The Practice of the Synaxis

An Intentional Community

2011-09-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

This year in seminary, among all the goings-on of my third and final year, I've moved into an intentional community. When I'm in Berkeley I'll be staying in a house a few blocks from the seminary with several other seminarians and friends and we are going to collectively experiment and try to find out what a Christian intentional community might look like in this day and age. We've set up a blog to track it, so if you're interested in how we're going about it, what works for us and what doesn't, check out the new blog for the newly commissioned and blessed Teilhard Guesthouse!

Weird Grieving

2011-03-23T19:21:00.000-07:00

My wife and I have been purging the basement. It's a good practice in general and, hey, we might move sometime in the next few years. I decided it was time to get rid of the stacks of archaeology reports I had from my previous life. I wanted to recycle them, but I also didn't want to dump the maps showing site locations in the regular recycling bin for any ol' looter to find. So, I went through each report, pulling out all maps and site-location data. It was a surreal version of “This is Your Life” as I went through ripping out select pages. I could remember lots of things about each project. Strange things stuck vividly in my memory – motels we stayed in, excavating an ancient firepit in the side of a pipeline trench, what a certain valley in Nevada looked like, pulling historical glass fragments out of a muddy screen in the rain. I felt rather odd through the whole purging; very quiet, very subdued.

Mixed in with all the boxes of reports I found what appeared to be a box from my last years of classes in anthropology graduate school at the U. of Chicago. It was full of pages and pages and pages of handwritten course notes and notes for research papers (this was the pre-laptop era after all). Much of it I couldn't remember writing. Here's something I thought worth quoting “Colluvial storage is the most difficult of all the sediment stores to estimate. This is, firstly, because colluvial storage is an inherent component of the distribution and pattern of soil cover, ...secondly, because it occurs in relatively minor volumes in many locations, and thirdly, because the boundaries between the processes of colluviation and alluviation are often not clear.” (1) For some now-unknown reason, I double-underlined the “secondly” and “thirdly” parts. It was an odd feeling to look upon all the note-taking, all the literature research. I filled an entire banker's box with this stuff.

The odd feeling, I think, can rightly be called grieving. It's a weird grieving. I chose to give up archaeology of my own volition. I spent considerable time thinking about it and making peace with the decision. I do not regret the choice. I may yet occasionally do some archaeology, if only for the sheer fun of it. But, nonetheless, for the most part, it has to go so I can do something else. The reports need to make room for my growing theological library; the notes need to make room for my files of liturgical materials. The truth is, I don't really want to crank out any more reports or copy out pithy quotes about colluviation. But, it is hard to not feel a bit sad to say goodbye, bit by bit, to the guy who did so much of that for so long.

Sherwin Nuland points out in “How We Die” that with death, “The operative word here is process, not act, moment, or any other term connoting a flyspeck of time when the spirit departs.” (2) It has been harder than I thought to let the archaeologist in me go. It has been a process. It still has a ways to go.

(1) A.G. Brown, “Long-term Sediment Storage in the Severn and Wye Catchments.” In Palaeohydrology in Practice, ed. by K.J. Gregory, J. Lewin, and J.B. Thornes, pp. 307-322. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 1987), 321.

(2) Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter, New Edition (New York: Vintage, 1995), 42.

The Poverty of Gaga Theology

2011-02-13T14:09:00.000-08:00

What makes us certain we are saved? Or, better yet, what is salvation? A wonderful and disturbing article in the Wall Street Journal highlights a common approach: I know I'm saved when I get what I want, particularly financial and social success. It turns out that Lady Gaga (along with a host of other performing artists from Elvis to Eminem) tend to hold and publicly affirm this belief. Lady Gaga apparently deeply feels that there has been a “higher power that's been watching out for me.” As the venerable Snoop Dogg puts it when speaking of his triumphs, “God makes everything happen.”

I want to first thank the author of the WSJ article for pointing out that these statements are less religion than belief. He calls it “competitive theism, a self-styled spirituality that can be overlaid on any religion...” However, I want to go a little beyond his critique. These statements are theological, they make claims about God and how God interacts with humans. Furthermore, they resonate with a certain simplistic equation of the happenstance of life with Divine Plan that has plagued Judeo-Christianity since its inception and which reaches a real height in a simplistic pseudo-Calvinism that often tries to dominate American Protestantism. From the mouths of stars they sound like the statements of all believers.

They aren't.

In fact, it's pretty poor theology and it is relatively easy to see why:

Let's start by exploring what “God wanted me to be famous” says about God. If Lady Gaga is right, and God intends for her to be famous, then the flipside must also be true. Those who are not famous are intended to be un-famous by God. Suddenly we have a God who is deeply invested in human fame and fortune. Why God would give a hoot about human fame and fortune is beyond me, and, indeed, beyond most traditional theology and any rigorous Christianity. Lest we forget, the more basic belief is that God has “cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:52). This doesn't sound like a God with a high opinion of human concepts of success.
The implications get worse. If your fame and wealth is due to God's plan for you, then the poverty of millions must be due to God's plan for them. This idea is repugnant, and, I and many others would argue, not supported Biblically. I lean on Liberation Theology here. I'm much more amenable to the idea that poverty is actually contrary to God's intention for creation than I am to the idea that God wants some of us to be rich.
If Lady Gaga (and Eminem, and Elvis, and Mr. Dogg) do have some latent memory of Calvinism in mind, it's pretty poor Calvinism. Calvin's main concern was an understanding of our standing before and relationship with God. As any good Protestant with a true Protestant Ethic will tell you, God's plan involves your soul and being – are you in right relationship with God; saved in the sense of being beloved of God? Personal financial success, while possibly related to that, is no conclusive indicator of it. Indeed, Calvin would be sure to point out that you do NOT know if you are favored by God – Ms. Gaga, et al. - fame or no fame. I'm not a big Calvinist myself, I've got enormous issues with the idea that God controls every minute detail of creation, but if you're going to sound like a Calvinist, you should at least know what you are talking about.

Ultimately though, the fundamental problem with Gaga Theology is that it only works when you are riding high on the hog. Only seeing God when you are successful, only finding God when you have material well-being, equating salvation with fame, leaves you pretty bereft when success eludes, when fortune turns, when fame is lost (or never found), when you suffer or when you become attuned to the pervasive sufferings of others. The trick is not to see God, thank God, or praise God only when you are successful. The trick is, as liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez points out, to find a way to speak of God in the midst of suffering. The trick is to avoid “...a religion of calculated self-interest, a cynical outlook that forgets the suffering of others...” (1).

To do so forces us to rethink our cherished understanding of salvation and to make the painful step of thinking beyond our selfish wants. It makes us consider that perhaps, just perhaps, salvation might consist of something beyond our own comforts. That maybe salvation is at once more fundamentally related to me – to my soul and not my social status – and at the same time beyond me, involving all of creation. Doing so opens up our possibilities in a wonderful way that Gaga Theology closes them. If salvation is not simply my own material well-being, we can also rest in the knowledge of salvation even in the midst of suffering. This strikes me as a far more wonderful gift than even fame itself.

Reference:

(1) Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Translated by Matthew J. O'Connell. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987), 93.

Cue it up

2010-12-09T08:12:00.000-08:00

When I was in college, I was a DJ for the campus radio station, WHPK (“So alternative, we don't even like their old stuff”). This was in the pre-iTunes, pre-CD era, and we spun actual vinyl records. You had to cue these records up, scratching them back and forth on the Technics turntable until you found the beginning of the song and then rolling it backwards a quarter turn. This enabled the turntable to get up to speed before the music started. You had to start the turntable a split second or two before you wanted the music to start. We took great pride in timing our fades and transitions between songs so that there was a seamless transition between each cut.

We also discovered that if you simply cued it up right on the start of the track most songs made an awesome “wwvvooorp” sound as the turntable revved up to speed, and we occasionally would do it deliberately for effect. We thought this was cool, clever, and anti-establishment.

I thought of this while leading sung Morning Prayer the other day in chapel. I've gotten to where I can sing without making people hide under the pews, but I'm still no fabulous voice. Starting canticles and hymns a capella is particularly challenging. What's gonna come out of my mouth? Will I find the note? Will WE find the note? The general grogginess of everyone in the morning only adds to the challenge. Sometimes we find that note just perfectly and sail into the songs of lamentation, petition, and praise seamlessly, like a choir of heavenly voices. A lot of times we have to slowly find it together, and the collective effect is like that badly cued record, “wwvooorp...us sing to the Lord, let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation.....”

I've decided, though, that just as in college, I kind of like the wwvoorp sound. I wouldn't record it for posterity, I wouldn't recommend it if you are the National Cathedral in Washington and trying to show people the beauty of Anglican hymnody. However, it can have a lovely feel, that moment of doubt and fear followed by the deep joy and relief when we find a key we can work in harmony; the satisfaction as we collectively search each other out, hear, and then find our voice together.

Saddle up, people.

2010-11-11T19:31:00.000-08:00

I write this blog from the Oakland Airport, my flight delayed, probably the 7^th or 8^th roundtrip I've done this semester.

I'm not much of a blogger, that's clear.

But here's some thoughts on seminary, Year 2. One-fourth through the year. 7/12's done with seminary. Not that I'm counting.

Seminary is different, better. Better with some seminary under my belt. The existential crises are passed for now. I actually feel like I know why I'm here. It's a good feeling. Time to get down to work.

Seminary is also harder. The work is harder. More reading for my classes. More writing, meaning more deciding. Giving sermons in front of my peers, an audience both friendly and demanding. Looking directly at God, or at least as best we can when we seek God. If I thought that I had a few assumptions challenged last year, that was an introduction. Time to re-think God. There isn't much more fundamental than that.

Seminary is good. It's a good feeling. Let's put some things together. Saddle up, people, time to figure out your theology for today. What a gift, to be able to have time and help to do that.

Seminary is different. Seminary is different after a summer spent in the hospital with people dying, grieving, suffering. Families looking at me and all I can do is be there. Different after a good program that made me take a hard look at myself. A little perspective never hurts.

Seminary is different with some new faces. My face from last year. People struggling, trying so desperately to listen to a God who is mysteriously right there and so, so, far away.

“Listen, I will tell you a mystery!” St. Paul says (1 Cor 15:51a). Time to make friends with mystery. Amen.

Have you seen the gates of deep darkness?

2010-04-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

As part of research for a paper in my Introduction to the New Testament class, I went over to the Cal Berkeley library and checked out a moderately obscure book. It was published in 1967. As I'm fond of doing whenever I check out an old (or older) book, I flipped to the little library circulation tag in the back to see how the book has been checked out in the past. Sadly, Cal Berkeley doesn't put names (you'd be surprised how often you find out some famous scholar also used the book), but they do have dates. The book had been used in waves. It was checked out on a fairly even basis after they obtained it. It languished until the late 70s when it changed hands a lot. It was either totally unused in the 80s to the mid-90s or the library was using some other circulation tag which is now lost. It was heavily used in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it was last checked out 5 years ago.

What struck me was that, despite the relative obscurity of the topic, and the long periods of disuse, the book does continue to get picked up, used in research and probably in the development of students such as myself. One of the things that got me changing careers here at mid-life is that I felt like, no matter how awesome my research might be, it was likely to be completely irrelevant in less than 50 years. Very little research is timeless, if only because the questions we are interested in change. Among a whole host of other reasons for choosing this path, I felt that I needed to do less research and more community work here and now.

I think I have to adjust that perspective a bit. The circulation record of this little book reminds me that we don't always know how or when what we do is going to be useful. The truth is, I've checked out books even more obscure than this one and found that even they get occasional use. Most clergy that I know will tell you that they are often surprised at how some minor thing they did years ago was one of the most helpful or meaningful things they did for someone or for a community. It is hard, perhaps impossible, for us to see the overall picture of what we are doing and how it fits into the purpose and life of the world (“Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare if you know all this.” Job 38:17-18). Perhaps walking in faith also means doing what you have done your best to grasp is your purpose and calling in the world and doing so despite not seeing the benefits you may, in fact, be creating.

Back of the Envelope

2010-04-11T21:07:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid, my Dad would tell stories about going to college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He described how the cafeteria tables would be littered with equations written on the back of napkins as the students and profs would furiously work out ideas over their meals.

In my previous job, I would periodically have to clean my office of the accumulation of back-of-the-envelope sketches and notes; on actual envelopes, on the flip side of memos, buried in the middle of legal pads. If enough time had gone on, it was a bit of an archaeological project; both to sift through the layers of the sketches that I put together furiously, always thinking aloud and visually with someone else, and to try and interpret them. What is the meaning of this oblong oval with the little boxes on it? Was that something we were excavating? Was it a general schema for a sampling strategy? Hmm.

This weekend we did another back-of-the-envelope, or in this case, napkin calculation. Our seminary class organized and attended a retreat. We designed our own prayer together, following mostly Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). This napkin is our notes for Evening Prayer last night. It is mostly the sequence of service music (canticles) and hymns. We had a great time working things out. We talked about the mood of the group, what we wanted to convey in the prayer, tried out different songs, began picking out music, and then realized we had better start writing it down so we wouldn't forget. I used the napkin to help keep the prayer flowing smoothly through the service.

Like all good quickie calculations, it uses a combination of code and actual misspellings. If you have been doing a lot of Morning and Evening Prayer, you can see our thinking: Pick the version you want of the Magnificat (Mag) because it is such a major part of the service, then the Phos Hilaron (Phos), then the Nunc Dimittis (Nunc). Now that the fixed elements are out of the way, pick a closing hymn (we looked long and hard for an Easter Hymn, but settled on 376, "Joyful, joyful, we adore thee" to the tune of Ode to Joy") and then, because we were in a good mood, we added an opening hymn (372, "Praise to the living God!"). I then decided to make it easy to remember the order in the service by adding the numbers (in practice it goes Phos, Mag, Nunc), and I threw in the Psalm as another reminder. After nearly two semesters of practice, it's enough to get you through a service without anything other than the BCP and Hymnal themselves. I'm tempted to secret it somewhere so that future archaeologists or textual scholars can puzzle over it.

I love all back-of-the-envelope calculations. They almost always spring out of working together, of pushing ourselves to do more with each other than we could do alone. They recognize the playfulness in all creativity. They remind us that creation is an ongoing act, that we participate in it, and that it is a bit of a rough-and-tumble art!

To hear clips of these hymns, click HERE.

Create in me a clean heart

2010-02-20T19:06:00.000-08:00

“Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Psalm 95:8)

Morning Prayer traditionally includes recitation of Psalm 95, “Come let us sing to the Lord,” also known as the Venite (from the Latin for “Come”). Usually we stop at Verse 7 (“Oh that today you would hearken to his voice”), but during Lent you can add Verses 8-11, which are a little harsher, calling on the people of Israel not to harden their hearts as they did during the 40 years of exodus in the desert.

Today I drove over to the Marin Headlands, right on the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. I wanted to take a break from theology and look at some geology. The Marin Headlands has some fantastic outcrops of Franciscan Complex chert (see image to left). They date to the Jurassic Period (about 145-199 million years ago). They are formed from billions of tiny skeletons of ancient marine creatures gradually turned to rock that was then beautifully heaved, folded, and exposed by the sea. I went to a place called Kirby Cove, and I had the beach to myself.

I poked around to my heart's content, checking out the geological formations, examining the sand composition, and generally enjoying doing geeky things that few others ever want to do with me. I also spent some time in meditation and prayer. It was an easy place to contemplate the grandeur of God.

I cleared my head by praying the Venite, but since we have been adding Verses 8-11, I automatically began adding those verses as well. Just as I said “harden not your hearts” I looked over at this tough outcrop, jutting up out of the ocean, slowly being shaped, and worn, and changed. I realized that this rock and my heart have a lot in common. I have, in fact, been hardening my heart for quite some time; that hardening my heart is the simplest way to characterize my struggles over the past months. But I also realized that maybe I could take some hope from this rock.

Thanks to the support of my home parish, to kind and direct insights, emails, and caring responses to some dramatic pleas on my part, I've managed to begin to truly open my heart to this path. I realize now that I've spent quite a bit of time hardening my heart to my church, to the words of other people, and to God and I've hardened my heart to the changes that this path has already begun to bring.

I looked out at the rock outcrop and thought about how it, hard as it is, is still being shaped as part of God's creation. Here you have what are essentially billions of tiny animal skeletons, that sank to the bottom of the sea in the Jurassic Period. They were buried, heated, hardened, and heaved back up, and now they sit, slowly rounded, moulded, and shaped by the sea. I thought, I may be a bit rocky myself, but I can do that too. I can let God and God's creation work on me. I can harden not my heart; be folded, rounded, shaped into what I'm supposed to be now. I can find my new place in creation. Not a bad start to Lent.

Expanding Our Sense of Sacred Community

2010-02-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

This past week I attended a conference, Epiphany West, which gave me both a necessary credit and some new insights into theology and the environment. The theme of the conference was “Sacred Elements,” and our sessions and speakers focused on ways to develop new theologies and even new spirituality for confronting and dealing with the growing environmental crisis. Throughout the week, the anthropologist in me kept kicking in. The more I thought about our environmental problems the more I thought they are really people problems - our inability to honor the gift of the earth given from our ancestors in the past, our inability to adjust our personal and corporate behavior now, and our inability to adjust what we do to ensure that future generations will enjoy the gift of this world. I was particularly struck by an insight from a panelist in a session called “Muslims Going Green.” He argued that the fundamental crisis was not a behavioral crisis or a policy crisis but rather a spiritual crisis. I felt that was very true and it also resonated with my growing sense that there really isn’t an environmental problem as much as an anthro-problem.

The very last talk, by Dr. Marion Grau (theology professor at CDSP), bumped me in a little different direction. She argued that we religious and faithful folk need to explore “re-sacralizing” or “re-enchanting” the elements - earth, fire, air, water. These elements are fundamentally sacred in many religions, even if we have somewhat drifted from emphasizing their sacred and holy quality in Christianity. Her emphasis on these elements as a focus for our theological reflection and for spirituality made me shift my focus on us humans. Perhaps it isn’t simply a matter of a human-caused problem with a human-centric solution. OR, maybe we simply need to expand our idea of community to include these elements. Perhaps we need to sacralize them by granting them the same sacred import we grant to human life. What if we included our world’s elements - earth, fire, air, water, their chemicals, their glorious combinations, in our community of care in a profoundly fundamental way, with the same import as we give to our human community members? I’m looking forward to seeing where Dr. Grau’s theology goes.

In many ways I was drawn back to my faith and religion because it helped me get beyond my own narrow ego. Say what you will about religion, but I think good ones remind you that you are not the center of the universe. Faith and religion also gave me daily reminders to focus on community, on my obligations to others starting with God. I’m now pondering effective ways and ideas that can help us all to grow our community even more, to include the very elements of our world.

Sarah Laughed

2010-01-16T14:19:00.000-08:00

“Then one said, 'I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.' And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age, it had ceased to be with Sara after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself...” Genesis 18:9-12a.

I've always thought it was fairly reasonable for Sarah to laugh here. As the narrator points out, what was promised was a biological impossibility; she was asked to believe something that is in many ways absurd.

I've been doing a lot of reflection on absurdity during my time between Semester 1 (of 6) and Semester 2 of seminary. It has been a huge struggle, and hasn't involved a lot of laughing. I've mentioned before that after the honeymoon wore off last semester I've been questioning following this path. Here's the essence of the struggle: Commuting to seminary as I am doing, being away from my family most of the week every week, has been harder than I expected. It's the only way for us to do it for a variety of reasons, but it is extremely difficult and no fun whatsoever. Seminary is also expensive; I will spend between 70 and 100K of our own money by the time this is done. Seminary can also only be so much. While I have learned and grown during the past semester, the learning and growth has not (and probably, reasonably, cannot) match the cost to me for doing it. Put in business terms, it is a poor return on investment. Not a horrible return, but perhaps more than a bit absurd.

So, the question I have had to ask myself is, “should I keep doing this absurd thing?” I could quit right now, cut my losses, and all would be just fine. It hasn't been fun to reopen this can of worms. To date, I have followed the feelings of joy that put me on this path, and they have in many ways evaporated as I face the realities of the sacrifice itself; as I write each multi thousand dollar check and get ready to get back on the plane, leave my wife and daughter (what kind of fool does this??) and head back for what will undoubtedly be another semester of a few good classes, a few mediocre classes, a few worthless classes, and another incremental bit of formation and growth.

In the end, I have returned over and over again to an inexplicable but unshakable feeling that this absurd path is, still, the one I should follow even if I can't exactly find a good intellectual justification. It is a path, not an investment. I felt strongly called to start on it. It was absurd when I started, nothing substantial has changed. I knew it would be a sacrifice, now I can point to the details of the sacrifice. So, I'm going to laugh a bit at the absurdity and try, again, to trust a bit; not so much in a divine promise but in the absurd possibility of a divine call.

Experiencing a Gift

2009-12-14T13:51:00.000-08:00

I went to church this past Sunday, the 3^rd Sunday in Advent, at St. Mark's, Berkeley. I had planned to go to another church that is rather distinctive in their worship as a learning experience, but I had to change plans so that I could meet some old college friends in town for the day. I picked St. Mark's mostly because it was pretty close to campus. St. Mark's has a lovely choir and music program (their choirmaster and organist is actually my music professor at CDSP). The music and hymnody was beautiful and very well attuned to the day in the church calendar and the readings. The service was a pretty straight-forward Holy Eucharist, Rite II, the most familiar service for most Episcopalians my age.

It was exactly what I desperately needed.

For me, at that moment in my life and study, the elegantly basic service at St. Mark's was extraordinarily nourishing. The beauty of the music, the familiarity of the hymns, the ease of following a familiar service that was carefully designed and prayerfully led all helped heighten my prayer and connection to God at a time when I needed that help. I'm tired here at the end of the semester. Tired of being away from my family so often. Tired of having to be ready to defend every minor observation from the critique of my fellow seminarians. Tired of trying to say something useful in class. Tired of asking hard questions of myself. To be able to just follow along, sing, pray, and not worry about asking or answering questions was like an early Christmas present. I realized why why our church can be a gift. We are supposed to be healers and reconcilers. I didn't need a lot of healing yesterday, but I needed some. I've been studying all kinds of complicated theologies of healing and reconciliation, but yesterday, in something no more intellectual or complex than a fairly standard service of our faith tradition, I experienced healing and reconciliation. It can be as simple as Holy Eucharist, Rite II.

Small Things

2009-12-03T14:51:00.000-08:00

In my class on suffering, we've been discussing the book “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Cominique Bauby. The author knows a thing or two about suffering. At the age of 43, he suffered a stroke that took him from being the editor of the French magazine Elle to a being unable to move but with a fully functioning mind. He could only communicate, and he dictated the book, by blinking his left eye. His book is remarkable in many ways.

In our discussion, we examined the degree to which he was able to find peace through many small things – the smell of French fries, the memory of a place, of simple pleasures. We recognized the degree to which the book brought home this point, so often said, that these small things are, in many ways, the meaning of life. We all found our appreciation of these things enhanced by Bauby's experience.

Previously, I was very dismissive of this kind of thinking. Statements like “It's the little things in life that matter” always felt a little trite to me. I felt like surely the great truths deal with the big questions and provide complex answers. I felt like if the small things are the meaning of life, then life must not be very meaningful.

I think now, though, that the phrase or concept does capture a wisdom, though not necessarily literally. Ice cream, kittens, holding hands, none of these are the “meaning of life” in a literal or even philosophical sense. But, the deep satisfaction that they provide, a satisfaction that all humans can relate to is a type of understanding. It is an understanding that is more of a sense of peace and connection rather than a solution to an intellectual puzzle. These small things and experiences also provide wisdom and satisfaction through their commonality, through their shared nature, through our ability to know that we share some understanding together.

I need to practice my ability to recognize this type of wisdom. Perhaps one aspect of ministry is helping others to make these connections; connections that are not trite, but deeply satisfying, what a connection with God feels like.

Thinking Theologically

2009-11-24T09:21:00.000-08:00

One of my goals when entering seminary was to become more adept and consistent at what I call “thinking theologically.” By this I mean looking at the world with more attention to God's action in the world, and, more importantly perhaps, to orient my thinking on a day to day basis to try and be in line with a greater divine purpose. What I'm hoping to do is move from approaching questions, problems, and issues with a “strategic approach” (what is the most efficient way to solve this issue?) to using a theological approach (how would God call us to solve this issue?).

I had an “a ha” moment in my class on Anglicanism. We were discussing the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886/1888. (For Episcopalians, check your BCP pages 876-888, for others, click here). In this effort towards ecumenicism, first the Episcopal Church and then the Anglican Communion tried to define what elements of Christian faith we considered essential or non-negotiable in inter-denominational dialog. We settled on four, essentially: 1. The centrality of the Old and New Testaments, 2. the Apostolic and Nicene Creeds, 3. Baptism and Eucharist, 4. the Historic Episcopate. It is the last one, the importance of having bishops considered to be in succession to the original apostles, that has often been one of the biggest sticking points in dialogs between Anglicans and churches that do not have bishops. Apparently, however, our intransigence on this point begins with Thomas Cranmer, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, who felt this was non-negotiable because bishops are actually in the New Testament (see 1 Timothy 3:1-2; Titus 1:7). They may not be in the Gospels, there may not be a line where Jesus says “You have to have bishops,” but he felt that the strong reference to bishops in the early church indicated that we really didn't have a choice in this matter, God wanted us to be organized this way.

Hearing that, I thought “a ha, he may not be 100% right, but at least that is an example of thinking theologically.” By this I mean that they didn't think strategically, which might lead you to say “you know, this bishop thing is getting in the way of the worthy goal of inter-faith dialog, let's dump it in the interest of moving things along,” they said “hey, how does God call us to be a church?” They then said, "hey, since we think the Bible is crucial to our understanding of what God calls us to be, we really can't blow off these texts that suggest that God's church includes bishops." Now, I can completely understand how other churches may have come do different understandings of how God has called them to be, understandings that don't include the Anglican fixation with the episcopate. I'm not saying that isn't a reasonable interpretation or even that I fully understand all the nuances of our own Anglican understanding of the theology of the episcopate. However, I did admire the way we approached the problem.

Practicing What You Read

2009-11-16T21:11:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting convergence of personal struggle, class readings, and spiritual practice last week.

In a previous posting, I noted that the honeymoon ended, and I’ve had some frustrations, doubts, and questions about the way I’m doing this whole seminary thing. While my experience hasn’t entailed a crisis of faith or any fundamental doubts about my basic call to serve, I have spent some time wondering if I was called to be here, at this place, doing this study, this way. Since I thought I had discerned that I was supposed to be doing this, I’ve been rattled by these questions. I’ve found a deep need to try and reconnect with my call, to reconnect with my sense of God working in my life.

Meanwhile, I’m reading the Pelagius-Augustine of Hippo debate in not one but two classes. For those of you not immersed in early 5th century theological debates, this one centers on the relationship between grace from God and human free will. Pelagius was a great believer in the power of the human will. He argued that humans can freely choose to be good, can, in effect, use their free will to live a good life and achieve salvation. Augustine of Hippo, Mr. Original Sin, argued vehemently against this, emphasizing the total dependence of humans on God. He felt that even our ability to choose good is a grace from God. (For those of you who are or have been immersed in early 5th century theological debates, I admit that just generalized a great deal. In case you are wondering, as far as the Christian Church at the time was concerned, Augustine of Hippo won the debate).

Hearing this debate and pondering it in the midst of a personal struggle to reconnect with God, I found Augustine of Hippo’s viewpoint very amenable. Wrestling with doubts, doubts for which there really is no simple or obvious answer certainly made me feel, realize, and/or recognize that I am, in fact, highly dependent on God and God’s ongoing grace. I’m dependent on something beyond my own murky, cloudy desires; that even my own will is insufficient power in my own attempt to live in a right relationship with God. St. Augustine may have been wrong about some other things, but I think he nailed this one.

That realization hit me just as I was trying to find concrete steps to aid my ongoing discernment. I had been debating whether or not to go attend a small-group spiritual formation meeting. I had a moment of great clarity where I realized that A: If I am, in fact, admitting my dependence on God and B: If I continue to believe (as I long have) that one way to hear God is through community, I should C: Go to said group meeting. I did. It is a long-term commitment, that I’m following through, like a lot of this, on raw faith that if I keep working as attentively I can, and follow what I know in my heart and head, I will, through the grace of God, hear what I need to hear.

Angelus

2009-11-09T20:06:00.000-08:00

The honeymoon between seminary and me ended this past week. A bunch of frustrations and doubts all hit at once and I felt very low about the whole enterprise. I wrote a very crabby blog that I've decided to sit on a little more, to see if I really mean it.

I'm climbing back out, I think, or at least climbing up a bit. I've been helped again by the bell (see earlier blog). A few weeks back in my class on Anglicanism we were studying the Anglican and Episcopal Church in Africa. The Episcopal Church had a strong mission presence in Liberia. This reminded me that my grandfather, the Rev. Fred Seddon (who I called Granddaddy), had been a lay missionary in Liberia before he was ordained a priest. The class got me interested in my grandfather's experience and I've spent a couple of weekends with my Dad (his son), looking at old photos, newsletters, etc., from Granddaddy's mission experience in Liberia.

This weekend, I read an old mission newsletter where one of his companions described a typical day at the mission station. I noticed that days at the mission were punctuated by ringing the angelus bell. Three rings -pray- three rings -pray- three rings -pray- nine rings. That's the bell that rings throughout the day here at CDSP. I've been cheered somewhat by that connection to my grandfather. There, across the decades is that darn angelus bell. It keeps ringing, calling, whether or not I feel up to answering at any given moment.

Taking the Bible and Truth Seriously

2009-11-02T08:42:00.001-08:00

This past week I found myself doing two odd things. One would be odd to other people (or at least some of them) and one was odd to me. On the first count, I found myself reading and quoting the Bible right and left. This may not seem an odd thing for a seminarian to do, but remember, I'm an Anglican seminarian, an Episcopalian seminarian. We are frequently accused of not taking the Bible seriously. Folks outside our religion accuse us of this, as do other Anglicans from time to time. But the truth is, for a group suspected of not taking the Bible seriously I found myself reaching for my Bible on my iPhone (best app I've bought yet), where I can easily look up chapter and verse. I did this on average every 10 minutes as I wrote papers, read interpretive studies and moved slowly through my training. I will agree that we don't read this document in exactly the same way as everyone else who does, but let me tell you, from a seminarian's viewpoint we take it tremendously seriously. I've now had to read Leviticus front to back, the whole thing, not just a law or two, three times. You try that sometime.

The other odd thing I did was use that document to argue that there might, in fact, be some absolute Truths out there in the world. The anthropologist in me shuddered a bit as I did that. The whole focus of my anthropological training was to emphasize the contingent and culturally conditioned nature of most truths. Anthropology generally stresses “relativism;” that it is hard to judge a viewpoint without understanding, relatively, where it comes from, without understanding its cultural context. Now, back in Anthropology school, we danced up to the limits of this way of thinking. We did agree that some things – violence against women, children, etc. - might be bad under any cultural system, but we didn't go much farther than that. We never settled how to make those decisions. It's tough if you want to emphasize analysis rather than judgement. Well, if you are in the Truth-with-a-Capital-T business as I am now you don't get to dance away from those questions. Some Anglicans in other countries, in countries that now accuse we Episcopalians of not taking the Bible seriously, have tried to use the Bible to encourage women to stay with abusive spouses. I found myself arguing that, no, the document doesn't say that and that in fact it commands us to protect the most vulnerable among us. Furthermore, I argued that this was, in fact, God's message to us, perhaps one of the central tenants of that message. I found myself making Truth claims, something I'm haven't done much of before.

I have not yet found a completely satisfying approach to Truth that honors both my conviction that there is Truth in the world and my understanding that all of us approach it in culturally conditioned manners. I do still feel that our grasp of the Truth, whether we get it from our culture, or the Bible, or some other text, sacred or otherwise, is always tenuous, approximate. We have to take the tools we've been given, by those who have gone before, by our culture and others, to do our best to find our way. We also can't dance away from the Truth, it has real impacts on real lives for real people. We may need to do it humbly, reaching for that Bible every ten minutes, reading it, re-reading it, and thinking about what it says in light of our lives and the words of others. The advantage of a sacred text is that it gives a starting point for all those who hold the text sacred, it is a gift that can form a common beginning and reference for our endless human arguments. The Bible is not the only sacred text in the world, and while I will be happy to swear that it contains “all things necessary for salvation” (asked of all Episcopal priests), I don't necessarily feel that it somehow has a lock on all the Truth out there, or if it does that we are yet capable of seeing it. But it is a start. And we take it seriously.

Comfort Ye

2009-10-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

To the right you can see what it looks like when an admitted liturgy-geek does liturgy planning. CDSP does a lot of liturgy, 15 services a week. The main service is the Thursday evening Eucharist, which is designated as community night. I was put on the team for the Eucharist this past Thursday, which meant I got to participate in the planning for said liturgy. What you see is a suite of hymnals, a midi keyboard (to plunk out hymns and see how they sound), various prayer books, and other resources I used to draft up what I thought the liturgy should contain. I then met with the rest of the team and we put all our ideas together. It took a great deal of effort, probably two hours each for a group of about 8 people. In other words, two full days of work for one person. I thoroughly enjoyed it and loved the intentionality and specificity it brought to the service when we finally worshipped together.

The really interesting thing about this service is that we deliberately toned down our usual liturgical variation. At CDSP we typically do lots of different kinds of liturgies-Rite I, Rite II, Enriching our Worship, as well as newly constructed liturgies borrowing from all around the Anglican Communion and beyond. When we met to plan we looked at where we were as a community (half-way through the semester, just before a week break for Reading Week), and unanimously decided that what the community needed was something familiar, something easy, something comforting. We basically took Holy Eucharist Rite II, the most familiar form for most Episcopalians, made careful hymn selections, tinkered a bit with where to chant and where to speak different sections of the service, fiddled with the choice of prefaces, and called it good. It seems to have worked. People expressed appreciation for not having to "think too much for a change" and for the ability to follow along easily, enabling more reflection and prayer.

Coming home for reading week to my home parish, I had new appreciation for the level of consistency in our prayer and worship. Like many parishes, and unlike a seminary, we don't do much liturgical tinkering or change. Having capped off six weeks of lots of services that demanded your full attention with a service designed to be comfortable, I had a new appreciation for the freedom that a comfortable and familiar liturgy gives for personal spirituality. I do think that it is important for a seminary to expose us to different liturgies. Each community has its own comfortable style and I have no idea where I'll end up. I also think that communities can benefit a bit from a little liturgical innovation, or at least careful planning and intentionality. If liturgy is too comfortable it can become so easy and familiar that it doesn't speak to where you are now or to where you need to go. But a little comfort can give space for the Spirit to work.

Christian Conflict Resolution

2009-10-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

When introducing a Gospel reading during the Daily Office (Morning and Evening Prayer) do you say “A reading from the Gospel According to X” or “A reading from X?” This question engenders strong responses here (and, truth be told, probably elsewhere). I was taught one thing during a class on worship fundamentals. I then had an opportunity to put the teaching into practice at Evening Prayer the same night. I was strongly informed by someone else that I had done it the wrong way, causing me to literally bang my head on the lectern in frustration (during the rehearsal, not the actual prayer). I then decided to stir the pot a bit and raise the individual squabble to a community discussion. Having seen this form of debate over liturgical practice occur in other settings and over other issues, I decided (in consultation with other students) that it was time we solved the general problem, which is: How do you decide what to do when something isn't specified? I raised the issue at a Worship Committee meeting, emails have ensued, and the conflict is on.

The problem stems from lack of explicit details in the rubrics. The rubrics, or official church details regarding liturgical (and other) practice, are the small font, usually italics, in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) or the nature of the text itself that give directions for how to conduct public prayers, worship, services, etc. In this case, the BCP specifies “One or two Lessons, as appointed, are read, the Reader first saying “A Reading (Lesson) from ________” (see pages 84 or 118 of the BCP). There is a lot of space in that blank. Space enough for “the Gospel According to X” or for “X.” Communities usually fill in those blanks in the rubrics with customary practices, things they have settled on that work in the particular community. Sometimes these are codified in an actual text, or “Customary.” In the case of CDSP a draft customary has been under revision for quite some time, leaving all kinds of room for little battles over these issues.

The wonderful side of these conflicts is that they show that we really do deeply care about worship, including the most minor details. My wife was stunned that we could even be perturbed over such a small set of words. It turns out that those who favor “A reading from X” want to make absolutely sure that the Gospel is not “proclaimed” in the Daily Office, as it is during the Eucharist. The rubric for introducing the Gospel reading during the Eucharist specifies saying “The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to ______” (BCP, page 357). About half of the community wants to distinguish the proclamation of the Gospel in the Eucharist from the sense of simply reading a text in the Daily Office; they prefer to drop the “according to” phraseology during the Daily Office and to replace it with “A reading from X”. Others prefer to always distinguish the Gospel from other texts and “according to” does that very nicely. It turns out that, at least in the learned opinion of a distinguished liturgical expert here on campus, either is actually acceptable.

So how will we settle it? My hope is that we will find a way that is either distinctly Christian, or at least encapsulates our values of respecting all people, paying attention to the marginalized (in this case the quiet ones who never say anything), and seeking reconciliation. I am supposed to be learning how to live and operate in and even lead a “Christian” community, not just any community. I hope I'm not being too literal in wanting to actually discover what, concretely, this entails. So far, the process has been fairly typical of any conflict resolution in any organization I've been in. We've had meetings, sent emails. In the discussion, many people have shared stories of being “chewed out” over some perceived violation of rubrics, customaries, or some such. Sadly, like all communities, we frequently hurt each others' feelings while trying to enculturate them. Where will the “Christian community” solution come in? Will it be in the details of what we do, or will it be in how we do it? Or both?

Formation

2009-10-11T20:04:00.000-07:00

Before I came to seminary, I received a lot of ominous warnings from priests and other former seminarians that seminary was going to be a new challenge for me, not just another graduate school. Not a lot of detail was given. Many statements were made about how it would work on your whole person, but I wasn’t quite sure that meant. Being who I am, I naturally took these predictions seriously, but was mostly left wondering what strange beast I might be facing.

Well, having now completed five weeks of seminary, I can say I’m still not quite sure what strange beast I’m facing, but I had perhaps a glimpse of it. Earlier this week, after a morning of lecture classes, I spent time with my music professor and he tried to help me wrap my mind around singing music on a two-line staff notation and give me tips on practicing my chanting. It was an hour in the chapel that was almost entirely centered on my throat and mouth and trying to make my body do something it didn’t naturally want to do. I left that and hustled across the street to the library where I sat down and immediately fired up a different part of my brain to thrash through an exegesis of Paul’s concepts of sin and salvation. The article mentioned the Greek genitive case. Multiple times. I finished that and worked on reading historical texts, which needed a different part of my brain. Then I hustled off to Evening Prayer to try and sit with God for at least 30 minutes. I might have had a spiritual experience and I might have just coasted through the service on autopilot, hard to say. I then went to dinner, where, though I don’t remember the conversation, I can basically guarantee that at some point my table-mates and I got into an intense and highly animated discussion about how to integrate some part of this into actual faith community life. Then back to the dorm to practice my chanting and then maybe read the Bible for another class.

I frequently hit 9 p.m. wiped out in a deep way. Working all of you indeed.

Defining Church Community

2009-10-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

I just had a lovely visit from my wife and daughter. I'm doing a very odd commute to seminary. My wife has kept her job back home, which does a lot of things (financial) and otherwise, for our family, making commuting a good option. Most weekends I fly home, sometimes they come out. This weekend they visited, and we had a great time. We puttered around the Berkeley waterfront and hiked in the hills, we ate out, saw a movie, and also hung out with seminary folks. We helped with a fundraising event, ate in the dining hall, and, most importantly, attended the Thursday night Community Eucharist and dinner. The latter is a big deal here on campus. The Eucharist is planned carefully well in advance, and it is followed with a communal meal. It is the CDSP version of a regular Sunday service for a parish.

Of course, being who I am, I kept second guessing myself. Am I doing enough to integrate my wife and daughter into this community? Are we the weirdoes that no one ever sees? Of course, when I really think about it, we aren't unusual here. The community is no longer defined by the bounds of walking distance. We have people living right across from chapel in the dorm, people a block away in student apartments, people living across town, and people living several hours away. I commute a particularly long distance but I'm not the only commuter. Some of these folks I see frequently, some I almost never see.

Are we all weirdoes? Truthfully, I think CDSP is now mirroring most communities. Our ability to travel greater distances means that what used to be a “church community” defined by the geographic area within which folks could walk to church, is now less and less common. Back at my home parish, no one flies in for services, but some folks do drive from distances of 30-45 minutes. We have communities where the ties that bind are not geographical proximity, but shared interests, hopes, dreams.

This gives me hope for the role of churches in communities today. They can be one place where what draws people together is a sense of longing, higher purpose, a desire to serve, something outside our personal desires. It is no small thing that a weekly Eucharist is a big deal.

Living Under the Bell

2009-09-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

In what is now New Mexico, in the 16th and 17th Centuries, mission churches were established by Spanish colonialists among the native pueblos of the region. This historical process, transformative and painful, has been summed up with the phrase “Living Under the Bell.” Communities that previously marked time in their own traditional ways, attuned to their needs, suddenly had the regular, systematic, ringing of the mission bell sounding over their village and land, calling (and in many cases forcing) them to live in new ways and under an alien schedule.

At CDSP, we also live under the bell. Out of the window of my dorm room, right across a small garden space, I can see the bell of our All Saints' Chapel hanging above the chapel's red door. The bell is rung once each morning just prior to the onset of Morning Prayer at 7:30 a.m. It is rung again at 11:20, calling us to the daily Eucharist at 11:30. It is rung again at 5:20, to call us to Evening Prayer or Evensong at 5:30. Three times a day, five days a week we hear the bell and are called to prayer, or at least a brief moment of remembering our calling and purpose (even I don't make every one of the 15 services, though I do attend at least one a day). At mid-day and early evening, the bell is rung in an “angelus” format, 3 rings, prayer, 3 rings, prayer, 3 rings, prayer, 9 rings (a trinity of trinities followed by a trinity of trinities!).

When you have chosen to live under the bell, it is a lovely thing. For me, it helps me to remember the bigger picture in the midst of trying to knock off reading, assignments, and other tasks. Hearing also fills me with joy over who we are. No other school in the Graduate Theological Union prays and worships publicly as much as we do. It is a particularly Anglican and Episcopal approach to work, life, and study, and our bell calls that out to the world. I am enjoying it while I can! The trick will be to leave here and be that bell in the world; a bell of joy, mystery, and praise, while not being a bell of oppression and colonization.

Basics 2: Study

2009-09-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

I have now completed two weeks of classes and am beginning to get the hang of things. It has been a little odd to find myself plunked back into the classroom; in some cases in actual wooden school desks I remember from elementary school. (The church is nothing if not willing to reduce and reuse). I’ve spent so much time as a professional with a career that to be sort of a blank slate again feels out of alignment with who I have been for so long.

But I’m not complaining, getting to dedicate myself full time to reading, thinking, commenting, and discussing things that previously I could only occasionally talk about with a few people is very, very stimulating. I’m taking six classes: Introduction to the Old Testament, History of Christianity, Introduction to Anglicanism, a systematic theology course called Suffering and the Human Person, Fundamentals of Worship, and Fundamentals of Music. This would be completely insane if not for the fact that the last two courses are one-credit courses and I’m auditing them. The remainder I’m taking pass/fail.

This load makes me run around a lot, quite literally. CDSP is part of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), a consortium of seminaries all in the Bay Area. I can take classes at any of them, and I am. I’m taking Old Testament (OT) from the Lutheran seminary located after a 10 minute drive to the top of the Berkeley Hills. My course on suffering is taught by a professor at the Jesuit seminary (though it meets on the CDSP campus). I study most often in the GTU library, across from CDSP, where it is quiet and you can spot the occasional napping monk.

I have several days that are wild and crazy. Mondays I’m in class nearly all day, with Anglicanism meeting from 2 to 5 p.m. I’m finding a 3-hour lecture in the afternoon to be a bit brutal. Tuesday mornings consist of what I have termed Mr. Toad’s Wild Berkeley Ride up to OT with the Lutherans at 8 am and then bolting out the back of the class and riding the brakes downhill to CDSP for Fundamentals of Worship 10 minutes after OT ends.

In the midst of the load there have already been a few wonderful moments of insight. My course on suffering has caused me to abandon my hope of solving the dilemma of “theodicy,” or, how can it be that if A: God is all-powerful, and B: all-loving, then C: evil and suffering still exists. The prof came right out on the first day and said that the only way to “solve” this intellectual dilemma is to “fudge” one of the three propositions. He then proceeded to show us how many fancy theological concepts (with Latin names and everything!) were basically ways of fudging one or another of those points. I was a great relief to realize that no one else, after thousands of years, had solved that problem! It’s not so bad to be back in the classroom.

Basics of Seminary Life

2009-09-28T08:59:00.002-07:00

When I was a professional archaeologist trying to write for the general public, I always had to remind myself that people were less interested in the high-falutin’ theoretical debates I was immersed in than they were in the seemingly mundane details of daily life in the past. They were less interested in “what is the role of ritual in the development of complex chiefdoms” then they were in “what did they eat and how did they get the food?” My blogging here may veer towards the former, but in the interest of the latter, here are some of the details of my daily life at seminary.

I live in a dorm, Parsons Hall, right on the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP, in Berkeley, CA) campus. Thankfully, all the rooms are singles, and I don’t have a roommate though I do have to share a big communal (male) bathroom with two private showers. So far there have been no shower conflicts with the men, I can’t speak for the women who are greater in number and have the same number of shower stalls. My room is spacious enough for my twin bed, a bookcase, a huge desk, and a bedside table. I also have more closet space here than we do in our 1927 house in Salt Lake City.

The CDSP campus fits neatly on an irregularly shaped lot which is one block from the north edge of the U Cal Berkeley campus. I look out of my dorm room window at a lovely green courtyard and across to the CDSP Chapel. I can also see Gibbs Hall, a lovely brick building used as a guest house, and if I lean out a bit I can see Shires Hall, which is the main administration, classroom, faculty office, etc. building. Some days I could potentially get away with never leaving campus.

However, I do not eat on campus. Due to crumbling kitchen infrastructure at CDSP, we can no longer use the campus dining hall. Consequently, we now eat at the dining hall on the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) campus across the street. There are some advantages to this. The PSR dining hall has a balcony with a view of the bay and San Francisco. I also run into students from the other seminaries of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in the dining hall. One morning I had a rollicking conversation with a Quaker about restorative justice whilst eating breakfast.

For exercise, I bought an inexpensive membership at the U Cal Berkeley gym. I take a short bike ride across campus to get there. The place is full of undergrads, who are considerably more cheery than the average “real” adult. Rather than trudging on the treadmill with a “workout, then job, then pick up kids, OMG what will I fix for dinner?”-look on their faces, their faces tend to say “workout, eat, sleep, drink beer.” I’m enjoying that little change of scenery.

As I finish this up, I can hear the bells from the Cal Berkeley carillon. The proximity of a bunch of nearby seminaries also means that I can hear their bells, for prayer, chapel, worship, throughout the day. There are a number of things that make going to seminary a challenge and a sacrifice, but the environment here is, for me, a source of abundance and blessing.

Practicing Faith

2009-09-28T08:59:00.001-07:00

Going to seminary was a real act of faith for me. I mean this in a literal, concrete way. Actually getting in the car about a week ago, kissing my wife and child goodbye (if only for a week), and pointing the car on the concrete and pointing it west into the vast Great Basin desert took an act of will and an act of faith. I’ll be absolutely honest, when I woke up that morning my main thought was “I don’t have to do this. I could just stay home.” As I passed each NV city along I-80 I thought “Here’s a place I could turn around.” Despite years of thinking, praying, reflecting, and planning, when it came time to actually do it, it was harder than I thought it would be.

There is an argument that faith is not as much a matter of consistent, wholehearted belief as it is a matter of practice; of acting as if God is good, just, loving, gracious and faithful regardless of what you believe. As an anthropologist, this concept resonated with me. I am an adherent of “practice theory;” the theory that our daily acts and practices from the mundane (getting dressed) to the complex (worshiping a deity) form our beliefs and culture as much as or more than our ideas, cosmologies, and ethics. So, the idea that faith itself may essentially be a practice holds a lot of appeal for me. My only quibble with this concept of faith is that I don’t think anyone simply acts; you only behave if, in fact, you believe.

My drive to seminary added a layer of complexity to this question. Certainly my beliefs felt very distant when I actually had to get in that car. My stomach was roiling and my head was full of that confused fog you have when you are filled with strong emotions. I more or less had to exercise discipline and just make myself do it. It was an ACT of faith in a moment of doubt. Perhaps a gift we all have is that our moments of strong belief, our times of deep, intellectual faith, do not actually have to align at every moment with our acts of faith.

Starting Questions

2009-09-02T19:42:00.000-07:00

Here is the beginning of a list of questions I hope to finish seminary either A: having answered, B: having better tools to answer, or C: realizing it was a dumb question (and knowing why). I do this with some trepidation, as it makes me realize the depth of my ignorance and I fear that all of these will be answered “C.” Please feel free to add your own questions to my list and I’ll do my best to figure them out too.

The order here is arbitrary:

1. What do we mean in this day and age when we say “God is sovereign”?

(Note: My father asked, “do we still say this?” My answer is, we do, at least during the Venite in Morning Prayer, Psalm 95:7, “We are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.” Are we just saying that just because it sounds vaguely comforting? What do we mean by a belief that God has and/or can act in history?)

2. What does it mean to “pronounce God’s blessing”? What do we mean when we say “We bless God”? What the heck is a “blessing” or “being blest” anyway?

3. What is a “marriage” in our church and what is “blessing a civil union”?

4. Is there a theology of religious diversity and non-belief that is defensible from an anthropological perspective?

5. Why do we pray?

6. Is there an existing theology that adequately considers the time depth of the earth (as evidenced geologically) and the universe (as evidenced through astrophysics)? The phrase “A thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past” (Psalm 90:4; see also 2 Peter 3:8), while a beautiful metaphor, doesn’t feel sufficiently rigorous to me....

7. Where or what exactly is/are the reconciling point(s) between our critical scholarship (text criticism, translation, contextual criticism, etc.) on the Bible and our deep understanding that this is an extremely important document that we (or at least some of us) are called to make meaningful today? Another way to put this is, I know (and love) all the scholarly attempts to unpack and understand the text of the Bible itself, particularly those aimed at understanding the Bible within the social and historical context(s) under which it was written. However, we will never fully understand the context(s) in which it was written, nor, importantly, are we the same society as the one(s) that wrote it. How do we take the valuable scholarship seriously and still make the entire text meaningful and important, here and now?

8. We Episcopalians still espouse (at a bare minimum in liturgy) atonement theology (Jesus died for our sins). We don’t play it up, but we haven’t discarded it. What the heck do we mean by “Jesus died for our sins”? What does “being saved” mean?

9. Can we reclaim Revelation and Daniel from the fundamentalists?

10. Can I improve my singing voice to the point that I can lead a smaller congregation in song without everyone cringing?

11. Do the Buddhists really have the best explanation of suffering? Is theodicy (why, if God is all powerful and all loving, is there suffering?) a fruitful area of inquiry? Or is Rabbi Kushner right, the only thing that matters is our response to suffering?

12. Do the translation difficulties surrounding the Greek word “epiousion” (often translated “daily bread”) matter in daily community religious practice? If so, why and how?

13. What particular aspects of Christianity are uniquely insightful for us today? What aspects of Anglicanism?

14. How can we as Christians meaningfully and seriously consider and incorporate the fact that Judeo-Christian beliefs occupy a historically (and geographically) brief blip within the overall scope of humankind’s theological and religious thinking? “We finally figured it out” doesn’t really cut it for me.

15. What do you say (or what are some options) in the following situation: you are visiting someone who is suffering and they (as they do rarely but occasionally) lay some theological explanation on you for the event they just suffered, and you completely and fundamentally do not agree, but they are looking at you with that “right?” expression on their face and you can tell that whatever the explanation was, and however you disagree, it just gave them a lot of comfort.

Proper 29, Saturday

2008-11-29T07:53:00.000-08:00

Today is the last day of the Christian church year. Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent, which initiates a new year. I love the fact that the church year thumbs its nose at the secular calendar. Advent always begins four Sundays before Christmas. This means that the beginning of Advent and the beginning of the church year fluctuates between late November and early December. It's not totally disconnected from the secular calendar, of course, since Christmas is a fixed, non-movable feast day on December 25. But, nonetheless, by making the entire church year start (and finish) on days tied to particular commemorations of sacred events, the calendar still asserts the primacy of sacred time over secular time. We basically claim that the events of what we understand to be salvation history condition our understanding of time itself.

In a day and age when we will apparently trample people to death to save a few bucks, I take some small hope out of our ability to also hold onto our sacred time.

Once and Future Community

2008-08-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

Today I spent time in two vastly different communities.

This morning I drove 100 or so miles south of Salt Lake City to check out some archaeological sites from the recent past. We looked at a good half dozen homesteads that were used from 1900 to about 1925 or so. From land records we could attach some names to the places, sturdy English and Scandinavian stock, farmers and ranchers.

They were brave little spots, out in the sagebrush. You could see stone house foundations, roughly made from local rocks, but with little home touches—porch remnants, well-laid stoops. Trash was scattered about. Window glass, barrel staves, a teacup fragment with a rose print on it, a patent medicine bottle, a small, white, button. Each homestead was broadly similar—a house foundation, a well, wood shed remnants, glass bottle bits—but each was also unique. One highly motivated soul had laid a sturdy one-room house by jamming white stones into wet-concrete he had pressed against rough boards. The roof, floor, door, and windows were gone, but the walls stood tough in the wind. I paused inside, looking out an empty window frame at the sagebrush and mountains. Off in the distance I could see the other house foundations, the spare traces of a community wiped out by the collapse of agricultural prices and lack of water in the 1920s. I realized someone else had probably also stood there, looking at their neighbors.

I drove home to the annual back-to-school barbecue at my daughter's elementary school. The place was filled with people. I always enjoy the chaos. Kids running around, parents visiting, teachers trying to be both official and pleasant. It seemed so vibrant and alive, an invincible little community.

Make a few economic changes, they don't even have to be that major, and that little school community can disappear just as quickly. Give it enough time, and I pretty much guarantee it will disappear. Archaeology teaches you that much. Our places are ephemeral, ready for the dust to move back in. All we can do is keep sweeping it out, keep our ties to each other, make new ones, try again.

The Wisdom Particle?

2008-05-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

The Higgs boson, which CERN's Large Hadron Collider is designed to find (or not), has been called the "God particle." It's an interesting metaphor, and worthy of theological reflection. (Click here for another explanation of the Higgs boson).

The metaphor hasn't set very well with me. I can't decide, however if I'm not thrilled with it for theological reasons (if God is the creator of all, how can a part of creation be God?) or metaphorical reasons (what do we mean by "God Particle?" Something that is God, provides insight into God? Speaks for what God is?). I'm not saying I don't think it is possible to use scientific data for insights into God, I do. I'm just saying that at the simplest level--naming a particle the God particle--doesn't seem to provide satisfactory insights in and of itself.

Today the Episcopal Daily Office lectionary offered up the a passage from Proverbs (Click for passage).

The passage is within a long meditation on Wisdom. Is this a better metaphor for the Higgs Boson? Is this the insight that the Higgs Boson will provide?

Down Ditch

2008-04-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

My grandmother woke me to help with the head gate. Tuesday. Irrigation day from Encino Street north in Tularosa, New Mexico. Sr. Lucero and RJ were already out staring at the ditch across the street. I figured this didn't bode well. My grandmother's neighbor, Estelle, met us at the gate between their houses. She fixed me with a stare, reading my city clothes and clearly doubting my abilities in this crucial arena.
--Ready to be a farmer?
--I guess.

In Estelle's yard leaning against an odd pile of artifacts—coffee can, broken wire brush, small wood thingy with a wire handle—was a sheet of metal welded to a stainless steel bar. This, apparently, was the head gate. The two grandmothers needed me to help carry it. My grandmother took the mysterious wood thingy. We tromped across the street, all three in rubber boots, to a grate flush with the ground and echoing with running water. Open grate, observe stream.
--My lands! It's running slow.
--Must be the Texan across the street. He doesn't know how to irrigate properly.
In goes the wood thingy, followed by the sheet metal contraption. None of it fits very well.
--You can never get it all closed.

More commentary about the inordinately slow water as it begins running perpidicular to the mother ditch and pouring into Estelle's ditches and yard. The yard isn't filling as fast as what is judged to be normal. My grandmother is down ditch from Estelle and the slow water hits her ditches. All the strange, apparently jury-rigged, contraptions in grandmother's yard—cinder blocks, bits of old signs—suddenly take on new meaning as they direct the water rather precisely to the trees and roses and greenish spots.

By 9 am the neighbors are gathered about the fence. Would someone be able to help Sr. Duran?
--Last time he forgot to watch and it ran over into my garage.
More commentary about the slow water. More grumbling about the Texan. Sr. Lucero had talked to him first thing that morning.
--He don't listen.

Grousing commences about the ditch boss, who is generally agreed to be less than useful. Four people have already complained to him about the slow water. Discussion moves on to the bad head gate.
--He won't fix it, say's it is the user's responsibility.
--It is not! It's on the acequia madre, that's his responsibility.

It is universally agreed that he isn't helpful. It is also universally agreed that no one else wants the job.
--Four complaints already this morning! My lands!
--Poor man.

More discussion about various neighbors and their irrigation skills or lack thereof. Concern about other elderly or sick folks; Sr. Lucero peels off to check on the grandmothers down ditch. Visiting continues apace as the yards slowly fill with the water that will grow trees, flowers, vegetables, Tularosa itself. Someone remembers pushing a nun into the ditch next to the church.
--She deserved it She was really mean to all the kids.
--My lands!

For one day an entire set of blocks in Tularosa is intimately linked by the ditch. There is no escaping it, those downstream need those upstream. A yard free of water is noticed. Is someone sick? Dead? Out of town? Water running over a yard and into the street is also noticed. Is someone stupid? Some kind of foreigner like the Texan? Sick? Hurt? Dead?

All morning as I splashed around, I cast about desperately to see if I could turn this into a metaphor of faith and community, of God among us. Was it better than Paul's metaphor of the body, each member as a key component of the body of Christ? Or, at least more timely and relevant in this place? No, not quite. The best I could come up with was the ditch as the Holy Spirit, flowing among us, calling us together, making us recognize God in each of us, whether we like it or not. Or maybe it is like love, true community love, a sense of tie and connection, tolerance and support for everyone.

We are losing these ditches, both literal and metaphorical. If we don't learn to compensate, to understand that ditch or no ditch we all are tied together by the flow of our common spirit and life, we will perish. The ditch connects us all, whether we know it or not. We need to find those ditches in all our communities.

....names have been changed.....

First and Continuing Christmas

2007-12-30T18:52:00.000-08:00

This Advent and Christmastide I have sought to again understand the Christmas story and its meaning. I've been struck by the contrast between insights I've gained through reading and insights gained in religious practice, and I've struggled to bring them together. For me, the problem is: “In modern tellings of a story that we know had ancient origins and meanings, how do we best relate the ancient and modern meanings?”

I've been reading The First Christmas by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. Like many scholars, Borg and Crossan focus on careful studies of biblical texts and surrounding historical materials to attempt to elucidate the meanings the texts may have had for the ancient authors and audiences. They argue that in the context of the Roman empire, these stories were designed to assert the primacy of Jesus as savior of the world through justice and peace. Jesus was thus placed in deliberate and revolutionary contrast to stories of the Roman emperor, who was cast as Son of God and savior of the world through violent (but in the mind of Rome, just) conquest. They make about as good a case as is possible with contemporary scholarship to elucidate the meaning that the Christmas story had for ancient Christians.

I then trooped off to church with modern Christians. On the last Sunday before Christmas, our parish put on the annual Christmas Pageant. In line with the practices of thousands of churches, the youth of the parish dressed in costume and told the Christmas story. Our telling culminated with two teenagers and a baby—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—center stage, surrounded by tiny prophets, angels, shepherds, and magi. At that dramatic moment I was profoundly struck by a sense of “This is it!”; that we as a community had just made our statement about the meaning of Christmas: “Witness the essence of God and God's love incarnate: people and a baby; love, creation, hope, and possibility, repeated every moment throughout the world.”

That interpretation of the Christmas story, if Borg and Crossan are right, is profoundly different from the interpretation intended by the authors of the Gospels and the earliest Christians. We've taken their story and mucked with it, yanked out parts, performed it, re-staged it, given it new political and social overtones. For example, because our parish uses teenagers for Mary and Joseph, I was also struck with a feeling of “Gee, we've just made an argument about how God enters the world, through unexpected and socially unacceptable means, teenage parents.” This feeling was immediately followed by the spirits of scholars pointing out that at the time of the Gospels, “teenaged” mothers were the socially acceptable norm. Bad intellectual! I was being anachronistic.

But isn't that the essence of religious practice at its best? True creative anachronism perhaps? These stories are dead if they aren't re-lived. At one level, it doesn't matter what the first Christians thought or didn't think about the Christmas story. The events they narrated are lost. Even Borg and Crossan, for all their scholarly knowledge, can only, at best, muster a reasonable approximation of what the meaning of the story may have been 2000 years ago. Borg and Crossan's book is valuable for how it can enlarge our understanding of an ancient story, but at the end of the day we have to continually make and remake these understandings. In our parish pageant, we did nothing more than the early Christians, we strongly declared what this story meant to us. This remaking is particularly powerful, as it was the natural expression of our community's present hopes and longings.

Nonetheless, I do think we need both our scholarly approximation of the ancient meaning of Christmas and our modern performances. In this time of continued conflict and war—a war cast by our own political leaders as a just means of achieving peace through violence—we may need to look again at another meaning of Christmas. As Borg and Crossan show, earlier understandings of Christmas are relevant to our own and can enlarge the transformative value of the narrative. Maybe our best hope is to marry our past and present, start with our powerful and basic community understanding and add to it. Perhaps next year our parish pageant should also put the peace that comes through love and justice at center stage along with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Our hope is for more than just an ideal family, but rather for a human family that idealizes peace and justice.

Practicing Episcopalian

2007-11-19T19:39:00.000-08:00

Ralph Becker recently won the election to be the next Salt Lake City mayor. I'm pleased about this, as I voted for the guy. As the campaign finally ends, I've been pondering one of the common campaign themes. All the major and alternative newspapers all ran “guides to the candidates” that listed their positions on issues, as well as a host of other things including their religions. We had practicing Mormons, non-practicing Mormons, and then my man Ralph, who was repeatedly listed as a “Non-practicing Episcopalian.”

Now, I mean no criticism of Mr. Becker, his faith is his business, but that little phrase-”Non-practicing Episcopalian”-struck me as a bit odd. I suspect the press came up with it. If you have a “non-practicing Mormon” why not a “non-practicing Episcopalian”?

I wondered, though, does such an animal as a “non-practicing Episcopalian” exist?

At one level, the answer is yes. If what is meant by “non-practicing Episcopalian” is someone who was “raised Episcopalian” but no longer goes to church, then sure, you can be a non-practicing Episcopalian; more power to 'ya.

But is such a thing equivalent to a “Non-practicing Mormon”? I found the phrase odd when applied to Episcopalianism since, unlike Mormons or Jews (or any number of other religious groups), Episcopalians don't really have a common identity as a people. Mormons, for example, regardless of their practices (or even their actual family background), can point to or at least claim a strong common story of a people. Their story is rich with persecution, multiple journeys, and the final arrival in the promised land of what is now Utah. Mormons can claim this story whether or not they attend Sunday meetings, do their home teaching, or participate in other important liturgies. They have an identity as a people that, while integral to their overall religious identity, can be separated from religious practice.

Episcopalians, not so much.

The closest thing that we can grab to claim as a “story of a people” is that it was a bunch of Anglicans who arrived at Jamestown 400 years ago and that some Episcopalians stem from such Anglicans. Of course, we recently had to (rightly) seek reconciliation for the effects of that arrival on the Native Americans who were already here, so we don't really want to trot that particular narrative out as a matter of pride. Otherwise, perhaps one of the great things about Episcopalians is that while there are many who have a long family tradition of Episcopalianism, many others are more recent converts. We're a mixed bunch, together for a lot of different reasons.

So then, can you be a “non-practicing Episcopalian”? I'm convinced that a fundamental aspect, perhaps the most fundamental aspect, of being an Episcopalian is our practices – Holy Eucharist (Rite I or II, of course), coffee hour, Advent Wreaths, and the like. We aren't a particularly creedal faith; saying the Nicene Creed in church is not forced on anyone, and the joke is that the nice thing about being an Episcopalian is that no matter what you believe, you can find at least one other Episcopalian who believes it as well. There are no required statements of faith, no required clothing, no common sacrifices, and we certainly haven't been persecuted in droves for “being Episcopalian.” What really binds us together, more than anything else, is our common rituals, our services, our Book of Common Prayer. We may be there for lots of different reasons, and we certainly come from lots of different places, but we do share a common life composed fundamentally of common practices. We're made, and, through our practices, we are constantly remade, not born.

Chapel Dress

2007-07-08T19:09:00.000-07:00

Can you wear Dockers™ to church? Jeans? Flip flops?

Recently, Robert Kirby of the Salt Lake Tribune published a blistering critique of an edict by an official in his church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). The church official had laid down a dress code; one that went right to the level of discussing whether particular brands of menswear were appropriate for a church worship service. In a fit of gleeful self-righteousness not uncommon to non-Mormons in Utah, I wore my own khakis to church that day, only to see that we certainly had unspoken community standards regarding dress in our liturgical space. Any anthropologist worth his or her salt would have noticed the near complete homogeneity in clothing out in the pews.

The truth is there are good reasons that dress for church is a matter of significant debate. As any teenager can tell you, personal dress is a highly symbolic and socially charged form of communication. Furthermore, just like much of religious worship in our society today, it sits precisely at the juncture of the personal and communal.

Dress minimally conveys personal social status, ethnicity, and, despite the dominant trend towards all-casual-all-the-time, it still conveys how individuals perceive the event they are attending, their role in that event, and their relationship to the other participants. Dress is never simply personal expression. Moreover, collectively, dress will define how a community wants to be represented.

Add worship into the mix—a setting where a community describes itself and its relationship to its god or gods—and dress takes on an additional weight. Top it all off with the tension that exists between a culture that tells you to pursue your personal interest at all costs and religious organizations that remind us that we live in communities. There’s no wonder that you hear as much about “chapel dress” as you do about theology. Dress in church sits at the center of more than one negotiation between the individual and society.

I don’t see any reason to rail against this very important human form of symbolic communication. Rather, I tend to think that thoughtful consideration of dress in church is highly worthwhile. Are you taking the event seriously? What does it mean to you, and how do you want to convey that in your dress? Most importantly, what are you saying to the community you are joining for worship?

At the same time, due to the potential for dress to be exclusionary, a community needs to be extremely careful in how it maintains inclusiveness in its stated or unstated dress codes. Our challenge today is to create vibrant communities in a world of unprecedented, wonderful, and rich diversity; communities that are identifiable in all of our collective symbols, including dress, without being exclusionary. I think it is perfectly ok for a religious community to develop a collective understanding of proper dress, so long as this understanding is broadly inclusive of all ethnicities, socioeconomic groups, etc. It is particularly important that the community's standards fully include those who have done all they can to simply join the service. At the end, it is just important to say “We believe this is serious business, worthy of taking care in our most personal of communal symbols.” No more, and no less.

Response to Draft Anglican Covenant

2007-07-07T19:52:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt, the meat really, of what I sent to the Office of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church per their request to respond to the Draft Anglican Covenant and at the request of the Bishop of my Diocese (Utah).

All human religions engage the tension between defining a community and excluding others. Jesus rejected this choice and welcomed sinners to his table. For me, Anglicanism offers hope of transcending the tension endemic to human religions by enabling a community unafraid of differences. Does the Draft Covenant bring us closer together? Does the Draft Anglican Covenant enhance or hinder my ability to live out my Baptismal Covenant; to seek and serve Christ in all persons and strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being? At first blush, I would have to say it does not; that the draft fundamentally, perhaps unintentionally, emphasizes comfortable-sounding words that provide for exclusionary processes. My initial reaction is to say, “Please start over with more communion, less exclusion.”

Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America

Pentecost, Anno Domini 2007

Blog Introduction

2007-07-07T16:22:00.000-07:00

The creation of grounded, confident, open, inclusive, and empowered communities within a fractured, individualized, and globalized world is one of our greatest challenges. I firmly believe that our religious communities can be ways to achieve a common life. Moreover, I also believe that one of our most basic human practices is ritual, and that ritual (or liturgy, or church, or whatever you wish to call it) is a profound and constructive force in human life. As I explore these issues, this blog will cover the following areas:

1. Practical Ritual: Posts focusing on worship/liturgy/ritual (with a focus on the practice of worship in a particular place and community and emphasis on the communities I know best)

2. Church Theory/Church Practice: Anglican/Episcopalian Church Structure and Practice

This blog will be more free-flowing and open to comment than my other blog, Credo ut Intelligam (http://mtseddon.blogspot.com/). This particular blog will have minimal to no editing prior to posting, and be open for comment. Please keep comments polite and constructive or I will exercise editorial prerogative.