithful the idea that confession isn’t important.

I say the “supposed” silence of the Prayer Book, because the writers of the Prayer Book simply assume that priests will be available for the Sacrament of Penance when necessary. The second of the Exhortations directs any who cannot quiet his conscience by means of private self-examination to see a priest and to “open his grief; that he may receive such godly counsel and advice, as may tend to the quieting of his conscience, and the removing of all scruple and doubtfulness” (p.88). Moreover, the Order for Visitation of the Sick directs that the “sick person be moved to make a special confession of his sins” (p.313). And most importantly, the Prayer Book rite for ordaining priests requires the bishop to lay hands upon the candidate, and using the words that Christ said to the Apostles, to say, “Receive the Holy Ghost for the Office and Work of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained” (p.546). So while the Prayer Book has no rite for the Sacrament of Penance, it simply assumes that the Sacrament is available, and that the people will have recourse to it. Our Canons assume the same, and Canon 12.5 of the ACC sets forth the requirements for those priests who hear confessions, but there is no minimum requirement regarding the number and frequency of confession as there is in the Roman canons.

The difference between our scheme and the Roman Catholic one is that the onus in our Church is laid upon the individual to make his confession, rather than upon the hierarchy to enforce confession. I said earlier that an act of perfect contrition and repentance will do the same thing as sacramental confession. I think many people rely upon this fact to minimize the role of confession. Many people also make the mistake of seeing the General Confession in the Mass as a substitute for the Sacrament of Penance, but the teaching of the Church is that this is not the case. From a technical theological standpoint, the General Confession alone, said with faith and repentance, will remit less serious sins (also called “venial sins”), but it does not remit serious sins (sometimes called “mortal sins”), unless it is accompanied by true contrition. I don’t want to address here the differences between the Roman teaching, on the one hand, and the Orthodox on the other regarding the difference between serious and less serious sin. There are Anglican Catholics who lean toward either emphasis, and many who probably don’t think about the question at all. The point I want to make is that the General Confession is a supplement to, and not a substitute for, sacramental confession, though many neglect the latter because of the former.

Two considerations follow, however. First, if the General Confession can be relied upon to remit less serious sins, how are we to be sure which of our sins are less serious and which are more serious? Sin is sin, certainly, but Scripture and the clear teaching of the Church hold that some sins are, from a practical standpoint, more damaging to us than others. Some sins are so serious that they endanger the very spiritual life upon which we rely for our salvation, and these sins are not always apparent to us if we are not engaging in systematic self-examination. We tend to think the most serious sins are the more spectacular ones, but in fact, the most serious sins are the most insidious and invisible ones: pride and envy, for example. The more visible sins, like murder or adultery or theft, are all preceded and made possible by an interior disposition which grew, in all likelihood, mostly unheeded by the person who later committed the acts. All sins, great and small, grow out of an interior turning-away from God. How are we to weigh and discern the spiritual virulence of our many sins?

The second consideration is that if even serious sin can be forgiven by making an act of perfect contrition and repentance, how can we be sure if we have made such an act? When much is at stake, it’s always best not to rely upon our own understanding. We are never the best judges of our own spiritual states and interior dispositions; St. Paul tells us that we tend either to be too hard or too easy on ourselves. This is where spiritual direction comes into play. A spiritual director can tell us when we need sacramental confession, and can help us evaluate the state of our spiritual life. I spoke about the Sacrament of Penance first because most folks making their confession will receive, not only absolution, but advice and counsel. Spiritual direction is part and parcel of the relationship between confessor and penitent. Yet spiritual direction can be had apart from sacramental confession, and anyone who is serious about growing spiritually will want to give serious consideration to finding a spiritual director. Unlike a confessor, who must be a priest, a spiritual director can be any baptized person who has some spiritual discernment and understanding. Some of the greatest spiritual directors have been women, such as St. Theresa of Avila or Evelyn Underhill. Spiritual direction and confession are related, however, because it would be a very rare instance in which spiritual direction did not lead to a recommendation for more frequent confession.

I must be honest and admit that it is not easy in our Church to make one’s confession. Many of our parishes don’t have resident clergy who can hear confessions, and not all priests in our Church are licensed to hear confessions. Still, inconvenience isn’t the same as impossibility; for instance, the Bishop visits all parishes in the diocese at least once a year, and he, of course, can hear confessions. And many of our clergy are able to hear confessions, as well. I’m not here to tell you that you need to make your confession any particular number of times per year, because the Church doesn’t lay that responsibility upon you; I am, however, more and more convinced that it is very hard to make progress in the spiritual life without the benefit of spiritual direction and confession. Spiritual direction in particular is not so hard to come by: as I said earlier, your spiritual director doesn’t have to be a clergyman, and communication can be in person, by phone, by letter, or by email. Having a spiritual director is something available to everyone, and something which will immediately pay off in terms of spiritual progress.

Spiritual direction and confession are important for finding your way, charting your course, and avoiding pitfalls and detours. The spiritual life is not something to be neglected. Anyone with money to invest would be thought a fool if he merely left his investments untended; first of all, he has to choose carefully where to invest, and then he has to keep any eye on what he’s done. And we’re all aware of the need to check with our doctors on a regular basis and to get some idea of the state of our health. We don’t just do this so the doctor can buy a new BMW: there are diseases which can creep up on us without any outward signs, and there are conditions which can get out of hand without proper oversight and care. It is no different with our souls. If we put this much care into what will not last forever, why shouldn’t we put at least as much care into what will last forever? When was the last time you sat down and made a full and frank evaluation of the state of your spiritual life? Do you know where you are on the road, or are you just wandering? Are you keeping an eye on incipient dangers, and looking out for the less-than-obvious pitfalls? Are you on guard against the great dangers of spiritual illusion and self-delusion? Spiritual direction and confession, taken together or separately, are your great safeguards.

The lawyer in St. Luke’s Gospel knew the right answer to how to have eternal life: “...love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself” (Lk 10:27), but as the rest of his conversation showed, and the rest of the New Testament makes clear, this is not something we can do on our own. “This do, and thou shalt live”, Christ said, and I think he must have been smiling, because he was setting the lawyer an impossible task, impossible at least without the aid of Christ, but the lawyer didn’t see his need. He was, we are told, “willing to justify himself”, which is something none of us can do. We must have grace, and spiritual direction and confession are two keys to ensuring that we are always open to the operations of grace, and that we are doing nothing to hinder its work in us. We are not of course interested in spiritual progress for its own sake, but because the goal of our progress is loving union with the Holy Trinity. Each step on the journey brings us more and more fully into loving communion with God himself; each mis-step robs us, to a greater or lesser degree, of that communion. “This do, and thou shalt live.” We can be comforted and cheered by the knowledge that God earnestly desires our salvation, earnestly desires to know us, that He makes possible for us what would be impossible without Him and that He has provided us with the means to grow in that loving knowledge of Him which, both now and in the life of the world to come, is the fulness of heaven.

Halloween & All Saints

2009-10-30T06:46:00.000-07:00

“Grant, O Lord, we pray thee : that thy faithful people may evermore rejoice in the veneration of all thy Saints; and be defended by their perpetual intercession.” (Postcommunion Collect for All Saints)

My favorite Feasts of the Church year are the autumnal feasts. I love Michaelmas, at the end of September, St. Francis, in early October, Christ the King at the end of October, and All Saints at the beginning of November.

There’s a lot of popular misunderstanding about All Saints, and about the related celebration of Halloween. Halloween is nothing more than the observation of the eve of All Saints. If you look in the lectionary at the beginning of the Prayer Book, you’ll notice that there are special lessons and psalms appointed for Morning and Evening Prayer on the various named Feasts that fall throughout the year. And you’ll also notice that on the day before any such Feast, the readings for Evening Prayer relate to the theme of the following day’s Feast. So, for example, if you look at the table in the lectionary which gives the readings for the Fixed Holy Days (that is, the Holy Days that fall on the same date every year), and look on November 1st, you’ll find the readings for Morning and Evening Prayer for All Saints Day. And just above this, you’ll find the readings for the night of October 31st, which are described as the “eve” of All Saints. This holds true not only for the Daily Office, but also for Masses. Many of the greatest feasts are celebrated by special masses, not only on the day of the feast itself, but also on the evening prior, in which case the mass is called a “vigil”.

The reason the major feasts overflow, as it were, onto the previous evening is that, liturgically speaking, a day begins at sundown the day before. In our Christian context, the greatest and most noticeable of these liturgical “eves” is Holy Saturday. When the Great Easter Vigil is celebrated, the First Mass of Easter takes place, not on Sunday morning, but on Saturday night. It is the same with All Saints, which used to be commonly called “All Hallows”. “Hallows” is an archaic term for “Saint” – to “hallow” something is to make it holy, and the Saints are those who have been made holy by God. And the vigil mass of All Hallows took place the night before, on All Hallows Eve, which was commonly shortened to Hallow E’en. “Halloween”, then, is nothing more than a contraction of “All Hallows Eve”.

That this seems utterly unknown to many people can be the source of some amusement. Evangelical churches, for example, are often at pains to replace what they see as a pagan celebration with something more Christian, and I saw a church sign last year which read, “Instead of Halloween, come to our ‘Holy-ween’ celebration”. They’d simply replaced one word for “Holy” with another, and the result was sort of comical. The change, which was meant to be significant, was merely redundant, and it didn’t sound very good, either.

So what about the charge that Halloween is really a pagan celebration? Obviously, as I’ve just been at pains to demonstrate, Halloween, as the eve of All Saints day, is a Christian celebration. Without the Feast of All Hallows or All Saints on November 1st, there would be no All Hallows Eve or Halloween on October 31st. Actually, until the 9th Century, All Saints was celebrated in May, but was moved to November 1st by Pope Gregory IV in 837. We can only speculate as to Gregory’s reasons for this move, but as it happened, the new feast-date coincided exactly with Celtic autumnal celebrations. It seemed natural to the ancient peoples of northern Europe that the end of the year came at the end of the harvest-season, after the autumnal equinox when the days begin to be shorter than the nights, and so the Celtic New Year came on or near what is now the beginning of November. This is roughly halfway between the autumnal equinox at the end of September, when day and night are of equal lengths in the northern hemisphere, and the winter solstice at the end of December, when darkness lasts its longest and daylight is at its briefest. This natural wisdom was taken up by the Church, which begins the liturgical year with the season of Advent at just about this same moment, when darkness begins to be dominant in the natural world, for this is a natural analogy to the darkness and shadow of death in which the world lay as it waited for the coming of the Savior.

And it was also natural that, at the end of the year, as the leaves fell and much of the green and growing world seemed to die or sleep, men should turn their thoughts to the friends and loved ones who had died during the preceding year. In many Celtic cultures, the days surrounding the beginning of November were thought to be days in which the veil, as it were, between the living and the dead, between the visible and invisible worlds, was at its most transparent and permeable. It was believed by our pagan ancestors that the dead could move about the land of the living during this season of growing darkness, and a good deal of mystery was attached to the darkening of the world as autumn drew on past its glorious prime and took on more of the shadings of winter.

Whether the deliberate adoption and exploitation of these natural themes was the motive behind the transference of the feast of All Saints to November 1st, we can’t know, but it certainly makes sense. Grace, it is often said, does not destroy nature, but perfects it; and the same can certainly be said of the overlay of Christian feasts on top of, as it were, older pagan festivals with similar themes. If pagan man, searching for truths amongst the raw data of creation, tentatively reached conclusions that seemed to foreshadow Christian truth, this can certainly be attributed to the work of the Holy Ghost preparing the pagan world for the fullness of truth to come in the Church. C.S. Lewis called these foreshadowings “pagan good dreams” and argued that, since all truth comes from God, the truths arrived at by pre-Christian men of good will were inspired by God; men so inspired would be more prepared to recognize in Christianity the hallmarks of familiar truth. St. Paul makes a similar argument to the philosophers of Athens in Acts chapter 17.

So in the feast of All Saints (and its related feast of All Souls, which falls on November 2nd), the Church ties together the incomplete threads of pagan reasoning concerning the dying of things and concerning the souls of the departed and gives us the fuller picture, the clarified reality at which the pagan world guessed and toward which it grasped. For All Saints teaches us that the veil between the living and the dead is, in the Church, very thin indeed. And while we do not believe that the dead come back to wander the earth, we do believe that the dead in Christ continue to have an active role in the affairs of the living. Membership in the Church is not like membership in a human organization; membership in the Church comes from the creation at baptism of a new and indelible nature within us. Faithful members of the Church, therefore, do not cease to be part of the Church just because they have died.

The Lesson for the Epistle for Halloween, in fact, is from Revelation chapter 5, and shows us the twenty-four elders, who symbolize the Patriarchs and Apostles, presenting before the throne of God the prayers of Christians on earth. And the Lesson for the Epistle for All Saints is from Revelation chapter 7, in which we are told that the Saints in heaven do not cease from serving God night and day. Taking these two readings together, we can see that the teaching of Halloween and All Saints is that part of the service of the Saints is intercessory prayer on behalf of the Church on earth. The veil between the worlds is thin indeed; thinner than we are ever aware.

Our part in this relationship with the Saints in heaven is, as shown by the Postcommunion Collect for All Saints which I have taken as my text, to offer “veneration” to the Saints. The veneration of the Saints is something very often misunderstood by those outside of the Church. The word “veneration” is used to translate the Greek word δουλια, by which is meant a special kind of honor. Veneration is carefully distinguished from that worship and adoration which is due to God only, and which is designated by the Greek word λατρεια. The Seventh Ecumenical Council decreed that Christians should give worship and adoration designated by the word λατρεια only to God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but that the Saints and their icons should be accorded δουλια, or honor.

The veneration of the Saints takes nothing away from the worship due to God, for it is precisely because of what God has done in their lives that we give honor to the Saints, and insofar as we honor their holiness and openness to God, we give honor to God who did the work in their lives. It can accurately be said that the veneration of the Saints is the honoring of God in their lives, or honoring God through them. The veneration of the Saints is merely an acknowledgment that God made of their lives a miracle, and an acknowledgment that where they have gone we are meant to go, and an acknowledgment that they continue to assist and support us as we walk the paths that they have trod.

I often tell friends who ask if we “worship” Saints or pray to Saints that we all ask our friends to pray for us, and the greater the reputation for holiness a person has, the greater our desire to have that person pray for us. The Saints have no further sins or other hindrances to their prayers, and so it is perfectly natural for us to ask them to pray for us, which is what we do. You’ll notice if you pay attention that during the Mass we never pray to a particular Saint; we ask for the prayers of the Saint on our behalf, just as at the offertory we ask one another for prayers for those on our Parish prayer list.

Our pre-Christian forebears had it right: there is a wistful quality about autumn that makes us mindful of the passing of things, and that reminds us that there are relationships which are stronger and more enduring than death. The good news of the feast of All Saints is that, in the Church, we are given hope by the example of the Saints who, beset by the same sins and infirmities as we are, were made righteous by God and now enjoy Him forever. The good news of the feast of All Saints is that, even when the daylight wanes and darkness seems to gather, we are bound as brothers and sisters to those who live where no shadow comes, and they aid us by their prayers and wait in joyful expectation for the fullness of time in which we all, by the mercy of God, may come where nothing passes, nothing wanes, and all is made whole in Heaven’s high summer.

“Grant, O Lord, we pray thee : that thy faithful people may evermore rejoice in the veneration of all thy Saints; and be defended by their perpetual intercession.”

Liturgy and Mortification: Metaphysical Therapy

2009-07-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

Individualism creates a sort of false self, an ego-centric collection of attachments and desires that covers up the person within. A caution is in order, however. Thomas Merton popularized for Christianity the dichotomy between the “false self” and the “true self”, but it is not completely clear that Merton was really expounding a Christian viewpoint. I’m sure that there are others who can explain Merton’s writings on the self, and can reconcile him with Orthodox Catholicism, but caution is still in order. Mahayana Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, contains a teaching on the true self which posits, in brief, that the “true self” is the Buddha-nature, utterly unrestricted and uncreated, hidden as it were within the maze of illusions which those enmeshed in samsara call the soul, the atman. Merton seems to indicate (especially in his later writings) that the “true self” is pure and unalloyed, and that it is naturally capable of making itself amenable to contact with God. If the “true self” is taken to be something uncreated and ideal, then the idea is certainly not Christian.

There are, however, Christian writers who use similar language but with different basic assumptions. Evelyn Underhill writes in Mysticism of the “superficial self” and contrasts it with the inner faculties of the soul which are capable of communion with God. The difference is that, for Christians, the inner or true self is itself contingent and corrupt: it is, in fact the same as the false self, but unlike the false self created by individualism, the true self of personhood recognizes its created, dependent, and fallen state and forsakes illusion and attachment in order to make itself amenable to grace. The true self only becomes true when, by virtue of prevenient grace, it sees itself as it is, bemoans its miserable and blinded state, and cries out to God for mercy. An individual, bent upon the task of self-definition and self-creation, doing the work of dominion, cannot cry out to God, for he sees himself as self-sufficient and central to the human drama. A person, having identified himself with the wounds of human nature, realizing his contingency and radical dependency, reaches out simultaneously toward God in contrition and repentance and toward other persons in sympathy and mercy.

Contemporary forms of Christianity, however, do very little to awaken their adherents to these realities. In fact, both conservative evangelicalism and liberal mainline protestantism in their own ways reinforce individualism. Both tend to favor subjective experience over objective orthodoxy, and both are uncomfortable with the strictures and discipline of a visible hierarchy dispensing an authoritative interpretation of Scripture. The means of grace are either denied as legalistic externals (nature being wholly depraved) or deemed superfluous in light of a sort of neo-pantheism (nature being divine in its own right). Both groups wind up reinforcing the surrounding cultures norms regarding the self and its prerogatives. One visible result of this tendency is the absence, in either camp, of any serious and coherent teaching on mortification.

Mortification is the ascetic practice, required of all Christians, by which the soul is weaned away from sinful habits and dispositions and made capable of cooperating with grace in the acquisition of virtuous habits and dispositions. There is a kind of natural mortification by which natural virtues may be acquired and which can be achieved without the help of grace, but mortification in the Christian sense requires and depends upon the action of grace in the soul. This is why Christian mortification is not legalism, but part of the therapeutic cure of the soul. Just as patients undergo physical therapy to retrain injured or afflicted limbs, mortification is metaphysical therapy to retrain body and soul in the ways of grace. In the context of our discussion of individualism and personhood, mortification is the method by which God strips away the illusions and attachments of the individual and nurtures in their place the attributes of true personhood.

There are many forms of mortification, but something often overlooked is that the Liturgy and liturgical prayer are themselves tools of mortification. Remember that mortification is not essentially negative, but essentially positive and life-giving: we mortify in order to be fully healed; we mortify in order to move from death to life. “For if ye live after the flesh,” St. Paul tells us, “ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:13). The Liturgy and liturgical prayer do the work of mortification by taking us out of ourselves and placing us in the larger context of the worshipping Church through time. This action takes us not only out of ourselves individually, removing us from our private inclinations and prejudices, but also corporately, removing us as a body from our collective and cultural inclinations and prejudices. Any “worship” which does not at least attempt this action of removal isn’t worthy of the name.

This, of course, is the problem of “contemporary worship”, an oxymoron if ever there were one. Contemporary worship immerses the congregation in the cultural ethos of its own time and destroys universality. When a “worship committee” dictates the content of the service, it is likely to be even more idiosyncratic, and immersing the congregation in the inclinations and prejudices of a few individuals. Add church-shopping to the mix, and you wind up with congregations hermetically sealed off from the permanent shape of Christianity, doing just what they like and just what makes them comfortable.

One of the virtues of liturgical prayer is that it gets us around our tendency to pray what we feel, rather than praying what we ought to feel. Most of us don’t realize the depth of our spiritual sickness, and so most of us, outside of the Liturgy, don’t pray with this realization. Liturgical prayer puts in our mouths the words that ought to be there, but so often aren’t. And these aren’t just words of contrition, but words of hope: Not just, “Lord I am not worthy” but also “but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed”. We have cause to bewail our condition, but at the same time we have cause to rejoice because God continually seeks us out, continually stands at the door and knocks, continually waits for our return. Left to ourselves, we tend to bounce between elation and despair, and often we’re at the wrong place at the wrong time. Liturgical prayer lifts us out of the cave of our own experience and allows us a larger experience than we could ever have on our own: that of the whole Church worshipping together through time. To modify an illustration I heard from my Archbishop, a Christian with a time machine ought to be able to walk into a church at any time and any place and recognize the same liturgical action. That time-traveling worshipper could stop in at Constantinople in the 6th century, at Rome in the 12th century, at London in the 16th century, and the language might be strange, but the acts and intentions, the shape of the worship, would be immediately recognizable. Immersion in the liturgical life of the Church sets forward the mortification of individuality and the healthy growth of personhood.

Personhood, Therapy, and Theosis

2009-06-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

Individualism has taken over from personhood in American Christianity. The push to make the Church “relevant”, the jettisoning of doctrine and theology in favor of experience-delivery, and the anti-traditional ecumenism which are the hallmarks of American religion are all signs that the surrounding culture has dangerously infected the Christian mind. These developments are signs that Christianity in America has lost the idea of personhood, of a common, immutable human nature, of received religion, and has put in their place the idea of individuality, of idiosyncratic and malleable human nature, and of customizable religion.

The difficulty with this replacement is that it has hampered the cure of souls. The Church has from the beginning, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, proclaimed itself to be the inn of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-35), the hospital of souls. The aim of Christianity isn’t primarily enlightenment or inspiration (though it can and does provide these), but the cure of the moral illness of sin. The Church’s mission is primarily therapeutic: to tell the sick and dying that they are sick and dying and to bring them into the inn where they can have their wounds washed clean and anointed with oil, where they can receive the Medicine of Immortality, and where they can restored when they have inevitable relapses. Both the proclamation of illness and the method of cure come down to us as the gift of the Church to each generation. Because we share a common human nature, and a common human illness, the method of our cure remains constant for all people at all times and in all places. Personhood is the sharing in the common illness, but because the Word was made flesh “for us men and for our salvation”, it is also the sharing in the common cure.

The rejection of personhood in favor of individualism is the refusal to recognize the illness, and the refusal to participate in the cure. The work of dominion is a symptom of our disease, and those who immerse themselves in that work cannot undertake the cure, which requires of us the renunciation of dominion in every area. The frenzy to have some kind of “worship experience” is just as much the work of dominion as is the frenzy to have fulfillment through acquisition of things. The pick-and-choose mentality of American religion, which takes the traditional bad news about the illness and good news about the cure and selectively adapts parts to suit its own ego-centric views -- this mentality is nothing more than the exercise of dominion even into the realm of the cure.

It is as if a patient in a hospital said, “I’m in pain. You tell me that it’s because of my broken hip, but I just don’t believe that. I think I’m in pain because I’m not self-fulfilled. So instead of having my hip replaced, which is a gross invasion of my privacy, I’m checking myself out, buying a sportscar, and getting a new lover”. We’d laugh at such a person, or perhaps order up a mental evaluation, but the same thing goes on daily, not just in the culture at large, but in Christian congregations. In those congregations, the monologue might sound more like this: “Of course I need my hip replaced. It’s broken, and I can’t walk. But once I have the surgery, I’m checking myself out and not doing any aftercare or physical therapy. After all, the problem has been cured once and for all by the surgery, right? This stuff about aftercare and therapy is just legalism. In fact, if I come back to the hospital at all, it’ll be to thank the surgeon and to hang out with the patients I met while I was admitted. It won’t be for therapy. So I don’t want the hospital to look like a hospital: after all, my broken hip was painful, and so was my surgery, and I don’t really want to be reminded of all that. It’s not relevant to where I am today. So I’d like the hospital to be re-made to look more like a shopping mall, which is the kind of place I and my cultural compatriots have good times, and it’d be more relevant to us. And if I look like I’m limping and dragging one useless leg along, well, that’s just because you have a pessimistic outlook. Once operated upon, always healthy.”

The Faith is not experimental. It is not customizable. It is not relevant at all within the worldview of the individualist, and to try and make it so is to impair its therapeutic, salvific value. It is the individualist worldview which must be remade; it is the individualist who must be un-conformed to the spirit of the age, and conformed to the mind of Christ expressed in the Church. The Gospel is foolish and scandal to the self-deluded individual, but to the person being saved it is life and health and peace. The end of the Church’s therapy is not the return of the person to the status quo ante, but the transformation of the person into one who is able to respond in love to the ultimate vision of God vouchsafed to the blessed. Theoria and theosis are the ends of the Church’s therapy, and the utter or piecemeal rejection of the method of cure puts these ends in jeopardy.

An individualistic approach to Christianity is therefore not an option. It is simply one more act of dominion, one more step away from true personhood, and therefore one more step away from theoria and theosis.

Individualism and Personhood: The Exercise of Dominion

2009-06-13T15:02:00.000-07:00

The individualism I’ve written about in some recent posts, and which I’ve claimed has infected some of mainstream evangelicalism, has historically fit in very well with the American identity. This is no surprise since, much as there are those who’d like to deny it, American identity has itself been bound up with the ideas of protestantism. The American polity has been a juggernaut of “rugged individualism”, both in public and in private life, and has walked hand-in-hand with evangelicalism to create a sphere of private, personal experience and aspiration from which all others may rightfully be excluded. This sphere has come to be known as the “right to privacy”, or more recently, as the “right to self-definition”.

According to the zeitgeist, no one -- not parents, not children, not spouses, friends, priests, policemen -- may rightfully interfere with the individual’s exercise of dominion over his own sphere of privacy or self-definition. For most people, and even for a growing number of Christians, God may rightfully be excluded as well, at least when “God” is defined as someone or something external to the self which makes objective demands and places objective responsibilities upon the self, over which the self has no legitimate right of control or even objection. But from the founding days of the Reformation, there has been a way of identifying “God” with the internal, subjective devices and desires of the self, and the surrounding culture has picked up on this and has run with it. Any external manifestations of God, whether these be in ritual, ecclesiastical authority, or doctrinal content, are up for grabs as the individual cuts himself off from everything but his own feelings and desires.

We are encouraged, from within our individual sphere of private self-definition, to exercise dominion over everything (except -- and this requires a real sleight of hand -- other individuals). Our dominion moves outward as we grow older, gradually including not just our own bodies, minds, and spirits, but our living environment (extended into our cars, of course), our circle of friendship and acquaintance, our jobs, our bank accounts, first homes, second homes, investments, extra vehicles, stuff, stuff, stuff… We build little (or large) empires of dominion and we exercise (or attempt to exercise) total control over every aspect. Certain strains of Christianity walk hand-in-hand with this individualism, telling us that we should name and claim any kind of prosperity we desire, any kind of health we desire (as if covetousness of a good thing were something other than covetousness), and that good experiences are God’s thing. In fact, a large segment of contemporary Christians seems to have no other creed than “God wants us to have good experiences”. These Christians are politically liberal and politically conservative; they attend every kind of Catholic and protestant church; they represent all parts of the economic spectrum. And they are infected with an idea which is utterly foreign to the Faith they claim to hold: the exercise of individual dominion. The only difference between these Christians and their utterly materialist counterparts is that these Christians call upon God to do the work of their dominion for them, to be their Agent as they “name and claim” their way to individualistic dominion.

The exercise of dominion not only excludes the overt Christian teachings on self-loss and self-surrender -- the exercise of dominion necessarily excludes the essential mystery which is at the most basic level of life. We are not, in the final analysis, in charge of reality and we never can be. There are forces at work in the world, both personal and impersonal, which are larger and more primal than we are, and against the scale of which we are quite diminished. Of course, mankind is a special creation, spanning both the physical and the spiritual worlds, and we are personally known and loved by the Creator. But the appropriate reaction to the greatness of the scene into which we find ourselves placed, as well as to the great blessings bestowed upon mankind, is humility and wonder. This is the beginning of all religion at its most basic and primitive level, and a familiarity with the Psalter will show that the Judeo-Christian tradition has never moved far from this appropriate response to reality, and from the acknowledgment of mystery.

Stress results when dominion meets mystery. Perhaps the greatest mystery and the greatest interruption we meet is suffering. We go to very great lengths -- some of them justifiable -- to prevent and avoid suffering, but suffering is another reminder of mystery, and of our lack of mastery, and of our need to fall back continually upon God in humility and wonder.

Individuals are angry at interruptions and perceived invasions of privacy because these are affronts to the exercise of dominion. One of the results of our focus on individualism is that we overlook the basic mystery of different persons as essentially “other”: as essentially mysterious and alien to the exercise of dominion. Our search for love and friendship is not a search open to the mystery and wonder of an Other, but for sameness, likeness, and compatibility. This is why marriages break up, relationships fall apart, and so on. We are looking for ourselves in everything we meet, and in everything we seek, including God and other people. The discipline of contemplative prayer, properly understood, is a great remedy against this false ideal, as is traditional liturgical worship.

The exercise of dominion requires “individuals”: an “individual” in this sense is one in whom a claim is made to a singular or idiosyncratic exercise of human nature. The “individual self” consists of an ego-centric collection of many parts -- many “lives” -- with the result that the sum of these parts is supposed to be a unique individual for whom even reality may be said to be exclusive. The individual has a social life, a spiritual life, a sex life, a family life, a work life, and all are supposedly chosen, exercised, and controlled by a unique self which exercises an idiosyncratic instance of human nature. The interesting and consistently-overlooked result is that this “unique” amalgamation in reality creates consistently-classifiable types who seek not Otherness, not true uniqueness, not mystery, but similarity, likeness, and compatibility and who consistently run through, try out, and reject relationships (and religions, and churches) in the relentless search for “compatibility”. These “individuals” want nothing more than to be around others who are like them. There are groups for all types, and all types -- even “loners” -- seek others of their type. This syndrome, imported into Christianity, is one reason why there are tens of thousands of protestant denominations, and one reason why there is an indefatigable search for “relevance”. As philosopher Roger Scruton observed in a different context(1), “relevance” means “relevance” to the individual, and if we extend this argument, we see that if individuals believe themselves to be unique and idiosyncratic instances of human nature, the search for relevance is futile, because true uniqueness makes relevance among individuals impossible. What is not part of the individual dominion is irrelevant.

As Vladimir Lossky noted in The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, real human uniqueness is found, not in an “individual” who is an amalgamation of self-chosen attributes and interests (which really mirrors the attributes and interests of many, many, others), but in a person who exercises, not a unique instance of human nature, but common human nature, and whose quiddity is much more than the sum of the parts. One could list every supposedly-distinctive attribute of an individual and still not explain why that particular person is not another. The individual is at base a statistical unit, attributes and interests mainly chosen from a known group of available options. The person is at base a mystery.

A “person” in this sense cannot do the work of dominion because a person realizes that, at base, there is a mystery at the center of who he is, at the center of who everyone else is, at the center of creation itself, and in the many and ineffable circumstances of life. The proper life of personhood is not illustrated by rugged individualism (though a person may paradoxically be less dependent upon the opinion and approval of others) or by dominion, but by the Sermon on the Mount. The consideration of the lilies takes the place of strategizing the expanse and protection of dominion. The God who wants us to have good experiences is seen for the idol, the self-reflection he is, and is supplanted by the God who made us, and who is the source of our personhood, the source of our being, and our proper end. Mystery is permitted, and the possibilities of theosis are opened before us.

(1) Roger Scruton, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Beseiged.

The Cult of Personality and The Cure of Souls

2009-06-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

One of the final characteristics of the megachurch which calls for comment is that of the charismatic personality at the center. It is the lack of such “strong charismatic senior ministers” that the Hartford Institute for Religion Research cited as among the chief reasons that Catholic parishes don’t fit the megachurch mold. In fact, the strong charismatic minister is the first criterion listed by the HIRR study.

And it seems that megachurches do require such personalities as the focus for and driving force behind their multitude of programs, activities, and ministries. The individual megachurch congregations tend to become completely identified with the personality of the main guy (or woman -- megachurches tend to ignore I Timothy 2:12, but that’s a post in and of itself), and the main guy tends to use the megachurch as a platform for boosting his strong charismatic personality.

Just to be clear, by “charismatic” I don’t mean (and it’s obvious that the HIRR study authors didn’t mean) “having charismatic gifts of the Holy Ghost”, but rather, “exercising a compelling charm that inspires devotion in others” (New Oxford American Dictionary). It’s a horrifying fact of the modern “charismatic” movement in all of its iterations that these definitions have become confused and that the presence of the second is invariably taken as evidence of the presence of the first. Perhaps this is because we live in the age of Drab Democracy, and the only flamboyant and noticeable personalities we tolerate, in general, are on the moral fringe of Hollywood celebrity. Gone are the days of learned wit, charming conversation, and the chasseur’s easy grace. Any people for whom the terms “modern” (or, worse, “post-modern”), “contemporary”, and “relevant” have become watchwords have become unmoored from the mainstream of human history and are probably doomed to drabness. No wonder they’re drawn to charismatic personalities: they’ve probably never met anyone more interesting than Monty Python’s stereotypical Chartered Accountant.

And worse, they’ve probably never been exposed to the quiet drama that is the spiritual ascesis of Catholic Orthodoxy: they’ve looked for the whirlwind, the earthquake, and the tongue of fire, but have overlooked the still, small voice, which doesn’t come across well through amplifiers and big-screen TVs. In fact, the model for leadership in Catholic Orthodoxy is the man who stills himself to listen in quiet, who would be horrified to see himself on a stadium-sized screen, and who rigorously keeps his personality in check. The model is the priest, who wants people to look at him and see, no his charismatic personality, but Christ.

This is one of the many reasons why priests spend so much of their time in church with their backs turned to the congregation: the priest is standing in the place of Christ, doing the work of Christ, and on this most important liturgical act his personality or lack thereof has no bearing. It’s useful for the priest to be a good public speaker, to be a convincing and authoritative teacher, but these things don’t really matter in the most important work of the priest, which is administering the Sacraments in the place of the Bishop, in the Name of Christ.

In fact, the Church has employed certain methods of repressing the individual personality of the priest, at least in the exercise of his priestly office. The most obvious is the adoption of distinctive clerical dress: black with a white collar. This is the extra-liturgical uniform of the clergy, and like all uniforms, is meant to emphasize, well, uniformity. It’s the same with liturgical vestments. When the priest is vested for the Liturgy, he’s in effect saying, “I may be Fr. Joe, but I’m not acting on my own behalf right now: I’m acting as an icon of Christ, in the Bishop’s stead, on behalf of the Church”. (This is also the reason that judges wear robes, and the penchant for judges to eschew their robes is a sign of the degradation of the judicial office into the mere exercise of personal authority… just as has happened with the ministry in congregational churches.) In short, he’s exercising, not his own office, but that of another. His authority is not native, but derived, and his personality is in the background, not in the foreground. “Charisma”, in the second sense noted above, doesn’t matter one bit in this exercise of the office of priesthood.

But in the first (and for Christians, the primary) sense, “charisma” matters extremely for priests: not in the sense that they need to display extraordinary gifts, but in the sense that they remain faithful to the ordinary operations of the Holy Ghost in Scripture, Holy Tradition, and in the resulting sacramental ministry. These are men who need first and foremost to learn to be still and to know God in the still, small voice, so that they may lead their congregations in humility and with an eye toward their first charge, the cure of souls.

The cure of souls is an idea that’s been lost in the protestant world, and it would be hard-pressed to find a place in the literal arena of liturgitainment. But the consistent teaching of the Church through time has been that Christian souls are in the process of a cure from the sickness of sin. This cure requires constant oversight and close attention by one who knows the methods of the cure, and who may lawfully and validly administer the Medicine of Immortality. A good bedside manner is a bonus, but when the personality of the physician takes precedence over the medicine administered, the health of the body declines.

Pentecost

2009-06-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

Acts 2:4: And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.

We are in the season of Pentecost, which, as the Prayer Book tells us, is commonly called Whitsunday. “Pentecost” means “fiftieth” in Greek; Pentecost is the 50th day after Easter. Pentecost ranks with Christmas and Easter as one of the three great Feasts of the Church year, and liturgically it has much in common with Easter. If you have a Missal, you have only to look at the mass for the Vigil of Pentecost to see that it looks like a compressed version of the Great Easter Vigil. The Easter Vigil has as one of its major features the blessing of the baptismal font, preceded by the reading of twelve prophecies, and followed by the chanting of the Litany. The Vigil of Pentecost also has a blessing of the baptismal font, preceded by the reading of six prophecies (the text of each of which is taken from one of the Holy Saturday prophecies), also followed by the chanting of the Litany.

The similarity is due to the fact that Pentecost in the Western Church very early became a secondary date for baptisms, perhaps because the weather in England and northern Europe was more favorable at Pentecost than at Easter for baptisms. Like at Easter, the newly-baptized wore white garments, and it is from these garments that Pentecost became known in northern Europe as “White Sunday”, or “Whitsunday”.

As you can see from the Lesson from Acts, however, Pentecost was a feast of the Jewish calendar before it was taken up by the Church. Pentecost was the fiftieth day following Passover, “Pentecost” being the Greek title for the Jewish Feast of Weeks, which was a feast of thanksgiving for the grain harvest established in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. By the time of Christ, the feast was also used to commemorate the giving of the Law to Moses. In other words, it was a feast of the founding of the Jewish religion: a sort of “birthday” of Judaism.

That it was an important feast accounts for the fact that we are told in the Lesson today that “there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). It is no accident, then, that God used this auspicious occasion as the birthday of the Church, at a time when the phenomena associated with the descent of the Holy Ghost could be displayed to maximum effect. We are told just a few verses later in Acts that three thousand souls were added to the Church on Pentecost.

As the Law was given in wind and fire, the new Covenant was ratified in wind and fire, and the men of all nations who had journeyed to Jerusalem to celebrate the giving of the Law were witnesses to the birth of the Church, which inherited and fulfilled the promises given to the people of the Law. The new Israel was born on the birthday of the old, the old covenant having been given in tables of law graven in stone, and the new covenant having been given by the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, to write God’s law of love in the hearts of men.

The Old Covenant was an imperfect precursor of the New, and the action of the Holy Ghost in the Old Testament is depicted as unpredictable, seeming to come and go. There is a sense in which the whole of the Old Testament, beginning with the Fall of Man in Genesis, is a quest by God’s people for the presence and power of the Holy Ghost, for this presence and this power is nothing other than a sharing in the life of God. The joyful and confident passages in the Old Testament are celebrations of this sharing in the life of God, and the sorrowful and despondent passages are all mourning for a disruption in this sharing and longing for its restoration.

The amazing thing about Pentecost is that this indomitable power of God, the having of which is joy and the loss of which is cause for despair, this wild, untamed vitality which in the divine economy is the presence and action of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, has become permanently resident in the Church. The Tabernacle and the Temple could be only temporary dwellings for the glory of the Lord, which was the presence of the Holy Ghost, and these temporary dwellings passed away. They were succeeded by the Church, which will not pass away, and against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail. It is in the Church that the prophecy of Joel, quoted by St. Peter in his Pentecost oration, is to be fulfilled: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17). What had been unpredictable and unchannelled has now become available to all mankind, reliably, in the Sacraments of the Church. This is the joyful mystery of Pentecost, that through the power of the Holy Ghost, the Church is made the habitation of God, and Christians sharers in the very life of God. What Christ won for us on the cross and by his Resurrection, what he made accessible to us by his Ascension, the Holy Ghost bestows upon us at Pentecost.

The actions of the Holy Ghost are, however, always ultimately mysterious. The Holy Ghost does not cast light upon Himself, does not speak of Himself, but speaks of the Son and illuminates us with the light of Christ. This is a point which is often misunderstood, and such misunderstanding leads to a couple of errors regarding the person and work of the Holy Ghost. The first error is to look at Him through the lens of contemporary culture, and to find Him somewhat antiquated and perhaps embarrassing. Those who want to use the Church as a safe harbor for their own passions and prejudices, as a shrine to the values of the surrounding culture, are justly uncomfortable with the idea that it is the Holy Spirit Who leads the Church into all truth, who convicts, leads to repentance, and illuminates. Faced with such a power, it is very difficult to see how one’s own agenda can be set forward. In fact, the Holy Spirit always speaks of Christ, and always leads through Christ to the Father, and this speaking and this leading tends to be destructive of personal agendas. The first error, then, sees the narrative of Pentecost as a superstitious description of an antique worldview, useful perhaps in a mythological or symbolical sense, but essentially unconnected from our lives. It is this error, I think, that gives rise to the popularity of the term “people of faith”, for “people of faith” are not people of any particular faith, let alone people of the Faith inspired and taught by the Holy Ghost.

The other error is to see in the Pentecost narrative a set of phenomena necessary for the Christian life at all times and in all places. This error is much closer to the truth, for, as I noted above, the Holy Ghost is the very life of the Church. But Pentecost was the starting-place, and the Church, under the guidance of the same Holy Ghost, has grown in her understanding of the faith proclaimed at Pentecost without ever departing from it. “Pentecostalism” takes the particular indicia of the first-century Pentecost and makes it normative: Christians, it teaches, must come under the sway of a charismatic and enthusiastic spiritual experience, and must speak in tongues. I remember a conversation I had with a Pentecostal friend when I lived in Baton Rouge. She told me that I could never be spiritually mature until I spoke in tongues. This, she declared, was the sure and infallible sign of the presence of the Holy Ghost.

The problem with this view, aside from the fact that ecstatic spiritual experiences are so easily counterfeited, is that it confuses the extraordinary actions of the Holy Ghost with His ordinary actions in the Church. Of course, it’s always dangerous to use the word “ordinary” when speaking of God, but “ordinary” in this sense means “regular” or “covenanted” – “channeled”, if you will. The ordinary actions of the Holy Ghost are, most characteristically, the leading to conversion, the illumination of soul with the truths of the Catholic Faith, and the provision of grace in the Sacraments for our sanctification. These “ordinary” actions are, of course, wonderful, miraculous, and, in the world’s eyes, most extra-ordinary, but we may, because of God’s unfathomable condescension, rely upon them ordinarily. The extraordinary actions of the Holy Ghost in Acts chapter 2 are tailored to the initial strengthening and confirmation of the Church. They may, of course, be used again at any time in the wisdom of God, and I believe that these gifts are always present, but they are not the normal fare of the Christian life. The rejection of the ordinary means of grace in favor of the extraordinary phenomena is caused by a desire for novelty and by a failure to understand the miraculous nature of the ordinary life of the Church.

Avoiding both errors, we should always try and recollect for ourselves the wonders of Pentecost, and its wonderful result, for in it the life of God became available always and everywhere to one and all in the Church. Familiarity does indeed breed contempt, or at least indifference, and the results of familiarity can lead to either of the two errors I’ve described. What we must never forget is that we live, and move, and have our being as Christians in the very real power of Pentecost, and that it is the same Holy Ghost who moves among us, sustaining, strengthening, and leading into all truth. The Church provides for us, through the power of the Holy Ghost, the near approach to the unapproachable God and the very life of God. Our Old-Testament predecessors longed for the presence and power of the Holy Ghost; it is available to us in the Church. For most of us, our experience of the Church isn’t as dramatic as it was on the first Whitsunday. Elijah thought to find God in the storm, in the earthquake, and in the whirlwind, but encountered Him instead in the still, small voice. God condescends at Pentecost to make his dwelling-place in the temple of the Church, from which His glory never shall depart, and we shouldn’t complain if he puts aside the voice of thunder and fire and speaks in a register we can hear, uses words we can understand, and ministers to us with elements we can touch.

He does this because Pentecost is ultimately about love: the love of the Father, who provides for our salvation in means readily accessible to us; the love of the Son, who gave himself for us and who ascended into heaven to give us his resurrected life in the Spirit; and the love of the Holy Ghost, who came at Pentecost to give the life of God to men.

Sunday After The Ascension

2009-05-24T05:17:00.000-07:00

St. Luke 24:50-51:

And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.

In the early Church it was customary to celebrate the Resurrection for a 50-day period, a great sweep of liturgical commemoration which encompassed all that we have, since the 4th Century, divided into the distinct observations of Easter, the Ascension, and Pentecost (or Whitsunday). The early Church saw the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Coming of the Holy Ghost as parts of the whole work of redemption, and this view is reflected in the prayer of Oblation from the Canon of the Mass: “having in remembrance his blessed passion and precious death, his mighty resurrection and glorious ascension; rendering unto thee most hearty thanks for the innumerable benefits procured unto us by the same”.

We are clearly shown in the Mass that the Ascension is one element of Christ’s work of redemption, and this is important for us to keep in mind. It’s easy to see necessity of the Incarnation, of the Nativity, of the Passion, and of the Resurrection. Without any one of these elements, our redemption could not have been accomplished, and this is fairly obvious. But, coming as it does sandwiched between Easter and Pentecost, it’s tempting to see the Ascension as merely a dénouement, a satisfying footnote to the Resurrection, the icing on the cake, and to lose sight of the part it plays in the act of redemption.

The Ascension is the capstone of our redemption, the act which brings it to completion and seals it for all time. If the goal of our salvation is the taking up of our human nature into heaven, into the fulfilling and beatific presence of God, then the Ascension marks the firstfruits of that salvation, for in his Ascension our Lord’s human nature, his human body and human soul, were taken up into heaven. We see in this the fullness of our Lord’s commitment to us. He took on our nature, not only for the time of his earthly life and ministry, but forever. The Revelation of St. John shows us a picture of heaven in which the Ascended Christ, his glorified human body still marked with the wounds of his Passion, stands forever before the Father on our behalf. It is mind-boggling to contemplate, but there is a human nature, flesh and soul, united with the Second Person of the Holy Trinity unto ages of ages. Our Lord’s ascended body is glorified beyond our comprehension, but it is nonetheless a human body, and one moreover which is the very icon of what our own vile bodies are capable of becoming by God’s life-giving power. We say in the Creed, “I look for the Resurrection of the dead: And the Life of the world to come”; Easter is the promise of the Resurrection, and the Ascension is the promise of the Life of the world to come. It is the opening of the Gate of Heaven to man below, and is the offer to him of entrance therein.

In the Ascension our Lord came bodily into heaven, and there, as we are told in Hebrews, he is our great High Priest, who “ever liveth to make intercession” for us (Heb. 7:25). The Ascension therefore marks the culmination of Christ’s role as our High Priest and Intercessor. The work of sacrifice was completed once for all upon the Cross, but that sacrifice is ever presented before the Father in the resurrected and ascended Person of Christ, and it is by this exercise of his High-Priestly office that our Lord makes his sacrifice efficacious for us, and gives us, again in the words of the writer of Hebrews, “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus” (Heb. 10:19). We look for the Resurrection of the dead, but even the damned will be resurrected; what makes our resurrection a joyful thing is that it is a resurrection into the life of the world to come, our passage through the Gate of Heaven and into the welcoming presence of the Lord who has gone there before us.

So our Lord’s office of High Priest before the Father is made possible by his Ascension to the Father. The work of redemption is completed by the Ascension. But we should look more closely at what this means for us. There is a difference between redemption and salvation: redemption is “the restoration of man from the bondage of sin … through the satisfactions and merits of Christ” (Catholic Encyclopedia). Our redemption has been purchased for us by Christ’s sacrifice and by his High-Priestly presentation of that sacrifice before the Father as our Advocate and Intercessor, and this is true for all people in all times and in all places. Individual salvation, however, is dependent upon one’s cooperation with the Grace of the Redemption, and consists not only in the remission of sins, but “in the sanctification and renewal of the inner man by the voluntary reception of God’s grace and gifts” (Id.).

This grace and these gifts are the work of the Holy Ghost in the Church. St. Luke tells us that before his Ascension our Lord said, “Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you” (Luke 24:49), and this promise is the promise of the work of the Holy Ghost for our sanctification. Jesus tells the Apostles repeatedly that his Ascension is a necessary precondition for the coming of the Holy Ghost. This does not mean, of course, that the Holy Ghost was absent from the world before the Ascension. Scripture is filled with the work of the Holy Ghost beginning with the first chapter of Genesis. What happens after the Ascension is that the Holy Ghost comes for the specific purpose of illuminating, directing, and giving power to the Church, and, in the context of individual salvation, this power is chiefly given to us in the Sacraments of the Church, which are the covenanted means of grace. As one writer put it, Christ “redeemed us once for all, but he is saving us now. And He saves us under the moral and sacramental conditions which are afforded in His Church.” (Hall, Dogmatic Theology, vol. VII, p. 288.)

The greatest of the Sacraments, is of course, the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, and this great Sacrament is in a special way a fruit of the Ascension. The 5th Chapter of the book of Revelation shows us, as I said earlier, an ascended Lord who still bears the marks of his Passion. The Hymn, “Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending”, takes up this image: “Those dear tokens of his passion / Still his dazzling body bears, / Cause of endless exultation / To his ransomed worshippers: / With what rapture / Gaze we on those glorious scars!” Our Lord is pleased to be recognized for all eternity (and from all eternity), not only as the Lamb of God, but as the Lamb that was slain, his sacrifice for us having become forever an unmistakable attribute of his human nature.

By his Ascension our Lord’s resurrected body was freed forever from the bonds and limitations of time and space, and so, by the operation of the Holy Ghost, that resurrected body, forever identified with sacrifice, is made available to us at all times and in all places, under the veil of bread and wine, to be the chief instrument of our salvation, of that lifelong process of sanctification which enables us joyfully to look for the Resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. On the Cross, Christ made, “by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world”. After his Ascension, Christ forever presents this sacrifice to the Father, and by the power of the Holy Ghost, with utmost care and condescension, he who is not ashamed to bear his crucified humanity for all time, allows his Church to make present upon her altars that same sacrifice, places before us under the forms of bread and wine his very crucified humanity and his impassible divinity. The same One who stands before the Father in glory comes silently, lovingly, like the Beloved of the Song of Songs, under cover of darkness, to be united with us, and to be the pledge of our ultimate union with Him.

But there is more. Our Lord’s care for us, his desire for our salvation, is so great that he sends the Holy Ghost, not only to provide the Sacraments, great as that gift is, but to guide and direct the Church, to make the Church our infallible guide along the way toward salvation. By his Ascension, Christ makes his mind known to the Church, which is His mystical Body throughout time and space. The Church’s feet are on the earth, but her Head is in Heaven, and the movements and directions of her earthly members are guided by that reality. The Holy Spirit guides the Church chiefly through her Bishops. At Synod a couple of years ago, Archbishop Haverland said that there were three proofs that God has a sense of humor. First, God made man. Second, God made woman. And third, God made bishops indispensable to his Holy Catholic Church. God has, I’m sure, an inscrutable sense of humor, but also an indefatigable loving-kindness, and the office of the Bishop is but a further pledge of our Lord’s care and concern for us. The whole Church is led in the way of Christ through her Bishops, whose consensus through time and space is in fact the voice of the Holy Ghost speaking the mind of Christ. The individual is led in the way of salvation by the moral teachings and sacraments of the Church, both of which flow from the office and work of the Bishop.

The priest’s office and authority in the celebration of the Eucharist are derived from and dependent upon the office and authority of his Bishop. The people of Christ, then, depend in great measure upon their local Bishop for their share in the mighty work of Christ as he stands before the Father in heaven. The Apostles and their successors the bishops were not meant to be stand-ins for an absent Christ, but the representatives of and living connections to the risen and ascended Lord who is pleased, not only to bear his humanity into heaven, but to depend upon the human instrumentality of the Church to present to the world the great work of love he consummates in the presence of the Father by virtue of his Ascension.

In all things, then, let us give thanks to God for the grace and gifts of the Ascension, and let us with one voice give praise and adoration to the Living Lord who leads the Church into all truth so that we may be saved, and who is present for us men and for our salvation on his throne of glory in heaven and in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.

Left Behind Part 2: Overcoming the Demiurge

2009-05-14T09:14:00.000-07:00

Individualist evangelicalism, with its concentration on the delivery of an experience at the expense of all else, leads to an utter abstraction of the Faith: all of the important, objective guarantees of orthodoxy are removed and placed in the head of the believer. The individual believer assumes the attributes of the Church within himself: he becomes the authoritative interpreter of Scripture as well as becoming both the minister and the matter of “sacramental” grace.

The anemic “church” which is left over is an abstracted association of people with like beliefs, but with no necessary physical expression, and with no authoritative content. Anything approaching a “tradition” in the sense of an authoritative doctrinal content which is passed from generation to generation of believers is seen as legalism, and rejected as something which would fetter the subjective experience of the individual. The Faith becomes purely mystical, though I doubt whether individualist evangelicals would embrace the term “mystical”.

What I mean by “mystical” in this sense is simply a faith that has become so abstracted from external, authoritative content that it can be said to have reality only in the subjective experience of the individual. There is no objective authority against which to check this experience. Of course, the individualist will claim that Scripture is just such an authority, but again, the individualist will submit to no external, authoritative interpretation of Scripture, and will deny that there is any authority capable of delivering an infallible interpretation. It’s no surprise that the leading edge of individualist evangelicalism, the Emerging Church movement, has been known to eschew theology altogether in favor of experience. But, as Vladimir Lossky observed:

“If the mystical experience is a personal working out of the content of the common faith, theology is an expression, for the profit of all, of that which can be experienced by everyone. Outside the truth kept by the whole Church personal experience would be deprived of all certainty, of all objectivity. It would be a mingling of truth and falsehood, of reality and illusion: ‘mysticism’ in the bad sense of the word. On the other hand, the teaching of the Church would have no hold on souls if it did not in some degree express an inner experience of truth, granted in different measure to each one of the faithful” (from The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church).

Note that Lossky identifies the objective teaching of the “whole Church” as the thing which grounds and ties together both inner experience and outward theology. And what is theology but the authoritative expression by the whole Church of the truths of the Faith revealed by the Risen and Ascended Christ? This necessarily includes Scripture, the canon of which was decided upon by the Church -- the same Church which tells us what Scripture means. The anemic church of the individualist has no such magisterial authority: that outward authority has been internalized by the individualist. What suffers is the truth that the Church is the Body of Christ, not just symbolically, but in reality: that believers are joined to one another not just (or even primarily) by the similarity of their beliefs, but by their baptism in Christ, which imprints an indelible character upon the soul and ties it organically to Christ, and so to all other believers so joined to Christ. Uniformity in belief follows from this incorporation in and submission in faith to the Body of Christ, rather than being the cause of the Body’s organization.

Other people are in the end abstracted away, too. There’s no gritty, earthy, human chain of Tradition by which God is pleased to present his truth from age to age: the community is submerged in favor of the individual. The “deposit of faith” -- something passed on, as it were, by hand -- is traded away in favor of the idiosyncratic experience, which cannot be truly communicated, much less passed on. Oral transmission is utterly displaced by the solitary act of reading printed words and of drawing conclusions therefrom without reference to what has been believed everywhere, at all times, and by all. One generation is abstracted from another, one person from another, and the Body of Christ is contracted into the space of the individual head. How many times have you heard someone say something like, “It doesn’t matter exactly what I believe, as long as I believe in Jesus”? Subjective experience cannot be adequately evaluated, tested, and scrutinized: St. John’s “They went out from us, but they were not of us” (I Jn 2:19) becomes an impossible statement. Who’s to say? The Body has become so vague as to become invisible.

Ultimately, the reality of the externals is denied, and only the reality of the internals is admitted. This is, in spirit if not in letter, gnosticism. A corollary is that the created order is at least implicitly condemned as something belonging to a dispensation which is corrupt and utterly depraved. Nothing in the physical realm can act as a means of grace (that’s all been absorbed into the head of the individual), so outward acts are denounced as “man-made” or as “traditions of men”. Where outward acts cannot be ignored (it is almost universally acknowledged that, whatever else it commands, the New Testament enjoins upon Christians baptism and the Eucharist), they’re abstracted into symbols which convey nothing. Take another New-Testament example: ordination by laying-on of hands. For the individualist, this act cannot convey any grace or objective character: it works no change upon the soul of the ordinand. The practice is only acceptable as long as it is admitted that it doesn’t do anything, that it’s objectively superfluous. As a superfluity, it’s not a “tradition of men”, but as a sacrament, it is. For the individualist evangelical, man is, in essence, the false maker of the sacramental connection between himself and the created order -- he is the creator of an illusion based upon the immanence of the Logos within creation. In other words, man is a sort of demiurge, remaking the created order into something vivifying, when in fact it’s something spiritually inert. Creation is, in fact, so spiritually inert that it bears no essential relation to the Christian and is fit only for destruction. The illusion of the demiurge must be overcome by the gnosis of the individual experience.

This brings us back to pre-millennial dispensationalism. This eschatology flows from the gnostic tendencies of individualist evangelicalism and does away with any responsibility to the physical creation, out of which the pre-millennialist is waiting to be raptured. This position isn’t ameliorated by the idea of the millennial kingdom on earth, because Christians really won’t be a part of it: they’ll be orbiting in the New Jerusalem. So instead of reclaiming their intended role as the keepers, the tenders, the stewards of creation, Christians who subscribe to pre-millennialism are free at best to ignore and at worst to exploit the created order. Add to this the deconstruction of the visible Church, the severing of necessary ties within and to the Body of Christ, and all that’s left is an anemic church huddled in a world devoid of meaning and grace, populated by the damned and by individuals preoccupied with gaining experiential gnosis and so assuring their place among the elect. No wonder they want to be raptured.

Left Behind: Strong Individualism and An Anemic Church

2009-05-10T19:17:00.000-07:00

There is a series of books wildly popular among evangelical and fundamentalist Christians called the Left Behind series; it has been an enormous best-seller, consisting of some 13 books, three prequels, graphic versions in a comic-book-like format, children’s versions, study guides, and feature films. Left Behind purports to be a fictionalized account of the events of the end-times, and since this subject has always generated interest among Christians, the success of the series is no mystery. One only has to look at the Left Behind website to see that what began as an attempt to map out the events of the end-times in a fictionalized narrative has become an entire industry devoted to spelling out for mystified believers exactly what will take place in the near future.

Left Behind may have become the keystone of current interest in eschatology, but it was not the beginning of that interest among evangelical protestants. In the early 1970s Hal Lindsey made a name for himself with his books on the same subject, The Late Great Planet Earth being perhaps the most well-known. But even Lindsey was only popularizing a scheme of eschatology which had been flourishing in evangelical circles for over a hundred years. Lindsey’s books and Left Behind, and literally thousands of others pouring out at a frenzied pace, though coming from hundreds of different pens over several decades, can map out a consistent picture of the end times because they all subscribe to a view of the end-times called Pre-millennial Dispensationalism (Pre-millennialism will do for our purposes).

Summary is almost always unfair, but one could summarize the teachings of Pre-millennialism as they relate to the end-times as follows: Christ came to offer a literal, earthly kingdom to the Jews. If the Jews had accepted Christ as Messiah, he would have assumed the Throne of David and ruled from Jerusalem over a renewed Israel, ushering in a thousand-year golden age of peace and godliness. The Jews rejected Christ, however, so God, in a move utterly unforeseen by the Old Testament prophets, turned to the Gentiles and established the Church. With the founding of the Church, God’s plan for the Jews is suspended. The Church in this view is not so much the visible Body of Christ, as it is the very loose association of individuals who have a relationship with Jesus – who have “been saved”. The Church on earth has no necessary outward form or structure, and in fact, outward structures usually are bad, since the Church age is merely a parenthesis in history, a sort of Divine Plan B. But at the very end of history, the theory goes, the Church will suddenly disappear from the face of the earth: Christian believers will be “raptured” and will be taken away to be with Christ, who will return to the clouds above the earth to receive them. With the Church out of the way, God can resume his plan for the Jews. A terrible tribulation will follow and will last for seven years, but despite this, a remnant of Jews and others will find faith in God. They will be horribly persecuted, and in the middle of the seven-year tribulation, the Antichrist will begin to rule the world, and will attempt to put himself in the place of Christ. Just when victory for the Antichrist seems assured, Christ will return again, but this time will come all the way down to earth, will vanquish the Antichrist, and establish a thousand-year (hence the term “millennialism”) kingdom on earth, which he will rule from Jerusalem. This kingdom will be primarily for the Jews, with raptured Christians living in heaven, but able to visit earth. Hal Lindsey and others posit that the New Jerusalem, the home of raptured Christians, might orbit around the earth like a large satellite. But though the Antichrist was vanquished, he was only Satan’s lieutenant, and Satan remains to be dealt with. At the end of the thousand years he will try to overthrow the millennial kingdom and will be utterly and finally vanquished in the battle of Armageddon, which will destroy the earth, and after which the new heaven and new earth foretold in the Revelation of St. John will come into being.

It’s important to understand this Pre-millennial view because it’s becoming pervasive in many circles. For example, I’d point you to the Left Behind website. Pre-millennialism is there made to look a lot like one of the most central doctrines of Christianity, if not the most central. Or to take another example: The Assemblies of God denomination lists the tenets of Pre-millennialism – the rapture, followed by the 7-year tribulation, followed by the earthly millennial kingdom – as among its “fundamental beliefs”. When I was an evangelical and a firm subscriber to Pre-millennialism, I was told by the leader of a ministry for which I volunteered and for which I was considering entering a leadership position, that Pre-millennialism was essential for any such leader. More recently, I was told by a friend that he saw a right understanding of Pre-millennialism as absolutely necessary for a full expression of Christianity. This ought to be shocking to any Christian, most importantly because Pre-millennialism is not the teaching of the Church and can in fact lead to some serious errors. Two of these are radical individualism and an anemic view of the Church. There are more, but these will do for a start.

Catholics and Orthodox (for convenience, I’ll call it Catholic Orthodoxy) hold to the Rule of St. Vincent: we believe that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. This rule of ubiquity, consistency, and consensus is the Church’s guide to orthodoxy. Christ, speaking to the Churches early in Revelation says, “But that which ye have already, hold fast till I come” (Rev. 2:25). There may be a certain amount of doctrinal development, but there are no new doctrines. And this is precisely the problem with Pre-millennialism’s insistence on rapture-tribulation-millennial kingdom: it was never taught by the Church and is, in fact, almost completely the creation of John Nelson Darby, a British preacher who flourished in the mid 1800s. Pre-millennialists are hard-pressed to find any reference to anything like this version of the end-times before the 19th Century. It’s an absolute innovation. Of course, the idea of being “raptured” out of the world and so avoiding the worst tribulation ever is pretty attractive. The Church, however, is the Body of Christ, and we cannot individually or corporately expect to be spared persecution when our Lord wasn’t: Jesus says in St. John’s Gospel, “The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (Jn. 15:20). The way of Christ is the way of the Cross, and if we know that we will have sufferings on account of Christ, we also know that those sufferings are not to be compared with the glory that is to be. Darby seemed uninterested in Christlike-suffering, however, and is the father of the modern, “name-it-claim-it”, prosperity-based evangelicalism which has followed in the wake of the invention of the rapture.

There is, in fact, a demonstrable and reasonable link between what might be called “easy eschatology” and “individualist evangelicalism”. Individualist evangelicalism teaches that the Church is nothing more than the gathering of people who happen to share common beliefs about Christ; for these people, the Church has no objective reality as more than the sum of the parts. The individual is the primary “church”, and carries within himself every attribute which has been traditionally claimed for the Church: the ability to interpret, more or less infallibly, Scripture; the related ability to act as his own magisterium; the ability to provide within himself simultaneously what Catholic Orthodoxy calls the minister and the matter of the means of grace. It is useful for such individuals to gather together to pray and to edify one another, but in the end, this “outer Church” has no objective, mystical reality.

This assumption about the Church, not surprisingly, underlies much of the easy eschatology so popular with individualist evangelicals. Pre-millennialism if founded upon the radical individualism outlined above, and so Pre-millennialists suffer from a very anemic view of the Church. The Church is, after all, in their view only a parenthesis in the greater story -- a stop-gap measure -- a Plan B put in place because the Jews rejected Jesus. But God does not have one plan of salvation for the Jews and another for the Gentiles – this is a consistent message of the New Testament. St. Paul tells the Galatians that “[t]here is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). And to the Colossians he says, “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11). Jesus spends a lot of time teaching about the Kingdom of God, and these teachings of Kingdom life are the teachings of the Christian life. The Church is the Kingdom. Jesus taught at the outset of his ministry that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mat. 10:7), and proceeded to establish the rule and governance of that kingdom, and, before his Ascension, to give that rule and governance to the Apostles and their successors, the Bishops of the Church. In Matthew 16:19 Christ tells the Apostles: “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven”.

Pre-millennialists fail to understand that the Church is the Kingdom, that the Millennial Kingdom began with the Incarnation and continues through the Second Coming of Christ and on into the life of the world to come. We testify to this belief in the Creed when we say of Christ that his "kingdom shall have no end". We are in the millennium now; Christ is our King and rules from his throne at the right hand of the Father. The Church is not a parenthesis or Plan B, but is organically connected to the Old Testament Israel. The Church is the inheritor of the promises to Israel, which is and always has been more about a relationship with God than about ethnic identity. The faithful remnant of the Jews – our Lady, the Apostles – through faith in Christ became the Church. Israel as a nation or ethnic identity was merely the foreshadowing of and preparation for the Church, in which all the promises of the Old Covenant are fulfilled.

As a result of this failure to understand the true nature of the Church, Pre-millennialism tends to be anti-Catholic. If the Church’s claims to a true continuity between Old and New Testament, Israel and the Church, are true, then Pre-millennialism, which relies upon a sharp division between them, cannot be true. Many of the evangelicals I know object when proponents of Catholic Orthodoxy appeal to the Old Testament to demonstrate the antitypes in which New Testament truths are foreshadowed. “That’s the Old Covenant,” they say, “and it was done away with and doesn’t apply to us”. The Church’s teaching that she is the Kingdom and has a visible sacramental life with a divinely-ordered system of governance, a life of faith and worship the types for which were established in the Old Testament, stands as an obstacle to Pre-millennialists’ belief in a parenthesis Church which is really just an ad hoc gathering of people who share the common denominator of being Christian. Except for the fact that this is a wonderful common denominator to have, the Pre-millennialist Church is really organizationally no different from the Elk’s Club or Rotary. I found a booklet the other day which describes the Church primarily as a means for escaping the tribulation: “Hurry up and get saved,” it seemed to say, “so that you won’t have to be around for the horrible tribulation”. Nothing about coming to know and love the Lord who knows and loves us, because of course the Pre-millenialist Church has no means of grace, no sacraments, no practice of contemplative prayer. There is in fact, no “church” at all for Pre-millennialists, only individual Christians waiting for the rapture.

Standing against this kind of loose organization of independent Christians is the “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” described in the Creed. Of course, the Church proclaims in the same Creed a Savior who will come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead. But the Church resists speculation about the specifics of the Second Coming of Christ, because such speculation tends to take one’s eyes off the immediacy of the Kingdom in our midst. Christ’s Kingdom will be perfected at the end of time, but it exists now, in time, and in heaven, spread across the dividing line of visible and invisible, one in the sacramental unity of the Body and Blood of the King. And that is really the heart of the matter. We have the kingdom now – not yet in its perfected, future state, for we all dwell in the world with all of its (and our) sinfulness and rebellion against God. But we have the kingdom nonetheless, and labor in the same vineyard as the patriarchs and prophets, for the same Master, in hope of the same reward of salvation. Christ came to inaugurate this wondrous kingdom, and to give us access to it here and now for our salvation, but we’ll miss this if we’re always worrying about how the evening news fits in with the Apocalypse, and if we see the primary benefit of the Church as a sort of “escape pod” from tribulation.

These considerations lead on to a further conclusion, one that can be glimpsed from what has been said above: both individualist evangelicalism and easy eschatology are in spirit, if not in letter, gnostic. That discussion, however, will have to await a further post. All this typing has made me thirsty, and there’s a cold Guinness in the ‘fridge.

On The Sign of the Cross

2009-05-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

Introit for the Invention of the Holy Cross: But as for us, it behoveth us to glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross. “Invention” in this sense doesn’t mean something made up or created, but, truer to the Latin root-word invenire, means “a coming into” or “discovery”. The feast is the commemoration of the finding of the remains of the Cross on which Christ was crucified.

With Constantine’s defeat of Licinius, his eastern rival, he became sole emperor, and shortly thereafter, Constantine’s mother, Helena, then about 80 years old, made the journey to the Holy Land to assist St. Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, with excavations in and around the sites of Christ’s crucifixion and burial. It was under the patronage of St. Helena that this work led, in about 327, to the discovery of the True Cross. Almost all ancient authorities vouch for the authenticity of the finding, and while most of the Cross was transferred to Constantinople, a fragment was kept in Jerusalem in a silver reliquary, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built to house it on the spot where it was found. Within twenty years, a great feast had grown up around the Invention or Finding of the Cross, and this spread from Jerusalem to Constantinople to Rome, where a church was built in honor of the Invention of the Cross.

Wherever Christianity spread, the practice of honoring the Cross came with it. In response to the iconoclast controversy in the Eastern Empire, the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 ruled that Christians should give veneration to the “precious and life-giving Cross”, as well as to images of the Saints, our Lady, and our Lord. As the Council decreed, “The honour paid to the image passes to the prototype; and he who adores the image, adores the person whom it represents”; it is clear therefore that our veneration of the Cross is actually a veneration of Christ, who gave himself for the life of the world upon the Cross of Calvary. St. Paul makes it very clear to the Galatians in the verse upon which the Introit is based (Gal 6:14) that we should glory in the Cross: we glory in the Cross because it is intimately associated with the redemptive work of our Lord, so much so that the Cross has become the immediately-recognizable symbol of Christianity. The Cross is a sort of shorthand for all that we believe, because it symbolizes the Second Person of the Holy Trinity who became man and suffered, died, rose again, and ascended for us men and for our salvation.

The Church has always identified the Cross with the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life appears at the beginning and end of the Bible, in Genesis and Revelation: it is like a spiritual bookend of salvation history. Man is cut off from the Tree of Life in Genesis when he is banished from Eden and is made subject to mortality, but in Revelation it stands in the midst of the New Jerusalem where there is no death. The Collect for the Feast today specifically calls the Cross “that Tree of Life”, and the Preface of the Cross tells us that Christ’s work upon the Cross was done in order that “he who by a tree was once the vanquisher, might also by a Tree by vanquished”. “He” here is both the devil and death, who vanquished man by the fruit of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and who in turn is vanquished by the fruit of the Tree of the Cross, which is our Savior’s death and resurrection. Salvation history begins when man chooses the fruit of one tree, leading to death, and it reaches its turning-point when the fruit of another tree, leading to life, is made available to him. The Cross in a sense opens Eden again to us, but whereas the first Eden was the place of those who passed from life into death, the New Eden is the place of those who have passed from death into life. The Cross is our Tree of Life.

But before the Cross could become the Tree of Life, it had first to be an instrument of crucifixion. And if this was so for our Savior, it must be so for us as well, for the servant is not greater than his Master. In order to have life, our Lord tells us, we must deny ourselves, and take up our cross daily, and follow him (Luke 9:23). In order to live as Christians, we must daily die to ourselves. In practice this is called “mortification”, which means “putting to death”, and it is not popular in our culture, which is obsessed with avoiding death. This may be why even churches are abandoning the sign of the cross. Drive around and you will see that there are churches which are intentionally devoid of any Christian symbols at all. But Christian churches have always been crowned with a cross because Christ is the summit of our aspirations, and he cannot be reached but through the Cross. And we are not content to display the cross upon our churches; we cover ourselves with the sign of the cross as well, for we know that we cannot live until we surrender our selves, our souls, and bodies totally to God, and this is a real battle for us and involves daily, hourly, moment by moment, taking up the Cross and crucifying the desires and devices of our hearts and minds.

In this hard task our prayers are greatly aided by the sign of the cross, which reminds us of our hopeless position before God and of God’s great mercy in giving us hope despite ourselves. The sign of the cross reminds us that we receive the fruit of the Tree of Life only by embracing the Tree of crucifixion; the sign of the cross reminds us that it is through our Lord’s great sacrifice that the gates of Eden are open to us again. When we make the sign of the cross upon ourselves we identify ourselves with our crucified and risen Savior, and signify our willingness to follow him through death and into life.

And yet the Church teaches us that the Cross is more than just a symbol: because the honor given to the Cross passes to the Person whom it represents, namely Christ, the Cross becomes a vehicle of grace to those who gaze upon it in faith. Ours is not a religion, as is popularly believed, of the bifurcated universe: that is, we do not believe in a created world which exists independently of what goes on in the spiritual world, each with its own concerns. All creation, visible and invisible, is one, and God has in a wondrous work hidden himself within the very fabric of the universe.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1). We learn from Genesis and from John’s Gospel that the Word was instrumental in the creation and remains instrumental in the sustaining of the world. “All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made” (Jn 1:3). He made the world; he gave himself to all creation by pouring himself out, as it were, into the very form of things: of stars, and of fireflies; of mountains, and of molecules. He made and sustained the wood which grew first into a tree, and then was fashioned into the Cross. He laid down his human life upon the very wood which he held in being, and he shed his blood upon the creation which relies upon him for its very existence from moment to moment. The Cross shows that heaven and earth are bound together in the God who is all in all; it ties together the horizontal and the vertical and draws them to a point in Christ, who holds all things together. And because Christ became man to die for us, the Cross is intimately tied to the Incarnation.

It is not too much to say, then, that Christ is in the Cross; but he is not just in the Cross in the way that he is in every blade of grass or every grain of sand. Christ is in the Cross by virtue of the act of love which caused him to die upon the Cross for us, and there is grace in every representation of the Cross because the Person for Whom it stands is the very fount of grace. This is why we use the sign of the Cross for every kind of blessing: it is from the power of the Cross that our blessings flow, and it is by virtue of Christ’s finished work upon the Cross that we can become sons of God enabled to receive his blessing. “The preaching of the cross”, says St. Paul, “is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (I Cor. 1:18). This is why those who are baptized are marked with the sign of the Cross, as well as those who are confirmed, and those who are sick, and those who receive a blessing of any kind. The thing which ties together every kind of blessing bestowed is the sign of the Cross. We make the sign of the Cross upon ourselves whenever we receive any blessing, and even inanimate objects which are blessed are signed with the sign of the Cross.

I want to encourage you for a moment to think about this universal sign of blessing, and to encourage you to use it in faith and devotion. There are several places during the Mass at which the congregation are encouraged to make the sign of the cross: at the beginning of the Introit, at the conclusion of the Gloria, at the announcement of the Gospel, at the absolution following the General Confession, at the elevations, just prior to and just after receiving Holy Communion, and at the Final Blessing. There are others, but these are the main ones. Throughout the Liturgy, we identify ourselves with Christ’s sacrifice made present for us upon the Altar, we offer ourselves as a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice in return, and we show forth the blessings we receive thereby by making the sign of the Cross.

The sign of the cross is not confined to church, however. Making the sign of the cross is an effective tool in your spiritual arsenal. Are you being tempted in any way? Make the sign of the cross as you ask God to help you. Are you sitting down to enjoy a meal? Make the sign of the cross as you ask God to bless your food. Are you rising in the morning? Make the sign of the cross as you thank God for your night’s rest and ask his aid for the coming day. Are you lying down to sleep? Make the sign of the cross as you thank God for the day just past and implore his mercy through the night. Have you received bad news or disappointment? Make the sign of the cross as you bring your cares to God. Have you received good news or some benefit? Make the sign of the cross as you thank God. The sign of the cross should become second nature to us, an habitual and reflexive act which calls down grace upon us. It is impossible to make the sign of the cross in faith and not be blessed, for when we make the sign of the cross, we are making the sign of Christ upon ourselves, identifying ourselves with him, and opening ourselves to his power.

The life-giving Cross is a fountain of grace, an aid in battle, a comfort in sorrow and affliction, a companion in joy. When we sign ourselves with the sign of the cross we have the power of God literally at our fingertips, to lead us to repentance and to victory. This is foolishness to the world, but as for us, it is right that we should always glory in the Cross of Christ.

Microchurch and Community

2009-05-01T05:41:00.000-07:00

One aside from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research study of megachurches which ties in very well with our earlier discussion of how the God Show doesn’t really succeed in a truly liturgical environment is the following, which is the explanation from the authors of the megachurch study of why Roman Catholic parishes don’t really count as megachurches:

Our studies and readings of worship and the congregational life of Catholic Churches has not convinced us that most very large catholic churches really function like the Protestant megachurches. There are a few that we have come across that do, but most don't have strong charismatic senior ministers, many associate pastors, large staff, robust congregational identity that empowers 100's to 1000's of weekly volunteers, an identity that draws people from a very large area (sometimes an hour or more) and across parish boundaries, a multitude of programs and ministries organized and maintained by members, high levels of commitment and giving by members, seven-day-a-week activities at the church, contemporary worship, state of the art sound and projection systems, auxiliary support systems such as bookstores, coffee shops, etc. huge campuses of 30-100 acres, and other common megachurch characteristics.1

There’s so much one could say about this conclusion; I’d like to concentrate on two things in the context of the microchurch discussion. In this post, let’s address the idea that the megachurch has “an identity that draws people from a very large area (sometimes an hour or more) and across parish boundaries”. The idea of the parish is very much tied to a particular locality: the idea is that the Christians of a certain, defined area pooled their resources to erect a church building, which then became the locus of the Faith in that area. This area, tied together by ties of family and locality -- a community in the truest sense -- was then served by the parish as the people gathered there to worship together and left to live together. They were baptized in the parish, instructed in the parish, confirmed in the parish, married in the parish, and buried from the parish. The life of the community became inextricably intertwined with the life of the parish.

But what role could a parish play in a mobile, fragmented society like ours? Before addressing this question, we should be clear that though our society has certain benefits, it is largely broken. Our mobility has made us rootless and has disconnected us from our families. There may be instances, unfortunately, in which this is a blessing of sorts; but in the main it has been disastrous. Our country, once a more or less stable polity, a nation-state built on a solid foundation of local allegiances and loyalties, has become utterly abstracted from itself, almost to the point where it has ceased to function as a stable polity. Our families have become abstracted from themselves as well, and atomized to the point of disappearance. How does the megachurch address this problem? It doesn’t. It ignores the problem completely. It obliterates the ties of community and locality by drawing from a huge base of congregants who have no other tie than that of the megachurch itself (and, as we have seen, those ties are themselves often ephemeral).

A microchurch, on the other hand, must rely on the kindness of those around it: it doesn’t have the resources to draw attendees from hours away, and why should it try? A microchurch reaches out to the immediate community, and ministers to those who live nearby. There’s no “show”, no monolithic facade: a microchurch is transparent within its community, in large part because its people and minister are known in the community, in which they live and move and have their being. It’s much easier, on the surface, to serve God where one isn’t known well, and where individual foibles and follies are masked by a certain anonymity and aloofness -- much easier, perhaps, but much less truly that service to which we’re called by the Gospel. Perhaps this is why megachurch ministers are prone to ministry-ending scandals: they live behind a monolithic edifice, and they’re not known by their congregations as human beings who struggle with living the Faith even as they lead. Their scandals are so ruinous because these megavangelists aren’t seen as real people; they’re not known in their real communities, but only in the ersatz community of the megachurch itself, and only in the persona they choose to project onto the giant screen TVs.

Shouldn’t the Church be in the forefront of combatting our rootlessness, our distraction, and our atomization? Shouldn’t the Church be consistently recalling us to our primal loyalties? The microchurch helps answer the call. One symptom of our cultural disease is the fact that the word “parochial” has come to mean “limited”, “short-sighted”, or “backward”. Serving the world is the big deal in our culture, but you can’t build a house until you’ve laid the foundation and poured the footings. The world is an abstraction; the pesky guy next door is as concrete as it gets. One learns to love and serve God by learning to love and serve one’s family, one’s neighborhood, one’s parish. We may go into all the world to spread the Gospel, but we generally have to come home again, and when we do, we can’t bring the world back with us: the world has got to stay in its own home, be baptized in its own parish, and learn there to love and serve the Lord.

1. Megachurch Definition, from the website of the Hartford Institute of Religion Research, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/definition.html, accessed on April 25, 2009.

Good Shepherd Sunday: Casual Worship?

2009-04-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

St. John, Chapter 10, verses 14 & 15:

“I am the Good Shepherd; and know my sheep, and am known of mine, even as the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.”

I regularly drive past a church which has recently put up an enormous sign which proclaims, in all-capital letters, “Casual Worship – Come As You Are”. Now, having come from a background which involved my passing through almost every brand of Protestant worship available, even at times leading such worship, and having settled with great relief into the liturgical life of the Catholic faith, I generally experience a sort of gratitude when I see a sign such as this. I’m grateful that I’m no longer involved in re-inventing the wheel every Sunday; I’m grateful that the chaotic experience of worship-by-committee is no longer my experience.

I might, by the way, illustrate my reason for gratitude by relating the events of a meeting of the “worship committee” to which I belonged when I first moved to Georgia in 1990. During my first semester of law school at UGA I was dodging the unpleasantness of what is called 1L (a wholly inadequate abbreviation for something which, unfortunately, is never abbreviated, namely, the whole hellish first year of law school); I was dodging this unpleasantness, I say, by haunting the Religion stacks at the main library. I had come to law school from graduate school at LSU carrying with me an unresolved religious crisis: I had been moved out of the evangelical Protestantism in which I had always lived, and was standing at the threshold of the Catholic faith, wondering how I could possibly move in. I found in the Religion stacks the whole answer to all my objections, neatly put, in a single volume: Bible, Church, Tradition, Volume I of the collected works of the Russian Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky. It took me a while to assimilate what I read, but it literally changed my mind, forever, and I could never see things the same way again.

Just as I was reading Florovsky, I was put on the worship committee. Our worship committee met every week to plan out the events of the coming Sunday. It was tiring business, because we were expected to keep everything new and interesting. Sometimes we’d have a communion service; sometimes we’d do drama; sometimes we’d have all music. It was an exhausting round of change and revision. We were told that everything was on the table. Since everything was on the table, I suggested trying a “traditional” worship service, including saying the Creed. Obviously everything was not on the table. My suggestion was met with an equal mixture of silence and hostility. After an hour or so of utterly uncharitable debate, one member of the committee, in an attempt to be conciliatory, conceded that we might say the Creed, but demanded that we take out everything which would be difficult to understand. My own admittedly uncharitable response was that if we removed everything difficult to understand we’d be left with “I believe. Amen.” And on second thought, I guessed we should get rid of “I believe” as well, for even this hints at the mystery of being and belief – by no means easy to understand.

This is all a roundabout way of getting back to the sign I saw: “Casual Worship – Come As You Are”. This sign reminds me of a time when I had a very clear experience of what it was like not to have a shepherd, to be part of a congregation utterly left to its own devices, cut off from the nourishing life of Holy Tradition like people marooned without a map. But primarily it reminds me that we, as Catholics, have a Shepherd who leads us into the knowledge and love of God by becoming our sacrifice, a sacrifice the making present of which is the central act of our worship. Worship is not just an activity: it is a mutual exchange of love at a level so profound that we are changed by it. Out of love, Christ becomes present on the Altar for us so that we, being joined to him, may become creatures able to give love and adoration to him. Our worship is a pattern of heavenly life, but more than a pattern: it is the very life of heaven made present for us. This is why the Eastern Fathers call the Sacrament of the Altar “The Medicine of Immortality”.

Our Lord tells us that the hallmark of a good shepherd is mutual knowledge between him and his sheep. “I am the Good Shepherd; and know my sheep, and am known of mine”. This is a sort of knowledge which is not just knowledge about one another: that sort of knowledge can be had between the sheep and the hireling shepherd, but it will not suffice to make the sheep follow the hireling into apparent danger and it will not suffice to induce the hireling to endanger himself for the sheep. It is not a knowledge which will prevent the sheep from being scattered and falling prey to wolves. The knowledge of which our Lord speaks is a more intimate knowledge, and is the difference between knowing about someone and really knowing that person. Jesus, in fact, tells us that he knows his sheep, and they him, “even as” the Father knows him and he knows the Father.

This is remarkable, wondrous. The knowledge which flows among the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity is love. It is love which causes the Son to be eternally begotten of the Father, it is love which causes the Holy Spirit to proceed from the Father, and it is love which the Three share in the exercise of one divine Nature. So it is absolutely astonishing that our Lord tells us that we can know him even as he knows us, which is even as he and the Father know one another. In Christ, the love which is the relation of the Persons of the Holy Trinity is available to us, to the sheep. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing writes that “By love God may be gotten ever, but by thinking never”. God is above our mere factual knowledge, though he has chosen to reveal many things about himself. But for knowledge of him, something more is required. Love is the most intimate way of knowing another, and the most deeply revealing. Its result in our world of time is always sacrifice, for one truly in love wants to know nothing of himself, wants to speak nothing of himself, but wants only to know and to speak of the Beloved. That is why, in relation to the Father, Christ willed, spoke, and acted only what the Father desired, and that is why, in relation to us, the sheep, Christ lay down his life. Each was the only available outcome of love. Each was an emptying of self for the beloved, a sacrifice.

So when the sign says, “Come As You Are”, I think, “How else can one come to Christ?” However we come to him, whether bad or good, whether mindfully or absent-mindedly, whether prepared or unprepared, whether wearing blue jeans or a suit, we only ever come to God as we are. We can come in no other way. No artifice or disguise will hide us from him who is, as Julian of Norwich said, “closer to us than our own soul, for he is the ground on which our soul standeth”. God sees our hearts; he holds our hearts, our very being, in the palm of his hand. Calling someone into his presence and saying, “Come as you are” is like saying, “Come over here; and while you’re at it, be sure to move from one place to another”. It’s a pointless invitation to the inevitable. We only ever come to God as we are. He is the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, as St. Peter writes in the Epistle, and knows us better than we know ourselves.

But we can know him, too. This is the amazing claim of the Christian faith: that God became man so that men might have saving knowledge of God, who is, outside of the Incarnation, utterly unknowable in and of himself. His light is darkness to our unaccustomed eyes, but, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing writes, this is a darkness of the mind and its thoughts only; and what cannot be grasped by them can be surely had by the heart and its love. We love what is, outside of the Human Face of Christ, darkness to us, inaccessible, unapproachable, and yet, through Christ’s very incarnate humanity, and through our loving adoration beyond the point where thoughts fail us, we can have by grace what nature has not strength enough nor daring enough to merit: access to the inaccessible, approach to the unapproachable, knowledge of the unknowable. This is what it means to know God.

And this is exactly what the essence of Christian worship is: the access, through grace, to loving, self-forgetting adoration which unites us to God and changes us forever. What, then, can possibly be meant by “casual worship”? It’s like saying, “casual self-crucifixion”, or “casual self-giving love”, or “casual adoration”. Who can point to one episode in all of Scripture or in the lives of the Saints where someone made casual contact with the Uncreated Light in which God dwells? Or in which someone casually underwent a change from death to salvation? Isn’t that, at its heart, what Christian worship is about? Even in the literature of love stories, who can point to one great story of casual love?

The image of Christ the Good Shepherd has taken on a patina of folksiness, and of course the Gospels show us a portrait of a Jesus who is utterly approachable, who took on human flesh in order to be approached. But when we approach Jesus, when we follow the Good Shepherd, it is to be led along a way of love which is inexorable in its desire to present us perfected before the Father. The Christian story is the pre-eminent and foundational Love Story. Can there be anything casual about our love for the God who loves us without ceasing, without sleeping, and who gave everything, took the greatest risk imaginable, in order to win us for himself? “God”, writes St. John of the Cross, “passes through the thicket of the world, and wherever His glance falls He turns all things to beauty” (Spiritual Canticle, stanza 5). What can be casual about being turned from nothingness to beauty? What can be casual about our worship of the God who does this for us?

Our Good Shepherd leads us in our worship by becoming the Object of that worship, the Visible one who shows us in himself the Father whom none has seen. The Shepherd becomes one of the sheep, the only unblemished Lamb of God, and makes himself present in the midst of our worship under the veil of bread and wine. Consider this, and you will see that there is no such thing as “casual worship”. Ask St. John beholding the “Lamb that was slain” standing in the heart of the heavenly glory, worshipped by Angels and Saints: “Casual worship?” Let us ask ourselves when we “Behold the Lamb of God, him that taketh away the sin of the world” here in our midst, when, with Angels and Archangels, and all the Company of Heaven, we laud and magnify his glorious Name: “Casual worship?” The Good Shepherd knows us, and calls us to know him, even as he knows the Father and is known of the Father. He calls us so that we may love and know even as we are loved and known. He gave himself up for us to make this impossibility a reality; and we are called, as his loving worshippers, to give ourselves up for him. Everything is on the table when the table is an Altar, and we can never be casual worshippers of the Good Shepherd who calls us to come as we are in order to be made what we can never by nature be.

Easter I 2009

2009-04-19T18:08:00.000-07:00

I St. John 5:4: Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world.

In the early Church the Catechumens, those who had spent a year learning the Faith and preparing for Baptism, were baptized on Holy Saturday, Easter Eve. On that day and for a week after, they wore their white baptismal garments, and the focus of the liturgical readings was on the new life conferred in Baptism. This is why today, on the Octave of Easter, the propers share themes of new life and of the joy and purpose given by this new life. In particular, the Introit and Epistle refer specifically to birth: the Introit quotes from I Peter chapter 2 (As newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word), and the Epistle contains the phrase I've chosen as my text (Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world).

As we embark upon Eastertide, then, we are reminded of something we are apt to forget about in the midst of our day-to-day busy-ness: Christ, by his Resurrection, has made all things new, and we, participating in his Resurrection by virtue of our Baptism, are made new creatures in him. God hath given to us eternal life, St. John tells us, and this life is in his Son. We are given in Baptism a new life, and though our former nature is not swept away, we need no longer live in servitude to it, bound to cater to its illusions and appetites. But because our former nature is still around, we must constantly recall and renew our Baptismal vows. The new life comes to us as spiritual infancy, and we must care for it, tend to it, and strengthen it, or it will not grow. And, because the new life is really a life, a living nature given to us by grace, if it is not growing it is shrinking, sickening, and ebbing away.

And yet, even in its infancy, even when newborn, the new life within us is very powerful, for it is, after all, born of God. It is his life within us, and that is why we are able, once endowed with it, to overcome the world. When St. John tells us that we are able to overcome the world, he is showing us several things. First, that the world needs to be overcome. “World” as St. John uses it here is the Greek word kosmos, and for John it generally means, not the natural or created order, which is God's handiwork and is good, but the organized resistance to God led by demonic forces and knowingly or unknowingly participated in by the great mass of mankind. This was the sense used by our Lord in John 15 when he told the disciples: If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you (Jn 15:19).

We began our natural lives as a part of this kosmos, this system of organized resistance to God (which may express itself as an unstudied antipathy toward God), and our natural inclinations and appetites, divorced from God's order and harmony, went very gently into that dark night. But Christ has chosen us “out of the world”; his act of creative love remakes us and takes us, from a jurisdictional point of view, out of the kosmos of darkness and into the kosmos of light. Of course, we remain within the world, for these two kingdoms inhabit the same space. All of creation is God's, but all of creation groans with the burden of Satan's non serviam, “I will not serve”, and all of us have with more or less gusto repeated this mantra in our thoughts, words, and deeds. Christ's life within us restores us to our rightful allegiance, and this makes the world hate us, as it hated Christ before us.

Now, one of the most sly and insidious ways which the world uses to cut us off from our new life is the presentation to us of its priorities and programs as those of the society around us. None of us want to be taken for cranks or weirdos, but especially now when our society has slouched its way into post-Christian paganism, we run this risk if we dare to live out the new life within us with all of its duties and implications. Our Lord was the light of the world, but he said that the world loved darkness more than light, and we must bear this in mind in our relations with our surrounding culture. We may find areas of agreement with our culture; we may strike an uneasy truce in places; but we must never allow ourselves to think that the programs and priorities of the world are those of the Lord we serve, for after all is said and done, the opposite is true, and we do the world a great disservice by downplaying the differences. You are the salt of the world, our Lord tells us, but how will the salt do its job if it loses its savor? Our job is to bring Christ to our culture, and to sanctify it in every way we can.

We overcome the world when we allow our faith to be the first former of our ideas, when we let the Church's authoritative teaching be our guide, and then when we turn and hold out a hand to those struggling in the whirlpool of the world's unhealthy doctrine. We overcome the world, not just by turning away from its plans, programs, and priorities, but by turning toward the people of the world with our unparalleled message of love, hope, and sanity. There is a world to be overcome, but that world is inhabited by souls in need of rescue.

We overcome the world when we realize that the Faith of the Church is not merely another set of moral or ethical doctrines, not merely another program for improvement, but is rather the way of life itself. Dr. Peter Kreeft writes that Christianity is not just a religion: it is a proposal of marriage. It is an invitation to utter transformation, not in some scientologist's dream of an evolutionary leap, but in the perfection of our existing nature, in its restoration to the Likeness of the God Who made it and with the sole aim of granting us the profoundest loving intimacy with him.

To be sure, this road is not an easy one, not at least for one determined to follow it to its end. Our faith overcomes the world, but as it does so we are buffeted by the hatred and antipathy of the world and by the unfolding of natural consequences of our rebellion such as sickness, disease, and misfortune. We continue to be affected by the futility to which the entire natural order has been subjected by sin; we continue to be affected by it, but the new life within us can never by any external cause be subjected to futility, can never become futile itself, for it is the very life of God within us, surrounding us, upholding us, remaking us, even in the midst of the adversities attendant upon life in a fallen world. We must never allow ourselves, therefore, to be cast down by the unfolding of events around us; we overcome the world when we fix our gaze upon Christ the lover of our souls and seek intimacy with him in all things and through all things. This is no platitude; our Lord is no detached ethical teacher unaccustomed to our woes. He was during his earthly life the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief, the only man who truly did not deserve what he got from the world. We overcome the world when we join ourselves to him in his suffering as well as in his triumph, in his Passion as well as in his Resurrection, in his humiliation as well as in his glorification.

The world around us needs to be overcome by us, to be sure, but an honest look at ourselves will reveal that the infection of the dark kosmos has found a comfy nook in our own hearts and minds. We adopt the basic assumptions of the world and find ourselves grudging toward the Church when she challenges these assumptions; we have been transferred into the Kingdom of Light, but though we have a new address, we still get all our old mail forwarded. Overcoming the world really begins by overcoming the world in ourselves, by relentlessly seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness in our own divided intellects and wills. This will have the double effect of making us harder on ourselves and easier on those around us, for we will realize that they all have the same great battle to fight, many of them without the aid of the new life of grace which benefits us. We overcome the world when we realize that the pearl of great price, worth everything we have and are, is the new life within us, and when we nurture and tend that life against the cares, riches, and pleasures which so easily seek to turn the garden of our souls into dead and barren ground.

It is Eastertide, and our forty days of solemn fasting are followed by a forty-day feast of joy. The Resurrection would be the greatest wonder of the world even if Christ procured nothing for us by it; as it is, we who believe on the Resurrected Christ have, by virtue of this belief and by the Sacrament of Baptism, the new life of the Resurrection within us, bringing us back, not from the brink of death, but from the very depth of death itself, the living death which is life without Christ. Because the stone is rolled away from Jesus' tomb, and because Jesus walked out of that tomb after conquering death, the stones are rolled away from the tombs into which we all were born, and we all stand blinking in the sunlight like Lazarus before the graves in which we so recently slept. We must take care not to return to those graves and take up habitation there.

It is Eastertide, and it is time for us to take a good look at the new life within us, to review our baptismal vows, to dedicate ourselves again to the care and feeding of the soul, with nothing less than an eye toward its perfect growth into the stature of the fullness of Christ. We are born by grace, not into a moral code or ethical system, not into a civic or charitable organization, but into a marriage. We are born with grace perhaps in its infancy, but with the fully-formed capacity to be the lovers of God, who loved us first and chose us out of the world. This is our birthright: a wedding feast, the very feast of which we may now partake at the Altar before us, not in type or in shadow or even in foreshadowing, but in the very thing itself, made present for us here and at every Mass. It is most fully in the Sacrifice of the Mass that we overcome the world, for this is the food which nurtures the life of grace within us, this is the pledge of our betrothal to Christ, and our first participation in the great Wedding Feast of the Lamb which is the occupation of heaven, the reward and cause of all who, chosen out of this world of darkness and shadow of death, have overcome the world.

(Given at St. Francis of Assisi Anglican Catholic Church, Gainesville, Ga., 04/19/09)

Welcome to the Microchurch

2009-04-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

The megachurch has become an icon of our times: thousands of people gathered together in huge auditoriums watching the action on a stage which may be too small to see from the vasty depths, but which is helpfully reproduced on huge screens, just like at a U2 concert. One of the megachurches near where I live recently outgrew its enormous complex and built another a mile or so away, even larger, with even more football-fields-worth of pavement for parking, and now uses both, one as its main facility (“south campus”) and one for overflow and other events (“north campus”). The parking areas at the new facility stretch into the distance, and there are shuttles running back and forth to collect people, who gather under bus-stop shelters in each parking area to await the shuttles. Kind of like Disney World.

The likeness to Disney World doesn’t stop with the people-moving scheme. Once inside, people are treated to full-bore liturgitainment, with rock bands, multi-media, and motivational speaking. And so it goes, at megachurch after megachurch, thousands upon thousands of people moving in to be worshipped-at, and then moving out again, still whistling the ditties and running out to buy the latest books produced by the main guy. Or maybe they just buy the books in the megachurch: increasingly these establishments are becoming one-stop-shops. The books by the leaders are on sale in the bookstore; there’s coffee in the coffee shop; there’s a game room for kids.

Did I say “game room”? When I was growing up in a relatively large Baptist church, there was a room with a couple of pool and foosball tables, a TV (which I never recall being turned on), and a pinball machine. This room was not usually open on Sunday mornings at first; later, it served as the location for the college Sunday-school class, and when so used, the entertainment stuff was pretty much locked down. The toys were only for weekend nights, when the room was meant to serve as an alternative to the downtown hangouts where college and high-school kids might otherwise go. The website for one of our local megachurches, on the other hand, advertises a youth program in which a rock wall, Xbox, Wii, and large-screen TVs are used as the initial draw, then the rock band starts playing, and then kids are led into an “altar experience” which is designed to show them that going to church can be as addictive -- I kid you not -- as eating Pringles. And, of course, the whole thing is “relevant”. This is not the to-hell-with-relevance post, however, so I’ll have to reign myself in.

My first point is that the megachurch mission is to deliver an experience. This isn’t something necessarily restricted to megachurches, and many smaller congregations have taken up this devastating debasement of worship. But the megachurches are well-oiled experience-delivery devices, and their scale makes the comparison with Disney World more appropriate. They are, in fact, theme-park churches, and if that sounds like a grotesque oxymoron, then we might be gaining some more insight into why these institutions regularly eschew the word “church” for the term “worship center”.

Not only is the megachurch essentially experience-oriented, the massive scale of its experience-delivery makes it essentially impersonal. This might seem strange, given that the experience once delivered to the saints is designed to make an appeal on the subjective, emotional level. But while the experience is designed to be utterly personal, its delivery-structure is abstract and impersonal. There is simply no way that 7,000 or so people can have personal relationships with one another, and there is no way that the pastors can have a personal relationship with any more than a fraction of the whole. That’s why these institutions have such large staffs. Much effort must be devoted to keeping the apparatus well-oiled and working, and to keeping the experiences flowing; much effort must be exerted to keep in contact with the membership and to keep them interested. After all, while megachurches are not usually in overt competition with one another, their memberships tend, statistically speaking, to be fairly fluid, and any lapse in the experience could send folks looking for the next best thing. In fact, the focus on experience means that people are trained to expect experiences, and because humans easily become inured to such things, there’s always the temptation to move on. Familiarity, in such a context, might not breed contempt, but it does breed ennui. The megachurch must expend time, talent, and treasure on retention (and, according to recent research, it’s not paying off).

Now just imagine if a church of 10,000 members divided itself into congregations of, say, 200. That would be fifty new churches, which could be spread out into local communities. People wouldn’t need to make a long drive in to a central megachurch; they could attend a service near where they live. The congregation, in turn, could be much more in touch with the needs of its local community, and could minister both to the community and to its own members on a much more human scale. The problem with this microchurch model, from the point of view of the megachurch, is that microchurches are not as well-equipped to provide a total experience. It’s much harder to pull off in a microchurch. And this is a very good thing.

Contemporary Christians, like many people, are like addicts who crave their drug even while loathing it. Liturgitainment, the “worship experience”, is the contemporary Christian drug. If you doubt it, just look at the emerging church movement and its critique of the megachurch “experience” (this movement has its own problems, but that’s a topic for another post). Microchurches, which can’t pull off the total “experience”, are better off eschewing the whole thing in favor of a return to more traditional ways of worship. This return is more likely to happen in a microchurch than in a megachurch, which would go the way of the dinosaur in the face of a return to traditional worship.

The Church is, after all, a family, and the local congregation is to the whole Church what the nuclear family is to the large group at the reunions. A local congregation which can’t function on the intimate, personal level is a truly dysfunctional family; and when attention is drawn away from an experience and toward a Person -- the Second Person of the Holy Trinity -- then these personal relationships are truly enhanced and become grace-full. The power of the personal relationship then flows outward into the community: not into the “community”, seen as a notional construct of either a certain demographic element (the sort of “community” brought to light by a “community organizer”), nor into the “community”, seen as “everybody else” (as in “the wider community”), but into the actual, local community of people who live and work within a few miles of the microchurch. The microchurch then takes on a definite identity within a reachable locality, and this identity, in order to be translated to the locality, must be a personal identity: personal in the sense that it is conveyed from one person to another, and is lived out in the context of the locality, and personal in the sense that it is an identity received from the Person Who is at the center of the Church’s life and mission.

The “experience” cannot be transmitted: it must be, well, experienced. The Gospel, on the other hand, is by definition capable of being transmitted. It is transmitted best and most reliably by small congregations which exist in the concrete circumstances of a local community, and in which the “family affair” of worship results in a deepening relationship with Christ, who is then borne into the community by worshippers who are known there. Most people come to church, after all, because they're invited by someone they know and not in response to a media campaign. Visitors and newcomers to a microchurch are welcomed by individual members, and not by a committee-member. The microchurch is the context, in short, in which may be conveyed most clearly the truth that the Faith is something received, inherited (to continue the family metaphor; I don’t mean to imply that one’s salvation can be inherited) from the living Body, the Church, and not something invented -- or worse, “re-invented”.

Maundy Thursday: Bread In The Wilderness

2009-04-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

John 6:11: And Jesus took the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down.

Matthew 26:26-28: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.

The miracle of the feeding of 5000 is one of the most important episodes recorded by the Evangelists. We can see just how central this episode was to the ministry of our Lord because, of all his miracles recorded throughout the Gospels, this feeding of the 5000 is the only one recounted by all four. In fact, Sts. Matthew and Mark each record another miracle of the same kind, a feeding of 4000. The Prayer Book, too, emphasizes the importance of this miracle by assigning it to three different Sundays in the year, the only Gospel lesson so repeated in the Prayer Book.

One reason the episode is so important is that it begins to fulfill the Old Testament type of manna in the wilderness. The people have followed Jesus and have come, like the Israelites following Moses, into the wilderness. St. John tells us that Jesus went up into a mountain; the other Evangelists all call it “a desert place”, all using the same Greek word, which implies emptiness or wilderness. This wilderness is located near the Sea of Galilee, which is an area of cliffs and caves. At the north-northwest end of the Sea of Galilee, the cliffs slope down into grassland, rather like the geography described by St. John. The Synoptic Gospels all tell us that Jesus and the disciples came to this wilderness place in order to get a respite from the crowds which had begun to follow them everywhere, so that, in St. Mark’s words, Jesus and the disciples “had no leisure so much as to eat” (Mk. 6:31), and that the crowds got wind of this attempt and followed them. Sts. Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us that Jesus, far from being angry at this interruption of his solitude, began to teach and heal the crowds, and St. John tells us that the crowds followed Jesus because of the miracles of healing they had seen. They are people in need, and Jesus has compassion on them, just as God had compassion on the children of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai.

The five barley loaves and two fish become sufficient to feed over 5,000 people (the number 5,000 accounts only for the men; when women and children are accounted for, the number swells and perhaps doubles), and the people, being steeped in their Jewish faith, would have recalled the events of the Exodus, and particularly the provision of manna. Like the manna, the bread and fish which the people were given by Jesus had no observable source: God is the one who feeds the people. Later on, after he and the disciples had returned to Capernaum, Jesus specifically links his miraculous multiplication of food with the manna provided by God to Israel in the wilderness. The feeding of the 5000 occurs in Israel, and there are 12 baskets left over, symbolizing the 12 Tribes of Israel; the feeding of 4000 depicted by Matthew and Mark occurs in Gentile territory, and there are 7 baskets left over, a number often associated with the Gentiles. Matthew and Mark seem to be telling us that the miracle was too important to be confined only to the Jews, that Jesus in repeating it to the Gentiles was confirming that he was sent to be the Bread of Life to the whole world.

I noted above that the feeding of the 5000 begins to fulfill the Old Testament type of manna in the wilderness; it begins to do so, but the true fulfillment of both the Old Testament and the Gospel events is found in the Institution of the Eucharist in the upper room on Maundy Thursday. The feeding of the 5000 stands like a signpost, pointing both backward to the manna in the wilderness and forward to the Last Supper. There was a tradition current in the Judaism of our Lord’s day that depicted Moses as the intercessor for the people of Israel, standing before God and pleading for the people. In other words, Moses was in the Israelite mind a prototype of the messiah, both leading the people out into freedom and pleading their case before God. Since Moses was seen as God’s agent in providing manna for the people, the idea became current that in the messianic age, manna would again be available. Our Lord’s provision of miraculous bread in the wilderness, then, surely aligned him with the Moses-like figure of the messiah in the minds of the people; in fact, St. John tells us that the people made just such a connection:

“Then those men, when they had seen the miracle that Jesus did, said, This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world. When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force, to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone” (Jn. 6:14-15).

Of course, Jesus was “that prophet that should come into the world”, but he was much, much more. He was God, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. And he sought to make this clear to the people of Capernaum shortly after the feeding of the 5000 when he said, “I am the Bread of Life” (Jn. 6:35). Now think about this for a moment. The miracle of the feeding of the 5000 occurs four times in the Gospels; the miracle of the feeding of the 4000, twice. There is no other miracle so favored. When I was an evangelical protestant, this caused me no small vexation. If the Eucharist is a wholly symbolic act, something we do primarily as a memorial of the Passion, then why is the feeding of the 5000 so important? Sure, it hearkens back to the Exodus, but so do others of Jesus’ miracles: the walking on water recalls the crossing of the Red Sea; the healings recall Moses with the brazen serpent, healing the Israelites; and so on. Why does Jesus, immediately after this miracle of loaves and fishes, tie it to his divinity, something he doesn’t ordinarily do at the conclusion of a miracle? And why does he do even more than this: identify the bread with himself?

St. John’s Gospel, alone among the Gospels, shows Jesus using metaphors to describe himself: “I am the light of the world” (Jn. 8:12); “I am the door of the sheep” (Jn. 10:7); “I am the good shepherd” (Jn. 10:11). But the first time Jesus does this is following the feeding of the 5000, and he goes beyond simple metaphor. When Jesus tells the Jews in Capernaum, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (Jn. 6:51), one could argue that he is prophesying his crucifixion, when he will indeed give his flesh for the light of the world. Yet when the people asked themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat”, Jesus, who was fond of explaining his parables, did no such thing; he flatly stated,

“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (Jn. 6:53-56).

Jesus directly tied himself to the miracle of the feeding of the 5000, letting the people know that he would shortly make it possible for them to eat his own flesh and drink his own blood, and that this is the true bread which comes from heaven. He never does this with any of his metaphors later in the Gospel: he never says that his flesh is really a door, or light, or a vine, and no one thought he did. But here, they took him at his word, because he gave them no choice.

Taking Jesus at face value, and taking his words literally, the people were unnerved, and though they had been willing to make him king immediately following the feeding of the 5000, they seem to have wandered off in puzzlement. In fact, even many of his own disciples stopped following him at that point, enough of them that Jesus said to the Twelve, “Will ye also go away?”. Even when Jesus didn’t explain a parable or hard saying to the crowds, he always did so to the disciples. And yet here, faced with desertions, he never says, “Let me explain what I meant. I don’t mean that people should really eat my flesh and drink my blood”. He simply asks the Twelve if they, too, will leave because of this hard teaching. And the Twelve stand by him, even if they don’t understand, and they become the first to partake of his flesh and blood at the Last Supper. The feeding of the 5000 begins to fulfill the typology of the manna in the wilderness because both are themselves fulfilled in the Eucharist. Both miracles point toward the Eucharist, and it would be a strange thing indeed if these two miracles foreshadowed and were fulfilled in an act which was no miracle at all, but only a memorial. Both the manna in the wilderness and the feeding of the 5000 are miracles of creation, acts of the same Creator who said “Let there be light”, and the Gregorian Canon reminds us that the Eucharist is no less a miracle of creation when the priest, making the Sign of the Cross three times over the Host and Chalice, prays to the Father that through Christ our Lord, “these good things thou dost ever create, thou sanctifiest, thou quickenest, thou blessest, and givest unto us”. The Evangelists, by their uniform depiction of the feeding of the 5000, are saying, in essence, “This act of our Lord is a miracle; the manna to which it hearkens back was a miracle; the Eucharist therefore is a greater miracle still”.

Understanding this, I think it’s instructive to look from the perspective of the Eucharist backward, as it were, at both the feeding of the 5000 and the manna in the wilderness. The miracle of loaves and fishes, when seen in the light of the Eucharist, becomes a more perfect picture of the Eucharist than even the manna in the wilderness, and this is shown, I think, as much by the differences between the two as by their similarities. First, of course, Jesus, who is both the giver and the gift at the Eucharist, is present at the feeding of the 5000, just as he is at the Eucharist. Second, the manna was a self-serve meal: the Israelites went out and gathered it up for themselves. This would be a very efficient way to feed over 5000 people, but Jesus instead gives the multiplied bread and fishes to the people only through the agency of the Apostles. This is clearly setting the stage for the Eucharist, which requires Apostolic authority for its celebration. Christ gave his Apostles the power to act sacramentally in his name, and we must in most cases come to the Sacraments through a bishop or a priest acting on behalf of the bishop. The Mass is not a self-service affair, and in this the feeding of the 5000 more perfectly lays the groundwork for the Mass.

Third, God told the Israelites in the wilderness: “At even ye shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye shall be filled with bread; and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God” (Ex. 16:12). Every morning, manna was left when the dew rose from the ground, and every evening flocks of quail arrived for the Israelites to eat. The manna, the bread from heaven, was not in itself complete: the people needed flesh, as well, and this was the purpose of the quail. The morning’s meal was completed by the evening’s. At the feeding of the 5000, Jesus gave the people bread and flesh, in the form of fish, together, and the people were able to eat all they needed at one sitting. We are told in the Synoptic Gospels that this miracle occurred at evening. In the feeding of the 5000, then, Jesus gives at once what the Israelites had to wait all day for: the provision is a full day’s supply of food. Jesus’ miracle is complete and does not require another later in the day. At the end of the day, the long-expected messiah gives his fainting people bread and flesh together. Jesus’ miracle of the loaves and fishes gives bread and flesh together in a way that ties it to his teaching in Capernaum: His flesh is bread, and wherever the manna-like bread of the Eucharist is found, there also is found the very flesh, the Body of our Lord. Finally, we are told in each of the Synoptic Gospels that Jesus “took” the loaves and fishes, he “blessed” them, “brake” them, and “gave” them to the disciples. This is exactly the four-fold action used by our Lord at the Last Supper, and used through the ages down to today at every Mass. The Evangelists, writing after the Institution of the Eucharist, mean for us to see the Mass prepared and foreshadowed in the feeding of the 5000, and to regard it as the greatest miracle of all, greater than the miracles which made the hearts of the people ready for it.

The doctrine of the Real Presence, that the bread and wine of the Eucharist really, truly, and fully become the Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that he is really, truly, and fully present therein in all his humanity and in all his divinity, is not an easy doctrine to swallow, if you will forgive the pun. It is a stumbling-block for those who are unfamiliar with the Catholic faith; it is superstitious nonsense to those who are without the benefit of Apostolic teaching and authority. And yet, it is above all what we have to offer to the world. More important than all the programs we might put together, more vital than any agenda we might plan, more basic than any buildings we might build.

When Jesus looked at the crowds who had followed him into the wilderness, St. Mark tells us that he “was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd” (Mk. 6:34). We stand today in the midst of what the old song calls “the world’s wide wilderness”, and we are surrounded by people who are truly fainting with hunger for the truth. What they need, what will fill them and make them whole, is not, most basically, a message, but a Person, the very Person who “in the same night in which he was betrayed” gave himself to his Apostles, and who gives himself still, at every Eucharist, under veils of bread and wine, to his people.

Tenebrae

2009-04-07T20:40:00.000-07:00

From the east (where Eden lay)
the shadows grow at close of day
and shroud the Tree of Life from sight
in Adam’s tomb, in Sheol’s night.
The sleepless watcher’s flaming sword,
extinguished now by Blood outpoured,
would keep no seeking soul at bay
if hearts of stone were rolled away.

In a garden twice betrayed,
In a garden gently laid --
nearby the bloody hyssop blooms
and myrrh is pierced to make perfume.
The greater Light to rule the day
the lesser lights have cast away,
but shadows merged in darkness cease to be;
my God, my God, why have I forsaken thee?

Palm Sunday

2009-04-04T17:32:00.000-07:00

One of my professional acquaintances used to say that she'd left the Church to escape from what she called “Catholic guilt”. I've also heard stories from people who've claimed to have escaped from “Baptist guilt”, and “Evangelical guilt”, and “Christian guilt”. In fact, this claim seems to be the hallmark of a great number of people who have taken up with the modern idea that Christianity is all about guilt, and since guilt makes people feel bad, and people should never have to feel bad, Christianity is bad. Whether this facile attack on Christianity makes sincere Christians feel bad doesn't seem to bother anyone.

But here, as it were in the vestibule to Holy Week, as we ponder the awe-inspiring drama which our Liturgy unfolds before us in the coming days, it is probably convenient to ask ourselves wether Christianity is really all about guilt. Certainly, anyone faithfully meditating upon the events of Holy Week could be expected to feel some guilt. Consider: we are shown a scene of triumph in the Liturgy of the Palms, and then, mere moments later are exposed to the terrible scenes of betrayal, agony, and death in the Gospel of the Mass. We are taken from the heights to the depths, from hosannas to calls for crucifixion, all in one great liturgical sweep. And when we consider that the same crowds which welcomed Jesus on Sunday, ready to make him king, were on Friday calling for his death, and that this fickle reception has a lot in common with our own unsteady allegiance to our Lord – that, in fact, it was for our sins as well as those of others that our Lord was put to death – when we consider these things, guilt might not seem misplaced.

Guilt, however, gets a bad rap. I knew someone in Baton Rouge who worked at what used to be the leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, and he told me that the great danger for someone with leprosy is that when the extremities go numb, the danger of injury and infection rises greatly. Someone with leprosy could cut or burn himself and never realize it until after an infection had set in, and so people with the disease are now trained to monitor constantly their extremities for signs of injury. Guilt, in the Christian context, is like the pain that makes you want to pull your hand out of the fire: it does a useful and important service.

And yet we are all to some degree numbed by sin, and are rendered insensitive to spiritual realities. This is why we examine ourselves, taking frequent stock of our condition, weighing our motives, poking into the recesses of our wills, in order to find the injuries which we have done to ourselves before they fester and get out of control. We hope, in short, by acts of self-examination to awaken in ourselves the guilt which we very properly ought to feel, for this guilt is not an end in itself, but becomes, when poured out to God in acts of confession, the contrition which makes us sensitive to sin, and which in turn creates an honest purpose of amendment. Without guilt, we cannot begin to cooperate with the grace God offers us, for without guilt, we would not be aware of our need of that grace. Without a sense of having wronged God, we could never be open to the power by which God perfects us and glorifies us. You have to take the guilt trip to come to the glory train.

How could we follow our Lord through Holy Week without realizing that we have repeatedly turned away from him, have repeatedly denied him, have very often laid down our cross, taken up our bowl, washed our hands, and walked away? Without this sense, our hearts are unmoved by the agony in the garden, by the injustice of the show-trial, by the mocking and scourging. Without this sense, we join the onlookers who turned aside for a moment to watch the drama on the Via Dolorosa, and then went about their business.

Palm Sunday and Holy Week mean nothing to a world numbed by spiritual leprosy. What meaning do they hold for us, for the very household of God? How far have we allowed the world's forgetfulness of God to steal into our hearts? Religion is not the opium of the people; the world is the opium of the people. Christianity is not the religion of guilt; the worship of self is the religion of guilt. We have guilt with or without the Church: psychoanalysis and substance-abuse are not symptoms of world which has finally freed itself of Christian guilt, but of a world which now, like Judas, has nothing to do with its guilt.

Much of what we call our lives, much of what we live for, is patent illusion, the sort of stuff which would burn like chaff if truly tested. We have at the heart of our selves something which serves to remind us of this, something which gnaws at us, something which aches. This is the still small voice of reality, breaking through to us where we lie enmeshed in our illusions. Just last week, I was talking with a probation officer from North Georgia who had begun to think of himself as a Buddhist. You know an idea has traction when it's shared by the Hollywood elite and a rural probation officer. And one reason Buddhism has such traction in our culture is that its world-view (at least for the Buddhism-lite which is commonly purveyed) is basically guilt-free. In this world-view, guilt has no more ultimate reality than goodness.

Christianity, on the other hand, affirms the alarming reality of the created order and of the uncreated God who made it all, but it also acknowledges that most of us have a very tenuous grasp of this reality. We live lives of illusion, not because reality is an illusion, but because we are made uncomfortable by reality. Reality shows us that we've got a real problem, and this problem makes itself known to us in the midst of our illusions by the nagging sense of guilt which haunts every healthy person. But this is only the preface to the Christian message, and not the message itself.

The message of Christianity is not guilt, but the taking away of guilt. The painful walk with the Lord through the events of Holy Week takes us through the valley of shadow and to the height of glory. Yes, we sing hosanna on Sunday and then grow forgetful on Monday; yes, we turn our faces from the Lord who suffered for our forgetfulness; but we remember, as we walk with the Lord through the coming days, that his suffering was not in vain – that it was for our salvation, for our perfection, for our glorification with him. The Church does not offer a Fundamentalist's legal fiction as the solution to the problem of our guilt; we are not simply stamped “saved” and then left to struggle with a very different reality. Neither does the Church join with Buddhism in offering to annihilate reality in order to alleviate suffering. The Church offers us grace for true growth in holiness now, in this life, in the very midst of our guilt and suffering, toward a very real perfection in the life of the world to come. The Church reminds us that Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are real, but that Easter is, too, and follows hard on their heels. The Church proclaims that death is swallowed up in victory.

We could never in good conscience sing hosanna on Palm Sunday, knowing that our songs of praise falter when we're tested, knowing that we are accomplices in Good Friday every day of our lives, if we could not look beyond it all toward the glory Easter. We can glorify God despite our guilt because we know that our guilt is done away. We can glorify God because we know that he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He who suffered and died and rose again to make all things like him in the image of his glory ever lives to make intercession for us. We are guilty, but he is glorious, and longs to make us like him.

The God Show Comes to Rome

2009-04-03T17:49:00.000-07:00

I said in a previous post that I thought it was harder to pull off the God Show in a Roman Catholic context. The problem is that the Mass is an ancient liturgical form which resists attempts at liturgitainment. I say “resists” because it is possible to do liturgitainment in the Mass, but there are factors to consider which don’t apply to the Protestant God Show.

First, it’s just not as easy to do the God Show within a traditional liturgical form. The form itself, which tends to be an expression of ideas and concerns which are not time- or culture-bound, does not lend itself to innovation, especially on the scale required for the God Show. Second, because of this formal resistance, the God Show must either be limited by its practitioners so that it fits somewhere and somehow into the form, or it must be allowed to overflow the liturgical form. In the first instance, the practitioners must take the concept of liturgitainment and make decisions about where and how its elements can be grafted onto the form. In my experience, this is the most common concession in Roman Catholic parishes. We might call this the incremental approach, and we’ll look at examples of it in a moment. In the second instance, the God Show is allowed to overwhelm the traditional structure and to render it barely-recognizable. We might call this the viral approach, the most common (or at least the most well-known) example of which is the Clown Mass (yes, it's real; it'll help you understand why some people are afraid of clowns).

The incremental approach is everywhere visible. For instance, the wholesale replacement of organ music with guitars is very common. I don’t even see pianos in local Roman parishes anymore: it’s as if the liturgitainers have excommunicated the keyboard. I know, I know: there’s nothing inherently subversive or anti-traditional about a guitar. It’s an instrument which has been around in a form recognizable to us since at least the 17th Century, and its ancestors and relatives have been around for thousands of years. I play the guitar myself (who doesn’t anymore?) and have, in my Bible-Church days, led praise-singing at youth gatherings and such. I earned beer money in law school by playing in a band. The problem, though, is that the guitar as actually used in most Roman parishes I’ve seen is pure liturgitainment. The songs which the congregation sings to the accompaniment of guitar tend to lack depth; they’re often sorts of folk songs which, while perhaps enjoyable in another context, detract from the central liturgical action by calling attention to themselves. Catchy songs are not really aids to the devotional act: suddenly the worshipper is caught out of what may have been a hard-won self-forgetting and is focused more or less wholly upon the music. This is the great thing about liturgical chant: it’s a container for the prayers, and creates a channel for devotion without ever calling attention to itself.

Adding to the problem of the guitar as actually used is the movement of musicians and singers from the back of the church to the front. When the musicians and singers are behind the congregation, even Leaving On A Jet Plane would be less distracting than when the music is coming from the front. The Altar is the centerpiece of the Mass, the focal-point of the physical aspect of the devotional act (we’re partly physical, after all, and our bodies need a focal-point as we train our inner dispositions). Anything which competes with it gets in the way. The musicians are performers when they’re up front, and there’s no way effectively to dilute the aspect of performance.

The same thing happens when the Altar is pushed out and the celebrant stands behind it. Even though the Altar is now “out front”, it’s difficult to get away from the aspect of performance, and the attention is naturally drawn, not to the Table, but to the celebrant standing behind it and looking out at the congregation. When Mass is celebrated ad orientem, the Altar is actually the focal point of the celebrant and the congregation, and the worshippers are more likely to look beyond, or along with, the celebrant toward the Altar, the true center of the Action of the Mass. The movement of the tabernacle away from the Altar and into a remote place also throws off the focal point.

The use of “lay eucharistic ministers” is also all about liturgitainment. We know this because the Romans’ own canon law (Canon 230, §3, 1983 Code) prohibits their use except in extraordinary circumstances when “ministers are lacking”; in fact the proper term for such persons is “extraordinary eucharistic ministers”. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Roman Catholic parish where extraordinary ministers were not used. Once I saw two such laymen used when there was a priest, a deacon, and perhaps six communicants. In most cases, the use of these laymen isn’t required by extraordinary circumstances, but seems to be justified in terms of “getting people more involved”: in fact, just such an argument was used by a priest I asked about the practice.

My wife and I were visiting a large Roman parish several years ago. Just before the priest and servers came down the aisle toward the Altar, a woman came up to the lectern and made announcements like the following: “Your ushers today are John Smith, Tim Johnson, and Sam Wilson. The first lesson will be read by Jane Doe. The second lesson will be read by John Doe. Your presider will be Fr. Joe. The acolytes are…” etc. I turned to my wife and muttered, “And the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is brought to you by Nabisco”. The priest did very little, putting the service on auto-pilot and really getting the people involved. When the time came for Communion, the extraordinary ministers trooped up, including a woman in a tennis outfit. “Getting people involved” is really a hallmark of liturgitainment: it’s a failure to understand that, at a Mass at least, it’s really impossible for a worshipper not to be involved. There can be no Mass celebrated without at least one person present beside the priest; the worshipper is integrally involved in the celebration of the Eucharist, for whom (among other intentions) and with whom it is offered by the celebrant. Celebration ad orientem adds to the perception that the celebrant and the congregation are doing something together instead of watching each other doing different things.

There are two possible roles for the celebrant in the God Show. First, the celebrant, now equipped with wireless mic, wanders up and down in front of the Altar telling jokes and trying to think of something to say to keep the people interested. This usually involves avoiding real theological content in homilies and adding extemporaneous theatrical elements in places like the offertory and the final blessing (I once attended a Mass at which the priest omitted the final blessing and sang Danny Boy in its place). The second possible role is one in which laymen take over the entire show and only trot out the celebrant at those points at which he’s absolutely indispensable.

Over time, the use of the God Show at Mass begins to cause disintegration of the liturgical form: the form recedes further into the background, becomes less apparent, and the elements of liturgitainment move into the foreground. If the adage lex orandi, lex credendi is true, the God Show will have the effect of changing the perception of what the Mass is about. I think it’s no surprise that after several God-Show decades, Roman Catholics increasingly don’t believe in the Real Presence. The outcry against conservative liturgical reform is the same as the outcry of my four-year-old when I turn off the TV so she can work on her reading lessons with my wife: the proposed changes take all the fun out of things, and make things less comfy and familiar. The God Show is not unrelated to Christian worship, but its relationship with worship is almost always destructive of worship. The God Show is all about comfort and familiarity. Worship naturally leads us away from comfort and familiarity. Worship may be leading us home, but ours is a home for which we are not by nature suited, and a difficult adjustment is required. The God Show never requires us to make any adjustment: we don’t have to get stronger; the journey is made to seem easier. The God Show has come to Rome, and although it hasn’t found the comfy home that it has in Protestant circles, the liturgitainers are working hard to give the people not just Bread, but circuses, too.

The God Show

2009-03-30T16:56:00.000-07:00

One of the things Retro-churches have going for them is that they avoid the God Show. This more than makes up for the fact that they don’t have Starbucks in the narthex. The God Show, of course, is liturgitainment: a certain packaging of Christian worship to make it look more like something you’d see on TV and less like, well … Christian worship.

Now, the God Show is not confined to mega-rock-n-roll churches, though that is perhaps where it really comes into its own. I once saw the God Show in a rural Baptist church with perhaps thirty people in attendance (and though there wasn’t rock-n-roll, there was a sort of anemic bluegrass). I once saw the God Show at a Roman Catholic mass, though, for reasons I’ll go into in a later post, it’s harder to pull off the God Show in a Roman Catholic context.

The God Show starts with the idea that people need information about God, which, of course, is absolutely true. Then it moves on to the idea that most people are not really up to getting the sort of information that, say, St. Paul has to offer, at least not in the terms in which St. Paul offers it. When people come to church, the reasoning seems to go, they want a continuation of the normal way in which they get information: chopped up, blended into mush, repackaged in sound bites and spruced up with music and graphics.

What Jerry Springer did for coverage of inter-personal issues, what The Weekly World News does for in-depth reporting (remember Bat Boy?) -- this is what the God Show does for Christian worship and instruction. Since many churches don’t really distinguish between worship and instruction, the God Show can be used to kill two birds with one stone. The elements of worship and instruction can be blended up together and pushed through a massive sound system and onto a large screen. Don’t just sing: follow the band onstage just like concertgoers do. Get into the hype. Dance. Wave banners. Don’t just listen to a sermon: follow along with the PowerPoint presentation, and with the presenter as he paces up and down the stage, freed from a podium or pulpit because of his wireless mic.

The stage is, in fact, one of the most telling elements of the God Show. Christian churches used to be dominated by altars of one kind or another (even the Baptist church I grew up in had one, front and center). Many of these altars had the words “This Do In Remembrance of Me”, or something similar, inscribed across the front. (It’s a topic for another day to discuss the interesting and ironic fact that most churches in which there are altars saying “This Do In Remembrance of Me” seldom “Do” the “This”.) The altar was a sort of signifier that what was about to be undertaken was a devotional action, and that sacrifice was involved.

The stage has obliterated this signpost of devotional action, this reminder of sacrifice, and has replaced it with a presenter or presenters and a band. These people are now the center of attention, and the concentration is upon what they’re doing and saying. They may be talking about God -- they probably are -- but God is not the center of attention. God is at one remove from the people on the stage. Corporate devotional activity is a delicate balance of internal disposition and external forms which ensure the orthodoxy and efficacy of the internal act and keep it from becoming idiosyncratic -- which ensure, in short, the continuity with what C.S. Lewis called the “permanent shape of Christianity”. It’s very difficult to maintain an internal devotional act while there are attention-grabbing antics going on up on the stage: the acts of the actors themselves become the object of attention, and God is abstracted into the liturgitainment. Not only is individual devotion in danger under such circumstances of becoming idiosyncratic, but the entire congregation shares the danger in a corporate form -- the danger of the idiosyncrasy of the local congregation in and of itself. Perhaps this is one reason why there are tens of thousands of different denominations.

The God Show becomes, in the end, a substitute for worship and instruction rather than another form for them. The God Show encourages, not conformity with the Faith once delivered, but with the episode once shown. Change the channel on TV and you get another episode with its own story line. Walk down the street to the next God Show and the result is the same.

The Red Herring of "Relevant" Worship

2009-03-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

Everywhere I go I come across churches with signs touting “relevant” worship. Usually this means a contemporary service with a rock band and multi-media sermons. Sometimes, usually among “emerging” congregations, it means not really having anything that could be called a service at all, but perhaps engaging in conversation, or silence, or social work (all while drinking coffee, of course).

When I was growing up as a Southern Baptist, we had “worship services” which consisted almost entirely of hymn-singing, a few prayers, a long sermon-cum-Bible-study, and an altar call. When I got to college, I began wondering if this was really “worship” at all; after all, most of the time was devoted to the sermon, and while listening to a sermon can certainly be instructive and edifying, it’s also certainly at a great remove from the I-Thou focus which seemed to me to be characteristic of true worship.

When I moved away from denominational identity into the non-denominational denomination of the “Bible Church” movement, “worship services” looked pretty much the same, except that the hymnal had been replaced by handouts or an overhead projector (it was early days), and the organ had been replaced by a Fender Rhodes (to this day, the sound of a Fender Rhodes is inextricably linked in my mind to the whispy, plastic-y air of 1980s “praise music” and to the big hair of those who performed it). The long sermon remained basically unchanged, except that the preacher might admit to having had a glass of wine recently.

Then I moved on to a small church which had weeknight small group studies in people’s houses instead of Sunday School. I was enticed because my contact there argued that the home studies meant that Sunday could be wholly devoted to worship. What’s more, this congregation had taken a thoughtful approach to what worship was all about and had appointed a Worship Committee to help plan worship services. I was put on the Worship Committee. At one of the meetings, I recall someone saying something like, “Since God is too big to fit into a box, worship shouldn’t fit into a box, either”. The result was mostly praise songs and a long sermon, but sometimes the Worship Committee would throw the congregation a curve ball and plan a Communion Service, which consisted of praise songs, distribution of crackers and grape juice, and a long sermon. I once asked if we could say the Apostle’s Creed, but apparently there must be a box big enough for God, because this was deemed to fall outside it. “People wouldn’t understand it,” one young woman complained. “Maybe,” she offered, “we could say the parts of it that aren’t hard to understand.” When I asked which parts those were, the subject got changed and a new praise song was introduced by the music leader.

I was introduced to another concept at that congregation. The ministry team (this seemed to be made up of the pastor and whomever agreed with him at the moment) decided that we needed to attract 20-and-30-something singles and families. Market research, it was said, demonstrated that this demographic was leery of traditional denominational affiliation and of “churchyness” in general. The result was something called (I think) CAMEO: Contemporary Approaches to Missions, Evangelism, and Outreach (I think). The basic idea was that churches should try hard not to look at all like churches so that the unsuspecting demographic would wander in (what, I wondered, would they believe they were wandering in to?) and be Christianized all unaware. Since that time, I’ve seen this idea carried to its incoherent conclusion. Whatever was thought to be interesting to the culture at large was boxed up and brought in, baptized and brandished, all in the name of “relevance”.

“Relevance to what or whom?” should be the next question, and the answer would seem to be, “Relevance to the intended audience”. If worship is something we offer to God, it is God, and not the worshipper, who is the “audience”. And what is it that is supposed to be relevant? Can the offering of the self to God ever be irrelevant? I’d argue that this is exactly what worship is: the complete and utter offering of the self to God. Worship is self-abandonment, self-effacement, self-forgetting. Worship is costly and sacrificial. And while this abandonment of the self to God should be the perpetual mindset of the Christian, it has ever been the understanding of Christians that worship should regularly be undertaken by believers meeting together. And when we undertake a corporate self-abandonment to God, I’d argue that the more regularized, the more formal, the less novel or interesting, the better. Novelty and interest of necessity remove the focus from God and put it instead on the service.

C.S. Lewis addressed this very problem in a letter from 1952:

The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it -- it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers; the rigid form really sets our devotions free. I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the preoccupation of the moment …. The permanent shape of Christianity shows through.1

I think the mention of the “permanent shape of Christianity” merits further comment. The Faith does not belong to us; we belong to it, we subscribe to it, we submit ourselves to it, because it is from God. We are not free to change it or to alter it; it is we who must change and alter in order to conform to it. The Faith has a permanent shape, a shape recognized by all Christians who have ever lived. And because every true Christian who has ever lived lives still, and worships still, in Heaven, our worship must be simply a joining in their worship, a lifting up of ourselves to the worshipping company of Heaven, all abandoning self for the Lord. There can be no idiosyncratic worship, because the corporate self-abandonment of believers has a permanent shape, something intrinsically recognizable, not to the surrounding culture, but to the Body of Christ.

Our worship is a family affair, not ultimately meant to appeal to the unchurched or unbelievers, though it is impossible that our otherworldly meeting of family in and out of time in an utter outpouring of self to the Lord could ever be objectively irrelevant to them. The worship of the Church has never been “relevant” to any culture in which she found herself, at least not from the point of view of the culture. Christian worship has always been a mystery to those around us, because the idea of self-oblation, self-abandonment to God is utterly foreign them. Relevance from the point of view of the surrounding culture is not something we should strive for. The search for relevance bends us out of our permanent shape, renders us unrecognizable. Our Lord was irrelevant to the scribes and pharisees, and his coming in the flesh was scandal and foolishness to the Hellenistic and Hebraic cultures to which this good news first came. Christian worship was offensive and sometimes criminal in the Roman world into which it spread.

Now, in an attempt to cajole those from the surrounding culture to get out of bed and come in off the streets, we’ve taken down our “church” signs and replaced them with “worship center” signs, as if worship were a commodity to be purchased after trips to the vision center, the garden center, and the entertainment center. We’ve stripped away the names of saints and of events in our Lord’s life, and we’ve replaced them with druidic-sounding names like rock, river, and grove (really, there’s a congregation called “The Grove”: haven’t they ever read the Old Testament?). But our Worship Center is not a building; our Worship Center is a Person -- the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is to be worshipped and adored for ever. This worship is not contemporary, but timeless; it is not relevant, but mysterious and sacrificial.

1. Quoted in The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings, reading for August 10.