02 Thursday Feb 2012
Posted in Books and Reading
01 Wednesday Feb 2012
Posted in Uncategorized
Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms—never leave it.
If you have just come to the monastery, and in spite of your good will you cannot accomplish what you want, take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart and to understand them with your mind.
And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up; hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.
Realize above all that you are in God’s presence, and stand there with the attitude of one who stands before the emperor.
Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him.
Saint Romuald’s Brief Rule is taken from Saint Bruno of Qerfurt’s Lives of the Five Brothers (Chapter nineteen). It was written around AD 1006—about twenty years before Saint Romuald’s death—and is based on reports from Saint John, one of the “five brothers”, who, like Saint Bruno, knew Saint Romuald well. We can therefore be certain we have here an authentic version of Saint Romuald’s teaching and spirit.
30 Monday Jan 2012
Posted in Scripture, Theory and Practice
Tags
anais nin, c.s. lewis, creation, dante, divine comedy, dorothy sayers, incarnation, j.r.r. tolkien, john donne, madeleine l'engle, poetry, song of songs, story, t.s. eliot, trinity
I want to poke some more at something I quoted a couple of days ago: Leslie Keeney’s wise and funny statement that the Bible is more like The Lord of the Rings than The Collected Sayings of Gandalf. Evangelicals, she says, have a lot of trouble with that. Having been raised Anglican and not Evangelical, I don’t have trouble with it. It’s just the way things are.
Christianity inherited a body of texts from Judaism. The two religions soon distinguished themselves from one another by what texts they considered authoritative; Protestants later distinguished themselves from Catholics by rejecting some of the texts that had been accepted as authoritative for over a thousand years. The texts that Christians call the Old Testament and Jews call the Tanakh include prose and poetry. The Psalms, the Proverbs, and much of the writings of the Prophets is poetry, along with that little erotic poem that somehow sneaked in, the Song of Songs. Ecclesiastes is a pessimistic prose reflection on the brevity of life and the futility of human endeavor. Pretty much all the rest of those texts, from Genesis through Chronicles, then the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, of Ruth and Esther and Jonah, are narrative.
They are stories.
The four Gospels of the New Testament are stories. So is the Acts of the Apostles. So is the book of Revelation, albeit a rather trippy story. The remainder of the New Testament consists of letters, many of them written by one identifiable person (that guy Paul) to identifiable communities in different locations around the Mediterranean world. While Paul probably did not write everything that has his name on it, he did write quite a few of those letters, in each one addressing a different, specific congregation of believers.
We have these stories.
The closest the Bible comes to ethical precept is Ecclesiastes and the book of Proverbs. Those two books, known as wisdom literature because their main thrust is “Do what is wise” more than “Do what is right” have much in common with the wisdom literature of Egypt, Canaan, ancient Sumer, and other cultures contemporary with ancient Israel. The closest the Bible gets to a how-to manual of behavior is the book of Leviticus, which is about ninety percent directions on ritual, ritual propriety, ritual purity, how to build a portable sanctuary in a tent and how it is to be attended, and what to do if mold or mildew appears in your home. It is full of instructions that Christians have routinely ignored at least since the debates recorded in the Acts of the Apostles: don’t wear clothes of blended wool and linen, don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk (or eat meat and dairy products together, as the laws of kosher still proscribe), don’t eat shellfish, men get circumcised, women take ritual baths after their menses.
The rest of it is stories.
I grew up with a religion of stories. The stories of Jesus and his disciples, of Paul and his journeys, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, of Ruth and Naomi, Esther and the king, Daniel and the lions, David and Goliath. Alongside the Bible stories, there were stories of Christian writers like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle, Dorothy Sayers. And there were stories about other gods, gods of Egypt and Greece, of the Norse and the Celts. As I read about other religions and other gods, I had no inclination to think they were evil or demonic or even untrue; they just weren’t mine. People used to worship Odin and Thor, Zeus and Apollo and Athena (I loved Athena), and now they didn’t. People in India still worshipped Shiva and Vishnu, but somehow that was okay. It was my own tradition’s sacred stories that taught me to pay attention to all story; a story was worth paying attention to no matter where it came from.
Along with the stories came the poetry. Not just the Psalms but the hymns we sang in church were poetry (not always good poetry, but poetry). I still remember finding the Song of Songs in the Bible and poring over it furtively with exactly the same frisson I later got from my father’s badly hidden copy of Anais Nin‘s Delta of Venus; even as a precocious nine-year-old, I knew it was a poem about sex. What was it doing in the Bible? What were breasts doing in the Bible?
As a teenager I discovered not only Anais Nin’s erotica, but the poetry of John Donne, about equally obsessed with sex and with God; the Divine Comedy of Dante, about equally obsessed with God, romantic love, and politics; and Julian of Norwich, and T.S. Eliot, and a lot of other things that the poetry of the liturgy and the Bible had somehow prepared me for. If I wanted to write about God (and sex, romantic love, and creativity), I had models to follow.
Religion, for me, was never about ideas, or propositions. Even the great doctrines like Creation, Incarnation, the Trinity were not abstract concepts, but rather abstracts in the literary sense, shorthand summaries of longer descriptions, references to stories. That God created humans, gave us the divine power to name, and then actually became human and lived with us, was, and is, the most fascinating story I could imagine.
29 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in Theory and Practice
Tags
39 articles, Anglicanism, Apostles' Creed, daily office, Jesus, lex orandi lex credendi, Nicene Creed, practice, praxis, prayer, t.s. eliot, thirty-nine articles
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
I have been thinking a lot about where I am and how I got here: Being a Christian, being an Anglican, again, after having been a Christian Druid, a Druid, a Pagan Druid, a Tibetan Buddhist, a Buddhist Druid… and so on round back to Anglican. I could just feel like I’ve been going around in circles, but it helps me to think of my progress as a spiral, or a dance, or a labyrinth; it may not be progress in the sense of onward and upward motion forever and ever, but it is a pattern, and maybe even a pleasing and/or meaningful pattern.
What helps the most, though, is to think in terms of doing rather than being. An Episcopalian is what I am; all through the past ten years of exploring, my name has been on the rolls of the parish where my husband is the organist, where his parents have been members for decades. But what am I doing? Well, since around Christmas, what I have done is say the Daily Office. I have done this before, as a teenager, in my twenties, in my thirties; I come back to it when I’m at loose ends, just as I come back to writing in a notebook, keeping a journal. (Which, come to think of it, I also started to do as a teenager.)
I’ve come to think that the Daily Office is just What I Do; in Buddhist (and in some cases Pagan) terms, it is My Practice. I read Scripture; I say Psalms; I recite prayers. It is a training in Scripture, in the ground level of Christian tradition; it is a training in how to pray; it is devotion, offering, the necessity of petition for human needs, the duty of praise to the Divine Source. And I just do it. Sometimes I read it silently; I prefer to say it aloud; sometimes I even chant it.
The idea of a Practice, of religion as something To Do rather than simply a label for what one is, or a set of beliefs, a list of propositions that to be affirmed, is very strong in Buddhist traditions and in Neopagan ones. Being a (Druid, Hellenic Reconstructionist, member of the Troth, whatever) means primarily doing certain things, at certain times, in certain ways, usually with a group of people. It is less important that everyone has the same opinions or theories about the gods, for example, than that everyone shows up to ritual with an appropriate offering for the deity to be honored, and speaks respectfully to the deity if given the opportunity.
For a lot of American Protestants, this would be a very strange idea. Religion is about belief, and belief means assent to a description of the universe, which may or may not be called a creed. People seem able to conceive of themselves as quite acceptable Christians without going to church, taking communion, or following the teachings of Jesus–because they believe the right things.
But the idea of religion as right practice is not really foreign to an Anglican. The Anglican tradition, and later the Anglican Communion, crystallized around a book of prayers, a book of practice, rather than around a description of beliefs. Lutheran tradition, for example, produced a number of confessions, whereas Anglican traditions did not. The Thirty-Nine Articles have never had the mojo of an official confession or catechism (although Article Twenty-Six has often been a great comfort to me in my affliction).
Anglicans like to quote a saying from the early Church: Lex orandi, lex credendi. The rule of prayer is the rule of belief. What we pray, what we affirm in our liturgy, is what we believe. What I believe as a Christian is what I pray: The Psalms, the Apostles’ Creed, the prayers of the Office and the Eucharist. Liturgy in the church is older than the creeds, older even than the canon of Scripture; the Church is older than the Bible, that is, the Christian community is older than the list of texts that it defined as authoritative.
I am not at all certain that I believe what I say in the Apostles’ Creed, if by “believe” I mean “assent to it as a definitive map of reality”. I say it because it links me with the Church, because it reaffirms my baptism and confirmation. I am even less certain that I believe what I sing in the Nicene Creed, which is full of Greek philosophical jargon that ceased to be widely understood over 1000 years ago; it is less important that I assent to it than that I sing on pitch and at a brisk tempo.
What I do believe, and by “believe” I mean trust in and rely on, is that God is present; God is listening; Jesus is a revelation of God; the Gospels have something important to tell me; and the Anglican tradition is a source of wisdom and peace for me, because it is a tradition of music, poetry, and story.
28 Saturday Jan 2012
Christianity’s authoritative document—the document that God intended us to have—looks more like The Lord of the Rings than The Collected Sayings of Gandalf. It is what it is—and what it is is a narrative.
22 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in Scripture
1 O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; *
my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,
as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.2 Therefore I have gazed upon you in your holy place, *
that I might behold your power and your glory.3 For your loving-kindness is better than life itself; *
my lips shall give you praise.
10 Tuesday Jan 2012
Posted in Scripture
Tags
Ancient Order of Druids, Art of Biblical Narrative, Bible, Book of Genesis, druid, druid revival, Genesis, john michael greer, midrash, story, talmud
In late Advent I returned to one of my core spiritual practices: Saying the Daily Office from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The Office of Morning and Evening Prayer involves repeated exposure to Scripture; each day there are psalms, canticles, and readings appointed, a reading from the Old Testament, another from the Gospels, and a third from the rest of the New Testament, in a two-year cycle.
This week, the first Sunday after Epiphany, the lectionary begins reading the book of Genesis, the Gospel of John, and the letter to the Hebrews. It will continue to read these books at least until the beginning of Lent. This is by no means the first time I have read these texts with the lectionary, but it’s been a few years since I opened either Hebrews or Genesis.
The book of Genesis is where it all begins, literally. The Hebrew title of the book, Berishith, literally means “beginnings”. It’s a book about the beginnings of the world as the ancient Hebrews understood it, about the beginnings of human culture in their part of the world, about the beginnings of their identity and history as a people. Right now Genesis is one of the two most contended books of the Bible, the other being Revelations. Stories of beginnings, stories of endings, how they should be interpreted, what they are meant to tell us–these are things the Christians are arguing about amongst themselves and with non-Christians, particularly scientists.
The last time I read all the way through Genesis, I noticed something interesting. It’s not just about the beginning of the world or the universe, not just about the beginning of the Jewish story–it’s about the beginning of storytelling. Through the course of the narrative, the narrator learns how to tell a story, in prose, with skill and artistry.
Genesis begins, of course, with the magnificent poem of the seven days of creation. This is the first reading at every Easter Vigil, the signal that as we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection, everything begins anew. It is a narrative, but it is distinctly a poem, with its strong parallel structures and its repetition of certain key lines: “… and God saw that it was good…. And it was evening and it was morning, a third day.”
The early chapters of Genesis of full of what a writer might call “plot holes”, those gaps in the narrative that skeptical readers love to exploit: If Adam and Eve are the first humans and they have three children, Cain, Abel, and later Seth, then who does Cain marry? How long did the flood last, and did Noah take two of every animal, or seven of the “clean” animals and two of the “unclean”? Did he send out a raven or a dove or both? Scholars explain this as the result of multiple versions of a story being combined (clumsily) into a single tale.
The narrative hits its stride with the introduction of Abraham. The peripatetic Abraham, his wife Sarah, his kinsman Lot, and their children and dependents will occupy the rest of the book, culminating in the saga of Joseph. By the time Jacob’s other sons, desperate and hungry, meet the Egyptian official who is, unbeknownst to them, the brother they tried to get rid of decades ago, the narrator has achieved mastery of his art. He’s able to portray Joseph thinking one thing while saying another, using the Egyptian language in front of his brothers and employing an interpreter without giving away that he understands what they’re saying, and playing on the advantage that he recognizes them, but they don’t recognize him. All the techniques of storytelling are in place, and the story of Joseph might just be the most sophisticated storytelling in the Tanakh.
After I had formed this theory, that Genesis is as much about the beginning of storytelling as about the beginning of the world and of the Jewish people, I read a book about Genesis that confirmed my theory, since it was a scholarly author, an expert on the book of Genesis, saying the same thing. My memory tells me that this book was called The Genesis of Narrative and was by Robert Alter; however, neither my library’s catalogue nor Amazon.com can confirm for me that Robert Alter ever wrote such a book. He is the author of The Art of Biblical Narrative and of a translation of Genesis with commentary, but I’m not certain that either of them is the book I read. (I work in a library; I read or skim a lot of books that I don’t afterward buy.)
Some years later, I read John Michael Greer’s The Druidry Handbook, which was written as first-degree study material for the Ancient Order of Druids in America. Greer covers a good deal of material which came out of the Druid Revival of the eighteenth century and makes it accessible and meaningful, demonstrating that it’s not just an elaborate forgery with a lot of Welsh names thrown in. He begins his exposition of Druid lore, appropriately, with a creation story:
Einigen the Giant, the first of all beings, beheld three rays of light descending from the heavens. Those three rays were also a word of three syllables, the true name of the god Celi, the hidden spirit of life that creates all things. In them was all the knowledge that ever was or is or will be. Beholding the rays, Einigen took three staves of rowan and carved all knowledge upon them, in letters of straight and slanted lines. But when others saw the staves, they misunderstood and worshipped the staves as gods, rather than learning the knowledge written upon them. So great was Einigen’s grief and anger at this that he burst asunder and died. When a year and a day had passed after Einigen’s death, Menw son of Teirwaedd happened on the skull of Einigen, and saw that the three rowan staves had taken root inside it and were growing out of its mouth. Taking the staves, Menw learned to read the writing on them and became famous for his wisdom. From him, the lore of the rowan staves passed to the Gwyddoniaid—the ancient loremasters of the Celts—and ultimately from them to the Druids. Thus the knowledge that had once shone forth in three great rays of light, passed through many minds and hands, now forms the wisdom of the Druid tradition.
(Greer, John Michael (2006-02-20). The Druidry Handbook: Spiritual Practice Rooted in the Living Earth, pp. 50-51. RedWheelWeiser – A. Kindle Edition.)
Greer refers to this story, rightly, as “the origin myth of the Druid Revival”. That is, it’s not so much about the beginning of the world as about the beginning of a movement, of how a group of people who came to identify with (what they knew about) the ancient Druids began to look to nature for meaning and to interpret that meaning in story and poem. As I see it, it’s also a story about the origins of the creative process. Einigen sees a light which is also a word, something to be heard and said. He records his experience in an act of art and craft, the carving of newly invented letters on pieces of wood. The words he carved on wood emerge from his mouth as green shoots, new words that are seen and understood by Menw. Those who saw the letters and worshipped them without trying to understand them missed the point; the point was the transmission of meaning from rays of light to letters on wood to mind and mouth, through the creative process.
I think the creation story in Genesis is also a story about the origins of creativity. And like the Druid Revival, which was after all created by men who had been formed by Christianity and the Bible’s stories, the book of Genesis locates the origins of meaning, of creativity, and of story in words. Just as God creates everything by speaking it, naming it, telling a story about it, so the Jewish tradition, and the Christian tradition that inherited its stories, creates meaning by telling a story. The Talmud is the record of generations of argument, discussion, and debate of those stories, an Internet forum before there was an Internet. Jewish tradition also gives us midrash, stories about the stories of the Scriptures; one story can best be commented on by another.
The lector reading or the cantor intoning the Scriptures, the old guy talking about his youth, your grandmother’s stories of when your mother was little, and we bloggers pouring our words into this digital Talmud–we create and recreate the world.
10 Tuesday Jan 2012
Posted in Photography
Tags
He provides food for the cattle and for the young ravens when they call. –Psalm 147: 9
06 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in Links
Image via Wikipedia
My stepdaughter has a blog of her own, and she posted an entry this evening about watching a Doctor Who episode, “Vincent and the Doctor”. And dedicated it to me.
*hangs head, digs toe into rug*
I guess I did something right.
I don’t know a better description of The Doctor than this: “…a loved and lost member of the greatest family ever known – the nerds, the writers, the introverts”. And if you don’t know the Doctor, or haven’t watched his recent, 21st-century incarnations, then as soon as you’ve read my daughter’s blog post–or before you do–hie thee to Netflix or Amazon and watch that episode. It will make sense, I promise you.
*sniff*
06 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in Feasts and Seasons, Poetry
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
–T.S. Eliot
