Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of my parish’s first Divine Liturgy in our purpose-built building. I have a handy way of remembering the date.
Two living churches
In England, the two kinds of churches I do still see filling appear rather different. In a local baptist church the pews are crammed with young families having powerful, intimate encounters with their faith. Something immediate is being accommodated. I remember seeing a guy fresh from a building site, dusty with a high viz jacket. Family with him, arms outstretched, tears on his cheeks. It would bring a lump to your throat.
Then I see my own parish, hushed and seemingly antique, but with more young people than ever before. In both I see people who look spiritually fed. Then out there in the wider audit of emptying churches there seems often to be a sense of weariness, or simple lack of oomph. There will be exceptions to this last sentence, I have no sneer in writing it. I sometimes go sit in those congregations simply out of love for the yards they’ve put in as parishioners. Solidarity, a hand held across the fence to a fellow worker bee.
It seems, from a distance, the two churches are very different, and I am well aware of the theological wrestles that create distance. What I don’t go along with is the notion that one is completely improvisational and unencumbered by tradition, and the other set-and-only-set in a kind of endless, ancient theatre or lifeless ceremony. Dame Mary Douglas, a cultural anthropologist, encapsulates something she calls the ‘anti-ritualist’ approach:
The confirmed anti-ritualist mistrusts external expression. He values a man’s inner convictions. Spontaneous speech that flows from the heart, unpremeditated, irregular in form, even somewhat incoherent, is good because it bears witness to the speaker’s real intentions.
I think actually, ritual is inevitable, even when tacit. We are ceremony people, no matter how spontaneous we think we may be. There will be a loved formula, a linguistic groove long established, a shared initiatory language in common for any community that lasts. It’s about the dynamic counterpoints of tradition and innovation. We may have done away with the candles, offerings and holy smoke, but simply to feel safe repetition will always have value.
Martin Shaw. I finally was able to begin reading Rituals of Spontaneity, which (if I’m not sorely mistaken) elaborates the folly of Christians dispensing with ritual.
Puritan Phobia
The Puritans quickly developed a phobia about ritual, going so far as to resist “rote” recitation of the Lord’s Prayer:
Henry’s Method culminates with his most fascinating phrase-collection of all, “A Paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer, in Scripture Expressions.” Christ’s own form of prayer given to his disciples had long been a thorn in Puritans’ sides, to be plucked out by being understood as only a general guideline. Henry’s strategy is to neutralize the prayer’s form in a pages of verses elaborating on the one phrase “Our Father, who art in similar method; he provides, for instance, an amazing two and a half Heaven” (MP, 163-65), a general topos, he says, from which begins. Many editions of the Method were printed as Henry intended, interleaved with one blank page between each printed one, to enable the reader to pen in his own collection of phrases to supplement Henry’s own. Like Bunyan’s demand for scrupulous sincerity, Henry’s lists and blank pages, figures of accumulation and abstraction, combine literally to efface the Lord’s Prayer and erase it from Dissenting practice.
Between the ledgerlike pages of Henry’s collected phrases and the blank sheets for scribbled lists of readers’ personal prayer phrases, one senses of variety of fears: that without this careful accounting, the business might go bankrupt, that in the copious, nervous quoting from God’s word to talk and talk and talk to God, God might not listen or respond at all.
Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity
Best listicle ever?
I have three lists of Maxims or such that I review regularly. This one, which I think was embedded in a longer blog post, seems more precious (in the good sense, not the snarky sense) every time I read it:
- First, live as though in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated into the world and the outcome of history has already been determined. (Quit worrying)
- Second, love people as the very image of God and resist the temptation to improve them.
- Third, refuse to make economics the basis of your life. Your job is not even of secondary importance.
- Fourth, quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.
- Fifth, learn to love your enemies. God did not place them in the world for us to fix or eliminate. If possible, refrain from violence.
- Sixth, raise the taking of human life to a matter of prime importance and refuse to accept violence as a means to peace. Every single life is a vast and irreplaceable treasure.
- Seventh, cultivate contentment rather than pleasure. It will help you consume less and free you from slavery to your economic masters.
- Eighth, as much as possible, think small. You are not in charge of the world. Love what is local, at hand, personal, intimate, unique, and natural. It’s a preference that matters.
- Ninth, learn another language. Very few things are better at teaching you about who you are not.
- Tenth, be thankful for everything, remembering that the world we live in and everything in it belongs to God.
A catholic vision of Christian faith
When I first opened A Severe Mercy nearly 20 years ago I had needed a vision of Christian faith that was unapologetically devoted to Christian doctrine without being materialistic, more American than Christian, and completely uprooted from history. Up to that point, the expressions of Christianity I had encountered were simply different forms of sectarian faith—a vapid progressivism or a parochial and narrow fundamentalism. Vanauken gave me catholicity ….
Jake Meador (hyperlink added)
Delusion
Christians can give their bodies over to the nation-state while continuing to express in textual terms that worship belongs to God alone.
William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry
Flipping the Script
On regular Christian campuses, there “are higher expectations for presidents than members of the faculty, and members of the faculty live with greater expectations than students,” noted religious-liberty activist David French, writing at The Dispatch. “Liberty flipped this script. The president lived life with greater freedom than his students or his faculty. The message sent was distinctly unbiblical – that some Christian leaders can discard integrity provided their other qualifications, from family name to fund-raising prowess, provided sufficient additional benefit.”
Terry Mattingly, What Next for Liberty University? Press Should Watch Future Campus Worship Services (September 2020)
Know-it-alls
In practical terms, the Reformed commitment to the theological significance of everyday life led to the development of something like Protestant metaphysics, Protestant epistemology, Protestant science, Protestant politics, Protestant social and economic theory, Protestant art, and Protestant poetics.19 The development of these Reformed spheres of intellectual and cultural activity never occurred without substantial influence from sources not specifically religious. In Switzerland, the southern German regions, Hungary, Holland, and the British Isles, the Reformed perspective could be used to mask economic or political aggression. More commonly, it emerged from a complicated mix of sacred and secular motives. Yet wherever sufficient Reformed strength existed, the assumption also existed that biblical Christianity had something fairly definite to say about everything.
Mark A. Noll, America’s God
Theology isn’t all deductive
Catholics find it impossible to theologize without deductive reasoning—a characteristic shared by virtually all Western Christians…
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 