August 14, 2007. 3rd Month of the Last Sabbatical

OLD ST. PAUL’S, EDINBURGH: OUTLAW’S HIDE-OUT OR CAVE DWELLING?

The “Royal Mile” in Edinburgh, Scotland, is an historic urban thoroughfare that has adapted successfully to the demands of postmodern tourism and commerce. Its shops specialize in Scottish paraphernalia, cuisine, and whiskey, and street performers do a brisk business among summer crowds that bulge out into the traffic. The “High Street”, as its’ known, runs up the side of a mountain, a dormant volcano, with Holyrood Palace (where I believe the Queen stays when in Edinburgh) at the lower end and Edinburgh Castle on the commanding heights, and numerous alleys and narrow by-ways intersect with it all along its length.

Located on one such obscure side street is Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, its existence noted only by a small sign on the High Street. There is no church building in sight, however, and those who wish to find it must proceed with considerable faith down a sloped alley cluttered with the usual signs of urban excess and dereliction to where a weathered door marked by another small sign identifies Old St. Paul’s as having been a “center of Jacobite politics in the Eighteenth Century, and later of Anglo-Catholic religious activity…”, or words to that effect. Like Harry Potter seeking admission to a Wizards-Only rendezvous, one must summon their courage and push on this door with some authority in order for their quest for Old St. Paul’s to be fulfilled.

There may be another, more conventional point of entry for this church, but entering it as I did reinforces the impression of a clandestine meeting place, a catacomb, or cave dwelling, for the door opens onto a space of astonishing depth and height, built as it is into the side of a cliff. Little daylight penetrates, since other buildings surround and conceal it, and so the large stained glass windows admit only a pale greenish version of daylight, barely enough to make out the faintly glowing shrines and altars scattered about the space below.

On the walls of certain European caves are crude paintings of animals that are regarded as the oldest evidence of religion among human beings. It is supposed that prehistoric hunters created these icon-like paintings to express gratitude, wonder, and hope with regard to the animals that sustained their lives. Like all hunters, they spent a lot more time story-telling, than they did hunting, and the cave-paintings were probably the result of winter nights made shorter by tales and memories of wooly mammoths slain and eaten, and of the miraculous renewal of their numbers that occurred every Spring. This sense of kinship with other species and gratitude to whatever it is that produced them is the primal source of religion, and (I am convinced) remains with us still, though few of us hunt, and those who do engage in a highly modified, ritualized version of this ancient struggle for survival.

As I have said, Old Saint Paul’s struck me as cave-like, and had its stained glass contained imagery of hairy bison and wooly mammoth instead of saints and angels I would not have been surprised. Those who worship in this place are delving deep into the primal elements of faith and human community, and when they emerge from their prayers into Sunday-morning sunshine they are reenacting a Navajo creation-myth wherein human beings emerge into this world from a crack in its surface. That was in Arizona, of course, and this is Scotland, so you might have to forget about the sunshine. But cosmic rebirth can occur anywhere, right?

The Jacobites were partisans of the Scottish house of Stuart, adherents of those royal politicians known to the British establishment as “Pretenders.” The Scottish Episcopal Church has this tendency in its pedigree, since its bishops were “Non-Jurors” who believed they could not in conscience rescind oaths of allegiance made to James II, the Stuart King deposed in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689. Of his successors, the most famous was “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” whose efforts to regain the crown were definitively overthrown at the Battle of Culloden in 1742, the last pitched battle to be fought on British soil.

So it appears that Old Saint Paul’s was, in times past, a center of conspiracy and dissent, a gathering place for outlaws and rebels. No wonder this church is so hard to find! In former times it would not have been wise to be seen entering Old Saint Paul’s publicly. Better to make one’s way furtively down the alley, unseen by officials of the Hanoverian kings.

In some ways Anglo-Catholicism may be to postmodern culture something of what the Jacobite-ism was to Eighteenth Century British politics. To those who know enough about Anglo-Catholicism to criticize it, its adherents often seem like “pretenders” who crave the pageantry of catholicism but have no appetite for its disciplines. Like the “Non-Juring” stance taking by Scottish Bishops of the past, places like Old St. Paul’s can seem out of step with the times, attractive only to mavericks, waifs, and strays. Like Prince Charlie’s doomed cause, there is something quixotic about the effort to melt capitalism’s stony heart by waving incense at it.

I am told there is still a Stuart Pretender to the throne, and nothing could be more irrelevant (or ridiculous) with regard to the current state of British politics. But outlaws have their place in history, an example being found at Old St. Paul’s, where one of the more modern stained glass windows shows three Scottish bishops in the act of consecrating Samuel Seabury, the first Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA. It is a relatively well-known historical fact that Seabury sought episcopal ordination from the Scots because English Bishops were unwilling to elevate to the episcopate a representative of England’s rebellious former colonies. Perhaps, along with the apostolic succession, those renegade Scottish bishops conveyed to America’s first bishop some their subversive spirit, and a measure of “up yours” defiance that is not uncharacteristic of Scotland to this day.

Anglo-Catholicism had its beginnings in the “Oxford Movement” of the mid-Nineteenth Century, but in the contemporary scene of ecclesiastical life and politics it continues to wield influence, not so much as a movement as an attitude. Perhaps a parallel observation could be made regarding the Jacobite cause of former times, which could be understood as having evolved into an attitude of cultural resistance to English dominance. In the past, this has taken the form of distinctive Scottish music, customs, and speech, but more recently has shown a more overtly political face, as evidenced by ubiquitous Edinburgh graffiti that reads “END LONDON RULE,” and the like. Anglo-Catholicism persists like the reverent stories told by hunters as they huddled around campfires in icon-studded cave dwellings. It haunts the halls where synods and conventions meet, manifesting itself wherever partisans of any stripe are inspired to take the long view, identify with the underdog, or learn to tolerate ambiguity. In all its diffusion, and even absurdity, Anglican catholicity continues to become incarnate in places like Old Saint Paul’s: obscure, odd, as deeply rooted in human consciousness as it is in the side of its volcanic cliff.

August 8, 2007 3rd Month of the last Sabbatical

Oxford Street and St. Paul’s

Oxford St. in London is more cosmopolitan, crowded, and commercially active than Times Square, Fisherman’s Warf, or Michigan Avenue, or any other American venue of its kind. Like them, it is lined with stores selling clothes, shoes, jewelry, electronics, and souvenirs, but its multi-racial clientele speaks more languages and is generally more glamorous and decked-out. Families on holiday, groups of animated women, and loud teenagers, mostly French, all make their way through the crowds with supreme self-confidence, ignoring everyone but their own companions, all spending, eating, talking, all but one Muslim man who stood out in his gown and skullcap, who carried no plastic bags of merchandise, but strode purposefully through the crowd that seemed to part before him.

At the east end of this thoroughfare rises St. Paul’s Cathedral, protected from the busloads of tourists by a contingent of uniformed attendants who, every day around 5:00pm, bar the door to all but devotees of Evensong. Disappointed tourists turn away angry, like all shoppers deprived of an opportunity to spend. Only the devout minority (numbering about 300), are permitted to queue up, in good English style, and wait to be admitted into the chancel where the daily service occurs. Do they even know what they are waiting in line for? Perhaps not, but, whatever it is, they know it is a bargain, for Evensong-goers are absolved from paying the hefty admission fee.

As I waited with them, my eye wandered over the vast interior, crowded with memorial plaques and tombs of various national figures, some famous but most just well-connected. A thought occurred to me, as it has to others, no doubt: how will Britain’s current crop of celebrities be memorialized? I dare say it will not be at St. Paul’s, because there is no space left! Then again, would the notables of today even want to be recognized in such a way, alongside the members of the famous charging Light Brigade, the first Anglican Bishop of India, and the Duke of Wellington? Preoccupied with such weighty thoughts I looked down at the memorial plaque etched into the floor at my feet, and was startled to find I was standing on the grave of Charles Darwin! A curious place, St. Paul’s, and hard to categorize. It is part museum, part mausoleum, part storage-closet.

Whatever else it may be, St. Paul’s is a place of worship, and after some time a verger ascended the pulpit, and, using the PA system, instructed us in the most elegant of accents to occupy choir stalls in the chancel, leaving space only for the “Vicars Choral,” the male portion of the Cathedral Choir who were to sing the service that evening. As instructed, I found a choir stall beside a very nice Canadian woman and her daughter, and we sat as the vast building gradually fell quiet.

The first sign of liturgical life was a growl from the cathedral organ that I felt in my feet and back before I could actually hear it with my ears. Soon the voices of the Vicars Choral could be heard from out under the cathedral dome, singing a Latin introit, and from that point on I became lost in a familiar liturgical landscape, a country where all boundaries melt away as chanted psalm verses merge imperceptibly with silence. Then, with the last “…world without end. Amen” still lingering in the air, from some unseen lectern a disembodied English voice began with faultless diction to inform us of the doom pronounced upon “ruthless nations” by the Prophet Isaiah. Are we to suppose this prophecy applies to the demise of the British Empire? If so, this huge building represents the remnant of its spiritual capital, and this elegant act of worship its requiem, witnessed now by a congregation of tourists, survivors of a day on Oxford Street.

The cathedral organ is undergoing massive reconstruction involving a forest of scaffolding, and the musician plays the instrument, Oz-like, from behind a curtain, saving thunderous crescendos for special moments, our souls serving as the wizard’s playthings, swooped up to dizzying heights of joy and surrender, and then abandoned in mid-air for some sedate doodling and harmless chords. We plummet to earth without a parachute, but finding ourselves still intact, at once begin to long for another dose, another turn on the thrill ride.

It is like an addiction, a yearning for more that cannot be fully satisfied- an awareness all the more strange since only a few minutes earlier, I (we?) were wondering how much longer this bible reading would last, how soon this period of silence would end, when something, anything, would happen.

This is religion in its purist form: ecstatic boredom, ruthless beauty, elaborate simplicity, unfinished completeness. I wonder: is the organist a tool of God, a sacramental agent? A means by which God descends upon a cacophonous world to render it harmonious, coherent, and beautiful? Is that unseen musician like the man in a skullcap, wielding an unseen authority? Or is the Man Behind the Curtain a charlatan? An Oxford Street merchant in an archaic store? A dealer in cheap addictive drugs?

Isaiah has the last word: all the ruthless nations of the Eighth century B.C.E. have come and gone, their cities have fallen and will never be rebuilt. What seems to endure is the very last, exquisite and unresolved chord of the organ postlude.

I return a few days later with my friends, one of whom is an organist and respected colleague of many years. My spiritual appetite has grown sharper in the past few days, and I am eager, desperate, almost, to share the intoxicating reality of this musical place with them. But it soon becomes evident that there is to be no choir, no organ. The Service will be said this evening, as the musicians are all on holiday. Should I feel so disappointed, like a child who, expecting to be offered an ice cream sundae, must settle for a chiclet? Am I a disappointed shopper, too late for the Big Sale? Here is Oxford Street, possessing my soul, right here in the bowels of the Cathedral. What, God cannot arrive without the wizard’s conjuring?

I apologize to U, scourge of empires, author of harmonies: the final chord still hangs unfinished in the air, with U inhabiting the emptiness as I share this moment with my friends.

August 4, 2007. Month 3 of The Last Sabbatical

Before leaving for Great Britain I wrote about “sacred enchantment” and the “vast domed spaces” that have symbolized it in my dreams. Strange, then, to find that “vast domed space” existing within sight of the hotel where we stayed in London! Well, not literally “domed”, but certainly high-steepled, massive, and visible all over the neighborhood. Catching a glimpse of it as I exited the underground, I surmised it must be St. Augustine’s, Kilburn, an Anglican church not unknown to the guidebooks but definitely off the beaten path.

What I found was a building of cathedral-like dimensions, surrounded by a large, green park, and surmounted by many towers of varying heights. In the yard stood a larger-than-life Calvary, its solemn grimness accentuated by vases of faded flowers wilting on its stone steps. Obviously, those who established St. Augustine’s meant it to be a place where religion is not to be taken lightly.

The only sign of life was an open gate in the iron fence surrounding the property, but a sign indicated that “the church will be open for a period before each service,” an event that was to take place shortly, as the hour for “Evening Prayer and Rosary” was about to arrive. Once inside, the dim interior revealed numerous shrines with flickering candles, side altars, and the ubiquitous feel of incense. A large shrine to Our Lady of Sorrows dominated the south aisle, summoning memories of my youthful attraction to that doleful devotion. There seemed to be a mantle of Marian influence cast over this space, like the veils shrouding the many Muslim women in the neighborhood. At St. Augustine’s, “sacred enchantment” revealed a distinctly feminine side.

Evening Prayer was said in choir, with the two clergy reciting from the Roman Breviary and coaching me as required, their mellifluous English voices answering one another like twin waterfalls on converging creeks. Parts of the office were chanted in Latin, and as I joined in soto voce I found myself with disbelief suspended, watching my own imagination take flesh before my eyes, regretting the end of every psalm and every reading, every canticle and every prayer. If it were not for Nancy and the children to hold me in existence, I might have disappeared for good into the silence between the psalm-verses, and become another mute spectator among the apostles posted along the chancel walls. In a way, I am there still, suspended somewhere between the vaulted ceiling and the frescoed walls, a lingering molecule of incense-flavored air, having been burned alive and martyred on hot coals at that place where (as my brother Bob says) myth and reality intersect, and (as I have written before), “…all the stories and the rivers merge, and sleep rolls like breakers on an unknown shore.”

My goodness, whatever happened to “sacred irreverence?” Scarcely any of that to be found written above. But it remains, nonetheless. These ultramontanist clergy are admirers of a different Roman Church than the one I have experienced in the US, where heavy-handed authoritarianism infantilizes the laity and leaves many clergy stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence. And I wonder, is it possible to maintain such a complex shrine as this without blocking out much of reality? Complicated worship, as Thomas Cranmer observed, puts all power in the hands of a liturgical elite, and makes passive consumers out of the most laity. Indeed, the C of E in general exhibits this characteristic, and it would be easy to become a “sampler of religious products,” hopping from one splendid edifice to another in search of musical perfection and liturgical excellence. Clericalism, like any top-heavy ideology, can create some very unhealthy dynamics. At the church I served in the 60’s, the elaborate worship went on unabated while the senior clergy lost themselves in self-destructive behavior. At the time, I blamed the professional choir and fussy liturgics, but what was truly lacking was someone to tell the truth about blatantly dysfunctional behavior. You might say they needed Jesus at that church. Or AA. Or maybe they are the same thing.

Yet if Jesus is anywhere he is at St. Augustine’s, and the clergy there struck me as being the “real thing,” men of God, not unhappy, cynical, or in denial. The congregation that worshipped there was eclectic, affectionate, and extremely devout. There was a sense that something truly extraordinary was happening in the course of the Liturgy, a quality that I want very much to replicate in my own approach to worship, more than in the past.

Yet (my irreverent self interjects) that quality is something (not exactly a “thing”) that enters the church with the people; it is not an alien “thing” we must “conjur up” at the altar and impose upon people. “It” is “already present,” and our task to be receptive and attentive, to remove obstacles, not to play God and invent “religious experiences.” Besides, if people are not exactly clamoring for a chance to take part in the daily office, why not chant parts of it in Latin? It’s just the sort of odd behavior that throws the world out of balance, and creates an opening for the wild Spirit to break in. It takes some drastic magic to enchant a world as thoroughly muggled-up as Oxford Street and Picadilly Circus. Anyway, it worked on me.

My encounter with St. Augustine’s was an accident, like Anglicanism, like meeting Nancy at the pharmacy, like discovering St. Michael’s Farm at a parish coffee-hour. Such “accidents” are the stuff of grace, and I put my trust in them.

Beneath the Cathedral 1988 The National Cathedral

Beneath this chthonic cathedral where tourists swarm like

young bees

in a subterranean chapel domed by solid rock,

I wait

And know

I have been here before.

For this is a stone-dream, wherein

I travel through some small drab towns,

And come upon a huge and multi-leveled church:

It is my church,

And I belong.

The paint peels; candles flicker at the shrines;

A vested celebrant waits in dim sunlight

At the end of a corridor.

But I pass down to the lower depths.

I come to a vast, domed space,

So hollow, so intensely hollow,

And in my sleep I find myself aroused, like in some

adolescent dream.

And then I have two bodies, one an outer husk or shell,

another exactly mirroring the first,

enclosed.

Is this stone a womb, where I re-live my own passionate

conception, and life in vitreo?

Am I an egg, waiting for some rendezvous?

Here in the Arimathean’s cave, I wait to see.

August 2, 2007. Last Month of the last sabbatical

Wedding Day: July 28, 2007

In Duns. Berwickshire, The Borders, Scotland.

Duns is Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, with narrower streets. It is also Oz, or the Shire, except with everything made of stone, solid and made to last. If “the Imagination became flesh and dwelt among us,” it would be at Duns. Yet the town radiates good sense, careful management, and tradition. But not stuffy! The Scots may be frugal and industrious, but they are peerless when it comes to having fun. As with other peoples who have been subject to cultural and political repression at the hands of more powerful neighbors, the Scots cling to their dances, music, speech patterns, and festivals as acts of defiant self-definition. To observe this in action is a major attraction for tourists; to be invited and accepted into it as a participant is an honor beyond measure.

After a blessing ceremony at the Scottish Episcopal Church the Bride and Groom led the entire congregation in a procession down the street to the groom’s family home, where a garden reception was held. A piper led us, the sound echoing far down the hill and throughout the town.

Procession Poem

A piper is playing,

A procession is following

Caitlin and Michael

Down the Duns Road.

Between the tall meadows,

Sheep at their grazing,

Stone walls and slate roofs

Yield to the sound,

Welcome their passage

Into the future,

Surrounded by Scotland,

Embraced by the sky.

Sacred their walking

In the procession,

Begun in the future

On the bones of the past.

Follow the piper,

Never an ending,

Crossing the Borders,

Join with it now.

July 17, 2007. 2nd Month of The last Sabbatical

Tomorrow we leave for England. For me it is a pilgrimage to places of sacred enchantment. I anticipate revisiting dreamscapes, “vast, domed space/So hollow, so intensely hollow…” (Beneath the Cathedral, 1988). I anticipate revisiting Muir Woods and Grace Cathedral, while remaining half a world away from California.

What I do not expect is to find anything like St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco, because I have the impression that such vigorous community life is rare in the C of E. It is not so rare in the Episcopal Church here. What is rare is to find places where the “vigorous community life” coincides with “sacred enchantment”.

The most popular forms of religion in our culture are almost entirely devoid of sacred enchantment. They are correct in their perception that most people do not seek exposure to the mysterious, the unfamiliar, or the “sacred”. I suppose Pentecostalism is an exception.

What I mean by “sacred enchantment” is an interior awareness before it becomes a theology or a set of conscious beliefs. As I have said, it involves dreams, childhood memories, sexuality, feelings of belonging and rejection, safety and threat, love and repulsion, guilt and forgiveness, fascination and vulnerability, ecstasy and dread. It involves the awareness of death and oblivion, as well as powerlessness and dependence, and a primitive sense of justice and the appalling wrongness of much in the world. Finally, it involves a child-like awareness of gladness, gratitude, and wonder. For me, all this gets caught up in the gestures, rhythms, rituals, and “vast, domed spaces” of catholic Christianity.

But without a healthy community to cherish, sustain, manage, finance, and be transformed by “it”, the “sacred” quickly loses its power to enchant. It is ironic that the recurrent effort to maintain the Tradition requires us to risk it in perilous forms of Mission. In reality, we cannot bring ourselves to actually take such risks (any more than could the original disciples of Jesus), so the Mission comes and finds us, drags us “out of the oratories and into the streets”, as our Theology Professor at Nashotah House used to say.

As I say, most people do not want such a paradoxical form of religion or of community, so they shroud their practice of it under layers of familiarity: football stadiums, theater-style seating, soft-rock music, etc. Of course, “vast, domed spaces” can become “familiar” too, a caricature and even perversion of the Gospel. In secular culture, anything like sacred enchantment comes disguised under layers of either violence or satire. Nothing is less enchanting than bland sentimentality, just as nothing is less sacred than stiff, formalized worship with no healthy community behind it, or intimacy without trust.

This is where “sacred irreverence” comes in. To be real, worship and community must have the capacity to laugh at themselves, as well as weep.

WHERE IDOLS ABOUND

For Herb Gunn

Where idols abound

Worship is common

Products are plentiful

But vision is rare.

Where idols abound

The landscape is littered

With discarded scraps

Of old vestments and prayers.


Out in the desert
The cities have crumbled
Discarded chemicals
Poison the sod.
Out in the rubble
Children are playing
On broken-down idols
And the bones of old gods.

Gross is the profit
Fat is the toy
Played with at markets
In Greece, or at Troy.

Wherever the desert
Wind blows it cleanses
The ruins of cities
That once there were found.
Blasted with insight
The prophets they wander
Like owls in the wilderness
Where idols abound.


High as the Spirit
They fly in their hunting
The word that escapes from from the
Cracks in the ground.
Blest with night vision
They write in the darkness
The wind is their weapon
Where idols abound.

JULY 5, 2007 2nd Month of The Last Sabbatical

LECTIO DIVINA...Psalms 42 & 43


These two psalms actually form one unit, with three stanzas each followed the refrain, Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul?* and why are you so disquieted within me?
Put your trust in God;* for I will yet give thanks to him, who is the help of
My countenance, and my God.

This psalm may have a special resonance for anyone who served as an altar-boy in the years prior to the Second Vatican Council, when the “Preparation at the Foot of the Altar”, including Psalm 43, was recited between the Celebrant and the Server at the very beginning of every Mass. The Preparation (which also included the dual recitation of a Roman Catholic devotion called the Confiteor) was murmured in conspiratorial tones barely audible to any congregation that might (or might not) have been present, and it contributed to a sense of strangeness and secretiveness, as if there were mysteries unfolding that were dangerous for the uninitiated.
This sort of obscurantism is why the “Preparation” mini-ritual was removed from the Roman Rite (and by those Anglicans who had sought to imitate it), along with most of the other devotional addenda that had latched onto the liturgy over the centuries. But these rhythmic verses continue to evoke the memory of intimate worship held in side chapels on weekday mornings, witnessed only by a pious few and the whole company of heaven.


Psalm 42
V 1.
As the deer longs for the water-brooks, *
so longs my soul for you, O God.

It is significant that the psalmist chooses a deer as an image of spiritual longing for God. Deer are graceful, beautiful, and possess an almost totemic fascination for a person like me, a hunter since my youth, and one whose dreams are haunted by elusive herds of deer that clearly represent the deepest longings of my own soul. Yet, like any animal, their grace and beauty are diminished as thirst increases. This Psalm reflects the basic Judeo-Christian experience that any relationship with God is going to include times of anguish and bitter desolation. Whether it is St. Paul, Martin Luther, St. John of the Cross, there is a common awareness that proximity to God is risky, painful, and terrifying, and that longing for the experience of God’s presence can become as all-consuming as the need for water in a dry place. By the same token, communion with God is like a cold drink of pure water that restores gracefulness and hope.
But the Psalmist is not there yet…
Vv 2& 3.


My soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God; * when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?

My tears have been my food day and night,* while all day long they say to me, "Where now is your God?"


The commentaries point out that the Hebrew word translated as “to come before the presence of God” is a term used to describe the pilgrim’s passage through the doors of the Temple in Jerusalem. This Psalm is regarded as a lament uttered by exiles or prisoners of war, Jews prevented from making their accustomed pilgrimages and held captive at a distance from the sacred place of encounter with God.
The world today often seems this way: disenchanted; alienated; utilitarian; impersonal; indifferent. The natural thirst of animals has been replaced with an insatiable thirst for security, comfort, and convenience. This is not the longing of a deer for the water-brooks, but the thirst of a rich nation for more wealth, of a celebrity for more fame, and of an addict for more of whatever-it-is.
But who likes the the idea of “tears as daily (and nightly) food?” It is easier to dull the senses, focus upon the immediate and the superficial, and try to forget our longing. As one heroin-addict said to me years ago, “I’ve gotten to the point where I have to get high to feel normal.” In psychotherapy, emotional pain is often regarded as an early and positive sign of healing. As one therapist friend of mine says, “you can’t heal what you can’t feel.” Perhaps the closest some people can get to God is to experience the painful emptiness where the presence of God might fit. So mediocrity, depression, and cynicism are greater obstacles than suffering, desparation, and outrage.
It is a terrible experience to be mocked for one’s forlorn hopes. “Where is now your God?” is the taunt of the powerful, the succesful, and the smug, but it can also be an inner voice that taunts us, deriding any inclination toward naivite, vulnerability, or trust. This is a familiar voice to me: when vows are broken, trust betrayed, and old icons exposed as idols this voice can be heard within.
Of all the spiritual enemies, this one is the most potent, and most subtle. When a child suffers and dies as family, doctors, and priest watch helplessly, this voice repeats its litany of hopelessness: “Where now is your God?” There is a particular brand of cold-heartedness, emptiness, and helpless rage that can come to eclipse all else that lives within the heart. Over time, it shuts down all the emotions, stifles curiousity, and silences every song.
At such times the memory of past joyfulness can intensify the self-mockery. Psalm 42 speaks with particular force to an ordained person who is depressed or suffering through a time of spiritual darkness. “I didn’t just join in with the ‘voice of praise and thanksgiving’, I led the multitude into the house of God.” I was a role-model, a spiritual guide, a teacher. I was a star.

Vv 4 & 5.


I pour out my soul when I think on these things: * how I went with the multitude and led them into the house of God,

With the voice of praise and thanksgiving, * among those who keep holy-day.

So much for the narcissistic self-importance that afflicts most clergy to one degree or another. Exposing and acknowledging it can be healthy, but only if we can shed the heavy garments of victimhood and self-pity, only if we can acknowledge our vulnerability and woundedness and let humility and gratitude have a chance to emerge.

Vv 6 & 7

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? * and why are you so disquieted within me?

Put your trust in God; * for I will yet give thanks to him, who is the help of my countenance, and my God.

Verse six could be a beginning-text for all psychotherapy. Why am I so unhappy? Why does everything seem so dull and meaningless? Why am I so restless and dissatisfied? Why am I so anxious?
By the same token, verse seven might provide inspiration for the provider of psychotherapy. I am not sure what Hebrew word has been translated “countenance” in the Book of Common Prayer, but it provides a rich image in English. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines the English word as having to do with “comportment, demeanour…appearance…the expression of a face… a sign, gesture… composure of face….” I Samuel 17:42 says that King David was, “…a youth, and ruddy, and of a faire countenance.”
In this way of speaking, a patient might come to a psychotherapist and complain: “my countenance hurts, Doc!” And the therapist might respond, “I can tell. We will have to repair your countenance from the inside out. But first, you must put your trust in the possibility of healing, in the the power of something greater than your present suffering.” In the Twelve Steps of AA it is stated thus: “we came to believe that only a power higher than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
Or, as the Psalmist says, “put your trust in God… who is the help of my countenance, and my God.” For this ancient author, no façade of cheerfulness, no carefully crafted public image could substitute for the serene countenance of one who has been healed from the inside out. Such healing can only come from a ruthless honesty regarding oneself, and a willingness to venture deeply into the unexamined regions of memory and the unconscious.

Vv 8 & 9


My soul is heavy within me; * therefore I will remember you from the land of Jordan, and from the peak of Mizar among the heights of Hermon.

One deep calls to another in the noise of your cataracts; * all your rapids and floods have gone over me.

Here the psalmist wanders into a specific geography, citing certain landmarks as launchpads for memory. Are these places the site of the author’s captivity? One commentator suggests that the Hebrew translated in the BCP as “the land of Jordan” may be intended to invoke the notion of “the land of descent”, or the “nether-world,” called Sheol in the Hebrew scriptures. That such ideas were common in the ancient Near East is well-documented.
If the poet intends to lead us from the banks of Jordan into Sheol, the imagery in verse 9 would reinforce it, for it could be understood to refer to both the actual Jordan River, in its precipitous descent from the mountains to the Dead Sea, and to the subteranean land of the dead as expressed in Egyptian and other ancient mythology. For us, it can lead us into the nether-world of our own unconscious minds, where parents morph into gods and demons, and “one deep calls to another.” Here, if our souls are to recover from their spiritual obesity, the “flood” must be allowed to drown the old and broken self, overwealmed as it is with heaviness from the past. This surrender to a higher power, this seeming loss of control, can be terrifying, and it is typical for human beings to fight it with all the resources at their disposal: denial; intellectualizing; blaming others; faking recovery; substance abuse. But death will come, one way or another, and the drowned soul is carried away down the Jordan rapids toward the Dead Sea.
It would be difficult for a Christian to ignore the baptismal imagery in these lines. The baptismal font, after all, is a branch of the Jordan River, and a portal into the nether-world of Sheol. In the water of baptism “…we are buried with Christ in his death… share in his resurrection… [and are] reborn by the Holy Spirit.” Having risen with Christ from the water, the reborn soul is ready for verse 10 of the Psalm:

The LORD grants his loving-kindness in the daytime; * in the night season his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.


In the season of darkness there is an unexpected moment of refreshment.
“I wake up to the sound of music,
Mother Mary comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
Let it be.”
This respite is brief, but exactly what is needed in order for the soul to persevere in its pilgrimage. Newly baptized and gleeming with the oil of chistening, the neophyte gasps for breath on the river bank, only to be driven back into the water, back towards the gates of Sheol and the thunderous waterfalls.
What is this? I thought I had finished this phase of my treatment! I want to register a complaint!

vv. 11 & 12
I will say to the God of my strength, “why have you forgotten me? * and why do I go so heavily while the enemy oppresses me?"
While my bones are being broken,* my enemies mock me to my face;

Broken bones? This has gotten out of hand! I demand to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention!

Szat so? Listen up…

Vv 13 -15

All day long they mock me * and say to me, "Where now is your God?"

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? * and why are you so disquieted within me?

Put your trust in God;* for I will yet give thanks to him, who is the help of my countenance, and my God.

This heaviness that seems so burdensome, it has not gone away, but it is changing in significance, just as what was merely bread becomes sacramental body, and what was a dead Jesus becomes a Risen Lord, so what was “heaviness of soul” becomes the “weight of glory.” As St. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:17: “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.” The “heaviness” that has dragged the soul down towards nothingness has been transfigured into a “weightiness”, a profundity, a gravitas that serves like a vestment cast over the presence of God. This heaviness contains strong medicine for the fallen countenance. The drowning swimmer becomes a fish, at home in its environment and giving thanks to God with every joyful flash of its silver sides.

Psalm 43

Give judgment for me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people;
deliver me from the deceitful and the wicked.

For you are the God of my strength; why have you put me from you?
and why do I go so heavily while the enemy oppresses me?

Send out your light and your truth, that they may lead me,
and bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling;

That I may go to the altar of God, to the God of my joy and gladness;
and on the harp I will give thanks to you, O God my God.

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul?
and why are you so disquieted within me?

Put your trust in God;
for I will yet give thanks to him who is the help of my countenance, and my God.

July 1, 2007 Month 2 of the last sabbatical

JULY 1, 2007

Journal Entry: December 20, 2006

“What if we knew the effects of our intercessory prayers? What if we knew for certain our prayers could reverse someone’s cancer, or end a war? It’s a good thing we don’t , because if we did have such knowledge the burden of guilt would be too great for us. We would suffer from extreme guilt for every second we did not spend in prayer on behalf of some poor suffering soul, some person whose pain grew worse with every thought their intercessor had about baseball, or bacon, or bananas.
We don’t know the precise effect of our prayers, so we pray in uncertainty, sensing the justifying enormity of Christ who adopts our wayward, orphan prayers and makes them his own…”

JUNE 25, 2007

At St. Gregory’s Abbey in Three Rivers, MI.
While browsing in the monastery library I happened upon a ragged monograph that had been personally signed by Dom Gregory Dix, the English Benedictine liturgical scholar. It was dated 1947, at which time Gregory Dix would have been resident with the fledgling St. Gregory’s community. The monograph, with the title Catholicity hand-written on the cover, was a report written at the behest of then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, by a group of high-church English theologians. The Archbishop had asked these people (all men, of course) to consider “whether any synthesis between Catholicism and Protestantism was possible.” It appears that Archbishop Fisher was concerned that the Church of England might be on the verge of splitting in two, or even three!

I was amazed to find that the authors of this monograph included almost all of the writers and thinkers who had influenced my own theological formation. In addition to Gregory Dix there was Austin Farrer (an Oxford theologian who managed to achieve credibility in both biblical and systematic theology), Gabriel Hebert (who is most responsible for popularizing the Liturgical Movement in Anglicanism), Arthur Ramsey (later Archbishop of Canterbury), Ambrose Reeves (later expelled from South Africa for his activism against apartheid), Lionel Thornton (who, as I recall, applied sociology and ascetical theology to the dynamics of congregational life), and (most astonishingly), the poet T.S. Eliot. A veritable rogue’s gallery of Anglo-Catholic heavy-hitters!

In this obscure little booklet “catholicity” is defined as “wholeness”, as a capacity to hold in creative tension all the strands of Christian experience that have developed over the centuries from the primal experience of the apostolic church. According to the authors of Catholicity, “wholeness is not the wholeness of an ideal but of something that is.” Every Christian community partakes of this wholeness to some degree, but no one church or tradition can fully contain it. “The apostolic writers cling to the paradox that the Church is both the Body of Christ and also consists of sinful and fallible members…the glorious Church of the future… and the imperfect Church of the present are one thing…”. The authors quote a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Fredrick Temple:

“Men [this was the 40’s!...JCS] speak of Christianity as if Christians came first and the Church after: as if the origin of the Church was in the individual wills of the individuals who composed it. But, on the contrary, …it is the Church that comes first, and men [!!] are invited into it… .”

So we live in two worlds: on the one hand, we get up in the morning, have Carnation Instant Breakfast, pat the dog, and go about our business; on the other, the world has ended, and we are breaking bread with Mom, Dad, and Dom Gregory Dix in heaven. The future is already present, and the past is now. The church is an absurd and pretentious bunch of social drones; it is also the vanguard of a new and transfigured creation. This strange duality could be interpreted as a form of schizophrenia. To the authors of Catholicity, it is the wisdom of wholeness.
For these authors the Eucharist is the daily bread of catholicity. For them, everything was “contained” within this “action of God toward the Church…and the Church toward God.” This recalls for me how all my old Anglo-Catholic mentors were in love with the Mass. There was a serene objectivity about their Eucharistic piety. For them, there was no dilemma in heaven or earth that could not be made right by offering it to God at the altar and receiving it back transformed in communion. For my mentors (and for Gregory Dix, et al), this eucharistic transaction included the achievement of social and economic justice, racial equality, and international peace. On the more personal side, it included the reconciliation of broken friendships, recovery from addiction, and the prospect of reunion in heaven with departed loved ones.
It is true that this kind of objective catholicity can serve as an “opiate of the people,” and encourage an unbliblical and unchristian resignation to the status quo. After all, if the kingdom of God has already arrived at the eight o’clock Mass, why be anxious about the petty affairs of this miserable world? It is against such self-serving complacency that prophets and reformers have raved. Yet even an apparent complacency can, when counterbalanced by prophetic impatience, contribute to wholeness. Catholicity calls us to be both prophets and priests. It is not a matter of “either/or”, but of differing vocations, of different gifts bestowed by the same Spirit.
Much of that “objectivity” has been lost, a casualty (at least in part) to the effort to make liturgical worship intelligible to highly secularized people. It was a shock for clergy in the middle 1960’s to begin celebrating the Mass “facing the people” and discovering how bored, distracted, or just plain absent those people were. It was easier to maintain delusions about “realized eschatology” with our backs to congregations that had no clue. In recent years evangelicals have reminded us of what visionaries such as Gabriel Hebert knew from the beginning: without the Gospel the Eucharist becomes a more-or-less empty ritual. If no one is aware of any spectacularly Good News to celebrate, why bother with a celebration? “Catholicity” requires conversion, discernment, spirituality, authentic community, wisdom, and repentance just as much as it does reverent Eucharistic worship. More than anything else, it requires that we be real with each other.
As a result, members of our congregations know each other more deeply, give more sacrificially, disagree more vehemently, pray and study the Bible more intently, and expect more of themselves and each other than has been true since the time of Constantine. It costs more to be an Episcopalian than it used to, and those who may have sought a more casual sort of Christianity have gone away. It was this sort of strong spiritual intimacy and honesty that led the Diocese of New Hampshire to choose Gene Robinson as the Bishop. They could not do otherwise without denying the validity of their experience of the Gospel.
Ironically, their integrity has contributed to the stretching of the bonds of catholicity as far as the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion are concerned. In an effort to preserve a measure of unity, the current Archbishop of Canterbury has emphasized the role that consensus ought to play in the maintenance of wholeness. Yet building consensus is no more a guarantee of faithfulness than papal infallibility or protestant fundamentalism. What if the prophet Jeremiah had waited for legislative consensus to confirm his vision of God’s will? The same question applies to Athanasius, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King. Catholicity ought not to be used as an excuse for complacency. At the same time, those who would challenge the status quo must be prepared to suffer the consequences, just as were the prophets of former times. Division and conflict, however, ought not to obscure the requirements of catholicity. Wholeness is not a reward for Christians who behave exactly as they should: it is a gift to be received humbly from God every time we approach the altar for communion. Excommunication and anathema have been the weapons of choice employed against each other by Christians in the past: they do not serve the interests of catholicity now.
The authors of Catholicity put it this way in 1947: “ [The] wholeness of the Church manifests itself in its outward order…the mutual submission of the members of the Church to each other in respect of their divine offices is a part of their submission to the rule of God.”