the feast of st. john: the old wine

i have been a bit disappointed to have read again this year so many "christian" complainers about how we mess up christmas. if the "we" is the same old empire, whether we call our emperor augustus or herod or george, of course we mess up christmas. it is our bounden duty so to do. if we are unwilling to let go of all the diversions that come to us wrapped in tinsel paper and lying beneath the tree, we will never open our hands and hearts to receive the gift that the holy one gives us again and again, eternally, world without end.

and yet christmas is upon us again, this miracle. i look around and see the mess, and once again i am amazed that our lord sees a world he loves so much that he strips off his eternal glory and is wrapped in scraps of cloth. it is of course popular for us evangelical sorts to want to jump to the cross, and i was tempted in the previous paragraph to make some illusion to the one who hangs on the tree we are beneath. but for a while it is enough to ponder in our hearts the wonder of the incarnation. of course we know this baby will die. all babies will die. jesus died because he was born. his eternal life he laid aside, putting on our death.

"in the midst of life, we are in death; from whom can we seek help?
from you alone, o lord, who by our sins are justly angered."

the familiar words of the burial office continue:

". . .
o worthy and eternal judge, do not let the pains of death turn us away from you at our last hour."

the amazing thing we celebrate at this time is that the pains of birth turned him not away from us at his first hour. who noticed? not the emperor, the pretender to the role of shepherd of israel. that one was herod, holed up in his palace in royal david's royal city, jerusalem.

no. the songs of the angels, which still fill the skies these christmas nights for those who have ears to hear, were first heard by the good shepherds, the ones "abiding with their flocks in the fields by night." the good news has heard by the ones out in the cold doing their job, doing the same thing the first david had been doing when samuel came around with the horn of oil to anoint him.

but this time the messiah was more than the shepherd of israel. he was that. the angels did say that "unto you is born this day a saviour, christ . . . ," that is a saviour, messiah. but also "a saviour, christ, the lord." to the title of the shepherd of israel is added the title of the true emperor of the whole earth, of all creation.

a friend of mine who was in london on christmas day was happy that she saw hugh grant, not five feet from her. but good friends of mine, i saw a far larger miracle christmas eve and christmas morning. i saw the very body of the saviour, christ, the lord, who was wrapped in swaddling clothes, handed to me as the bread of heaven in the hands of a woman from wyoming; i drank the very blood which made that babe's cheeks blush, poured out for me in a chalice held by a poet of some renown, but who will never do anything more important than to hold that cup.

but ah, it gets better. well, not better. it's just that there's even more: every morning the church prays, after reading the new testament: "blessed be the lord, the god of israel, for he has visited his people . . . ." this year the lord has gifted our little house with a visit from two of the people whom i am sure most of us would consider among the least. but somehow there was room for them, and they brought the presence of christ, the incarnation of light from light, god from god, the word eternally begotten of the father, with them.

it is good.

long time no write much happen

in which i notice that it's been almost a month since i posted anything here. it has been a very insightful month, and that's probably why i've written nothing. through the good grace of finding a celtic daily office from the northumbria community, i found catherine de hueck doherty's poustinia: christian spirituality of the east for western man (notre dame, indiana: ave maria press, 1975) which describes the kind of solitude-in-community that seems to be what i'm trying to do with space i call beatus, and which i now call beatus, an urban poustinia.

one lime, two beers, three friends, six cats

dan phillips asked one his blog, "when do you pray?" the wednesday morning discussion group i'm priviliged to enjoy, usually josh and jeff and bradley and me, have all been on trips of some sort or another the past week or two, so this week we were sipping around the question of how we maintain our spiritual disciplines, such as they are, whilst trippin'. not a new question, granted: "how shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?' do we just hang up our harps?

but sometimes the trips are little, or so they seem. i have been in babylonian captivity this week in a very small but effective way. i'm housesitting for a friend who leads a very cluttered life, with televisions in every room, computer moniters galore, and six cats. so last night, into the midst of this confusion (i'm easily confused), come ryan and josh, to share a cheap mexican beer with an expensive co-op lime and to catch up, while keeping the cats company. josh is allergic to cats, so he skipped the beer.

and we're talking all spiritual stuff, being all spiritual guys, and feeling cool and having a good time, and josh is telling ryan about his past year's discovery of deeper and simpler prayer, and i'm telling ryan how pleased i am to have found a friend like josh who is crazy enough to share psalms every morning and evening, when it strikes me full in the forehead that in the clutter of being amongst the cats at 8:00 to drink our beer, we had left out the psalms.

so. we stopped and prayed the psalms together. simple. psalms 141, 16, 62; a passage from the gospel according to luke (4:16-22); the magnificat; the our father.

behold, no longer were we captives, but pilgrims. this morning i found most of the lime on the cutting board by the sink, a little dry from the time in the desert.

"blessed are the peacemakers"

or, if you prefer, "happy are the peacemakers." jesus said it, and it's true, although probably some of us who want to be peacemakers oten thhink that "tired and frustraed are the peacemakers" is more likely true. On the other hand, if there is no peace, perhaps we are really only -eace-wishers, or war-opposers.

if you're serious about becoming a blessed, happy peacemaker, join us for a conversation to help bring that about. we will use jim forest's the ladder of the beatitudes, as well as sharing our own experiences. (The book will be at Village Books at the front desk).

this conversation about peacemaking starts on the 8th of november, a tuesday, at 7:00, at Beatus: the art of prayer, 215 west holly, G-4 (the bellingham hardware building, corner of holly and bay).

antioch, where they were first called christians, or, holy faith

this week i and my good friend josh parrish are in santa fe, new mexico: the royal city of the holy faith of st. francis of assissi. mostly i am visiting old friends, either people or rivers or places. he is finding new friends and checking out st. john's college. we are also vising communities of faith, one of them holy trinity, a parish of the antiochan orthodox church, one of them the church of antioch at santa fe, a parish of the catholic and apostolic church of antioch. josh says they are like second cousins twice removed.

both of them trace their roots back to the first century church in antioch. how they treat, and what they value most, in the tradition they have received from that time are very different. i look at them in terms of paul's analogy of the body in his first letter to the corinthians. the whole, the one holy catholic and apostolic church, is the body, but it "consists not of one member but of many." (12:14, njb).

unfortunately, these cousins don't always respect each other as they should, i'm afraid. we all know that family quarrels are the worst. it reminds me to wonder why antioch was such an important center in the early church, beyond its importance as a market city at the cross roads of the empire. i suspect that the church at antioch fulfilled jesus' prayer in the 17th chapter of the gospel according to john, which condlues with "i have made your name known to them and will continue to make it known, so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and so that i may be in them." (17:26, njb). may we continue to fulfill this prayer, so that the words of the hymn, they will know that we are christians by our love, may be true.

fear not, it's wednesday

and on wednesdays jeff and josh and sometimes bradley and assorted others get together to get together, and we tell people we are a reading group reading something big and spiritual. we started to read the philokalia but that was too big so we moved to the way of the pilgrim which was wonderful but not big enough for us to keep getting together every week for as long as we wanted, so we started reading and discussing the psalms, but jeff throught that was too weird, so we settled for slowly exploring the gospels, as if they were not very big and very weird.

and this morning as usual, jeff brought up the really engaging question/point of entry for being together: fear. he shared a dream in which he kept going down a long hall and opening doors, just with the power of his mind, but then he got to one he was afraid to open, because he knew it was the door behind which was god, and that was good and scary.

jeff is an unusually honest person: when i reach that point, i usually make "excuses in excuses in sin," as psalm 140 reminds me in the septuagint.

all of this was within the context of our discussing the story in the fifth chapter of mark in which a woman was healed of her haemorrage by touching the clothes of jesus, "after [years of} long and painful treatment under various doctors." then jesus and the people arrive at the house of the president of the synagogue whose daughter is presumed dead, and he says, "do not be afraid, only have faith." another, i think better translation, is "do not be afaid, only have trust."

the good news (the gospel) in the words of jesus is that the kingdom of god is at hand. it is the work of the deceiver (satan) which makes us wonder whether we are going to hell when we did. fear not. what is behind that door is good. it is god. we are encouraged to enter the kingdom.

you know something's happening, but you don't know what it is, do you, mr. jones?

so i went to seattle, to the church of the apostles for a "learning party" on the emerging church. it was a day well spent, meeting lots of cool folks and hearing parts of their stories and particularly hearing the experiences of cool folks who are trying to be church in a way that is understanded by the people who have grown up on mtv and mp3.

it was the dark times of 1966 when i first conciously noticed something was happening which we have very modernly called "post-modernism." i was a junior in college in chicago, and i put together what i hoped would be a conversation to try to understand what this thing was that we were entering, but none of us could really do anything more than notice that we were noticing something, but what it was we couldn't tell.

after saturday i'm still not too sure we have begun to grasp the magnitude of the shift. we were told proudly, adamantly, by a very gifted "abbess" that they of course did not use books in their worship. but of course lap-tops were there, and since they're just the modern--oops, post-modern--cool thing that has replaced books which were the cool thing of the 15th century, i'm not sure we were not just fish not noticing the water.

this morning i started reading the philokalia, and somehow the words of the introduction, by g.e.h. palmer, philip sherrard, and kallistos ware, about "the contemporary reader" seem particularly appropriate: ". . . he may be led . . . to question his own outlook and assumptions and then to modify or even abandon them in the light of the understanding with which he is now confronted. . . . it should be remembered that, however much the external appearances and conditions of the world may change, such changes can never unroot the fundamental potentialities of the human state and of man's relationship with god . . .."

of course we need to speak to our culture. but we need not be overwhelmed by it.

entering the theatre

when i was a young child, back in the previous century, one could enter movie theatres at any time, and stay as long as one wanted. one could therefore come into the ten commandments just as moses were holding his hands up against the red sea and now have any clue that it was moses or what he might be doing dividing all that swirling jello. or one could join john wayne and montgomery cliff's big fight in red river and not have any idea why they loved each other so passionately. one had to stay around for a while, see the whole movie at least until "this is where i came in" to begin to understand what was going one, and for better movies stay for several showings, maybe buy another box of jujubees, to really understand the story.

the liturgy and the church year are like that, too, it occurs to me. dropping into a congregation where someone reads or someones read three passages of scripture, and someone else prays a "collect" or a "megalynarion" can be confusing. but if one stays around for the whole cycle, one not only finds that it makes sense (I'm trying to avoid an awful cliche that it's the greatest story ever told, but that it is a story in which each of us has a leading part, an interactive story that transforms us and leads to transforming the world around us.

one of the church's several new years days is coming up. but one can join the story at any time.

end of the world as we know it

or why tom wright, rem, john dominic crossan, and the international bible society are all in agreement:

all these folks agree, either in song or scholarly writing or on the covers of bibles that it is the end of the world as we know it. but do we feel fine?

visiting several congregations of the church in bellingham recently, i've been struck by the insistance we seem to have to continue the arguments that divided us either from each other or from the world, back when the arguments meant something. so the "orthodox" christians are still insisting on their orthodoxy as trinitarians, but in words which were meaningful to arians but which are mostly merely quaint to people struggling to understand and to experience the trinity today. the "reformed" christians are still arguing against a midaeval understanding of "the mass" as sacrifice which is certainly no longer held by the catholic church, and which is, i am convinced, again merely distracting to those who are sincerely seeking the real presence of christ in their lives but who aren't privy to courses in church history.

so, again and again, let us pray, "lord, have mercy." send us into the world in peace, and give us strength and courage to love and serve you in gladness and singleness of heart. and give us courage to behold the world for which you suffered and died, and speak to it with co-suffering love.

rocky barjonas

it is always a little surprising that the church in her wisdom (allright, i'm being sarcastic here: the church as old men in strange clothes' insecurity) has put so much more attention on peter's declaration that jesus is the messiah that on any of the earlier declarations, often coming from people with less dramatic evidence. remember anna and simeon in luke's gospel? or nathanael's somewhat ironic declaration in john's?

but this week's lectionery gospel (in the revised common lectionery used by most of the parts of the church that speak european languages these days) has what has come to be called "the confession of peter."

i found the discussion at sarah laughed rather insightful on peter's role in the whole process, especially as related to men who consider themselves powerful and who wear clothes proclaiming the same.

stranger in a strange language

"woe is me! for i am undone;" not only "because i am a man of unclean lips; and i dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips . . .," (isaiah 6:5)but because i am a man of often mis-understood lips in a land of misunderstanding.

i bring this up because some of those of us who gather nearly daily to pray the psalms have discovered what seems to us a wonderful translation of the psalms, the psalter according to the seventy, which others of us who gather nearly daily to pray the psalms find just a wee bitte too olde englishe to be understanded.

this microcosmic problem seems to be a reflection of part of what is going on in most of the north american and european church today. my initial reaction was not quite as crass as "get over it," but it was more just "get used to it"--not terribly pastoral. and i justify this attitude by my feeling that a lot of what passes for trying to accomodate to what we so glibly describe as "post-modern" or something is really our saying to people that they have just been dumbed down and we treat them like that, and not as the ikons of god we say we believe they are when we're speaking our sunday best. (my own ikon here is my wonderfully orthodox maternal grandmother, a wesleyan orthodox christian with an eighth-grade education and a very subtle understanding of the word of god as written in the authorized (kjv) translation.

so. given that there is a gap between easy public grasp of some of our words of art, how do we bridge that. it seems to me that in many ways those of us who grew up among the ruins of christiandom (i'm a baby boomer, remember) are the real ones at a disadvantage because it was assumed we understood all the words of the church, and we were a bit embarassed to ask. younger folks don't have to be embarassed.

but we do desperately need to be in conversatio.

dormition of the theotokos/assumption of the b.v.m.

today, the 15th of august, is a feast the recognition of which as church dogma by pius xii karl jung called the most important event in western religion since the reformation.

it is the celebration of mary's entering heaven. the church in the east and in the west have slightly different understandings of the event, but they share it's centrality to understanding the working out of the incarnation of the second person of the trinity, god the son.

some of us of a more protestant mind-set sometimes have troubles with such a feast, thinking it is about worshipping mary, or making her part of or another side of the holy trinity.

kevin bond at st. paul's episcopal parish preached a wonderfully comprehensive and evangelical sermon about the unique role of mary as the theotokos, the bearer of god, yesterday, in which he expressed very clearly the teaching of the orthodox church about the uniqueness of mary: it's about the nature of her son; and in which he also made clear the ways we are called to be like her, bearer's of the good news about her son; and in which he pointedly reminded us of her words at the beginning of his public ministry, recorded in john's account of the wedding at cana: "whatever he says, do."

readings for the feast:
morning prayer: psalms 113, 115; 1 samuel 2:1-1; john 2:1-10
evening prayer: psalm 45; jeremian 31:1-14; john 19:23-27
liturgy: Isaiah 61:10-11; psalm 34; galatians 4:4-7; luke 1:46-55

arrogance and inclusivity

An old friend of mine with whom i share membership in a study group posed a question that comes up often in different guises: how do we hold to our faith in Jesus as the Messiah and as our Lord without making non-believers feel left-out or belittled or somehow of less value? (Of course, i really do feel that they are left out of some of the most wonderful experiences, which makes for me the question more what do we as followers of Christ experience that others do not?)

But certainly in the present modern or post-modern international-traded world, where anyone with access to a computer can set himself up as some sort of spiritual guru (see, even i have two web sites!), this question becomes one we should be facing more frequently than ever.

How would you answer?

books and community

You may have noticed that i linked Hearts and Minds Bookstore. And if one must buy books, there is no better place, i think. But if one also notice a link to Ron's blog titled "how much is enough," one might wonder whether i really think buying more books is a good thing. It can be, if one shares.

So: before running out and buying more books, check if the Holy Cross Library, a part of Community of the Cross, has it, which you can do by e-mailing me, or see if it's at the Brendan Center, or check the public library, which in Bellingham is quite good, actually.

mary magdalene and community

Last Friday a few of us celebrative types gathered at the Brendan Center to celebrate the feast of the Apostle to the Apostles and inventer of the Easter egg, and to discuss the proper role of women in the contemporary Church.

Mostly we had a good time, ate a few madeleines and some cheese, and enjoyed wonderful music provided by Carol Reed-Jones and the Hildegard singers.

But we also decided that what women have provided and continued to provide, far better than all the old men in strange suits, is a much clearer vision and much more determined formation of community.

Thanks to everyone who came and shared.

mary magdalene and community

Last Friday a few of us celebrative types gathered at the Brendan Center to celebrate the feast of the Apostle to the Apostles and inventer of the Easter egg, and to discuss the proper role of women in the contemporary Church.

Mostly we had a good time, ate a few madeleines and some cheese, and enjoyed wonderful music provided by Carol Reed-Jones and the Hildegard singers.

But we also decided that what women have provided and continued to provide, far better than all the old men in strange suits, is a much clearer vision and much more determined formation of community.

Thanks to everyone who came and shared.

coffee shop trinitarianism

A young friend of mine who is interested in what he calls "theistic understanding of the world," having grown up within the " consumeristic understanding of the world," said to me that he is having a problem: he has read enough C . S. Lewis to know that to be a christian, he must believe in the trinity. My first response to him was, "why would you want to be a christian?" We have had some interesting dialogue following.

But a reflection i have had from this interchange is that most of the people i know who consider themselves practicing christians do not seem to believe in the trinity. God for them is Big Daddy in the Sky with all the goodies. The Son is not God the Son but the son of God, as often as not a sort of cosmic whipping boy, willing to run interference for us at our asking. The Holy Spirit is a sort of heavy breathing, not the Lord and Giver of Life, but something that proceeds from the Father the same way exhaling does. Certainly not the sort of equal Persons of the creeds and of the Ruvelev icon.

As i talk to people about the Trinity, i try to describe the experience the early Messianists had, nearly all jews by birth or baptism, who were accustomed to beginning their day with the shema: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One." It was their profound experience of the holiness of Yeshua which led them to the God-talk (theology) that resulted after more than 400 years, in what has become for most of us today, I'm afraid, the doctrine of the Trinity.

But how do we really experience the Holy One in Three Persons? What is the praxis of the Trinity?

best psalm

(allright: the field is crowded; but for me this little jewel is very big:)

Yahweh, my heart is not haughty,
I do not set my sights too high.
I have taken no part in great affairs,
in wonders beyond my scope.
No, I hold myself in quiet and silence,
like a little child in its mother's arms,
like a little child, so I keep myself.
Let Israel hope in Yahweh
henceforth and for ever.

the cappadocians and we neos

When the Byzantine Empire was the last word in new world orders, a group of family and friends in worked to forge a language to express their understanding of what the Holy One was doing in their lives in Christ, through the Holy Spirit. Makrina, her brothers Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil's close friend Gregory of Nazianzus as much as any group of believers set the tone for how the faith would be discussed as it spread beyond the area of Jerusalem and Judea and into the whole world.

There is a new world order in the making now, and it is exciting that there is a large group of family and friends trying to find new words to express their experience of the Holy One in their lives.

Even more important than new words is how to act in response to our experiences. Hopefully this blog will be a part of the conversation to lead us to new acts of today's apostles.