Partying Like Mary Magdalene

I am in the middle of Glennon Melton's Carry on Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed. The book is a series of personal essays by a "mommy blogger" with the kind of past that respectable suburban mommies sometimes have but do not talk about in public.

The strength of the work is that it is a public examination of the author's soul. Yes, she tells her "conversion story." But she also talks frankly about the struggles she has with parenting, marriage, and friendship. She is converting every day, just the way I should. Melton is a recovering alcoholic, drug user, and bulimic, so you almost could imagine subtitling this work, "The Christian Life: One Day at a Time."

Since we are late in the octave of Mary Magdalene, I will point out Melton's reading of last Sunday's Gospel. I doubt Melton is familiar with the Jesuit technique of lectio divina, but she knows to how to use it. She sees herself in Martha and specifically in Martha's anxiety about hospitality (or as Melton renders it, "hostressing": "And Martha is still in the kitchen grabbing her hubby's shoulders and yelling, 'WHAT DO GODS AND DISCIPLES EAT?'"

Melton reads this story by asking some questions, "Is it possible that hospitality is not about perfect food or fancy furniture? Could the better part of hospitality be listening? If you can't do both, could the better part be focusing on your guest instead of trying to impress or even feed him? Could the better place be the family room, at the foot of your guest, instead of tucked away in the kitchen? Maybe."

She responds to the Gospel by inviting her best friends to a party where she chooses the better part, like Mary Magdalene. She insists everyone comes in their pajamas, bringing whatever they want to eat, whatever they want to drink, whatever they want to drink out of, and something on which to sit. And Melton then sits on the floor at their feet and listens.   

We Believe In The God Who Arrives

I found this observation from Fr. Charles OFM Cap. to pair well with the passage from William James quoted by A Thinking Reed

A merely human religiosity can see prayer as an addressing of ourselves to a deity somewhere up in the sky, either literally or in some rarefied sky more palatable to persons imbued with modern science. [...] From the call of Abraham to the Resurrection appearances, Christian faith speaks of a God who arrives, who is adventitious. He is not a supreme being who must be pulled down from the sky or a cthonic power that must be conjured up from the netherworld. Rather, he is a Presence discovered, sometimes as a surprise, as with Abraham and the three men, or simply recognized precisely when he calls us by name, as with the Risen Lord and Mary Magdalene. Prayer and adoration, then, as the postures that make us disciples of Jesus Christ, are acts of hospitality, of graciously receiving the Presence of God as he arrives in the particular circumstances of our days.

Theosis Democratike or the New Holiness Part 4: Community Amidst the Chaos

If you've been reading this series, your first question will be: where's Part 3? It's coming, perhaps some time in the fall. I thought I'd talk today about community.

Fr. Cramer linked to this post on Facebook today. This week's Gospel pushed people to think in a certain direction, I think. The sermon I heard on Sunday emphasized, "just showing up an hour per week for Sunday worship."

I have two immediate replies to this kind of thing that somewhat contradict one another. First, I think, "Wow, look at our low expectations!"

Second, I think, "How fortunate I am to have a free Sunday morning free on which to worship. I know many young Christians who are (right now) cooking meals for the aged in residential care, opening the local big box store, or dressing in Colonial garb for a hot day taking tickets. We're not just missing the people who are sailing or sleeping late."

I can understand the anxiety of the preacher. Down to one service in the summer, we've lost a good portion of attendees from our later service. The parish budget has been impacted by the deaths of several pledge units, and summer absenteeism cuts into cash flow.

In other words, I hear overt concern about the spiritual welfare of those who are missing, but I sense in discussions of Average Sunday Attendance and summer/necrological pledge deficits that the interest is financial.

I don't think this paradigm can last. That is, I don't think we can center a particular community or Christian community in general around Sunday morning worship and Coffee Hour. There is something about that institution which is particularly tied to expectations about class, labor, and leisure that no longer hold.

Ultimately, our model of church comes from a tradition of State compulsion and social pressure. It cannot be sustained in an era when both have faded away. Moreover, whether technology outpaces the decay of ecology or vice versa, we will need community that saturates our lives more than a single act of common weekly worship or fellowship. Either the balance will favor Kunstler, and we will need to make the world once more by hand, or Kurzweil is right, and we will lose all sense of our hands. In either case, we will need one another in a way that cannot be sustained by a 2-3 hour mass meeting that many of us cannot manage to attend. Indeed, we need one another in that way now.

The communities that will be functional in the future still may meet on Sunday morning. We still do organize our society somewhat after the rhythm of an era dominated by those who hallowed "the first day of the week." The leadership of the community may commit to that worship. But the church will not only meet then. Small groups will meet throughout the week to meet, talk, study, perhaps serve the church and the world, share a meal, and pray in common. Many may never attend a Sunday service other than perhaps on Easter. Once in a while, a priest may come to teach, hear confessions, and make Eucharist.

And that will be it.    

A Brief Note on Sex (Even Just the Heterosexual Kind)

In May, I remember reading with joy and anguish what Elizabeth Smart had to say at an event about human trafficking (one of the great moral scourges of our time),

"Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, saying she was raised in a religious household and recalled a school teacher who spoke once about abstinence and compared sex to chewing gum. 

"'I thought, "Oh, my gosh, I'm that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away." And that's how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value,' Smart said. 'Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.'

"Smart says children should be educated that "you will always have value and nothing can change that."

For a decade or so, I have been anxious that the innovations in the Episcopal Church with respect to GLBT inclusion have been impoverishing what and how we teach about sex everyone, gay or straight. At the same time, I found both Roman Catholic and evangelical teaching on sex made me uncomfortable.

Just now, I realized why. I have a visceral objection to any connection between sex and a commercial transaction. And a discourse that makes virginity or sexual interactions of any kind into either a gift (a common Roman Catholic view) or a consumer product (like gum) troubles me.

Sex is certainly not something to be held in dishonor. Medieval preachers often understood marriage to be a monastic order, but a very special one, ordained by God Himself. Sex and its direct connection to parenthood is a way we can experience in the body the way God relates within Himself and with us. The mystery may be imperfectly participated in by defect of body or soul, and God through Christ and the leading of the Church by the Holy Spirit has opened up to us other ways to experience the mystery, but "it was not that way from the beginning." Marriage's place is primal but not necessarily one of primacy. 

For most of the Church's history, sex has been a unique part of the charism of marriage. And if Episcopalians are going to be a witness for the wondrous estates of the gays and lesbians in the Body of Christ, we need to be clear about this. To adopt a medieval view, fornication is bad in two ways: (1) it risks children not being raised by their natural parents, which is the ideal; and (2) it divorces something temporal from the spiritual context in which it is meant to be experienced. Point (2) is still very much valid, no matter how we take point (1).

When I blanche at relations between sex and commerce, I see the explicit divorce of the temporal thing (something done in the body) from its spiritual component (God and the virtues) so clearly, because the commercial exchange makes me see that the entire interaction is temporal. The difference is one of degree, not form. 

Now, it's also possible for sex to have a bad spiritual component, which should be discussed, but I think differs from "simple" fornication. The medieval theologians, whatever their flaws, recognized fornication as a species of lust. And as early as Augustine, it was recognized that manipulation, disrespect for liberty and autonomy, and exploitative self-regard was a species of lust: libido dominandi (the lust for mastery).

Which is all to say that any teaching on fornication is pretty ironic if it's comparing fornicators to used chewing gum, a self-gift that is given or exchanged, or any temporality. Sex is a state into which we enter, not an exchange relation. And thus, if we are uncomfortable with practices that seem like the buying and selling of husbands and wives, we should reflect whether it is simony: what Simon Magus did when he tried to buy the Holy Spirit from the Apostles with silver.

The only way I have been able to see sex as a temporality is to compare it to a wedding ring. It comes to you as a gift. You keep it safe. It merely symbolizes your relationship, so as long as the relationship exists, no one would fault you for having it replaced if it were lost. And you would only sell it as an act of desperation. It's not the best analogy.

And when the groom used to give the bride a ring (men didn't wear wedding rings in the 17th century?), the 1662 Book of Common Prayer has him say, "WITH this Ring I thee wed, with my Body I thee worship, and with all my worldly Goods I thee endow: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

The ring is thus a symbol of sexual intimacy with both temporal and spiritual consequences ("my Body I thee worship") and of endowment with temporalities ("all my worldly Goods I thee endow"). The only way marriage avoids participating in the vices that underlie fornication and simony is the total mutual commitment of persons and property in the company of God. I think the totality of the implied economic exchange is one way married people can participate in the evangelical counsel of poverty.

However, the spiritual and temporal components of one's sexuality cannot be lost. For too long, humans in western civilization turned virginity into an asset. This thinking still pollutes most Christian teaching about sex. So let's think about it a different way.

Jesus said, "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man" (Matthew 15:11) and to explain this (the Pharisees saw the stern critique immediately) He also said, "Do not you yet understand, that whatever enters in at the mouth goes into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashed hands defiles not a man" (Matthew 15:17-20).

I don't think Jesus is just talking about food. I think he is talking about everything we do in the body. Defilement for his audience meant sexual impurity as much as it did eating non-kosher food. And he emphasizes this, not by talking about the vices of our heart, but by saying that what his audience considered gross violations of the Law came from the heart. 

So in the classic tale of evangelical or Roman Catholic advice books, when some poor sweet innocent young Christian has slept with a man who breaks off the relationship and she feels like she's lost something, the Gospel teaching is that no transaction has taken place. What she (or he) feels is the conviction that her heart has been revealed: that something in herself has gone astray. 

Repeated, unexamined behavior in this way can change us physically and spiritually. Unplanned pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease is a risk, especially when you get in a situation where you are having sex but not talking about it outside of having sex. Sex can be addictive, which can lead us astray to get our fix. And worse yet, in cases of rape and sexual abuse like that of Elizabeth Smart, we are not culpable for those changes, but they may happen anyway.

The Good News is that our failures in sex can be remedied like our failures in every area of life, because they proceed from the same set of weaknesses. Victims of abuse need to be pointed to their intrinsic worth and God's love for them by the deepest love those who love them can muster. 

The rest of us need to use our failures as an opportunity to reflect and turn once more to God. But let's try to lay off analogies in which sex uses us up and spits us out, shall we?

Theosis Democratike or the New Holiness: Part 2

Last time, I promised I'd discuss how to introduce "a vibrant, ordinary, and democratic holiness" to the Episcopal Church and to any other ecclesial context in need of renewal. The solutions I put forth fall under three broad alliterative headings: Catholicity, Catechesis, and Community, and they are, of course, linked. In this part, I will discuss Catholicity: the recovery of catholic practices that aid the spiritual development of the members of Christ's Body.

Catholicity: Rooting and Grounding in God

By catholicity, I do not mean greater orientation to Roman Catholic practice per se. Instead, what I'm advising is the reclamation of three practices central to the pre-schism (pick yours) catholic church: Eucharist, the offices of corporate prayer, and Penance. The end of this reclamation is a church whose members are in a defined and reasonable program of spiritual development.

One critique I have of Thornton's Christian Proficiency is how he talks about Proficient Christians (by which he means those in a defined and reasonable program of spiritual development) as an elite. There's probably some hint of the debate in the Church of England about whether the parish church should minister to the "faithful remnant" or the parish at large. Yet even in Thornton's time, that question was moot. No priest, as Justin Lewis-Anthony implies in his excellent  If You Meet George Herbert on The Road, Kill Him, should be ministering to the parish at large without the help of that "faithful remnant." And that faithful remnant will be poor ministers of grace without Grace working in their lives.

Moreover, a general emphasis on the principles and infrastructure of proficiency will be of immense evangelical benefit. Into our parishes on any given Sunday walk baptized Christians of free church traditions, baptized Roman Catholics, or curious seekers of other kinds. As things stand now, none of these see the formational power of our worship (the Roman Catholics should see but may not have been well catechized.) They see a cultural institution or a political rally. They imagine the people are there for reasons other than religious faith. They might be more impressed if they understood we were trying to work out our salvation in fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12).

About the time I was born, the Episcopal Church began to restore two important catholic practices of spiritual formation at the expense of another. The Eucharist returned to its central place in the life of the Church and a rite of Penance was included in the Book of Common Prayer. The cost was a reduction in emphasis on the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, let alone Noonday Prayer and Compline.

Donald Fairbairn, as I pointed out in a recent post, recommends greater emphasis on the Eucharist in the evangelical church, rightly emphasizing that the Eucharist is the way Christ has ordained for feeding His Body. The diffusion of weekly Eucharist in the Episcopal Church has been an almost unmitigated good. What has gone wrong is that the importance of self-examination has been de-emphasized. The use of "An Exhortation" or the Penitential Rites has fallen mostly into disuse. And one cannot blame Prayer Book revision. Both of those elements were retained in the 1979 BCP and can be used with Rite II as easily as Rite I.

And worse yet, suppose you felt keenly the words of An Exhortation outside of a few valiant Anglo-Catholic parishes, how could you take its counsel?:

"And if, in your preparation, you need help and counsel, then go and open your grief to a discreet and understanding priest, and confess your sins, that you may receive the benefit of absolution, and spiritual counsel and advice; to the removal of scruple and doubt, the assurance of pardon, and the strengthening of your faith."

By the wayside also has fallen the Office. Its use (except in valiant Low Church and High Church parishes) has mostly shrunk to irregular Choral Evensong, to the extent that some younger Episcopalians have been surprised to discover that the Office is possible without the Choir. I've had some success turning younger Episcopalians onto St. Bede's Breviary (the best of a host of sites), but there are also podcasts for those who like to listen to audio during the run or at work.

Some people still like communal Office, though. Moreover, our labor system is no longer controlled by Sabbatarians. We need to offer more services during the week: ferial or feast day. And noonday services may not work either. Lay-led offices may be the solution. Might there be a group of lay people who would like to pray MP or EP with company one day in the week? Could you notify people about cancellations by Twitter? Why, yes you could!

Thornton's "Rule of the Church" also encompasses private prayer (colloquy), in which one talks frankly with God in one's own words. I know I have had much trouble formalizing my practice here, but I have been fortunate to have been exposed to so many different approaches. Thornton's work reminds us that recovering catholic practices means turning to the spiritual disciplines of the past: English or otherwise. I am happy to say that Episcopal clergy are turning to these practices: particularly to those of the Society of Jesus. However, the individual nature of colloquy makes it incumbent on those in charge of Christian education to expose the parish to the diversity of catholic ascetical practice. Something I am sure will stick.

What I have discussed seems daunting. A priest reading this might say, "I can't do all of this." A lay person might say, "I don't know how to do all of this, even if I had the time." In the next part, I will discuss what changes need to be made in Christian Education to make catechesis more efficient for everyone involved. In the following part, I will make some radical proposals about how we might better organize parishes for growth in both numbers and the divine life.