No wonder they won't let me vote

Here in the glorious liberal, progressive blue state, they won't let me vote in the upcoming primary because I have previously registered as having no party affiliation (aka independent), something unheard of in truly progressive places like Wisconsin. I guess those Eastern Establishment types know how to best protect themselves from the likes of me, now scientifically and statistically proven by the following:

You are a Social Liberal (61% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (15% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist (15e/61s) Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Blog a Dog

I've been working on various essays on inclusion, sacred spaces, the Iowa caucuses, various writings by Frank Furedi (not just the recent deliberately provocative one on spiked), and have thought about entering the recent fray over multi-culturalism, Nazir-Ali's remarks and Jonathan's commentary on those remarks. However, Gracie has suggested that I get the day-job stuff out of the way while she naps and then take her out for a long walk in what looks like will be near-tropical, record-breaking weather here later today (projected to be 58 F -- it was minus 10 F last Thursday). Sounds like a much better plan. Hope Rowan and Clumber and the pups all get out to play today, as well.

A Wedding

Above is the view from the back of the church.

Below is the view from the altar, looking at the chancel steps and the wedding party benches below and the nave beyond.


We had a wedding on New Year's Day. A Burmese couple, one of whose family is Anglican, wanted to be married on a day when all their friends and relatives could attend -- New Year's being a holiday when most did not have to work. So, with the help of a translator, pieces they wanted from C of E hymnals and prayer books, it happened, with joy and a bit of fanfare, organ music and guitar, with the local Karen singing group from the Baptist church.

I can't begin to describe what a wonderful and happy occasion it was, even for those of us with limited knowledge of the people and their customs. The decorations were colorful, with the focus on the benches (borrowed pew sections) up front, facing the altar and the priest, where the wedding party was seated during the music and readings. Food and people poured in throughout the morning before and after the ceremony, at which something like 150 people attended. It was an honor to share their day of celebration.

The New Year

Umberto Boccioni, courtesy http://www.moma.org

Well it's about to be a new year, of one kind or another (never mind that the Jews, the Orthodox, the Chinese, and many others see it otherwise). I'm not much for treating this day or tomorrow any different than any other day, though I certainly do not mind the time off of work.

When I was growing up I spent the time watching t.v., Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show and the Astaire and Rodgers films. I recall one ghastly New Year's Eve home from college trying to emulate an Anglophile friend who had recently taken to sipping gin over ice with barely a smidgen, if any, of tonic water. To this day I can't come near the smell of gin. In later years, I gave up the alcohol part altogether, finding alcohol anything but a sign or means of celebration while I was married to an alcoholic.

This year I actually will be going out for a change, thanks to an invitation from friends. It will be a bit odd, I think, three couples, comprised of three Episcopal priests (two male and one female, if anyone's counting), a lawyer, teacher, and entrepreneur. Wonder what on earth we'll talk about. (Let's pray it will not be the ++ABC). We hope to wine and dine and dance and, who knows, maybe even stay awake past 9 p.m. or so.

Meanwhile, the blogosphere no doubt will carry on, seamlessly turning over the year from time zone to time zone. I do not wish to bury my head in the sand, but I must confess that I have grown weary of news, reaction to news, reactions to the reactions, whether it be the ongoing drama of As the Anglican World Turns or the vagaries of U.S. and international politics. I am tired of my own and sometimes others' outrage when it has little or no chance of spurring positive action or change. I am tired of rage and conflict, in the world at large and in my own home and community. There's no escaping it, I know, and I hope for much more than keeping a distant eye on things, as does the man with the arched Welsh eyebrows. But I do believe that building bridges and connections are the best that the internet can provide, not new ways of building virtual gated communities that only tolerate one kind or another and claim, right, left, or middle, to be able to discern what is truth and knowledge, meanwhile standing back looking at those with whom one disagrees with contempt and disdain. That is not, I believe, the way to keep an open mind -- seeing others as "not simply as wrong but as corrupt and wicked," or, at best, inexcusably ignorant. If we (including and especially me) continue to proclaim loudly and and as widely as possible that we simply cannot "imagine" how so and so could possibly think or act a certain way, then we need to start not only imagining better but also come to meet with others face to face.

So as part of my New Year's celebration, I salute Howard W., who earnestly believes in and practices the art of dialogue, and resolve to someday learn to do it so well.

Happy New Year to you all!

From Howard:

DIALOGUE RELATED GROUPS & RESOURCES

Civic Reflection
http://www.civicreflection.org/home.php

Eugene Bohm Dialogue
http://www.uoregon.edu/~mears/about.html

Extreme Tao of Democracy Inquiry
http://www.taoofdemocracy.com/

Global Transformation - Richaerd K. Moore
http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/rkmGlblTrans.html

National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation
http://www.thataway.org

Study Circles
http://www.studycircles.org

The Dialogue Group
http://www.thedialoguegrouponline.com/dialoguegrp.html

National Issues Forum
http://www.nifi.org

Selected Websites On Dialogue
http://laetusinpraesens.org/links/webdial.php

Making space and keeping it

Jane has called attention to Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which I, for one, lost sight of in the midst of daily episodes of As the Anglican World Turns. There's a lot of food for thought in it, but I'm struck by this snippet:

And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: "Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don't let it go."

Lessing is known for many works, including The Golden Notebook (acclaimed by feminists but for which the author refused to be a banner bearer ["What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness." Doris Lessing]. In her acceptance speech, she spoke in part to the space that writers need, but, at the same time, advocated for the kind of space that all humans need to thrive.

Lessing's kind of space is strikingly different from the kind Pope Benedict recently spoke of:

The family "founded on the indivisible union between a man and a woman" is the "privileged space in which human life is received and protected from its beginning to its natural end," the pontiff said.

(courtesy of Mad Priest). Had Doris Lessing stayed in that space, with her alcoholic father and her long-suffering mother, or perhaps even her family with her first husband, all bound up in the constricted space of colonial Rhodesia, the world would have been far poorer, I think. While physically leaving families, marriages, and homelands is not always necessary or desirable, space for one's humanity (and, I would add, those glimpses of divinity that we struggle to help God let shine through) and that of others requires something far different than being walled into a man-woman marriage and the family relations that surround it. Stability, comfort, love, and loyalty may, in fact, thrive in such structures but so, too, can their opposites. It is the space within that matters and the ways in which we can help create it for others not so blessed with the means to find it.

No Country for Old Men

The other night I went to see No Country for Old Men in hopes of seeing a serious, well-made movie for a change. That I got, a brilliant piece of movie-making from Ethan and Joel Coen, the creators of Fargo (which I've always considered a masterful account of the kinds of evil that lurk on the edges of ordinary life).

A brilliant movie, however, is not necessarily a good movie. Unlike Fargo, No Country for Old Men is driven by an extraordinary psychopathic killer, a foreign hired gun, Anton Chigurh, rather than the unraveling of everyday life that occurs when people give in to the temptations that have led humans astray since time immemorial. What this new movie does instead is depict, in excruciating detail and with slow, quiet, carefully crafted suspense, a series of killings that take place in the wake of a drug deal gone bad when the protagonist, Llewelyn Moss, stumbles upon a suitcase full of cash amidst the carnage in the desert and decides to take it and run, only to find Chigurh one step behind and sometimes in front of him. Chigurh was hired to retrieve the money, but he's on a mission of his own dictated by his own peculiar brand of "principles" -- namely, killing bluntly and coldly anyone and almost everyone in his path.

What is brilliant about the movie is not simply the nuts and bolts of its cinematography, sounds, rhythms, and pace, the fine acting from Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, and others, but the way it upends the conventional Western in which the good guys track the bad guys and eventually prevail, one way or another. It plays with all the conventions but attempts to hide the artfulness in what seems, at first blush, a naturalistic style, which some reviewers have found stark and bare of the kind of acerbic humor and disrespect for "simple folks" found in Fargo and some other Coen movies.

What keeps it from being a great movie is that the distance is still there, there being little art, imagination, or understanding behind the artfulness. Framing the entire story is the perspective of Sheriff Bell, who laments the loss of the Old West in which the Old Men fought the good fight and generally won against the forces of evil. In the contemporary world (depicted as Texas in the 1980's), there is something new and more powerful, epitomized by the story of the fourteen-year-old killer, described in the opening narrative as killing for the sake of killing, and the story of Chigurh's killing spree that unfolds in the movie. Bell and the unblinking locals who are killed on roadways and in gas stations are not sure what that new evil is or where it comes from, but it is real and terrible and won't be stopped. All Bell can offer by way of explanation are lines like: ''It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.''

This might be grimly funny, but it seems that the Coen brothers (and perhaps Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the novel), are playing it straight. They seem to think they are being cleverly existential, staking their vision in the person of Bell who says matter-of-factly that he waited all his life for God to come into his life, but to no avail. So he trails the killings and finally retires, left with no knowledge but that the end is in sight and dreams that when it comes his father, one of the Old Men, will be waiting for him.

The result is a shallow vision of good and evil and, worst of all, history. One doesn't have to look far to another kind of artful upsetting of Western conventions, the HBO series Deadwood, to realize that the Old West (with its virtuous Old Men and no comparable Old Women to speak of) was a figment of the Hollywood imagination. For those who care to look further, one can dig deep into the myths and folklore of the American West, the Turner thesis, and the hagiographies of various figures in American history, and find all the hard work later historians have brought to bear to bring them out into the light of a fuller, more complex historical reality, as best they and we can discern it. What we learn time and time again, once we delve below the surface and try to fathom real lives, is that the evil that comes from greed, betrayal, and love of power is pretty much the same as it has always been, and there is no clear dividing line between the ignorant local folks and the sophisticated, knowing oustiders that sets the boundaries between good and evil. (And what one can sometimes only imagine, because the historical record is sparse, is that it has often been the women, like Trixie and Calamity Jane, who have seen the bigger picture far better than any of the men, old or young.)

Artfulness that pretends otherwise, buys into the good 'ol times as historical reality to make a cinematographic point, strikes me as sorely lacking in imagination. Full-blown myths like The Lord of the Rings come closer to the truth because they unabashedly take the myths as our dreams and aspirations rather than a fundamentalist bygone age that must be recaptured or, at best, lamented while wallowing in the pain and confusion of its loss. Meanwhile, God only knows how many will see No Country for Old Men and simply be entertained by its clever carnage. Straw Dogs did it better, I think, but maybe that's just nostalgia for the good old days.

The Priesthood of All Believers

I've never been much enthused about the Reformation. While the Roman Church of its day was full of abuses (as it and others are still today), which needed correcting, a whole lot of the mystery of faith and the corporal aspects of Christian life seem to have been tossed out, with dull literalism, anti-sacramentalism, and individualism taking their place, enthroned on pulpits rather than bishop's chairs.

Yet I'm beginning to see more and more of value in the extent to which the Protestant view attacked the notion of priesthood and the Magisterium that governs it as the keepers of holy mysteries, indeed, of the keys to the kingdom itself. Looking upon recent events in the Episcopal Church and the Christmas ceremonies in the Vatican, I'm struck by how important it is that the laity understand and appreciate that they are, indeed, living members of the body of Christ. As such, they need to strive to be mature in faith and witness, not act as children ever in need of instruction and oversight or as young or old delighting in the cult of personality, goggling, fawning, and destroying those they place in the limelight.

Earlier this month, Fr. Matthew Hopkins wrote with regard to this passage from the Archibishop of Canterbury's Advent Letter,

the gift shaped by the Holy Spirit which decisively interprets God to the community of believers and the community of believers to itself

that

At best, that fragment of a sentence should read

the gift shaped by the Holy Spirit which interprets God in and with the community of believers and continually forms and re-forms that community itself.

The Archbishop completely objectifies, makes passive, “the community of believers,” which, for this Anglican, is about as far from Anglicanism as one can get.

(Rev. Michael W. Hopkins, December 15, 2007).

In other words, even with regards to understanding and interpreting Scripture, the laity has an active, vital role to play as part of the larger community of believers.

This doesn't necessarily mean congregationalism in the usual Protestant sense, but it does mean that the clergy is not the sole repository for and guardians of the faith, the kind that was "once delivered" and must be jealously kept under glass, free from air or light or human touch.

It also means, I think, that sooner or later we all, Protestants and Catholics alike, need to let go of our notion that clergy are somehow supposed to be some sort of species of the semi-divine or at least measured in those terms. So many of us want clergy to be somehow better than the average person, not simply accountable for misconduct, as we all must be, but somehow radiating holiness or, at the very least, at all times striving to do so, while at the same time being our friends, neighbors, mother and father figures, and the teachers and preachers who tell all those in our lives and in our worlds who displease us that they should behave differently, prophets and advocates of all of our own personal agendas.

The problem, as I see it, is not simply the occasional "toxic" congregation, where these attitudes take the form of a group dynamic that can be very harmful to all involved, institutionally and personally. The problem is the extent to which those, both the sometimes believers in the pews and the skeptics and non-believers on the outside, expect moral and spiritual super-performance from the paid professionals, either as consumerists, who want return for our money (those of us who invest) or simply as frail human beings who would like to believe that if only we tried harder -- as those who have taken religious vows presumably are or should be doing -- we would be living in the City on the Hill or whatever our vision is of living the holy life here on earth.

Those of us who are Christians, especially those of a more Catholic bent, want our pastors and priests to be iconic in some special and distinct way -- not just iconic in the sense that all who seek to follow Christ hope to reveal a glimmer of the face of the divine imaged in all of us humans, but as humans whom we expect to re-present themselves as Christ himself, to not just follow or serve the Good Shepherd, but to act as though they are Him. This is dangerous, not only in relations with clergy, but in what it means in how we think of ourselves as non-clergy. Always looking up to clergy to lead -- although many lead well -- all too often leaves us waiting for directions, for mission "strategies," for planned evangelism (i.e. marketing), for community-building, for building-building, etc. It keeps us from taking action, living full lives in Christ as not just as individuals, seeking our personal salvation, but as his corporate Body here on earth, we, the people, the one holy and apostolic Church, lay and ordained alike. Priests have important roles to play in celebrating the sacraments, administering resources for mission and worship, facilitating and focusing the community's efforts at providing Christian fellowship and service to the wider community, but we, too, have important and vital roles to play in teaching, preaching, ministering, and, on occasion, even prophesying.

There is so much work to do for Christ, as individuals and communities, that we cannot afford to just sit in the pews or even bring the dishes to the pot-lucks. What brings me the most hope of late is seeing laypersons in the Episcopal Church reach across parishes and dioceses, across miles and nations, to each other. But if we are to do more such good work, I think we have to start at home, as well, seeing every single one of us as vital parts of the whole. We need to stop conceiving of ourselves and acting as communities around ministers but instead work at becoming ministering communities. We need to stop the busyness of putting our priests on pedestals, sometimes tearing them down, only to look for new ones to raise up to replace them, and instead plant all of our feet firmly on the ground, everyone working together to imitate and serve Christ.

As I recently heard in an ordination sermon:

We need to remember that it is baptismal ministry that is primary and basic to the life of the Church, and it is only when and where clergy and laity both believe and embrace that truth that the mission of the Church can be advanced. Those of us who are ordained, while exercising ministries that are essential to the Church’s life, do so to support and empower the ministry of the all the baptized, the vast majority of whom are lay people. Without you, our ministries have neither context nor purpose.

* * * *

This priesthood belongs to the whole Body of the Faithful; it is the priesthood shared by all the baptized.

And what do we have to offer? In and of ourselves, whether lay or ordained, all that we have is the widow’s mite. We have our own limited and fallible humanity— imperfect and broken, flawed in so many ways, prone to making stupid and idiotic mistakes, seemingly unable to offer the perfection that God has the right to expect. But the incredibly Good News of the Gospel is that this is precisely what God wants. God wants the imperfect, broken and flawed human beings that we are, to reach out to the world, because each and every human being on the face of the earth is made of the same stuff, experiences the same challenges, and must deal with the same flaws.

It’s all symbolized in the widow’s mite— it seems like so little. But it’s not the amount that’s the focus here. It is our willingness to offer who and what we are and have. That is our call; and that is how we exercise our priesthood.

Not just to clergy, but the call of the priesthood to all believers. Each of us, with our own mite to offer.

Christmas Day

Sing to the LORD a new song;
sing to the LORD, all the whole earth.
Sing to the LORD and bless his Name;
proclaim the good news of his salvation from day to day.

Psalm 96



Oh, the majesty and magnificence of his presence!
Oh, the power and the splendor of his sanctuary!



Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness;
let the whole earth tremble before him.
Tell it out among the nations: “The LORD is King!



(choir door)















(The Lady Chapel)



(Tiffany windows in The Lady Chapel)

Christmas Eve

Still looking for my Christmas music CDs. Can't find my Mahalia Jackson, so this will have to do.


Hard to believe it's Christmas Eve already. It's been warm and grey and muddy of late, the two feet of snow that fell the other week melting, freezing, and melting again, patches of grass beyond the four-foot high mounds left by the snow plow. Maybe we'll have a touch of snow later today.

All those weeks of Advent and I'm still not ready. Ran around with the kids shopping on Saturday just to spend some time with them before they left yesterday to visit Grandpa, aunts and uncles, and cousins who all will be congregating in the Midwest. The kids finally went out and got a tree together on Thursday and Friday night decorated it. My son and his girlfriend disappeared upstairs, and my daughter and I watched Princess Bride on t.v. Yesterday went to early mass, drove them to the airport, and finally did some shopping myself.

Now they're gone. Had a bit of heart failure last night when I frantically text-messaged them when they should have arrived two hours earlier, when the last I had heard from them from Detroit was that their connecting flight was on time. Turns out that the wind gusts in Milwaukee were so bad that they had to circle around for an hour and almost went back to Detroit. Thank God they landed safely.

Today looms so long. I should be at church from 4 p.m. until 1 a.m. or so, unless we decide to come home for some of the 7-9 p.m. break between services. Have scarcely seen my husband, which, of course, is usual. Among other things, he had to write two sermons for last week (one an ordination sermon), and three for this long weekend -- Advent IV and two for Christmas Eve (one of the latter going to be recycled over for use Christmas morning). We'll probably just sleep tomorrow afternoon. Then it's back to work on Wednesday. Gift exchange, such that it is, probably will wait until later in the week when the kids return.

I wonder sometimes how other clergy families manage. In the beginning it was good to participate in something far more important than family gatherings, and to get away from the football t.v. fests, the delicate maneuvering around delicate family matters, the restless children, the focus on gifts, and what to do afterwards other than eat and eat and eat and fall into a carbed up stupor. Now it's just a time to try to be inconspicuous and avoid frayed nerves and tired, aching bodies. It's a series of performances, which each year have their own little glitches but the show always goes on. Nothing wrong with that -- indeed, as Children of the Story, it is vital that it gets played out in all of its splendor.

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news,
But she just smiled and turned away.
I went down to the sacred store
Where I’d heard the music years before,
But the man there said the music wouldn’t play.

And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.

(Don McLean, American Pie)

So let the music play on, the church bells ring, and those three men and their good women carry on. It sure beats the alternative.

The Mad One Speaks

My mind (not to mention my heart and soul) is still struggling to find its way out of the debris of legal research and the flurry of teenage activities in my household (even the "good" child is showing anarchistic tendencies -- principal's office called the other day to report a "serious" infraction of the school cell phone policy and to warn of "very serious" consequences if another violation were to occur -- her story is that she did not use her phone or even open it during regular classes, just opened it to check the time at the end of P.E. class -- given the tone of the jerk who called, I'm inclined to believe her).

Meanwhile, I've come across this from the Mad Priest. I think it's one of the most ***king brilliant things he's ever written. I hope he won't mind my bringing it here (where it is extremely unlikely that anyone will see it without having read it first at MP's). I just need to save it to ponder further. So, thank ye, thank ye, Jonathan for your generosity and clear-sightedness.

COMMENT: Ironically, this little outburst from The Tufti shows just how snuggled up in bed he is with the fundamentalists. There is little difference between the liberal desire to hold everything in our tradition up for scientific scrutiny and the evangelical obsession with treating every jot and tittle in the Bible as if it's the unchallengeable word of God. Both are missing the point, both are blind to the big picture. Both are standing on the beach studying the pebbles when they should be gazing out upon the glorious ocean.

Although there is still plenty of overlap, there are two types of people living in the developed countries and so, also, in the churches - modernists and postmodernists. Those of us who grew up in our faith embracing the freedom of liberation theology and narrative criticism are predisposed to look first for the big picture. Unfortunately, because of snobbery and the old school tie network, those in positions of power within the Church tend to be academics, like the Tufti, who still cling to the modernism that was the defining theme of their education. Modernism is about laws and classical science. Postmodernism is about big ideas, dreams and quantum physics.

These two world views can be understood as two different languages and this is why there will never be any agreement between the lawyers and the liberationists. When they speak I stare blankly because there is nothing in my mind on which I can hang their words. I am sure the same must be true for them when I speak.

But I am happy to be where I am as the alternative is such a boring place to be. I really can't see what the point is in worrying about the reality of our mythology. I accept that things either happened or didn't happen but to deconstruct them without any intention of reconstructing them as new, more powerful myths is pretty pointless and a Grinchy thing to do. When you read a book to a child, that child is not thinking, "Is this a true story?" The child doesn't care. The child is listening to a story and a story exists outside of conventional reality.

Some Christians are children of the Book. Me, I snuggle up in bed with those Christians who are children of the Story - it's so much more fun. Posted by MadPriest at 10:27 AM

* * * *
Liberals made postmodernism possible. I would call myself a post-liberal in that I believe the liberal quest was of the utmost importance in the development of true religion. I also believe that it has now done it's job of deconstruction and it is time for us to reconstruct. This does not mean, in the slightest that we dump what liberal theology has taught us. It just means that it becomes a component of a new theology rather than the main, defining philosophy and method for radical Christianity. 20 December, 2007 22:57

And, BTW, here is the second most brilliant thing he's written, IMO: "...born from an unnatural and obscene act of coupling between the British Old School Tie and Modern American Business Practice." (15 December, 2007 14:16).