Discipleship at the Cafe

What would the Church look like if we thought of “disciple-making” as
our core purpose, in adult formation programs, in seminary education,
in worship?

There you go, folks—that’s the key question. It’s from a post here at the Episcopal Cafe. I’d say all of the rest of our questions about church stuff (including what we do with people, buildings, politics, etc.) are properly subsets of this question.

Significant Books

Fr. Chris was posting on books that had been particularly formative in his faith journey and, turning it into a meme, tagged me for it.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and I find it a very difficult one to answer. There have been so very many books that have influenced me in many ways. But—fitting in my turn away from true protestantism—when I think about my faith journey people have been more formative for me than books. Or—to mix it up, what certain mentors taught me with certain books has been incredibly formative…

None of that answers Fr. Chris’s question which is partly about recommending really good books to other people. I’ll morph it a little bit too–I’ll list what I currently think to be the seven most important books for my faith formation and theology. There are, of course, three that should go without saying so I’ll just stick them here at the top for the sake of form and make it a round ten:

1. The Bible
2. The 1979 American Book of Common Prayer
3. The ‘82 Hymnal
4. The Book of Concord: Ok—here’s the first book that I’ll explain, and that needs some explanation. For those who don’t know it, the Book of Concord is that official collection of theological writings that Lutherans accept. I don’t accept it all (one of the reasons why I’m not currently a Lutheran pastor), But I find myself very frequently going back to Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms, the Augsburg Confession and its Apology. The Small Catechism in particular is a key work for me.
5. The Rule of Benedict/John Cassian’s Institutes and Conferences: Three books for the price of one… Benedict’s work is fairly widely known in Christian and Episcopal circles and is justly honored for its wisdom, structure, and humanity. Cassian’s works are still fairly obscure—and that’s to our detriment. The early church didn’t write systematic theologies. However, Cassian’s work is the closest that you’ll come to a systematic spirituality. Filled with theological and psychological insight, Cassian focuses less on doctrines and more on practices, on communicating a path for cultivating disciples. I find myself at a place in my spiritual and intellectual life where I can’t see these three works as truly distinct from one another. The Rule is in many respects a distillation of Cassian and yet the Rule becomes a lens for reading Cassian as well.
6. Monastic Practices: This is a supremely practical book written for Cistercian novices. It introduces them to the basics of the monastic spiritual practices. Ever since I first encountered it in a theology library in Tokyo during undergrad this book has been having on me.
7. On Christian Doctrine: This is Augustine’s main work on hermeneutics–how to read Scripture and get stuff out of it. The center of his argument is caritas: If you are reading and you find something other than love, read it again because you missed it. Of course, love is not a gooey do-whatever-you-like; it’s love with depth and integrity. Like the Rule & Cassian, this one has been very influential in my spiritual and intellectual lives.
8. The Soul in Paraphrase: This was a very important book for me because it introduced me to the notion of the religious affections. It gave me a vocabulary for thinking about a range of human experience I didn’t know how to describe. In many ways this book laid the groundwork for me to appreciate what Stoicism is really about and therefore monastic spirituality which is fundamentally a kind of Christian Stoicism. 
9. The Temple: For a sacramental Anglican who loves poetry, this is simply a no-brainer. Herbert’s verse sings. He soars up to great heights but—just as important—he plumbs great depths too. His poetry of misery in relation to God is second only to the Psalms in my opinion.
10. The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters: This work begins by affirming that the creed is not an easy thing for modern people to affirm. Then, rather than making excuses for it or weaseling out of it, affirms the importance of a literal reading of the Creed and ties each article into classic Christian theology and spirituality, explain why each one is important and the broader ramifications of it.

What are your picks?

An Act of Recalibration

Go read Christopher’s latest post. He and I have been working around some similar themes of late especially in terms of what is going on at a national level in the church.

Christian social justice is not separate from personal holiness nor vice versa. In fact, they’re really not in opposition to one another despite what various “culture warriors” want you to think. However, both of them are only Christian when they flow from the Gospel.

Christopher makes mention of the Benedictine tradition. Now, when I think and say “Benedictine”, I often conjure up in my head a kind of idealized Benedictine spirit that I believe existed in ninth century Europe as mediated through my experience with Benedictine teachers I’ve had and monasteries I’ve visited.
But there are other very real and important parts of the Benedictine tradition that I would do well to remember.

The monastic house of Cluny, founded in 909 was by the end of the 11th century to become the head of a sprawling family of houses throughout the Continent and in England as well. At its founding it was devoted to a strict interpretation of the Rule. As time went on, things changed… Because of its later years, the name of Cluny is now associated with liturgical excess. A reading of its customaries reveals that the monks were actively in choir over eight hours a day. Now—liturgy is good; but that doesn’t mean that more liturgy is better. Rather, Cluny lost the balance of the Rule that demanded physical labor and study in addition to hours in the choir. Many scholar of the period regard the use of lay brethren as a kind of second-class citizen to do the physical work as a sign of the decay that eventually led to Cluny’s collapse.

What came in its stead was the Cistercian revolution. More ascetical, less liturgical (by comparison—still far more liturgical than anything most of us have ever known) The Cistercians re-emphasized the principle of balance. They did not jettison the old. Indeed, the use of silence outside the choir was a central feature of Cluniac spirituality retained and heightened by the Cistercian reformers. Fundamentally as an act of Reformation, it was an act of Recalibration. 

While I make no secret of my love of Cluny and its liturgies even when they tend to excess, the Cistercians proved themselves a necessary and important part of the Benedictine tradition. And, in their in their path of Recalibration it would suit us now to walk.

We face different challenges, of course. And yet—the balance of the liturgical life, the intellectual life, and the active life still, I believe, burns at the heart of the Anglican way. We would do well to recalibrate.

Does This Come as a Surprise?

The “unchurched” prefer churches that actually look like churches.

No kidding… So do many “churched” people.

Aesthetics have a lot to do with religious experience. After all, a large part of religion is just that: experience. It’s not just about what we think or what we say we think—it’s about what we do and who we are.

Two Things

1. Michelle of Heavenfield has diversified her blog holdings as well. Heavenfield will remain focused on early medieval history and texts while Selah will focus on the Psalms and Daily Office/Book of Hours type material. Check it out and add it to your readers…
2. I’ve been invading LutherPunk’s brain!

The Anglican Scotist on the Eucharist

In his comment to my post below and in a new post on his blog, the Anglican Scotist takes issue with my suggestion that those representing the national church and those clergy with progressive political views remember that demands for justice in church flow best from acknowledging God’s call to humanity in light of what God has done for us through Jesus Christ.

He states:

Granted, loosey goosey lefty preachers might preach social justice and
be too dull to notice the sacramental context in which they preach is
soaked in political references, but there is also a loosey goosey
mentality perversely abstracting the Eucharist from the political, as
if real labor and real money and real paychecks and real exchanges were
not actually involved and actually sanctified, as if it were all just
symbolic or even pretend.

I can’t tell if he’s directly accusing me of holding the second “a loosey goosey
mentality [that] perversely abstract[s] the Eucharist from the political” or not… If he is, it’s a caricature and not an accurate representation of what I said or believe. I agree that there are some who have tried to make a hard separation between the religious and the political and that doesn’t make sense to me either. You can’t pray the Psalms and believe that “YHWH is king” has no political implications.

However, let me reiterate to clarify my position to the Scotist. The Eucharist is a powerful multivalent symbol. The Eucharist is misunderstood whenever we attempt to reduce its complexity.  Our historic liturgy and architecture is designed to highlight these multivalent elements and the move in recent years to change things has resulted in just such a reduction. That is, an east-wall altar speaks of a table, a sacrificial altar, and a tomb. The bread, wine, and water speak of simple family meals, the fruits of the earth,and—yes—the products of human labor. The liturgical words speak of covenant relationships, political injustice, the triumph of love, and a God who choose to permeate human life through multiple modes of presence and incarnation. And these items that I have pointed out just barely scratch the surface…

I would not claim that the Eucharist is “simply religious,” abstracted from the political. That’s not how I understand “religious”—it can never be “simply” anything because it’s fundamentally not simple.

In a similar fashion, I would hope that the Scotist would shy away from reducing the Eucharist to the purely economic or even political and miss the full splendor of its spectrum of meanings.

Liturgy is Not Enough

As my readers know, I love the liturgy a great deal. I believe, in fact, that the liturgical cycle as it came to fruition by the end of the early medieval period is the greatest tool for Christian formation that the Western Church has ever produced. Much of the great writings of the medieval monks, mystics, and others could have only been produced in relationship to this cycle. It is a great and powerful engine for the formation of disciples.

But it is an engine that has largely gone untuned.

At the time of its creation, it was only accessible to a small number—namely those who lived within intentional liturgical communities, had the capacity to become fluent in a language other than their mother tongue, and had the temperament to turn their wonder, creativity, and intellect to its majesties rather than to other arenas.

At the time of the Reformation, the English Church was the only dissenting group that preserved the key elements of the cycle—the Mass and the Office—but even these were severely pared back, breaking, obscuring, and eliminating many of the connections that had bound the cycle into a harmonious whole.

For most of its history, the Episcopal Church has been an either/or body: either Office or Mass. With the coming of the ‘79 BCP and Eucharist becoming the normative Sunday celebration, two hundred years of Office supremacy came to an end—but balance has yet to be achieved. Too, the ‘79 book has recovered more of the classical links with its inclusion of seasonal material than any other BCP with the possible exception of the failed English ‘28 text.

And yet the discipling inherent in, promised by, the liturgy has not appeared.

And it will not appear.

The experience of the liturgy is not enough.

Certainly there will be some who will start to see and make connections. Who will discover a hunger and turn to earlier and other sources to learn of the connections, to recover or recapture the mystery and the power they feel near its surface—but this is not “most”. Nor necessarily even “many”.

If the liturgy were enough, the discipling would be happening.
If it were enough, there would not be people in our churches who have stood, sat, and knelt through decades of liturgies and not been formed by them. If it were enough, there would not be clergy in our churches who have
stood, sat, and knelt through decades of liturgies and not been formed
by them.

The liturgy is not enough. And yet it is an engine of great power. It does not choose to sit idle; we allow it to do so.

What the liturgy needs from us are three things:

1. We must be open to it. This is the first and greatest step. We must open our hearts to its leading in confidence that the Holy Spirit speaks through its ways and its means.
   
2. We must recognize the treasure that we have before us. The liturgy is many things. It is a path, a discipline, a place where aesthetics, intellect, the affections and emotions are all engaged. We must recognize its value and allow it to have its own authority over us. That is, we must live in it before presuming to change it. And I don’t mean existing alongside of it—I mean living in it. Opening ourselves to it and following where it leads. Because this isn’t really about the liturgy. The liturgy is a path and discipline that leads us into the mind of Christ. And that’s what this is really about.
   
3. We must share its riches. Specifically, this means we must testify to its power and capability to transform, and we must educate. The liturgy is not self-evident. You must be open to it—but it also must be opened to you. Preeminently, this means communicating that the liturgy is an embodiment of essential Christian theology. We don’t do a solemn high mass or evensong just because we like it (though we do, of course…) but because of what it communicates about who and what God is and who we are in light of that reality. Liturgy is theology made kinetic and aesthetic. Even when we succeed in our first two tasks, this is where we have failed in the past and are continuing to fail today. The Episcopal Church is moving towards a new prayer book; protesting at its arrival is too little, too late. If we hope to see a prayer book whose liturgies stand in continuity with our Anglican, our catholic, our Benedictine roots, then we need to start learning, talking, and teaching now while it is yet on the horizon and not yet here at our doorsteps.  

All of us who love the liturgy must be intentional about these things if we wish it to exercise even a quarter of its full power within us and within our communities. Through the centuries, I believe the Holy Spirit has crafted this great work as a faithful and true means of guiding humanity into the mysteries of God. But we have to be faithful and true to it as well.

Christopher and Fr. Chris on the “Office Ideal”

Christopher has been doing some good thinking recently on the Daily Office (and also here) and it’s place in our daily life. His conclusion is that Cranmer’s twice-daily Office should be seen as an ideal. Fr. Chris agrees and sees additional offices as a calling for some but not necessarily the ideal for all.

I quite agree with them both. I always fight a more-is-better tendency when it comes to the liturgy in general and the Office in particular. But, in the interests of both predictablity and sustainability sometimes we—ok, I—need to remember and relapse into what Christopher calls “Benedictine simplicity done elegantly”.

Gospel Antiphons Coordinated with the RCL

I realized it’s been quite a while since I posted anything liturgical…

To amend that, I’ll point you to something I may have mentioned before (or not). Over at Fr. Bosco Peter’s site at ChristChurch in New Zealand, he’s got a PDF of Gospel Antiphons [i.e., antiphons used before and after the Gospel canticles in Morning and Evening Prayer] put together by one of his comrades, Fr(?). Tom Kostrzewa, OblSB CAM. It’s designed to go along with the current Roman Liturgy of the Hours which means it’s in synch with the Rman version of the RCL. They number the propers slightly differently than we do, but it shouldn’t be hard to follow.

I’ve been using it during Easter and have enjoyed having them. Yes, it’s more book-flipping, but it’s easy enough to cut and paste them to a trifold to stick in your prayerbook of choice. You can do a season at a time that way and it’s easier than book-flipping.

Maundy Thursday Vigil Devotion

I’m theoretical in charge of the vigil over the reserve sacrament between the end of the Maundy Thursday service to Good Friday’s Masses of the Pre-Sanctified at my congregation. Due to my bite I’ve mostly been writing bits for newsletters, announcements, etc. instead of doing real organizing work.

I completed my final task here at the last moment; it’s a booklet of devotions for use at the vigil. Two I borrowed with light adaptations from the St Augustine Prayer Book produced by the Order of the Holy Cross some years back. I also edited one myself out of George Herbert poems and hymns. Since, to the best of my knowledge, these are not under copyright I’ll post them here: Herbert-Hymn Devotion

I noted something interesting in the midst of preparing the other two. The St. Augustine’s Prayer Book is an Anglo-Catholic book that runs in line with current (or current then) Catholicism rather than being the medievalist sort of Anglo-Catholicism. My congregation is not Anglo-Catholic. It’s MOTR to low and very broad. The Maundy Thirsday vigil itself is perceived as being “too Catholic” in some quarters. In any case, I decided to tone down some of the elements that might scandalize and disrupt devotion should a MOTR to low parishoner read through one of these. One item I took out was a concluding prayer after intercessions that was a devotion to the Sacred Heart. I substituted instead the Prayer for All Sorts and Conditions from the BCP.  In reading through the final copy, it stood out like a sore thumb; it has a dignity, poise and spare eloquence that the surrounding prayers lacked. I’m not saying they were bad prayers or anything—I’m just saying that they weren’t the BCP. . .