"my ways are not your ways, says the lord:" thoughts in the night about the feast of st. gregory the great

my earliest introduction to the church bigger than the enlightenment congregationalism of walnut street baptist, a severely georgian building filled with the hymns of watts and, at least in the evenings or wednesdays, of crosby, was in the modestly romanesque blessed sacrament (roman catholic) church. at walnut street the choir entertained us with anthems and contatas by handel and stainer, standing up front behind the pulpit and in front of the baptistry, all the while attired in robes that coordinated well with the adam green walls. at blessed sacrament the choir was invisible, but filled the dark red brick space with ethereal, heavenly, music that wounds its way amongst the plaster virgin and attendent saints to join the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven in one great hymn of unending praise.

i knew this was holy music because on the christmas eves i attended midnight mass at blessed sacrament, snow would be falling when we left in obedience to "ite. missa est. alleluia."

that music was of course gregorian chant, not written by pope st. gregory the great (ca. 540-604) but developed and systemized and encouraged by him.


these days neither gregorian chant nor gregory the man are so widely appreciated as they were from the time he, among other achievements, saved rome from the lombards, until my childhood, a period of thirteen and a half centuries.

it is about this change of attitude towards gregory that is so much of and so representative of our "modern thought" that occupies my meditation in the night watches early in the morning of his feast.

he really did exhibit in his own life the humility that let him honestly call himself the servant of the servants of god, yet he exercised the office of the roman papacy in a way that tenaciously upheld the primacy of the roman see. he did this largely because he had been an ambassador, the apocrisiarius, of pelagius ii to constantinople and was convinced that the eastern empire was hopelessly decadent.

he was very successful in strengthening the church in spain, baul, and north italy. he encouraged the spread of benedictine monasticism. he was most successful in the conversion of the english, sending augustine with forty monks from his own monastery.

his writing was extremely influential, ranging from topics such as his "liber regulae pastoralis," which described his vision of the pastoral life of a bishop, the pastor of souls, to the organization of the entire roman catholic order and worship, which in part continues even after vatican ii.

i cannot imagine a contemporary movie about gregory which would not introduce the necessary jungian, neo-gnostic darkside which we would assume for the pontiff. we just do not make movies with heroic early medaeval popes. we are so profoundly anti-nomian that the world "regulae"--rules--of pastoring is an immediate turn off.

yet gregory was only taking seriously what jesus had said. "no one can serve two masters," and he recognized thirteen centuries before dylan that "everybody has to serve someone."

we often, it seems, pretend that this is not true. few of us any more pray each day the "collect for peace" from gregory's sacramentory (no. 1345), describing god as the "author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom." (the original latin is more vivid and terse: "whom to know is to live, whom to serve is to reign.:)

rather we prefer what we sometimes call, oxymoronically, "chaos theory." after all, it releaves us from any nagging feeling that we should pick up our bedroom. but, to continue with the words of gregory's collects, we are left not only at the merch of "our unruly wills," (no. 1120), but abandoned to the "fear of any adversaries."

so i wonder, as i lie fearlessly and snugly in my bed this cold lenten morning (lent may mean spring, but it's a mostly cold spring so far), whether i have any of gregory's many writings. i find i have only this one lenten hymn, no longer set to gregorian chant:

"O Kind Creator, bow thine ear
to mark the cry, to know the tear
before thy throne of mercy spent
in this thy holy fast of Lent.

Our hearts are open, Lord, to thee:
thou knowest our infirmity;
pour out on all who seek thy face
abundance of thy pardoning grace.

Our sins are many, this we know;
spare us, good Lord, thy mercy show;
and for the honor of thy name
our fainting souls to life reclaim.

Give us the self-control that springs
from discipline of outward things,
that fasting inward secretly
the soul may purely dwell with thee.

We pray thee, Holy Trinity,
one God, unchanging Unity,
that we from this our abstinence
may reap the fruits of penitence."


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Words: attributed to Gregory the Great, sixth century;
trans. Thomas Alexander Lacey, 1906

9 march: the feast of st. gregory of nyssa

the first reading for the synaxis of st. gregory in the western rite:

wisdom 7:22-2822

for wisdom, which is the worker of all things, taught me: for in her is an understanding spirit holy, one only, manifold, subtil, lively, clear, undefiled, plain, not subject to hurt, loving the thing that is good quick, which cannot be letted, ready to do good, kind to man, steadfast, sure, free from care, having all power, overseeing all things, and going through all understanding, pure, and most subtil, spirits. for wisdom is more moving than any motion: she passeth and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness. for she is the breath of the power of god, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the almighty: therefore can no defiled thing fall into her. for she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of god, and the image of his goodness. and being but one, she can do all things: and remaining in herself, she maketh all things new: and in all ages entering into holy souls, she maketh them friends of god, and prophets. for god loveth none but him that dwelleth with wisdom.

9 march: song of two saints

awakened by moonlight, i boil water, dress, pulling my hood over my cap and my mantle over both, carrying my coffee through the crunch of last fall's needles to my vantage point on the edge of the void, beneath the tall pines. the not-quite-full moon on this not-quite-spring not-quite morning gives not quite enough light to see the not-quite-blooming forsythia to my right, but i imagine at least that i feel the yellow promises.

i sit here with the moon's brightness and the pines' darkness,trying to sing a songs of the saints of god. i want it to be a simple song, but the saints are thomas acquinas and gregory of nyssa, and i think it may be all day long before i can quite harmonize them, if at all.

thinking of them takes me back forty-four years to the fall i acknowledged myself a wise fool. that semester was plato's. yes. sign me up. i want to be a philosopher king. let me out of this cave. spring brought aristotle, whom i found to be a bit pedantic. the following year was to have been thomas acquinas, but the thomas-professor went off to yale, and i suppose found fame, while i went off to roosevelt and such second lights as ernst cassirer and teilhard de chardin and obscurantism. i never read st. thomas.

ah, but gregory of nyssa: his works, some of them anyway, i have read. sign me up. i want to see the world his way. cappadocia may be a land of caves, but gregory saw the light. his moses is no charlston heston, projected into the cave by phantoms, climbing a fake mountain with a fake beard as edgar robinson shows aaron how to make a molten calf. gregory's moses shines in the pure light of mount tabor.

somehow i was able to separate thomas whom i knew as the angelic poet of pange linguam and verbum supernum from the doctor of the summa. but i sat under the pine trees this morning after having read, well, not st. thomas on his feast yesterday, but chesterton's dumb ox biography of acqinas, and i was reminded both that, as plato had recognized, kings may pretend to be philosophers, but philosophers do not want to be kings, and that the methods of the enemy are subtle and pervasive even when simple: julius caesar has taught well; divide and conquer. i am easily carried along by the prejudices of my ignorant times even as i flatter myself that i work against them.

i find a friend who is opposed to private confession caught up in the lutheran heresy because her reason to reject that sacrament is that "roman catholics do it," but i never see past the log in my eye that keeps me from reading thomas because i have swallowed the more respectable heresy of hegelianism, never even tasting its bitterness amongst the sugars of modernism.

i was reminded of my dismissal of acquinas' thought as pedantic aristotelianism in a wonderful way this morning. pedantic is, after all, a sort of pun, combining the pedestrianism of walking with the pediatrics of childhood. the moon's brilliance was obscured by clouds as that lesser light approached the horizon. then, i could see more stars, stars which i wanted to place in constellations, but could not because of the pine trees. then, in the great darkness before the dawn, i began to hear the foot-fall, the pedantry, of a doe and her fawns browsing on the forest flood. i could even see ever so slightly the forms of the forsythia blossoms. the pines lost what chesterton might call, even if i do think wrongly, their byzantine flatness.

how easy it is not to see the pine trees for the stars.

2 march: the feast of st. chad

there is snow under the pine trees this morning, reminding me of the snowy morning by the pine tree at amelia white park in santa fe eighteen years ago when i took chad as my patron in my journey with christ. chad the barefoot walker who recognized that fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom.

my faithfulness in that journey has been far from consistent. i have again and again excused myself for my faltering inconsistancy by the ease with which i can find fault with the church. there must, i tell myself, be a better way. i want the church to be one, to be holy, to be catholic, to be apostolic. when i fail to see her so, i like john the forerunner ask, should i look somewhere else.

one year i took a leave from my duties in the parish to "explore native american spirituality." i was living in santa fe at the time, where there actually is some survival of the old indigenous ways. i also returned to arkansas to try to find what had been the "beliefs" of the peoples indigenous to my natal soil before they had been driven out by my ancesters. i didn't find much, and yet i found enough.

the local religions were just that, local. they were many. they were natural, not holy, and entirely unconcerned about including others. despite what rich white women in navajo skirts and pawn silver said about the wonders of praying for "all my relations," all those relations were one's own family tree. the hopi might dance for the good of the whole world, but there was no place for a european in the dance, or a syrian, as the syrian church had made european bishops, and the european bishops had made navajo bishops. "native spirituality" was many, natural, local, and ethnic. i returned to the church, and found myself much to my surprise being made missionary bishop to the ozarks. (i had only enquired about how to make the order of st. chad canonically independent of new mexico.)

so, for a while, i was faithful again, returning to arkansas, even if it were to jonesboro rather than to fayetteville, trying to lead a life remarkably different enough from the world that people would ask me, what gives, when i could tell them of the faith "once delivered to the apostles."

my next crisis, once again, was with that collection, assortment really, of buildings ranging from repulsively hideous to sublimely beautiful, with signs out front saying "church." i had no interest in starting another one, but i felt that i should find them, if not on the same page as i, at least in the same book. then came the 2000 "election," in which many christians professed their faith in george w. bush as their lord and saviour, and even worse, almost non called that action heresy. there would follow the events that have come to be known as 9/11, and the cathedral church of sts. peter and paul, both of which were martyred by the empire, the more aptly named national cathedral, came to the service of those who said "let us bomb our enemies back into the stone age," a phrase for which i have looked without success in my strong's concordance. they rolled out creaky old billy graham, the kindest and gentlest of those who present the gospel as a "get out of hell free card." the apostate empire was singing "onward, christian soldiers," and from building after building signed "church" came the great amen.

i cried. in my tears i thought, there must be something better. as i was packing to return to new mexico, through my tears i read an old friend's name on the return address of a letter that arrived on the last day i was in jonesboro, a friend from the old parish in santa fe who then lived in seattle. come, he said. you'll like it here: ocean; mountains. this was my introduction to the none-zone.

the none-zone, western oregon and washington, is the area where most people, if asked their religious preference, say none. i bought a kayak and started exploring. people would ask, what do you do? i would say, i'm looking for clues. people pretended to understand. bellingham, home of western washington university, became my home port. there i met some brilliant young students of arts and sciences. if anyone had a clue, i thought, they might. they were brilliant but clueless, sacrificing four years of their lives in residence at an institution which taught that there were no real clues. many of them would sacrifice more years paying off student loans. i quickly realized that "the faith delivered to the apostles" is as good as it gets, is indeed as good as it needs to be. the problem is that we resist receiving it.

once again i resisted "starting a church," although i danced around the idea. i had a congregation of sorts: students who came to my tent in the night like nichodemus, students i catechized and baptized and buried, who were intrigued by jesus and a strange old man they thought might look like jesus--jesus if he and mary magadalen had really been married and had become grand parents. but mostly, they did not join me on sunday mornings at the church where i worshipped. (a few did, but the church was not very welcoming to them, nor did they understand why i would waste my time there.)

the worst moment came one easter morning, soon after the death of tim, a 29-year-old graduate of western washington. his was the first death, the first, funeral, many of these young people had known. in my pew sat nine kids who had known tim. they had been moved by the faith expressed during tim's death and wake and funeral, and they wanted to see where i worshipped. i was horrified. the "service" was one of those laurence-welk-show type of things so common with protestants these days: lots of special music that excluded the congregation. no silence. no room for the holy. and the most anti-resurrection sermon i had ever heard. and i was stuck. afterwards, i couldn't say, no this isn't church, this isn't easter. there was a big sign in front of this big building with stained glass windows claiming church. the brass band had played special easter music.

the next sunday i started worshipping at st. paul's episcopal church. it was two miles further from my house, and up a long hill, but at the easter vigil there had been a real proclamation of the resurrection, and the gathered people of god had been encouraged to do their work, to worship. so for the next several years in bellingham, without meaning to, i became a casual missionary for the episcopal church. as one young man, raised mostly methodist, who had asked, but where do you worship, dale, a young man, now exploring priesthood in the episcopal church, says, "in my church we worship the way christians have for 2,000 years. i pray that there might be more churches like st. paul's.

but now i am back in the ozarks, back to the place i was sent 14 years ago, on a morning with snow under the pines once again. the pine underneath which i took my first vows of obedience, poverty, stability, and chastity, has been cut down. in its place is an ugly statue. that's it in the picture above. one that statue is plaque that i can only paraphrase: be careful what you do here. simple acts can have great consequences. i came back to the ozarks on what i thought to be a retreat, to spend some time in silence, listening to the wind words. ah, that can be a dangerous thing to do.

on this second day of march, the feast of st. chad, bishop of mercia. i find myself once more hoist by my own petar. if find the wind words saying, inconveniently at this time when once again there is no king in israel, albeit the new israel, and every man does as he pleases, to return to the faith that has been given to us by the apsotles, to call us to receive it. alas, this morning's matins reading for a patron saint who is a bishop is from the tenth chapter of the gospel according to matthew: go to the lost sheep of the house of israel. so, i pray this morning, under the tall pines among which i know dwell, for the grace to be cunning as serpents and yet as harmless as doves. amen.