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.