I Want One!

Especially the little shocker buttons…

Now–since I teach preaching do I get the special pew in front that has a puplit-shocker for when preachers start rambling/tell one story too many/forget that they’re speaking in relation to a biblical text?

H/t AKMA

Random Bullets of Aliveness

• Yes, I’m still alive. Barely. But I’m buried under a mound of crap.
• I did finally send off one thing that should have been done a month ago. It’s a project M and I are doing together. More on that one later, perhaps.
• I have 217 feeds waiting for me in Bloglines. That means y’all are still alive and writing. Good news, but I fear they’ll continue to pile up for a while. I may be mostly away until the end of Lent or so.
• I do have something in the works for the Cafe so I’ll still be marginally about.
• Thomas, I fear I don’t have any other good recommendations on Anglican lectionaries. There are a few historical works out there on the BCP but they seem few and far between. The only two things in my library that are even close to the topic are Marion Hatchett’s Commentary on the Prayerbook and Martin Dudley’s The Collect in Anglican Liturgy: Texts and Sources 1549-1989. Christopher, M, or others may be able to point you to some other, better stuff. The single most instructive thing I’ve found to do is to peruse Chad Wohler’s amazing BCP site and to print out various liturgies/tables/etc. and to study them in parallel.
• Lil’ H is no longer wandering the halls at night and—for the moment at least—has stopped stripping off her diaper at night. Instead, she and Lil’ G are bunking down together—at Lil’ G’s insistence. As the big sister, G sleeps on the outside so H can’t roll out…
• Enough procrastinating–back to work. Y’all take care of the Anglican Communion while I’m away, ya hear?

Big Bed Update

I’m typing away in here, the Muse is going and suddenly I hear a loud thump from the next room, a moment of silence, then wailing… Lil’ H had indeed fallen out of bed.

Actually, the transition’s been going well. No more nocturnal wanderings. *fingers crossed* The major problem we’re having now with her has no relation to the crib/bed change. It’s that whenever we put her in pj’s with pants, whenever she feels wet she’ll strip off her pants and the wet diaper—which, as nature continues its course through the night and calls again, leads to 2 AM wailing and a lot of sheets and mattress pads that need washing…

New Stuff at the OJN Liturgy Page

I have been alerted through a broken link notice (thanks, bls!) that there is new material that the Order of Julian of Norwich’s Liturgical Publications page. There are three new items: a new set of collects, a 2008 kalendar, and—perhaps most exciting—the order’s hymnal from Advent through Lent. I’d posted Advent bits but did not have the time to get to the rest. Thankfully, they have…

Patristic Bits

The sum of all we have said since we began to speak of things thus comes to this: it is to be understood that the plenitude and the end of the Law and of all the sacred Scriptures is the love of a Being which is to be enjoyed and of a being that can share that enjoyment with us, since there is no need for a precept that anyone should love himself. That we might know this and have the means to implement it, the whole temporal dispensation was made by divine Providence for our salvation. We should use it, not with an abiding but with a transitory love and delight like that in a road or in vehicles or in other instruments, or, if it may be expressed more accurately, so that we love those things by which we are carried along for the sake of that toward which we are carried.

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all…  (Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 1.35.39-36.40)

Since God accepts repentance after sin, if each one knew at what time he would depart from this world, he would be able to select a time for pleasure and another time for repentance. But the one who promised pardon to a person who repents did not promise us a tomorrow… (Gregory the Great, Hom. 10)

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies–Visit LutherPunk…

…because this is what will happen:

Without fail, every time we visit the LP clan, upon our return the girls draw all over their legs and arms. Why? So “they can have tattoos like Mr. LP.”

Next they’ll be wanting to read the Augsburg Confession or some such nonsense…

Random Stuff

• I’m really slammed with stuff right now—I’ll not be posting or commenting much for a bit.  I’ll be back before too long, though.
• I saw the moving from a crib to a big bed that Marshall+ posted in the comments below. I’m not convinced and I’ll tell you why… As far as I’m concerned, a “wrote-down prayer” (as we call ‘em down here) ought to be what I’m thinking and feeling, but just more eloquent and with more depth. My crib to big bed transition prayer at 2 in the morning was, “Father in Heaven, please make this darn baby sleep instead of playing, giggling, or roaming around the upstairs. Amen.” And to my eyes, certain elements of that were, well, missing from the suggested prayer below.
• I was struck the other evening that Ps 59 would make an awesome voice-over at the start of a vampire-slaying movie. I blame it on verse 2…

New Episcopal Cafe Post

Here’s another one up at the Cafe. It’s more practically oriented than most of mine…

News from the Smaller Set

• I walked down stairs to find M dredging chicken bits for some fried chicken with “help” from Lil’ G (the 4.5 yr old).
• M: Okay G, It’s your turn—you can do these next two pieces.
• G: [Looking out over the counter] Welcome back—I’m Rachel Ray. First we’ll take the chicken, then we’ll put it in the egg like this…
• Last week, Lil’ G informed us that Doodoo’s mother had passed away and that she’d be coming to live with us. (In actuality, Doodoo’s been living with us since we were in PA—she’s one of G’s imaginary friends…)
• Though her second birthday is still over a month away the signs are clear: Lil’ H needs to move to a toddler bed. We’ll be commissioning Fr. John Julian to write the requisite “life-transition” prayers…

History Meme

Both Jonathan and Michelle tapped me for this one so here goes…

Instructions:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3. Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4. Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

Of course, I wouldn’t be up to my usual pedantic standards if I didn’t preface something interesting with a whole pile of boring verbiage.

Let’s think for a second about the Benedictine Revival! In the mid-tenth century, King Edgar decided that England was in need of a religious revival. There a number of reasons in back of this–one was the decimation of monasteries and monastic life by the past several centuries of viking depradations, a concomitant loss of learning, bad morale (and maybe morals too), and there was probably something in there too about transferring land-ownership to grateful clergy rather than scheming eorls. While monks can cause problems they rarely raise up armies to overthow you… In any case, he kicked of the reform on the secular side of things. On the sacred side it was begun by the work of three great now-sainted monastic bishops: St. Dunstand, St. Æthelwold, and St. Oswald. This was the first generation of the reform. The second generation is characterized by two men with extant writings, Archbishop Wulfstan of York and Abbott Ælfric of Eynsham. Ælfric was the greatest catechist of his day who embraced the notion that religious reform and revival would occur by promoting sound religious teaching in the vernacular—including a host of sermons and sermon-like materials in Old English, over 150. And yes, he’s the hero of my dissertation. But I’m not writing about him today! (Well—any more today…) No, I’m writing about the author of one of the few surviving documents we have from the third generation of the reform, one of Ælfric of Eynsham’s students, Ælfric Bata.

And yes, the similarity between the names has confused an awful lot of people over the years.

Ælfric Bata’s surviving work is the Colloquies. When you studied foreign languages, did you ever have to stand up in front of the class and act out lame dialogues about buying cheese or whatever in that language? Well, that’s what ÆB’s Colloquies is. Remember, the goal here was to get Germanic-speaking yokels to be able to converse fluently in Latin. ÆB’s Colloquies take us from intermediate level to truly advanced-level conversational Latin. Ok—enough pedantry: onto the good stuff, seven wierd or random facts.

1. Bata isn’t a last name—it’s a descriptor that probably refers to a barrel of beer. Scholars are split as to why this was applied to him but the leading suggestions were either that he was overly fond of emptying said barrels—or that he was shaped like one. Of course, I see no reason why they can’t both be right.
2. ÆB’s teacher, my Ælfric, was a serious, pious kind of guy. Not ÆB. The conduct recorded in his Colloquies has been used by historians as evidence of the state of moral decay in English monasteries in the time before and at the Norman Conquest.
3. For example—one of the dialogues (#3) takes place in a classroom before the teacher arrives. In it, students learn how to ask how to cheat off another’s homework.
4. In another (#6), the students get beaten for not being able to recite their homework. (Which does give the previous point a bit more urgency…)
5. Several of them contain an interesting insights into liturgical life, especially the part played by the adolescents who would have been learning these dialogues. In one (#5) a student describes for the master a quick sketch of what the boys have been up to that day—primarily liturgical duties. Another (#18) teaches students how to rent out their services copying liturgical books. According to this colloquy, a well-written missal could fetch up to two pounds of pure silver. The final selling price, though, is twelve mancuses. (If only I knew how that compares to two pounds of silver… What’re the odds that an expert on medieval numismatics might wander along shortly…?)
6. The point of one of the colloquies (#25) is (apparently) to learn how to insult someone in Latin.
7. This treatise (still #25) is partly agricultural in nature, going through a variety of plants and trees. However, it seems as if a far greater weight is given to learning the various specialized names for the kinds of manure. If it comes out of the rear of a domestic animal you’ll find it listed here! And yes, I suspect this connects far more to the abuse topos than the agriculture one…

So, if you ever wanted to read some fascinating vignettes of tenth-century monastic life—or how to call somebody cow-poop in Latin—Ælfric Bata’s your man.

[The Colloquies in both Latin and Modern English can be found in a great edition edited by Scott Gwara, translated by David W. Porter called Anglo-Saxon Conversations: The Colloquies of Ælfric Bata (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997).]

I’ll tag bls, Anastasia, the Postulant (now that GOEs are over), Christopher, LutherPunk, the Lutheran Zephyr, Caelius (are you still alive?) and anyone else with a hankering to do it.