Blogging the Catechism (3): Life Apart

Q: Why then do we live apart from God and out of harmony with creation?

A: From the beginning, human beings have misused their freedom and made wrong choices.

Within this question-and-answer pair, the word apart, in the question, catches my attention—perhaps because this week I’ve been reflecting particularly on my time living in intentional community between 2006 and 2009.

I remember a conversation my late friend Brian Logan and I had: so many in our country live in apart-ments, he said, but maybe we should call these dwellings together-ments. If we used Brian’s term (togetherments), we might at least then gain a greater sense that the human family lives together, whether we like it or not.

As a central quality of the divine image, God granted freedom of choice to humanity. But the catechism says we’ve misused the freedom that God has given us, that we have made wrong choices.

With this question and answer the catechism starts to get to the root of human life lived apart: apartness from God, or what Tillich (I think) called estrangement.

The question mentions not only apartness from God but also disharmony with creation. And the catechism says that both human-to-human estrangement and human disharmony with creation come about because we have misused our God-given freedom to make choices.

Especially in North America, where we prize private property, individual rights, and individual freedoms, it does not take long to realize that we live lives apart. We demarcate property lines with fences. We lock our domiciles and cars. And our spaces apart are fueled by resources extracted from the creation at great cost to it.

The catechism’s answer here notes that wrong choices have been with us humans from the beginning. That word, beginning, of course recalls the early chapters of Genesis: the trust established between God, the earth, and its caretakers; the loss of trust that first brings about alienation, then exile from the garden, then fratricide.

Why did we misuse our freedom? Neither Genesis nor the catechism seems to answer that question; any answer seems speculative. Genesis and the catechism only point to the way things might once have been and to the way things are now, not to the why of things.

Question 2 points out that we human beings image God in our abilities to love, to create, to  reason, and to live in harmony with creation. But we routinely use our freedom to foster indifference or hate (and not to love), to destroy (and not to create), to deceive, mislead, or confuse others (not to reason or to enlighten), and to live in dominance over creation (not in harmony with it). Says the catechism (and Christian faith more broadly), the right choices humanize and so benefit the many; the wrong choices dehumanize the many and so benefit the few. If we use our freedom to dehumanize our neighbors, we have misused our freedom.

When I left intentional community and moved with a roommate, to whom I’d only recently been introduced, into my own apartment, I felt a bit scared at what I’d done, and also proud of having resolved to test my ability to live independently, to find my limits. And to do all this was a very good thing, it turns out. I never lost sight of my need for others, of my connection to a larger whole, or of my connection to God. I was simply glad to learn some cooking skills and to be able to keep my own schedule outside work.

However, over the almost thee years we lived on the same premises, I observed my roommate (we never became friends) a loneliness and despair that seemed impenetrable. I tried to be as neighborly as I could, but it was difficult. It’s not always easy to image God in the world, but we can try our best: we can seek to know and learn from our loving Creator, who’s as near to us as our next breath.

Remembering, and the Prayer Book’s Gift: Words When No Others Come

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about my friends and colleagues in Eugene, Oregon.

The Church of the Servant King is an intentional and worshiping Christian community who own and run the publishing company for which I work. (This is simplifying things a bit, but  no matter.) I lived for nearly three years with members of the Church of the Servant King (from June 2006 until April 2009).

The Church of the Servant King owns seven houses in downtown Eugene and consists of between 40 and 50 community members. During my nearly three years in the community, I lived with two separate families, and with each for about the same length of time.

That community lost one of its teachers and cheerleaders yesterday. B. L. died  suddenly on Monday and leaves behind a wife and two adolescent children (children on the young side of adolescence).

B. L. made his living as a pastor and teacher and as a barista at the coffee house run by the community.

He loved to top off each foamy drink and to trace a flower or leaf in the froth.

Upon my arrival at the Church of the Servant King, I lived with the L. family: we regularly ate together, hung out, watched movies, and the like. They were hospitable and did their best to make me feel at home in the shared house.

So today memories of that time have come flooding back: sharing wonderful grilled meals on the patio—meals which often included wine; watching many kids (from several families) run around or play baseball in the backyard; reading Wendell Berry aloud together.

In view of this loss, I have also been remembering other things: that B. was a mostly self-taught teacher.

What his teaching may have lacked in nuance, it made up for in passion. If at times he overstated his conclusions about Christian truth (and I hazard he did, at least for my own taste), his conclusions nevertheless flowed from his own extravagant experience of God’s love in community.

B. taught and explored the faith with a childlike joy and abandon of which Jesus most certainly approves.

It was from B. that I first heard the speculation that Priscilla (the wife of Aquila and student of the Apostle Paul) wrote the book of Hebrews. We of course have no proof of this authorship, but B. was bold enough to do more than suggest it.

It was B. who liked to point out the correct reading of Philippians 2:4: “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

It was B. who read Hebrew and Greek for fun.

It was B. who said that only living life absolutely for the sake of the other brings true life.

It was B. who said that the definition of humility is to make another person shine.

It is B. who liked to compare humans to zebras: Are humans good with evil parts, or evil with good parts? Well, analogously, can we truly say whether zebras are white with black stripes, or black with white stripes? We don’t know, and we can’t assume we know. This was his point, I think. And the point was that God does know.

Another friend reports this: “My friend B. shared with me a year ago that he reminds his kids of this all the time: ‘You might not always do the right thing, but I know that in your heart you are good.’”

It was B. who said something to the effect that he didn’t want to  live as and with the body of Christ only on Sunday mornings. He wanted to live the body of Christ all the time, to really know the body of Christ. And he did just that.

As I reflect on the effects of this loss on my friends, including within B’s own family (on his wife and children), I’ve noted again today that it’s important to live in the moment, because we don’t know when our last moment will arrive. And I’ve been thinking about Eben Alexander’s experience of divine love in coma, and I’ve been hoping that both those who grieve in God and those who die in God experience the abundance of this love.

And I’ve also been thinking about the gift of the Book of Common Prayer. When we’re faced with sorrow that leaves us wordless, we can turn to the prayer book to find truth—as I did this morning:

Almighty God, we remember before you today your faithful
servant B., and we pray that, having opened to him the gates
of larger life, you will receive him more and more into your
joyful service, that, with all who have faithfully served you in
the past, he may share in the eternal victory of Jesus Christ
our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the
Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

What Did I Expect?

I still find myself fascinated with the Catholics, though I’m no closer to becoming one.

So I continue to listen to archived call-in shows at http://www.catholic.com/.

Yesterday I became genuinely annoyed as I listened to a live stream in the evening when, after someone called in asking about the history of the Gospel writers or Evangelists, the respondent gave the traditional answers without qualification: Mark was the companion of Paul and Barnabas who wrote the gospel from Peter’s point of view, Luke was a contemporary of Paul who wrote for Gentiles, Matthew and John were apostles.

The assumption behind this response appeared to be that of course these men wrote the gospels named for them.

But what we know is that the Gospels are only attributed to these writers. The authors never make self-referential remarks so that we know their names. We really don’t know who wrote the Gospels.

But what did I expect? The radio program is an organ of traditional Catholics. And Catholics place a great weight on tradition. For them, tradition equals truth. So of course the respondent would give traditional answers without qualification.

In reference to the caller, I thought to myself: well, here’s another person who would be surprised by what’s taught in seminaries.

Then I got a bit peeved: why can’t clergy and teachers, who know what we really know, share that with churchgoers? Why are clergy and teachers still presenting tradition as undisputed fact?

We can still, of course, present traditional answers. But we need to qualify them.

In the case of the Gospels we can talk about the attributions.

But we can talk more about the communities who read and preserved these Gospels and less about who wrote them.

The focus then turns to the Christian community, to us, as interpreters.

When I heard a seminary professor talk about the Gospels this way, I began to feel grateful to be part of a wider interpreting community, and I was reminded that interpretation is never an individualistic act (neither by an individual church nor by an individual person).

But it seems that, for whatever reason, seminaries have as one of their missions to either tweak or overhaul the catechesis that most Christians receive from their churches—and from their radios.

Blogging the Catechism (2): The Image of God—A Matter of Degree

Q: What does it mean to be created in the image of God?

A: It means that we are free to make choices: to love, to create, to reason, and to live in harmony with creation and with God.

This week I’ve been pondering especially what it might mean to be made in the image of God.

And I’ve had two main struggles. The first is that the catechism appears to define the image of God reductively: It’s our ability to make choices. The second is that so often in Christian thought  the faculty of reason is strongly (sometimes exclusively) associated with the image of God.

Does Imaging God Mean Making Choices?

The catechism first appears to define the image of God reductively: it’s our ability to make choices.

In response to this reductive definition, I asked H this week, can’t Emma the dog make choices?

She can choose to come when she’s called, or not; she can beg at the breakfast table, or she can follow our instructions and lie down instead.

She can hop in our car when commanded, but most often she chooses not to, and she simply lies down when we command her to board the Subaru.

Emma can (and certainly does) even show love to us, her human caregivers and biggest fans.

Although Emma may be making choices to obey, to disobey, or to love, the alternatives she has to choose from are limited, and they’re defined both by her instincts and by how we’ve trained her.

In other words, although Emma the dog makes choices, she chooses with freedom under more severe limits than the freedom we humans have.

In a lecture called “God and the Art of Happiness,” the theologian Ellen Charry (an Episcopalian) lists at least thee qualities as part of the divine image: our freedom, our creativity, and our intellectual power. The degree to which we possess these makes us more like God than other earthly creatures.

I might also add to this list our self-consciousness and everything that comes with that, including our dignity and our capacity for knowledge of ourselves, of God, and of others. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (complete with gender-exclusive language) hints at this notion of self-consciousness in its elaboration of the image of God: “[Humanity] is capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons.”

So perhaps our ability to make choices is one of the best ways to summarize what it means to be made in the divine image; by spotlighting our ability to choose, the catechism doesn’t imply that only humans can make choices. But reflection on the focus on choice does highlight the truth that human beings can choose with greater freedom than other earthly creatures have. Acknowledging this freedom, God entrusted to human care the earth and everything on it (Gen 1:27–28).

Does Imaging God Necessarily Entail an Ability to Reason? 

Here I am thinking of folks with cognitive disabilities. Yet even a person with developmental disabilities often gains some ability to reason. Infants, who have not yet gained any ability to reason, are part of the human community, and so are recognized to be made in the image of God.

Indeed Genesis 1 could be read as a dialog between communities: the divine community speaks to the human community and says, Steward creation well. And of course the stories of Genesis don’t trace humanity in the abstract but tell of humans in (mal)functioning communities. The catechism itself nods to the importance of community by employing the first-person-plural pronoun we.

We image our God, it seems then, to the extent that we acknowledge our life in community, to the extent that we make our choices well for the benefit of community—for the benefit not only of our human community but also of the entire created community around us.

Blogging the Catechism (1): What Are We by Nature?

After a discussion at Starbucks yesterday, I realized that as a new Episcopalian I might benefit from spending some time with the Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer. So I plan to reflect weekly on one or two questions for however long it takes.

To approach each question and answer historically would be my preference: to gather answers to each question from across Christian history—including from the present day—and in this process to follow the trajectory of Christian thought on each question, and to see by this tracing how the writers of the catechism generated its answer, to assess the extent to which we today can meaningfully speak in the same words that the catechism does.

But . . . who has the time or the mental stamina for this sustained querying except those who don’t have to work for a living?

So I will offer personal reflections on each question and answer.

(1)

Q: What are we by nature?

A: We are part of God’s creation, made in the image of God.

I am struck that we are the subject of the first question, and that God is not. The question is not, what is God by nature? The question is, what are we by nature?

Some might object that the catechism ought to start by defining who God is. But I see in the choice of the catechism’s first question a fundamental humility—a humility necessary for faith. Humility starts with humanity. If we start with the so-called attributes of God (omnipotence, omniscience, and the like) rather than with who we are, we create a godlike abstraction (the god of the philosophers) detached from the witness to God’s work in the story our faith tells.

The question also asks about our nature, about our essence. And the answer that the catechism gives is not immediately that we are fallen, but that we are part of God’s creation. As I read the answer, we are not first of all individual sinners separated individually from an angry God. Rather we are part of a complex fabric called creation. (Indeed, we could put the answer this way, substituting the word good for the word God: “We are part of good creation.”)

By nature, then, we are not first fallen. By nature we are first part of a complex fabric of a good creation. (As I am rereading Eben Alexander’s book, Proof of Heaven, in preparation to hear him speak tonight, I am reminded of Alexander’s discovery in coma that the universe is far grander than we can even imagine, but that we each are an important part of it.)

Here are a few more thoughts on this question and answer.

(1) By nature we are a part of creation. By nature we are not the sum total of creation. The catechism calls us to live with an awareness of our partialness.

(2) By nature we are made. When the builders of Babel tried to make a name for themselves (Genesis 11), God had to remind them that they had been made by someone beyond themselves; God had to remind the builders that they were creatures. We can create only because we have been created.

(3) By nature we have been made in the image of God.

The phase “image of God” is so loaded historically and theologically.

We might say though that “this child is an image of her parents.”

We understand that God is spirit, and that we are body and spirit.

For the certain difference that exists between Creator and creature, the catechism instructs us that by nature we bear some deep and intrinsic resemblance to God, perhaps as a child does to a parent. Life might just be about discovering and exploring this deep and intrinsic resemblance to the divine.

Easter Newness

Easter is a season of new beginnings, a season when the first disciples of Jesus Christ were left feeling bewilderment (What happened to our Teacher?) and joy (Could it really be possible that he is alive?). These two emotions come together in wonder. I feel something like that today. 

Last night I was officially confirmed as a member of the Episcopal Church at the Cathedral of the Incarnation. 

Despite the importance I will always place in my Mennonite identity, I sought confirmation for several reasons: 

1) I have always loved the Book of Common Prayer—as liturgy in English it has no peer—and the weekly Communion: these parts of the tradition (so central to the tradition itself) feel like home to me; 

2) The tradition emphasizes in worship the joining of things often separated in other Protestant traditions: Word and Sacrament, the material and the spiritual. So the tradition gives me the space and so many liturgical riches for living into my embodiment and (dis)ability;

3) Over the past year it has become important to me that my wife (a cradle Episcopalian) and I worship in and belong to the same tradition;

4) I still feel God calling me to some kind of ordained life and sense spaciousness and support for that within this tradition and community. 

Within this wide fold I will continue to claim my Mennonite identity and heritage. I maintain associate memberships in two Mennonite congregations.

 

Bach’s Beautiful Confession

This longish post comes from my earlier blog that I now no longer keep. I originally posted this in March of 2008. But this week I thought of posting it here. And I was glad to still be able to find it.

It might be that we’re soon to be in Easter, but all of a sudden I feel achingly thirsty for Bach’s choral works, thirsty to explore musically (as much as I can) and textually who Bach was as a theologian.

Today I listened to the rest of the St. John Passion. Besides the stirring final chorale, which, in my recording moves from soft to loud in increasing ardor, here were my favorite sections—in unfortunately preachy, archaic-sounding translations from the liner notes:

1. The bass aria, with the chorus:

Haste, ye troubled souls,
leave your dark recesses,
haste—oh, where?—to Golgatha!
Put on the wings of faith,
flee—oh, where?—to the hill where stands the cross;
happiness awaits you there.

No words can describe the remarkable dialog between the bass soloist and the chorus. In concert with the assuring words of the foregrounded bass, the chorus repeats the question of eager longing: “Oh, where?” (“Wolin?”)

2. The bass aria with the chorus:

O Thou my Savior, give me answer:
though Thou upon thy Cross art crucified,
and though Thou hast said that the end has come,
am I from death forever free?
Through Thy despair and desolation
am I assured salvation?
Have all our sins been washed away?
Thou must for grief indeed be silent,
yet bowest Thou Thy head
to say, in silence, Yea!

The German Ja moved me profoundly. This single stanza (indeed this single word) holds the entire gospel from God’s point of view: the stanza communicates both the Saturday silence of a grieving God in the face of sin and death, as well as the great, unshakable Easter yes. God says no to death and yes to us. Alleluia.

I also checked out from the library today a CD containing both the Bach Easter Oratorio (which I have not yet heard) and an Easter cantata. I look forward to listening to them tomorrow.

Finally, all day yesterday at work (on Bach’s birthday-anniversary), in my celebratory mood, I could not chase from my head the final setting of the recurring chorale from the Christmas Oratorio, particularly those bars of cascading trumpet sound. (Some know the tune to accompany the text in English, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.”) So from my complete recording I downloaded to my I-Tunes library that exhilarating finish. The text’s language of vengeance troubles me, but such language rests deeply within the tradition. The New Testament writers and the fathers understood Christ to be victor over “death, devil, sin and hell.” So I cannot dismiss the language.

More to the point, the final setting of that chorale is surely some of the most joyous music ever written: A soaring torrent of trumpet sound carries the triumphant chorus, one as fitting for Easter as for Christmas. I have been playing this music over and over today because its lofty magnificence at once steals away my breath and thrills my soul:

Now are you well avenged
for, upon the host of your enemies,
Christ has broken
that which was against you.
Death, devil, sin and hell
are quite diminished,
the human race has its place
at God’s side.

It is common to refer to the disciple Peter’s confession—”I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God” (Mark 8:29, Matt 16:16)—as “the good confession.” I don’t know the reason for this moniker, especially since soon after Peter gives this “good confession,” Jesus reprimands him for thinking in only human terms. So how long is the confession “good”? And what is it good for?

Perhaps Peter’s confession is good for its being a human confession. At one moment Peter is able to exercise his faith boldly and at the next moment to speak shortsightedly or ignorantly. This way of being (characterized by faith mixed with unfaith) is human. It’s just like us.

I suppose what I find in Bach is akin to what I find in Peter’s “good confession.” Bach offers musically beautiful confession. And Bach’s confessions are beautiful for being musical as well as for being human. (If Harold Bloom is right that Shakespeare helped to discover the notion of the human personality, then perhaps Bach, like other early modern people, was discovering and working out the notion of human personality within the Passions.)

In the Passions at least, it seems that at one moment the chorus can speak as the misguided mob demanding Jesus’s death and at the next moment can speak as a multitude of seekers on their way to Golgatha wondering “where” (“Wolin”) to find happiness. The soloists too can portray, for one, unknowing or hardhearted villains (in the recitatives) and, for another, sincere followers (in the arias). This contradiction is human.

Perhaps, then, I am drawn in the St. John Passion to the two bass arias with choruses because the arias seem to probe searching faith questions interiorly, soulfully, experientially.

The arias take the form of prayer. The elegant chorales, on the other hand, seem to reflect something of a devotional coming to peace with, or summarizing of, faith questions pondered in the arias. The chorales take the form of proclamation.

So in the Passions, and maybe in the oratorios in general, the arias (prayers) and the chorales (proclamations) complement the recitatives (scriptural material—dialogs and narratives) in much the same way as occurs in other services of the word.

The two bass arias to which I am drawn seem to combine both unsettled prayers and assured, proclaiming faith expressions. These two selections are dialectical in such a combination. This combination, resonant in the Passions as wholes, reflects the humanity of Bach’s beautiful confession.

Perhaps the beauty of Bach’s confession rests not only in the remarkable music but also in the clarity of the texts—hopeful texts that do not shy away from the antinomies that find expression in authentically human faith.

Thanks be to God for the fathomless depths of Bach’s beautiful confession.