Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Women in Ministry

The United Methodist Church recently celebrated its 50th year of ordaining women. Many other Protestant churches have made similar moves, but still others insist that Scripture shows that while men may be called to ordained ministry, women are not. With help from my dad, I decided to try and further explore the rationale and Scriptural basis for ordaining women.

The most commonly referenced Bible passage (with my apologies for what seems like prooftexting on both sides of this issue but is just an effort at being concise) is 1 Timothy 2:8-15. "I desire, then, that in every place the men should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument; also that the women should dress themselves modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes, but with good works, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God. Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent...Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty." In a way, this is passage is a blessing of the vocation of motherhood, something too often overlooked in today's society. On the other hand, it is a difficult text for women who feel called to the ministry. It seems clear from this excerpt alone, not to mention many other Scriptural references to similar decrees, that women should not be permitted to enter the ministry.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that the Bible was written and its stories and admonitions located in a specific time and place. The Word of God is itself timeless and transcends temporal boundaries, but the Scriptures were put into writing during a time when the dominant culture was a firmly patriarchal society. I don't know any Christians who abstain from eating pork after reading Leviticus, or who shun women as unclean during their menstrual cycle. True, those examples are related more to health concerns in a time before modern medicine, but the point remains: the culture of the ancient Near East plays a key role in determining what is included in Scripture, and what may have been extremely important to the Jews of the Old Testament or the fledgling Christian church may include concerns that had meaning in that time period but not necessarily in ours.

I do not say all this to suggest that we should ignore anything in Scripture that does not seem to fit with modern sensibilities. Much of what Jesus had to say doesn't fit with any sensibility except that of the cross—selling all one's possessions and giving them to the poor, for example (I'm certainly not saying that just because a decree like this is difficult it can be dismissed as irrelevant!). What I mean to say is that it is important not to get bogged down in those things that were specific to the time and place in which the Bible was written at the expense of hearing the heart of the Gospel. Another favorite text, this time on the other side of the debate, is the familiar line from Galatians 3:28: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." This is the heart of the Gospel.

When you look at the example of Jesus and his followers, it is easy to see the ways in which the disciples and their rabbi were countercultural in many ways, not the least of which was their inclusion of women. Luke 8:1-3 reads: "Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources." These were wealthy women of high standing who owned property. They were not along to do the dishes; they were on equal footing with the men present. Another example comes in Romans 16:7, where Paul names Junia (also called Joanna) as an apostle: "Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was." In the book of John, it is a woman who first proclaims (preaches?) the gospel of the resurrection. Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and chooses her as his emissary to his followers (John 20:18): "Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, 'I have seen the Lord'; and she told them that he had said these things to her." What might be considered the first sermon was delivered by a woman.

Check out this piece by Steve Harper, who teaches at Asbury, for another good look at the Methodist practice of ordaining women.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Disturb the Peace (quote)

"You can't claim you're for peace if you're not willing to disturb it."
— Bill Maher

Friday, September 14, 2007

Just Out of Habit

The other night, I told a friend over dinner about some difficulties I've been having and about the ways in which God is working in my life right now. Excited about the vocational developments happening lately, I listed for her all the ways in which I'm engaging my spiritual life and discernment process—attending morning prayer daily, being involved in and leading my campus ministry group, going to my adopted local church, singing in two choirs (one leads a weekly, formal Vespers service, the other is a student gospel choir), taking Eucharist at least once a week, reading the Psalms, working on the undergrad Christian magazine here at Duke. At one point she stopped me and asked, "But are you getting anything out of all this? Are you getting anything out of the sermons you hear or the prayers you say?" I paused and gave her a quizzical look. "Well, yes," I replied, "but that's not the point. It's not about me getting something out of church. It's about me being formed by good habits."

The word "habit" has become a swear word in today's American church. If you go to church just out of habit, that's bad. If you pray just out of habit, your prayers are meaningless. If you engage with other Christians just out of habit, your fellowship is not genuine.

I think this view is contrary to the nature of the Christian life. Habits are not the enemies of faith but are the ways in which we are incorporated into its disciplines and practices. To use a pre-Christian example, Aristotle believed that the root of all ethics was couched in habit. The process of acquiring virtue was one of developing good habits.

In Christianity, we repeat certain prayers, formulas, and rituals to the point that they become habits. Many people these days think that if you say the Lord's Prayer or the Apostle's Creed out of habit, you don't really mean it. But what does it mean to mean it? What does it mean for prayer to be genuine? The key seems to lie in oneself, in the person's intentions and understanding of what they are saying or doing. However, I believe that the true purpose and value of worship lies far beyond any one worshiper and his or her intentions. The beauty of worship is that it is not about us. We should thank God that the validity of our worship does not rest on the sanctity of our intent, because what mortal would stand in judgment of such? However, if we allow the habits of the Christian life to pervade our lives, they will become a part of who we are and prayer can become a sort of divine reflex to serve us when we need it most.

I certainly would not advocate the practice of attending church weekly, saying the prayers by rote, and then leaving Monday through Saturday only to return the following week out of habit. It is important that church leaders instruct their parishioners in the importance and meaning of the practices of worship, prayer, service, and all other aspects of the life of the church. However, to condemn the habitual nature of the Christian life is to say that if you're coming to church just out of habit, you might as well not come at all. This is dangerous thinking. If people go to church expecting to get something out of the sermon or the prayers and then for whatever reason don't connect with what is said from the pulpit on that particular day, they leave disappointed because their needs weren't met, when it was never their needs that mattered (don't get me wrong, people's needs certainly matter in the church, but look at my post "Our Desires Are Too Weak" for a mention of the difference between felt needs and Gospel-preached needs). The times when we don't feel like going to church are often the times when we need most to be in church. We believe in a God on whom we can cast our weariness, our doubts, our boredom, and our pain. Worship is when God meets and redeems us, whether we really want to run into him there or not.

All in all, I think that part of my work in the church will be to redeem the concept of habit. The idea of being formed by disciplines that aren't necessarily under our control isn't a comfortable one for many. However, that is what the Christian life is about—being formed by God, not trying to form ourselves to what we think is genuine or meaningful.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

A Prayer from St. Augustine

O Lord, our God,
Grant us to trust in your overshadowing wings:
Protect us beneath them and bear us up.
You will carry us as little children,
And even to our grey-headed age you will carry us still.
We need not fear to find no home again
Because we have fallen away from it;
While we were absent our home falls not to ruins,
For our home is your eternity. Amen.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Whose Service is Perfect Freedom

At 8:00 a.m. this morning I stood in Goodson Chapel at Duke Divinity School and read from my pocket-sized Book of Common Prayer as a group of students (graduate students—I was the oddball) went through the daily rite of morning prayer. I went twice to morning prayer last week and every day so far this week; I'm hoping to make it a permanent fixture in my daily routine. As I prayed the Venite, the Nunc Dimitis, and the Psalms, I realized just how odd I am among my peers for actually enjoying—and even desperately needing—such a practice. Where for me a discipline like morning prayer is centering, formative, and vital to my spiritual life, to many Christians today it seems...well, boring. Where is the break? What has the church done to make formal worship "boring"?

I suppose I'm a bit of a weirdo when it comes to worship. I read liturgical theology for fun, for crying out loud. Nobody does that. But even though I know that I occupy a different spiritual and intellectual landscape regarding worship than most other people, I still feel a deep sadness anytime someone tells me that such-and-such a church is too boring or too formal. Has worship really become that dull? Or is our culture forming us with expectations that simply do not fit with what worship is all about? (There's another post hidden in here somewhere about habit, which I will address in full later on.)

Some churches really are boring. Eddie Izzard, a fabulous comedian (he's a British transvestite and is wickedly smart), makes a point in one of his routines about how oftentimes Christian worship sounds just plain painful. "There's something phenomenally dreary about Christian singing," he says as he goes on to provide a particularly dreary rendition of "Oh God Our Help in Ages Past." "They're the only people who can sing 'Hallelujah' without feeling." I've certainly been in churches like that (white churches...Izzard makes the distinction clear and revels in the raucousness of the worship of people of African descent), and it hurts, it really does. But somehow that image of dreariness has been projected onto all formal (or even mildly structured!) worship. People feel restrained, as if they are not free to "really" worship (whatever that means).

I thought about this concept of being "free" to worship during one of the collects we prayed from the BCP this morning. It says, "Oh God...whose service is perfect freedom." In serving God, in being bound to him, we are truly free. The notion of being unrestrained and able to do as you please just doesn't jive with the whole concept of forming one's desires to God's will. Maybe this is a problem uniquely my own, but I struggle with prayer and with focusing on worship, so to have a liturgy sanctioned by hundreds of years of practice is not limiting but rather freeing, and deeply so. I love praying the Psalms because through them I am able to make the supplications, lamentations, thanksgivings, and confessions that sit in my heart with no words to set them free. Sometimes I wonder if people even read the Psalms properly anymore. The Psalms make up a prayer book and, to paraphrase Bonhoeffer, when you pray the Psalms you are praying with the whole church and with Christ himself.

I wonder if some people are so averse to ordered, formal worship because individualism and uniqueness are so stressed in today's culture that the thought of being brought into a unified, disciplined practice with others seems undesirable. We all want to do our own thing. The thought of engaging in practices that put you in communion not only with other Christians today but also with Christians who lived and died hundreds of years before now doesn't invoke the kind of awe it once did (and still does for some of us). Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico is one of my favorite places in the world. What overwhelms me in watching the monks perform the daily office, praying seven times a day, chanting the psalms and taking Mass each morning, is that, aside from incorporating things like running water, solar power, and even internet (the monks have an online gift shop and post the daily martyrology on their webpage), their way of life has remained essentially the same for 1500 years. The monks in the desert outside Abiquiu, NM are walking with Saint Benedict himself, a millennium and a half dead. I wonder if there is a way in our post-Enlightenment world to recapture the minds of Christians today in such a way that the thought of being a part of something bigger than themselves is not oppressive or marginalizing but rather liberating and empowering.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Remembering Father Murphy

I can still hear the silverware clinking, the hollow, metallic bang of pots in the kitchen, the occasional sound of decompression as hot air from a stove or oven picked itself up and moved across a room. I can also hear voices, but not like those to which I am accustomed; boisterous men with facial hair that could put them on The Sopranos converse loudly, women with dark hair scold their olive-skinned children, who babble on in the lilting, bouncy tongue of the country in which I had found myself for the past several days. This perfectly Italian trattoria off the main square in Assisi remains with me not only in its sounds, but also in its sights. I can see the appropriately Umbrian, rural decorations creeping across the walls and the bottle of effervescent water (we had asked for “no gas” but had been disappointed upon our waiter’s return) in the center of the table. I can see the cozily crowded restaurant and its entrance, a door that seemed too small for a normal person from either end and required the customer to stoop down as he or she descended the stairs into the family-run eatery, or ascended them out.

Most of all, I can see my father’s face. Thinking back, I remember that this summer he had grown a goatee; my father has been clean-shaven all my life, so this was a novelty, and we had to buy him a small pair of scissors in Assisi with which to trim his facial hair because he wouldn’t stop picking at it. This time I don’t remember the goatee. I do, however, remember his eyes. They are a murky, hazel shade, discolored from their original dark brown by a case of Hepatitis C he had as a young man, and this time, they are shining in an odd way, partly with happiness and partly with tears.

Earlier that day, in one of our rare forays into a nearby internet café, my father had learned that Roland Murphy, his Ph.D. adviser, had passed away. Father Murphy was more than a professor to my dad; he was a mentor and a friend. I can’t remember in any sort of detail many of the stories that my dad told me that night in the trattoria in Assisi. But I do know that he regaled me for several hours with anecdotes about Father Murphy. I was sad to hear that such a good man had died, sad that my father was abroad when it happened and would be unable to attend the funeral, sad that he had no one but his 16-year-old daughter to whom he could reminisce. I felt curious to hear my dad talk about his own life, curious about this moral and scholastic giant to whom my father seemed to owe so much gratitude and affection. I felt confused by my father’s tears, though my dad has never been the image of the stoic, unfeeling patriarch and is in fact a bit of a crybaby. I listened politely, even interestedly, asked a few questions, and let the leftovers of my spaghetti carbonara (my new favorite Italian dish) grow cold as his storytelling stretched on into the night.

That night in Assisi seems so poignant to me now and may in fact have been the most spiritual moment of that trip, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Here I was, essentially on pilgrimage to the place where Saint Francis lived and worked; I had familiarized myself with the streets of the town, this town perched on a hill that seems to float in some ephemeral way. I had attended Mass in the basilica (this was years before I became borderline neurotic about the Eucharist). I had listened to and memorized much of my father’s treasure trove of stories about Saint Francis. I had visited the church of Santa Chiara and had seen the miraculously preserved body of this 13th-century saint and friend of Francis. Later in the trip, when we had moved on to Lithuania, I would have a wonderful moment in a small Franciscan monastery overlooking the Hill of Crosses, which had stained-glass reproductions of the famous frescoes depicting Francis’ life in its sanctuary. But for all the obvious inbreakings of God on that trip, perhaps the most meaningful one was also the most subtle—the experience of talking to my father over pasta, wine, and carbonated water, witnessing how the sad news of the death of a dear friend can elicit the most beautiful, joyful memories of a person’s life.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

A Prayer from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

O God, early in the morning I cry to you.
Help me to pray
And to concentrate my thoughts on you.
I cannot do this alone.
In me there is darkness.
But with you there is light;
I am lonely, but you do not leave me;
I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help;
I am restless, but with you there is peace.
In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;
I do not understand your ways,
But you know the way for me...
Restore me to liberty,
And enable me to live now
That I may answer before you and before me.
Lord, whatever this day may bring,
Your name be praised. Amen.

Monday, September 3, 2007

God's Coming is Unforeseen (quote)

"God's coming is unforeseen, I think, and the reason, if I had to guess, is that if he gave us anything much in the way of advance warning, more often than not we would have made ourselves scarce long before he got there." — Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey

Sunday, September 2, 2007

A Prayer from Teresa of Avila

May nothing move you;
May nothing terrify you;
Everything passes;
God never changes.
Patience be all to you.
Who trusts in God
Shall never be needy.
God alone suffices.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Women in Ministry

The United Methodist Church recently celebrated its 50th year of ordaining women. Many other Protestant churches have made similar moves, but still others insist that Scripture shows that while men may be called to ordained ministry, women are not. With help from my dad, I decided to try and further explore the rationale and Scriptural basis for ordaining women.

The most commonly referenced Bible passage (with my apologies for what seems like prooftexting on both sides of this issue but is just an effort at being concise) is 1 Timothy 2:8-15. "I desire, then, that in every place the men should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument; also that the women should dress themselves modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes, but with good works, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God. Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent...Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty." In a way, this is passage is a blessing of the vocation of motherhood, something too often overlooked in today's society. On the other hand, it is a difficult text for women who feel called to the ministry. It seems clear from this excerpt alone, not to mention many other Scriptural references to similar decrees, that women should not be permitted to enter the ministry.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that the Bible was written and its stories and admonitions located in a specific time and place. The Word of God is itself timeless and transcends temporal boundaries, but the Scriptures were put into writing during a time when the dominant culture was a firmly patriarchal society. I don't know any Christians who abstain from eating pork after reading Leviticus, or who shun women as unclean during their menstrual cycle. True, those examples are related more to health concerns in a time before modern medicine, but the point remains: the culture of the ancient Near East plays a key role in determining what is included in Scripture, and what may have been extremely important to the Jews of the Old Testament or the fledgling Christian church may include concerns that had meaning in that time period but not necessarily in ours.

I do not say all this to suggest that we should ignore anything in Scripture that does not seem to fit with modern sensibilities. Much of what Jesus had to say doesn't fit with any sensibility except that of the cross—selling all one's possessions and giving them to the poor, for example (I'm certainly not saying that just because a decree like this is difficult it can be dismissed as irrelevant!). What I mean to say is that it is important not to get bogged down in those things that were specific to the time and place in which the Bible was written at the expense of hearing the heart of the Gospel. Another favorite text, this time on the other side of the debate, is the familiar line from Galatians 3:28: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." This is the heart of the Gospel.

When you look at the example of Jesus and his followers, it is easy to see the ways in which the disciples and their rabbi were countercultural in many ways, not the least of which was their inclusion of women. Luke 8:1-3 reads: "Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources." These were wealthy women of high standing who owned property. They were not along to do the dishes; they were on equal footing with the men present. Another example comes in Romans 16:7, where Paul names Junia (also called Joanna) as an apostle: "Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was." In the book of John, it is a woman who first proclaims (preaches?) the gospel of the resurrection. Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and chooses her as his emissary to his followers (John 20:18): "Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, 'I have seen the Lord'; and she told them that he had said these things to her." What might be considered the first sermon was delivered by a woman.

Check out this piece by Steve Harper, who teaches at Asbury, for another good look at the Methodist practice of ordaining women.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Disturb the Peace (quote)

"You can't claim you're for peace if you're not willing to disturb it."
— Bill Maher

Friday, September 14, 2007

Just Out of Habit

The other night, I told a friend over dinner about some difficulties I've been having and about the ways in which God is working in my life right now. Excited about the vocational developments happening lately, I listed for her all the ways in which I'm engaging my spiritual life and discernment process—attending morning prayer daily, being involved in and leading my campus ministry group, going to my adopted local church, singing in two choirs (one leads a weekly, formal Vespers service, the other is a student gospel choir), taking Eucharist at least once a week, reading the Psalms, working on the undergrad Christian magazine here at Duke. At one point she stopped me and asked, "But are you getting anything out of all this? Are you getting anything out of the sermons you hear or the prayers you say?" I paused and gave her a quizzical look. "Well, yes," I replied, "but that's not the point. It's not about me getting something out of church. It's about me being formed by good habits."

The word "habit" has become a swear word in today's American church. If you go to church just out of habit, that's bad. If you pray just out of habit, your prayers are meaningless. If you engage with other Christians just out of habit, your fellowship is not genuine.

I think this view is contrary to the nature of the Christian life. Habits are not the enemies of faith but are the ways in which we are incorporated into its disciplines and practices. To use a pre-Christian example, Aristotle believed that the root of all ethics was couched in habit. The process of acquiring virtue was one of developing good habits.

In Christianity, we repeat certain prayers, formulas, and rituals to the point that they become habits. Many people these days think that if you say the Lord's Prayer or the Apostle's Creed out of habit, you don't really mean it. But what does it mean to mean it? What does it mean for prayer to be genuine? The key seems to lie in oneself, in the person's intentions and understanding of what they are saying or doing. However, I believe that the true purpose and value of worship lies far beyond any one worshiper and his or her intentions. The beauty of worship is that it is not about us. We should thank God that the validity of our worship does not rest on the sanctity of our intent, because what mortal would stand in judgment of such? However, if we allow the habits of the Christian life to pervade our lives, they will become a part of who we are and prayer can become a sort of divine reflex to serve us when we need it most.

I certainly would not advocate the practice of attending church weekly, saying the prayers by rote, and then leaving Monday through Saturday only to return the following week out of habit. It is important that church leaders instruct their parishioners in the importance and meaning of the practices of worship, prayer, service, and all other aspects of the life of the church. However, to condemn the habitual nature of the Christian life is to say that if you're coming to church just out of habit, you might as well not come at all. This is dangerous thinking. If people go to church expecting to get something out of the sermon or the prayers and then for whatever reason don't connect with what is said from the pulpit on that particular day, they leave disappointed because their needs weren't met, when it was never their needs that mattered (don't get me wrong, people's needs certainly matter in the church, but look at my post "Our Desires Are Too Weak" for a mention of the difference between felt needs and Gospel-preached needs). The times when we don't feel like going to church are often the times when we need most to be in church. We believe in a God on whom we can cast our weariness, our doubts, our boredom, and our pain. Worship is when God meets and redeems us, whether we really want to run into him there or not.

All in all, I think that part of my work in the church will be to redeem the concept of habit. The idea of being formed by disciplines that aren't necessarily under our control isn't a comfortable one for many. However, that is what the Christian life is about—being formed by God, not trying to form ourselves to what we think is genuine or meaningful.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

A Prayer from St. Augustine

O Lord, our God,
Grant us to trust in your overshadowing wings:
Protect us beneath them and bear us up.
You will carry us as little children,
And even to our grey-headed age you will carry us still.
We need not fear to find no home again
Because we have fallen away from it;
While we were absent our home falls not to ruins,
For our home is your eternity. Amen.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Whose Service is Perfect Freedom

At 8:00 a.m. this morning I stood in Goodson Chapel at Duke Divinity School and read from my pocket-sized Book of Common Prayer as a group of students (graduate students—I was the oddball) went through the daily rite of morning prayer. I went twice to morning prayer last week and every day so far this week; I'm hoping to make it a permanent fixture in my daily routine. As I prayed the Venite, the Nunc Dimitis, and the Psalms, I realized just how odd I am among my peers for actually enjoying—and even desperately needing—such a practice. Where for me a discipline like morning prayer is centering, formative, and vital to my spiritual life, to many Christians today it seems...well, boring. Where is the break? What has the church done to make formal worship "boring"?

I suppose I'm a bit of a weirdo when it comes to worship. I read liturgical theology for fun, for crying out loud. Nobody does that. But even though I know that I occupy a different spiritual and intellectual landscape regarding worship than most other people, I still feel a deep sadness anytime someone tells me that such-and-such a church is too boring or too formal. Has worship really become that dull? Or is our culture forming us with expectations that simply do not fit with what worship is all about? (There's another post hidden in here somewhere about habit, which I will address in full later on.)

Some churches really are boring. Eddie Izzard, a fabulous comedian (he's a British transvestite and is wickedly smart), makes a point in one of his routines about how oftentimes Christian worship sounds just plain painful. "There's something phenomenally dreary about Christian singing," he says as he goes on to provide a particularly dreary rendition of "Oh God Our Help in Ages Past." "They're the only people who can sing 'Hallelujah' without feeling." I've certainly been in churches like that (white churches...Izzard makes the distinction clear and revels in the raucousness of the worship of people of African descent), and it hurts, it really does. But somehow that image of dreariness has been projected onto all formal (or even mildly structured!) worship. People feel restrained, as if they are not free to "really" worship (whatever that means).

I thought about this concept of being "free" to worship during one of the collects we prayed from the BCP this morning. It says, "Oh God...whose service is perfect freedom." In serving God, in being bound to him, we are truly free. The notion of being unrestrained and able to do as you please just doesn't jive with the whole concept of forming one's desires to God's will. Maybe this is a problem uniquely my own, but I struggle with prayer and with focusing on worship, so to have a liturgy sanctioned by hundreds of years of practice is not limiting but rather freeing, and deeply so. I love praying the Psalms because through them I am able to make the supplications, lamentations, thanksgivings, and confessions that sit in my heart with no words to set them free. Sometimes I wonder if people even read the Psalms properly anymore. The Psalms make up a prayer book and, to paraphrase Bonhoeffer, when you pray the Psalms you are praying with the whole church and with Christ himself.

I wonder if some people are so averse to ordered, formal worship because individualism and uniqueness are so stressed in today's culture that the thought of being brought into a unified, disciplined practice with others seems undesirable. We all want to do our own thing. The thought of engaging in practices that put you in communion not only with other Christians today but also with Christians who lived and died hundreds of years before now doesn't invoke the kind of awe it once did (and still does for some of us). Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico is one of my favorite places in the world. What overwhelms me in watching the monks perform the daily office, praying seven times a day, chanting the psalms and taking Mass each morning, is that, aside from incorporating things like running water, solar power, and even internet (the monks have an online gift shop and post the daily martyrology on their webpage), their way of life has remained essentially the same for 1500 years. The monks in the desert outside Abiquiu, NM are walking with Saint Benedict himself, a millennium and a half dead. I wonder if there is a way in our post-Enlightenment world to recapture the minds of Christians today in such a way that the thought of being a part of something bigger than themselves is not oppressive or marginalizing but rather liberating and empowering.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Remembering Father Murphy

I can still hear the silverware clinking, the hollow, metallic bang of pots in the kitchen, the occasional sound of decompression as hot air from a stove or oven picked itself up and moved across a room. I can also hear voices, but not like those to which I am accustomed; boisterous men with facial hair that could put them on The Sopranos converse loudly, women with dark hair scold their olive-skinned children, who babble on in the lilting, bouncy tongue of the country in which I had found myself for the past several days. This perfectly Italian trattoria off the main square in Assisi remains with me not only in its sounds, but also in its sights. I can see the appropriately Umbrian, rural decorations creeping across the walls and the bottle of effervescent water (we had asked for “no gas” but had been disappointed upon our waiter’s return) in the center of the table. I can see the cozily crowded restaurant and its entrance, a door that seemed too small for a normal person from either end and required the customer to stoop down as he or she descended the stairs into the family-run eatery, or ascended them out.

Most of all, I can see my father’s face. Thinking back, I remember that this summer he had grown a goatee; my father has been clean-shaven all my life, so this was a novelty, and we had to buy him a small pair of scissors in Assisi with which to trim his facial hair because he wouldn’t stop picking at it. This time I don’t remember the goatee. I do, however, remember his eyes. They are a murky, hazel shade, discolored from their original dark brown by a case of Hepatitis C he had as a young man, and this time, they are shining in an odd way, partly with happiness and partly with tears.

Earlier that day, in one of our rare forays into a nearby internet café, my father had learned that Roland Murphy, his Ph.D. adviser, had passed away. Father Murphy was more than a professor to my dad; he was a mentor and a friend. I can’t remember in any sort of detail many of the stories that my dad told me that night in the trattoria in Assisi. But I do know that he regaled me for several hours with anecdotes about Father Murphy. I was sad to hear that such a good man had died, sad that my father was abroad when it happened and would be unable to attend the funeral, sad that he had no one but his 16-year-old daughter to whom he could reminisce. I felt curious to hear my dad talk about his own life, curious about this moral and scholastic giant to whom my father seemed to owe so much gratitude and affection. I felt confused by my father’s tears, though my dad has never been the image of the stoic, unfeeling patriarch and is in fact a bit of a crybaby. I listened politely, even interestedly, asked a few questions, and let the leftovers of my spaghetti carbonara (my new favorite Italian dish) grow cold as his storytelling stretched on into the night.

That night in Assisi seems so poignant to me now and may in fact have been the most spiritual moment of that trip, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Here I was, essentially on pilgrimage to the place where Saint Francis lived and worked; I had familiarized myself with the streets of the town, this town perched on a hill that seems to float in some ephemeral way. I had attended Mass in the basilica (this was years before I became borderline neurotic about the Eucharist). I had listened to and memorized much of my father’s treasure trove of stories about Saint Francis. I had visited the church of Santa Chiara and had seen the miraculously preserved body of this 13th-century saint and friend of Francis. Later in the trip, when we had moved on to Lithuania, I would have a wonderful moment in a small Franciscan monastery overlooking the Hill of Crosses, which had stained-glass reproductions of the famous frescoes depicting Francis’ life in its sanctuary. But for all the obvious inbreakings of God on that trip, perhaps the most meaningful one was also the most subtle—the experience of talking to my father over pasta, wine, and carbonated water, witnessing how the sad news of the death of a dear friend can elicit the most beautiful, joyful memories of a person’s life.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

A Prayer from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

O God, early in the morning I cry to you.
Help me to pray
And to concentrate my thoughts on you.
I cannot do this alone.
In me there is darkness.
But with you there is light;
I am lonely, but you do not leave me;
I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help;
I am restless, but with you there is peace.
In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;
I do not understand your ways,
But you know the way for me...
Restore me to liberty,
And enable me to live now
That I may answer before you and before me.
Lord, whatever this day may bring,
Your name be praised. Amen.

Monday, September 3, 2007

God's Coming is Unforeseen (quote)

"God's coming is unforeseen, I think, and the reason, if I had to guess, is that if he gave us anything much in the way of advance warning, more often than not we would have made ourselves scarce long before he got there." — Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey

Sunday, September 2, 2007

A Prayer from Teresa of Avila

May nothing move you;
May nothing terrify you;
Everything passes;
God never changes.
Patience be all to you.
Who trusts in God
Shall never be needy.
God alone suffices.

 

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