Friday morning I decided to ride my bike into the western hills of Portland where the Japanese Garden is located. It's only three miles from our apartment but the road to the Garden is steep. I've been biking along the river on the Springwater Corridor, a multi-use path for bikers, runners, and walkers, which is mostly flat. It was time to tackle the slopes. The only way out of Portland is over the hills.
We became members of the Japanese Garden as soon as we settled in. At just over five acres it is small but the design packs in a space- and mind-expanding array of plants and paths, two dry gardens, a pond busy with carp, a tea pavilion, and borrowed scenery that includes the Cascades. Even when there are crowds, it is possible to slip off into a corner behind a Japanese Maple and be alone.
Jefferson Street, where we are located, turns into Canyon Road just as the serious climb begins. I got about two blocks before I had to stop to breathe. I looked ahead; ahead was still up. Stopped again at the top of the next hill, I was panting when an elderly woman asked if I needed help. Yeah, I gasped, I'm lost. Where's the Japanese Garden (near by, I hoped)? Oh, she said, go up to the corner and turn left. You'll see the signs. I stood and pedaled to the top, turned left, turned right. Stopped to breathe. Not a walk in the park.
And so it went for another couple of endless hills. The scenery, by the way, was gorgeous, conifers of all sorts wedged among maples and a dozen varieties of green (I have to learn more about these trees). The clean air made my screaming leg muscles almost glad. At the top of the penultimate hill to the Garden, you can keep biking up the steepest incline or pick up your bike and climb the steps cut into a hillside. I picked up my bike. The switchback steps ascend a couple of hundred feet--not too bad given how far I'd come.
The Unitarian-Universalists were in town for their annual convention. I met a few coming down as I was heading up. You could tell they were UUs, as Connie and I call them, because they were wearing t-shirts with a flame on the chest. I felt like a sterling example of Portland culture hauling my bike on my shoulder up to the Garden. Grinning. Yeah, I do this all the time. Clean air, clean living.
There was an art show in the main pavillion, showcasing northwest artists who had created images based on the Garden. I bought a small collage by a resident of Lake Oswego, just south of Portland, and stuck it in my backpack. I went out to the graveled space in front of the pavilion and looked out across the city of Portland to the Cascades, which gently framed the city's modest skyline. Mt. Hood was not visible.
Hood looks like Mt. Fuji, just as this view from the Garden reminded me of a similar view I recalled from one of the Imperial Gardens overlooking Kyoto, Japan. On clear days you can see Hood from almost any part of the city, including our apartment terrace. I have begun writing a series of haiku, "Summer Views of Mt. Hood" (derived from the printmaker, Hokusai's, series, Views of Mt. Fuji). Here are a few of my haiku.
1
Extended wings
balancing a crow on a high spruce twig
fold carefully
2
Dawn silhouette
floating snowcap at noon
faded in evening marshgrass
3
Against darkening skies
at morning
the white cone advances
4
Pasted on the window
of the Wells Fargo tower
the mountain’s face
5
Crows call to crows
summer light rises
with the mountain
6
The eastern hills
edged in sharp pines
rain clouds shroud Mt.Hood
Monday, June 25, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
Speaking in Anglican Tongue
The Executive Council of the Episcopal Church issued a statement last week that caught my interest. It was titled, “The Episcopal Church’s Commitment to Common Life in the Anglican Communion.” (Read it at www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_86804_ENG_HTM.htm.) Those of you who don’t care about the Anglican Communion—and you are legion—might hold on for a moment because the subject of this entry is the misuse of language; the example is specific but the point is more general and one that is especially relevant to our common public life today.
The communiqué was a response to demands by Anglican Primates (Bishops-in-Charge of other national churches around the world) that the Episcopal Church stop ordaining gays in same-sex partnerships (ie, not celibate). The Primates imposed a deadline of September 30, 2007. In its statement, the Executive Council said:
“. . . the requests of the Primates are of a nature that can only properly be dealt with by our General Convention. Neither the Executive Council, the Presiding Bishop, nor the House of Bishops can give binding interpretations of General Convention resolutions nor make an ‘unequivocal common commitment’ to denying future decisions by dioceses or General Convention. We question the authority of the Primates to impose deadlines and demands upon any of the churches of the Anglican Communion or to prescribe the relationships within any of the other instruments of our common life, including the Anglican Consultative Council.”
In other, clearer language: “You can’t tell us what to do.”
Read the second sentence in the quote above. Can you tell me what it means? And can you tell me how this statement belongs in a statement about the church’s commitment to common life? The entire statement is written in a similarly legalistic and obfuscatory style. It is a political message dressed up in churchy language. Those who have tried to make the Episcopal Church change its ways and have interfered in the constituted governing authority of the church are addressed here as “brothers and sisters” (there are no sister Primates, by the way). The communiqué denies it is resting its message on legalities, asserting instead that it speaks out of loving concern for relationship in Christ.
That may well reflect the feelings of those who drafted the communiqué. I can’t claim to know their hearts. They are certainly good people. But the unintended effect of the language used is to suggest insincerity and even deceit. It is a speaking in tongues. If I were on the other side of this issue, I would respond: Bullshit.
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14, makes a distinction that is perhaps helpful here between prophesy and speaking in tongues. (I thought it appropriate to bring in scripture since the communiqué itself begins with scripture, although a strange passage, in my opinion, for those seeking reconciliation.) The Council’s communiqué speaks in tongues, abusing the language of theology in the service of politics. The Episcopal Church is behaving prophetically in its stance on gays and women but politically in its dealings with the Anglican Communion. Paul says this:
“. . .those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God; for nobody understands them, since they are speaking mysteries in the Spirit. On the other hand, those who prophesy speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation. Those who speak in a tongue build up themselves, but those who prophesy build up the church.”
The subject of this communiqué is not a mystery in the Spirit but an effort to placate members of the Communion who do not accept the stance of the American Church. It is a stall. It is in effect a lie. The Church is saying, "Well, we can’t do what you want because it isn’t the way we do things, and anyway, the point here is that we’re in relationship and we have to do something vague in Christ that allows us all to keep on as we are." Or something like that.
When we speak in tongues we mislead, intentionally or unintentionally, or as Paul says, build ourselves up. Corporate Speak is also like this. Political candidates always speak in tongues. So, increasingly, does the church. Unity bought at the price of deception and accommodation is no unity at all.
Some years ago when I was working in a parish in Manhattan I saw the implications of pandering to the toxic people among us. The few destroyed the work of many because we did not confront them directly. Everyone in every organization has seen the same thing. Toxicity spreads. In relationships, when your spouse continues to drink and beat the kids, you separate from him or her to protect yourself and your children. If a member of the church continues to accommodate those who abuse blacks or women or gays, while asseting a loving relationship to all, it is behaving hypocritically and in fact enabling discrimination.
In a true instead of rhetorical loving relationship, the Episcopal Church would not be worried about what to do if the family throws it out. It would be leaving.
And it would assert what it believes and why the current situation is intolerable in clear and forthright, even loving, language. The present communiqué is not a statement of love. It is a statement of aggression and deceit. Don’t believe it. The real subject is political power—something the new Presiding Bishop has claimed to abhor—and self-protection. The subject is money and property and power. It always is, even in the church.
That is not prophesy, no matter what prophetic work the Church does behind the veil of its snake-oil language.
The communiqué was a response to demands by Anglican Primates (Bishops-in-Charge of other national churches around the world) that the Episcopal Church stop ordaining gays in same-sex partnerships (ie, not celibate). The Primates imposed a deadline of September 30, 2007. In its statement, the Executive Council said:
“. . . the requests of the Primates are of a nature that can only properly be dealt with by our General Convention. Neither the Executive Council, the Presiding Bishop, nor the House of Bishops can give binding interpretations of General Convention resolutions nor make an ‘unequivocal common commitment’ to denying future decisions by dioceses or General Convention. We question the authority of the Primates to impose deadlines and demands upon any of the churches of the Anglican Communion or to prescribe the relationships within any of the other instruments of our common life, including the Anglican Consultative Council.”
In other, clearer language: “You can’t tell us what to do.”
Read the second sentence in the quote above. Can you tell me what it means? And can you tell me how this statement belongs in a statement about the church’s commitment to common life? The entire statement is written in a similarly legalistic and obfuscatory style. It is a political message dressed up in churchy language. Those who have tried to make the Episcopal Church change its ways and have interfered in the constituted governing authority of the church are addressed here as “brothers and sisters” (there are no sister Primates, by the way). The communiqué denies it is resting its message on legalities, asserting instead that it speaks out of loving concern for relationship in Christ.
That may well reflect the feelings of those who drafted the communiqué. I can’t claim to know their hearts. They are certainly good people. But the unintended effect of the language used is to suggest insincerity and even deceit. It is a speaking in tongues. If I were on the other side of this issue, I would respond: Bullshit.
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14, makes a distinction that is perhaps helpful here between prophesy and speaking in tongues. (I thought it appropriate to bring in scripture since the communiqué itself begins with scripture, although a strange passage, in my opinion, for those seeking reconciliation.) The Council’s communiqué speaks in tongues, abusing the language of theology in the service of politics. The Episcopal Church is behaving prophetically in its stance on gays and women but politically in its dealings with the Anglican Communion. Paul says this:
“. . .those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God; for nobody understands them, since they are speaking mysteries in the Spirit. On the other hand, those who prophesy speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation. Those who speak in a tongue build up themselves, but those who prophesy build up the church.”
The subject of this communiqué is not a mystery in the Spirit but an effort to placate members of the Communion who do not accept the stance of the American Church. It is a stall. It is in effect a lie. The Church is saying, "Well, we can’t do what you want because it isn’t the way we do things, and anyway, the point here is that we’re in relationship and we have to do something vague in Christ that allows us all to keep on as we are." Or something like that.
When we speak in tongues we mislead, intentionally or unintentionally, or as Paul says, build ourselves up. Corporate Speak is also like this. Political candidates always speak in tongues. So, increasingly, does the church. Unity bought at the price of deception and accommodation is no unity at all.
Some years ago when I was working in a parish in Manhattan I saw the implications of pandering to the toxic people among us. The few destroyed the work of many because we did not confront them directly. Everyone in every organization has seen the same thing. Toxicity spreads. In relationships, when your spouse continues to drink and beat the kids, you separate from him or her to protect yourself and your children. If a member of the church continues to accommodate those who abuse blacks or women or gays, while asseting a loving relationship to all, it is behaving hypocritically and in fact enabling discrimination.
In a true instead of rhetorical loving relationship, the Episcopal Church would not be worried about what to do if the family throws it out. It would be leaving.
And it would assert what it believes and why the current situation is intolerable in clear and forthright, even loving, language. The present communiqué is not a statement of love. It is a statement of aggression and deceit. Don’t believe it. The real subject is political power—something the new Presiding Bishop has claimed to abhor—and self-protection. The subject is money and property and power. It always is, even in the church.
That is not prophesy, no matter what prophetic work the Church does behind the veil of its snake-oil language.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Planet Portland
We all have heard, I imagine, that after death the second most stressful life event is moving (my guess is that the stress of death is that felt by the survivors). Divorce comes third, job loss next. Connie and I are still blissfully married; no comment about jobs.
Moving to Portland has been an almost unalloyed pleasure. Looking out the window I see the varigated greens of a park; below our (small) terrace along Jefferson the trees obliterate the road. Beyond, Mt. Hood goes through its daily changes: a silhouette in the morning, a floating snowcap at noon, fading at dusk, and then fully revealed against dark clouds. It is like Mt. Fuji in so many ways, coming and going. Far to the north this morning I saw the outline of Mt. Adams. Both Adams and Hood are inactive volcanoes; somewhere out there is Mt. St. Helens, visible from the western hills on a very clear day.
A crow alights on the top and thinnest twig of a swaying conifer (not sure yet what kind) at eye level with my terrace. The twig is an improbable landing site. His broad wings extended balance him, his body adjusts, teeters, head still. Then the wings tilt. He settles, stops moving. The wings fold as carefully as origami. He looks around, satisfied with his perch, with the world.
We are like that, satisfied with our perch. Sunday morning, reading the New York Times, we could see twenty blocks down 3rd Avenue toward the Pearl District, which is where the art galleries mostly are--Portland's Greenwich Village--and not a single car was moving. Not one. We are located in the middle of downtown next to the federal building, across from the Wells Fargo Tower, and the nights are so quiet we wake to see if the city is still out there.
The first three days were hot and sunny, not typical but welcome. This morning was rainy, heavy clouds moving in from the Pacific. (The ocean is to the west, remember that.) The dramatic sky is always performing: right now there are heavy white cotton clouds above an eastward tending layer of gray, bordering a west-side wedgewood blue. To the south rain-laden dark gray hovers over Oregon State Health University's elevated tramway. But no rain at the moment. Here, there are people who don't believe in umbrellas. They walk out in the rain and the notrain.
Sunday evening we walked down to the Willamette River (rhymes with DamnIt), bought some sorbet, and sat on a bench overlooking the marina. Because this is Rose Festival Week here (the one hundredth anniversary no less) there is a lot of merriment, high-school girls hoping to be elected queen standing around in evening gowns. Two square-riggers are maneuvering into battle positions before us and begin to fire blanks, the explosions echoing along the city as the night before fireworks announced the beginning of the week's celebrations. On the river is a carnival with rides and music. Walkers and cyclists mosey around, making way for one another. We stop in astonishment at a slingshot ride that catapaults two people strapped into a kind of carnival loveseat straight up into the sky at least a hundred feet, maybe more. They crash earthward on bungy cords and are again flung up into Sunday's clear blue and for a moment it appears they will keep going, set free.
We are terrified by the daring of it.
But it's also how we feel this week. Slingshot into space, landing on this other planet: the holodeck of the Enterprise? Exhilerated by the daring of it.
More about Planet Portland to come as we explore the wonders of this distant colony in a galaxy far away.
Moving to Portland has been an almost unalloyed pleasure. Looking out the window I see the varigated greens of a park; below our (small) terrace along Jefferson the trees obliterate the road. Beyond, Mt. Hood goes through its daily changes: a silhouette in the morning, a floating snowcap at noon, fading at dusk, and then fully revealed against dark clouds. It is like Mt. Fuji in so many ways, coming and going. Far to the north this morning I saw the outline of Mt. Adams. Both Adams and Hood are inactive volcanoes; somewhere out there is Mt. St. Helens, visible from the western hills on a very clear day.
A crow alights on the top and thinnest twig of a swaying conifer (not sure yet what kind) at eye level with my terrace. The twig is an improbable landing site. His broad wings extended balance him, his body adjusts, teeters, head still. Then the wings tilt. He settles, stops moving. The wings fold as carefully as origami. He looks around, satisfied with his perch, with the world.
We are like that, satisfied with our perch. Sunday morning, reading the New York Times, we could see twenty blocks down 3rd Avenue toward the Pearl District, which is where the art galleries mostly are--Portland's Greenwich Village--and not a single car was moving. Not one. We are located in the middle of downtown next to the federal building, across from the Wells Fargo Tower, and the nights are so quiet we wake to see if the city is still out there.
The first three days were hot and sunny, not typical but welcome. This morning was rainy, heavy clouds moving in from the Pacific. (The ocean is to the west, remember that.) The dramatic sky is always performing: right now there are heavy white cotton clouds above an eastward tending layer of gray, bordering a west-side wedgewood blue. To the south rain-laden dark gray hovers over Oregon State Health University's elevated tramway. But no rain at the moment. Here, there are people who don't believe in umbrellas. They walk out in the rain and the notrain.
Sunday evening we walked down to the Willamette River (rhymes with DamnIt), bought some sorbet, and sat on a bench overlooking the marina. Because this is Rose Festival Week here (the one hundredth anniversary no less) there is a lot of merriment, high-school girls hoping to be elected queen standing around in evening gowns. Two square-riggers are maneuvering into battle positions before us and begin to fire blanks, the explosions echoing along the city as the night before fireworks announced the beginning of the week's celebrations. On the river is a carnival with rides and music. Walkers and cyclists mosey around, making way for one another. We stop in astonishment at a slingshot ride that catapaults two people strapped into a kind of carnival loveseat straight up into the sky at least a hundred feet, maybe more. They crash earthward on bungy cords and are again flung up into Sunday's clear blue and for a moment it appears they will keep going, set free.
We are terrified by the daring of it.
But it's also how we feel this week. Slingshot into space, landing on this other planet: the holodeck of the Enterprise? Exhilerated by the daring of it.
More about Planet Portland to come as we explore the wonders of this distant colony in a galaxy far away.
Friday, May 25, 2007
I'm Not Invited Either
I know I'm moving and not supposed to be doing another post for a couple of weeks (don't tell Connie) but the recent news about Gene Robinson's being excluded from Lambeth next year requires some comment (and I'm far from being the first).
Let's see: a gay bishop equals an illegally consecrated bishop equals (maybe) an archbishop associated with human rights violations equals.....
This grouping of the excluded simply supports what I've said before: we are seeing the church associate itself with the criminalization of gay identity. That's the slippery slope.
The Presiding Bishop has been speaking out on all the right issues, in my opinion: the war, immigration, etc. I am delighted that she is going public on social justice matters that we care about. But her initial response to Williams--let's not get excited--is simply institutional cowardice.
When you are in a bad marriage--TEC and the Anglican Communion, for example--and you have had counseling and have promised to do better and STILL are unfaithful to one another, continue to violate commitments, it is time for a separation. This latest outrage, even if in the end it gets worked out (ok for Gene to come as something else--maybe a goat?), is something KJS and the church needs to reject. Either Gene goes as himself or none of us goes.
Ok, I haven't been invited either, but that's because I'm a deacon. We never get invited to go anywhere. Well, except to leave town. Westward, ho!
Let's see: a gay bishop equals an illegally consecrated bishop equals (maybe) an archbishop associated with human rights violations equals.....
This grouping of the excluded simply supports what I've said before: we are seeing the church associate itself with the criminalization of gay identity. That's the slippery slope.
The Presiding Bishop has been speaking out on all the right issues, in my opinion: the war, immigration, etc. I am delighted that she is going public on social justice matters that we care about. But her initial response to Williams--let's not get excited--is simply institutional cowardice.
When you are in a bad marriage--TEC and the Anglican Communion, for example--and you have had counseling and have promised to do better and STILL are unfaithful to one another, continue to violate commitments, it is time for a separation. This latest outrage, even if in the end it gets worked out (ok for Gene to come as something else--maybe a goat?), is something KJS and the church needs to reject. Either Gene goes as himself or none of us goes.
Ok, I haven't been invited either, but that's because I'm a deacon. We never get invited to go anywhere. Well, except to leave town. Westward, ho!
Monday, May 21, 2007
Talking about the Body, 4
Augustine, the fourth-century bishop, enjoyed sleeping with women. He liked sex. His monogamous relationship with a woman who bore his child was not a marriage. The arrangement between the two of them was sexual. Their one child was probably a mistake; clearly, Augustine and his concubine used birth control. He put aside his concubine, who became a voluntary widow, so that he might marry properly and enter the governing class. The girl chosen for him by his mother, Monica, was Catholic and she, his mother, hoped Augustine might himself become a baptized Catholic as a result of the union.
Taking up with a mistress after his concubine departed, Augustine realized that he had a compulsive need for sex, the obvious basis for any further relationships with women, even a wife. He chose not to marry, becoming instead ordained to the priesthood.
The mystical joy of communion with the spirit had intervened: "limbs asking to receive the body's embrace" were disturbingly similar to the touch of God. Christ's embrace of the soul was superior to even Catholic marriage: the direct encounter with God's Wisdom in "an utterly untroubled gaze, a most clean embrace; to see and to cling to Her naked, with no veil of bodily sensation in between."
The discipline of continence allowed him to embrace Christ more fully: "O, my late joy!"
But Augustine did not take up an ascetic life alone. His male friends joined him in "a holy plan of life, . . . truly chaste because [of the] untarnished joining" of like souls. In Hippo, five years later (391) Augustine founded a little monastic community that became for him serenity at the center of his hectic episcopal life.
What troubled Augustine was the urge to act out sexually (the urge not in itself a sin), and he felt it deeply. Even married couples had to fight against this urge. In the act of marital intercourse, even for the production of children, the body enacts Adam's fall. Augustine taught that we all feel sexual shame. Baptism and incorporation into the church freed men and women from the shame of Adam--and that only at the end of time. This is the power of what has come to be known as "original sin," which, according to Augustine, is transmitted to children at conception.
For Augustine, clearly, the way out of the sexual trap--the body created to embrace the material, the requirement that the body be loved and cherished, as Augustine believed--was not easy. He regretted having engaged in sexual intercourse because, having done so, he knew what he was relinquishing: sadness attends the act, always, because of its coming between the human and God.
How does this brief review of Augustine's struggle with sexuality relate to today's disputes over homosexuality and the church (and, as I argue, women in the church)? Male society, for Augustine, was the only safe society allowed to the Christian who wished to know God outside of the pleasures of the flesh. With Augustine the church learns shame and her children are conceived in shame. Parents are taught the the act of sexual intercourse is in itself a submission to concupiscence, the urge to pleasure. When males in the church engage in sexual acts, they do so only for pleasure and they violate the last refuge of the celibate male: the company of other celibate males. If the purity of the church cannot be upheld in the company of men, then its society as a mirror of God's purity is doomed. Bad enough that women have entered the sacred garden of male continence and discourse, tempting them with conpupiscence; for the male to do the same, to imitate the female, is intolerable.
Augustine was not gay. He loved the flesh of women. He retreated to the company of celibate men to protect himself and to remain open to the embrace of Christ. He subjugated the flesh to his and God's will. And expected others to do the same, insofar as they were able. The modern conservative objection to the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church is one with Augustine's rejection of the embrace of flesh: God's will is that the body be held in purity for the embrace of Christ. The male body is the vessel of that purity. Once again, the model is the body of Christ, the male whose penis is forever that of an infant.
Taking up with a mistress after his concubine departed, Augustine realized that he had a compulsive need for sex, the obvious basis for any further relationships with women, even a wife. He chose not to marry, becoming instead ordained to the priesthood.
The mystical joy of communion with the spirit had intervened: "limbs asking to receive the body's embrace" were disturbingly similar to the touch of God. Christ's embrace of the soul was superior to even Catholic marriage: the direct encounter with God's Wisdom in "an utterly untroubled gaze, a most clean embrace; to see and to cling to Her naked, with no veil of bodily sensation in between."
The discipline of continence allowed him to embrace Christ more fully: "O, my late joy!"
But Augustine did not take up an ascetic life alone. His male friends joined him in "a holy plan of life, . . . truly chaste because [of the] untarnished joining" of like souls. In Hippo, five years later (391) Augustine founded a little monastic community that became for him serenity at the center of his hectic episcopal life.
What troubled Augustine was the urge to act out sexually (the urge not in itself a sin), and he felt it deeply. Even married couples had to fight against this urge. In the act of marital intercourse, even for the production of children, the body enacts Adam's fall. Augustine taught that we all feel sexual shame. Baptism and incorporation into the church freed men and women from the shame of Adam--and that only at the end of time. This is the power of what has come to be known as "original sin," which, according to Augustine, is transmitted to children at conception.
For Augustine, clearly, the way out of the sexual trap--the body created to embrace the material, the requirement that the body be loved and cherished, as Augustine believed--was not easy. He regretted having engaged in sexual intercourse because, having done so, he knew what he was relinquishing: sadness attends the act, always, because of its coming between the human and God.
How does this brief review of Augustine's struggle with sexuality relate to today's disputes over homosexuality and the church (and, as I argue, women in the church)? Male society, for Augustine, was the only safe society allowed to the Christian who wished to know God outside of the pleasures of the flesh. With Augustine the church learns shame and her children are conceived in shame. Parents are taught the the act of sexual intercourse is in itself a submission to concupiscence, the urge to pleasure. When males in the church engage in sexual acts, they do so only for pleasure and they violate the last refuge of the celibate male: the company of other celibate males. If the purity of the church cannot be upheld in the company of men, then its society as a mirror of God's purity is doomed. Bad enough that women have entered the sacred garden of male continence and discourse, tempting them with conpupiscence; for the male to do the same, to imitate the female, is intolerable.
Augustine was not gay. He loved the flesh of women. He retreated to the company of celibate men to protect himself and to remain open to the embrace of Christ. He subjugated the flesh to his and God's will. And expected others to do the same, insofar as they were able. The modern conservative objection to the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church is one with Augustine's rejection of the embrace of flesh: God's will is that the body be held in purity for the embrace of Christ. The male body is the vessel of that purity. Once again, the model is the body of Christ, the male whose penis is forever that of an infant.
Monday, May 14, 2007
The Church of St. Jamestown
I had planned to continue my reflections on the body today, but the Episcopal Church advertisement in the Saturday New York Times, on the OpEd page, derailed that intention. The ad, which commemorates the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, represents in almost every respect the problem with the Episcopal Church today.
The ad is wordy, dense, backward-looking.
The headline, "Marking a Milestone, Moving Forward," is about as dull and institutional as a headline can be.
The content begins with history, buildings, and, finally, in paragraph 7, The Boook of Common Prayer.
It appears that the people in the Episcopal Church have differing points of view but it isn't clear about what.
And then there is a reiteration of our English heritage as a church (the word English outnumbers the word Jesus three to one), as if that is a big selling point.
The ad says we struggle over how to interpret faith for today, how to maintain tradition, how to disagree. Some people leave us, some come back. But: TO WHAT? WHAT DO WE BELIEVE?
We are moving forward in mission all over the world--a world we are committed to transforming to one of justice, peace, wholeness, holy living (as Jesus taught). We get around to that message in paragraph twelve. Is that the core of our belief?
It is apparent in a couple of other references that the church has been in the right place at the right time (for gays and lesbians, for example), but the overwhelming impression created by this unfortunate ad is that the Episcopal Church is the First Church of St. Jamestown: stuck in the past, unaware of its own mission and message for the world of today, inordinately proud of its buildings (especially the big ones), and unable to articulate a vision for the future that might mean something in the twenty-first century. Historically, Jamestown is significant for this country and the church, but it was also a slave-owning settlement and the first step toward the extermination of native culture. It is not the shining icon of the church of today.
The ad also reinforces the old image of the Episcopal Church as the conservative party (the people with money and power) at prayer. Its very placement on the OpEd page of the Times speaks of power, the establishment, and immobility. It is addressed pre-eminently to the demographic that now rules the church, people of my age (over 50--I'm 63). No one under forty will "get" it or even see it.
The ad invites the reader (assuming he/she gets through all of the type to the bottom of the ad) to "come and grow" and offers a website link to both the main church website and a come and grow site. Click on www.comeandgrow.org and tell me you're excited about the mission and message of the church. Tell me what it is. Tell me what Episcopalians believe and why anyone should move a muscle to come into one of our churches.
A pdf of this ad is available on the church's website, presumably for parishes to download and perhaps run in local media. I think it's a very bad idea. Anyway, you can read it at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/newYorkTimes_opAd.pdf
The Episcopal Church, and indeed all of the mainline churches, are terrible at marketing themselves. (Please see http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com --the blog to "frustrate, educate, and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ"--for some helpful information on how to do what the Episcopal Church, as this ad definitively establishes, does not know how to do.)
Come and grow? I don't think so. Sit there and stagnate is more like it.
Here's an alternative idea: Go into the world and give people in despair the Good News. Tell them what that Good News is and why they should care. Give them some hope. And maybe show some faces of real people.
They can get the history and the architectural details later.
The ad is wordy, dense, backward-looking.
The headline, "Marking a Milestone, Moving Forward," is about as dull and institutional as a headline can be.
The content begins with history, buildings, and, finally, in paragraph 7, The Boook of Common Prayer.
It appears that the people in the Episcopal Church have differing points of view but it isn't clear about what.
And then there is a reiteration of our English heritage as a church (the word English outnumbers the word Jesus three to one), as if that is a big selling point.
The ad says we struggle over how to interpret faith for today, how to maintain tradition, how to disagree. Some people leave us, some come back. But: TO WHAT? WHAT DO WE BELIEVE?
We are moving forward in mission all over the world--a world we are committed to transforming to one of justice, peace, wholeness, holy living (as Jesus taught). We get around to that message in paragraph twelve. Is that the core of our belief?
It is apparent in a couple of other references that the church has been in the right place at the right time (for gays and lesbians, for example), but the overwhelming impression created by this unfortunate ad is that the Episcopal Church is the First Church of St. Jamestown: stuck in the past, unaware of its own mission and message for the world of today, inordinately proud of its buildings (especially the big ones), and unable to articulate a vision for the future that might mean something in the twenty-first century. Historically, Jamestown is significant for this country and the church, but it was also a slave-owning settlement and the first step toward the extermination of native culture. It is not the shining icon of the church of today.
The ad also reinforces the old image of the Episcopal Church as the conservative party (the people with money and power) at prayer. Its very placement on the OpEd page of the Times speaks of power, the establishment, and immobility. It is addressed pre-eminently to the demographic that now rules the church, people of my age (over 50--I'm 63). No one under forty will "get" it or even see it.
The ad invites the reader (assuming he/she gets through all of the type to the bottom of the ad) to "come and grow" and offers a website link to both the main church website and a come and grow site. Click on www.comeandgrow.org and tell me you're excited about the mission and message of the church. Tell me what it is. Tell me what Episcopalians believe and why anyone should move a muscle to come into one of our churches.
A pdf of this ad is available on the church's website, presumably for parishes to download and perhaps run in local media. I think it's a very bad idea. Anyway, you can read it at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/newYorkTimes_opAd.pdf
The Episcopal Church, and indeed all of the mainline churches, are terrible at marketing themselves. (Please see http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com --the blog to "frustrate, educate, and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ"--for some helpful information on how to do what the Episcopal Church, as this ad definitively establishes, does not know how to do.)
Come and grow? I don't think so. Sit there and stagnate is more like it.
Here's an alternative idea: Go into the world and give people in despair the Good News. Tell them what that Good News is and why they should care. Give them some hope. And maybe show some faces of real people.
They can get the history and the architectural details later.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Talking about the Body, 3
Our difficulty with the body of Jesus--how he could have been both human and God--translated to the same issue for our own bodies: how we can have in us an eternal soul and yet live in a material realm. If the body misbehaves, then the soul is soiled. As children of the sexual act, we are inevitably defiled. We are born of women. In part, the problem of Jesus' body is solved by making Mary innocent of sexual defilement: she is perpetually virgin and is not impregnated by a human. Jesus is born free of sin: he has the same human body, which in itself is a source of sin, but he is sinless because of his origin in spirit not in flesh.
Our bodies encase our souls, which through Jesus the Christ may be released into eternal bliss--BUT, wonder of wonders, a bliss enjoyed nonetheless in a body. The resurrected Jesus is in a body too but now one that mirrors for us what we can become if we live in him and follow his way. Jesus was human but not sexual. (The Renaissance paintings that show witnesses pointing to the infant's genitals are not acknowledging his sexuality but his human[male]ness.) He is sinless in part because he does not act sexually. Like mother like son.
The early church endorsed this perspective in suggesting that the body was superfluous; the sooner we get out of it, the better. On his way to a welcome martyrdom, Ignatius writes: "Let me be fodder for wild beasts--that is how I can get to God. . . .I shall be a real disciple of Jesus Christ when the world sees my body no more. . . .It is a fine thing to cut oneself off from the lusts that are in the world, for 'every passion of the flesh wages war against the Spirit,' and 'neither fornicators nor the effeminate nor homosexuals will inherit the Kingdom of God.' . . . Therefore we should guard the flesh as God's temple. For just as you were called in the flesh, you will come in the flesh."
Note that homosexuals and the effeminate are equally damned for their fleshly acts along with fornicators of all sorts. They sin by their actions, by their behaviors, by their very embodiment. This perspective is relevant to the present dispute in the church over the role of gays. It is ok for someone to be gay so long as he/she does not engage in sex with others who are gay. The celibate gay is acceptible, just as the man who might want to engage in sex outside of marriage with a woman is acceptible so long as he doesn't act on his desire. A man who acts and looks effeminate is also violating the order of things and causes others to lose control.
The early church urged celibacy on everyone, male and female, married and unmarried, in order to purify the soul. Tertullian described the body as a "unified organism." As Peter Brown writes in his book, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Tertullian's "insistence on the control of the body was so rigorous precisely because he believed that it was directly through the body and its sensations that the soul was tuned to the high pitch required for it to vibrate to the Spirit of God. The soul was a subtle, invisible, but concrete 'body,' 'set in the mould' of the outer body." Temptation in the form of woman was the biggest problem: baptism did nothing to alter the fact of woman's seductiveness. As with present-day Islam, women were to be veiled to reduce the danger of their inherent seductiveness. (Hence, the problem with male effeminacy.)
Christ, in fact, came to earth, according to Clement, "to deliver us from error and from this use of the generative organs. . . . They say that the Saviour himself said: 'I come to undo the works of women,' meaning by this 'female,' sexual desire, and by 'work,' birth and the corruption of death."
The virginal will have less trouble at the last days than the sexually active; those who have been active and then renounce sexual acts can also be saved. Their souls may be purified and worthy of the new body of the society of God.
In our religion, modern Christianity, we have taken this to mean that we shall have eternal life, meet our friends, look the way we now look, etc. We don't have to renounce sexual acts of pleasure (it was rare for early Christians to have sex for pleasure; sex was for procreation and it was therefore likely that a couple with three children may have had intercourse precisely three times), but we do have to be washed clean in baptism and repent of our sins, the fleshly acts, for the most part, that are deeply feared in the faith. (This is the essential difference between the conservative and the liberal churches, between a barrier to full membership rooted in repentence and purity and the open door of full inclusion--although the desire of a convicted pedophile to be a member of a congregation has troubled the faithful on both sides.)
Gays, of course, are in permanent danger because for them to repent requires complete renunciation (celibacy), as it did for heterosexuals in the early church. The "conservatives" of today--Martin Minns and Peter Akinola, for example--partake of that early mentality that demands renunciation of the flesh as a matter of sexual purity and practice, except in the performance of one's duty as a married man and woman. The acts of the flesh, all of them, endanger the immortal soul. And only a man ordained according to the Catholic faith can protect us. (The necessity that the priest/bishop be pure is, of course, an ancient heresy.)
To return for a moment to Ignatius: "The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body, and Christians dwell in the world, but do not belong to the world. . . . The flesh hates the soul and treats it as an enemy, even though it has suffered no wrong, because it is prevented from enjoying its pleasures; so too the world hates Christians, even though it suffers no wrong as their hands, because they range themselves against its pleasures. . . . The soul, which is immortal, is housed in a mortal dwelling; while Christians are settled among corruptible things, to wait for the incorruptibility that will be theirs in heaven."
Next time, I will talk about Augustine, as one must in thinking about this subject. A look ahead: Augustine writes in Book 6 of the Confessions: "I was bound by this need of the flesh, and dragged with me the chain of its poisonous delight, fearing to be set free."
Our bodies encase our souls, which through Jesus the Christ may be released into eternal bliss--BUT, wonder of wonders, a bliss enjoyed nonetheless in a body. The resurrected Jesus is in a body too but now one that mirrors for us what we can become if we live in him and follow his way. Jesus was human but not sexual. (The Renaissance paintings that show witnesses pointing to the infant's genitals are not acknowledging his sexuality but his human[male]ness.) He is sinless in part because he does not act sexually. Like mother like son.
The early church endorsed this perspective in suggesting that the body was superfluous; the sooner we get out of it, the better. On his way to a welcome martyrdom, Ignatius writes: "Let me be fodder for wild beasts--that is how I can get to God. . . .I shall be a real disciple of Jesus Christ when the world sees my body no more. . . .It is a fine thing to cut oneself off from the lusts that are in the world, for 'every passion of the flesh wages war against the Spirit,' and 'neither fornicators nor the effeminate nor homosexuals will inherit the Kingdom of God.' . . . Therefore we should guard the flesh as God's temple. For just as you were called in the flesh, you will come in the flesh."
Note that homosexuals and the effeminate are equally damned for their fleshly acts along with fornicators of all sorts. They sin by their actions, by their behaviors, by their very embodiment. This perspective is relevant to the present dispute in the church over the role of gays. It is ok for someone to be gay so long as he/she does not engage in sex with others who are gay. The celibate gay is acceptible, just as the man who might want to engage in sex outside of marriage with a woman is acceptible so long as he doesn't act on his desire. A man who acts and looks effeminate is also violating the order of things and causes others to lose control.
The early church urged celibacy on everyone, male and female, married and unmarried, in order to purify the soul. Tertullian described the body as a "unified organism." As Peter Brown writes in his book, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Tertullian's "insistence on the control of the body was so rigorous precisely because he believed that it was directly through the body and its sensations that the soul was tuned to the high pitch required for it to vibrate to the Spirit of God. The soul was a subtle, invisible, but concrete 'body,' 'set in the mould' of the outer body." Temptation in the form of woman was the biggest problem: baptism did nothing to alter the fact of woman's seductiveness. As with present-day Islam, women were to be veiled to reduce the danger of their inherent seductiveness. (Hence, the problem with male effeminacy.)
Christ, in fact, came to earth, according to Clement, "to deliver us from error and from this use of the generative organs. . . . They say that the Saviour himself said: 'I come to undo the works of women,' meaning by this 'female,' sexual desire, and by 'work,' birth and the corruption of death."
The virginal will have less trouble at the last days than the sexually active; those who have been active and then renounce sexual acts can also be saved. Their souls may be purified and worthy of the new body of the society of God.
In our religion, modern Christianity, we have taken this to mean that we shall have eternal life, meet our friends, look the way we now look, etc. We don't have to renounce sexual acts of pleasure (it was rare for early Christians to have sex for pleasure; sex was for procreation and it was therefore likely that a couple with three children may have had intercourse precisely three times), but we do have to be washed clean in baptism and repent of our sins, the fleshly acts, for the most part, that are deeply feared in the faith. (This is the essential difference between the conservative and the liberal churches, between a barrier to full membership rooted in repentence and purity and the open door of full inclusion--although the desire of a convicted pedophile to be a member of a congregation has troubled the faithful on both sides.)
Gays, of course, are in permanent danger because for them to repent requires complete renunciation (celibacy), as it did for heterosexuals in the early church. The "conservatives" of today--Martin Minns and Peter Akinola, for example--partake of that early mentality that demands renunciation of the flesh as a matter of sexual purity and practice, except in the performance of one's duty as a married man and woman. The acts of the flesh, all of them, endanger the immortal soul. And only a man ordained according to the Catholic faith can protect us. (The necessity that the priest/bishop be pure is, of course, an ancient heresy.)
To return for a moment to Ignatius: "The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body, and Christians dwell in the world, but do not belong to the world. . . . The flesh hates the soul and treats it as an enemy, even though it has suffered no wrong, because it is prevented from enjoying its pleasures; so too the world hates Christians, even though it suffers no wrong as their hands, because they range themselves against its pleasures. . . . The soul, which is immortal, is housed in a mortal dwelling; while Christians are settled among corruptible things, to wait for the incorruptibility that will be theirs in heaven."
Next time, I will talk about Augustine, as one must in thinking about this subject. A look ahead: Augustine writes in Book 6 of the Confessions: "I was bound by this need of the flesh, and dragged with me the chain of its poisonous delight, fearing to be set free."
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