Weekend Update

Well, it's the weekend and the end of Proper 20. As usual, there's a lot going on. Lesser Feasts and Fasts celebrates Jerome today, which is especially appealing to me since I've been reading the "New Jerome Biblical Commentary" to help me learn more about the Scriptures. The Commentary, of course, was given it's name to honor Jerome, the 4th century theologian whom we remember today.

In further news, Esther ended without reading the part about the institution of the festival of Purim. Fair enough, I suppose, since it's a Jewish festival that didin't translate well into Christianity. In the Old Testament we're now on to Hosea, a prophet whose career began in a time of relative prosperity but continued on as Israel's political fortunes collapsed disastrously. After the death of King Jeroboam II, Israel murderously dispatched six kings in twenty years and finally had to submit to an Assyrian overlord. Those were chaotic times.

No wonder God speaks angrily though Hosea, continually telling Israel to clean up its act or else accept the punishment that it deserves:

2 When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, ‘Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.’

The New Testament passage for today is nice. First there's the resurrection of Eutychus, the boy who fell alseep listening to Paul's sermons while sitting in a window, and then plunged three stories to his death. ( I suppose resurrecting him was only proper, considering Paul had literally bored him to death in the first place.) There's an interesting turn in verse 13, when the perspective shifts back to second person. "We went ahead to the ship," the story continues, "and set sail for Assos..." The Book of Acts reads often like a journalist's reporting; switching back to "we" restores the immediacy.

Your Daily Officer is tired and is going to bed, so talking about the home-made prayer-table coverings will have to wait until later. Suffice for now to say that I did not mangle any of my fingers with the sewing machine.

Angels and Archangels

I was ready to write about angels tonight, not cutesy angels, but the angels of today's Holy Day. We celebrate St. Michael and all the angels with a feast day, which allows those of us who normally mark Fridays with abstainance to enjoy a little meat with dinner. The Archangel Michael is an interesting character. Tonight's passage from Daniel mentions him briefly; he is referred to as a great prince and he promises he will take the side of Israel in the massive conflicts to come. In iconography he is usually pictured with a sword and often has Satan at his feet. He is a warrior for God and for that reason has been claimed as the patron saint of many military groups throughout history.

Remember Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite? He spent a great deal of time ranking the angels in heirarchies, with Michael placed firmly at the top as prince and archangel.

So I was going to write about him... and I was going to talk about how the cutesy angels differ so strongly from angels in the Bible and in literature. Two of the best treatments of angels in art are in the film Wings of Desire and in the Duino Elegies by Rilke:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders of the angels?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.

...and they are nothing like the porcelain angels with baby faces that you can buy in Hallmark stores.

I was going to talk about all that. I may also have talked about the concept of guradian angels, or even the Guardian Angels of New York City, or even the fact that Googling "Guardian Angel" gets you 11,200,000 hits. Wow.

That's what I was going to write about, until I saw that Evening Prayer tonight points us towards Psalm 104... and guess who makes another appearance! Yes, my friend the Leviathan! And of all the times that his fine and fishy head pops up, this is really my favorite. Because God created him just "for the sport of it." Really. God just thought the world would be a better place with a Leviathan cavorting somewhere and splashing about in it. He created him for sport, or according to some translations, to sport about. But regardless of how you translate the passage, the Leviathan reads like some sort of big fishy lark, an oddity, a uniquely huge and uniquely wonderful scaly beast that appears to have fun sporting and splashing about, or at least bringing a smile to God's face with his antics. Some say he's dreadful, and he may be, but certainly not in Psalm 104. And really, once you get to know him, I'm sure he's quite nice.

Affirming Catholicism

Does the Anglo-Catholic part of the Anglican church need to be politically conservative? Apparently not. The group Affirming Catholicism (based in England, with many local chapters there) recently released a press release expressing deep sorrow about the meeting in Rwanda, chaired by Peter Akinola, Primate of Nigeria, which was convened with the goal of establishing alternative Episcopal oversignt for conservative Anglican parishes in the United States. Both the editors at Affirming Catholicism and your own Daily Officer believe that the venerated Catholic liturgucal tradition is not at all incompatible with an inclusive church that welcomes all to God's table. I believe that the most important thing is celebrating the sacraments, and to me that simply transcends politics.

That's enough of that for now.

Thanks to an avid and pious reader (see comments from Sept. 26), I can now tell the difference between Luke and John. Your Daily Officer is never upset about being corrected when he screws up.

The novella of Esther continues. Mordecai has been spared according to Esther's wishes, and Haman, who himself was only recently promoted to Grand Vizier, is now swinging from the rope he hung for Mordecai. A quick and fascinating read. Those following along have noted the distinct lack of theology in Esther; this is basically an entertaining story about a beautiful virgin who saved the Jews from destruction by her wits and rightousness, but we don't learn a whole lot about the ways of God. In fact, some have suggested that the abscence of theology in Esther was deliberate. That view proposes that Esther was written as a basically secular book in order to distance the popular festival of purim from explicitly religious holidays. But I'm getting ahead of myself... more on purim later.

A brief comment on the Collect of the Day: those of you who have been following the BCP without any augmentation have noticed that we've had two Feria in the Daily Office this week, which means that instead of turning to LF&F (or other sources) for collects, we've been staying with the collect for Proper 20. I find that good and comforting, becaue the line "Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things..." seems like great advice for everyone. I find myself basically saying the same thing (although not in the same words) frequently at work.

Don't forget: tomorrow we interrupt (or augment) our regular readings because of the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. See page 999 of your prayer book.

Marching Toward the Scaffold

Well, anyone reading Esther with me must surely be on the edge of their seat. Mordecai is on his way toward the scaffold. This reads like a good cliff-hanger coming in the middle of Esther's great plan to save the Jews from the edict commanding their destruction. Tune in tomorrow to see if he makes it.

In all the excitement of the Esther vs. Judith controversy, I failed to appropriately mark the transition from John to Luke. Tonight I will fail to mark it yet again. Let's suffice to say only in this brief post that we move from a spiritual and almost mystical gospel to one that gives perhaps a more day-to-day account of Jesus' time on earth.

I'll conclude tonight by noting that the Psalm for the day (78, split into two halves--one for Morning Prayer and the other half at Evening) is an especially sublime treatment of the question about why God lets evil things happen in the world and what our reaction should be to it.

The Office continues to be immesurably rich, but I continue to be immesurably busy, to that's going to be it for tonight. Peace.

Common Prayer

At the left you see a depiction of St. John Chrysostom from Hagia Sofia, which for centuries was the most important church in Christendom and still endures as one of the most important architectural wonders of the word. The church was partially destroyed by an earthquake in 588, but was rebuilt, and is still standing today.

The mosaic you see here on this page was discovered during a 20th century renovation of Hagia Sofia. (Many of the original mosaics had been covered with plaster after the Ottoman invasion in 1453, due to the Islamic reluctance to depict godly images.) One of only two copies of this mosaic beautifies the wall of St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church here in Chicago, and that is where your Daily Officer went this morning for Morning Prayer.

Interestingly, they chose the readings from the Sunday Lectionary and not from the Daily Office; so although I technically said morning prayer, I had to make up my reading of Esther on my own. A simple sacrifice. I'm gald that the Anglican tradition embraces such different styles of worship. We're better for our tolerance of diversity.

After church, I watched the Bears win a tough game against Minneapolis and then I took a nap. I woke up an hour later after a vivid and frightening dream in which I was on the phone to my father, complaining that I had expected to feel something different when I became an adult; while in reality my childhood kind of merged into grownup-ness or whatever is is that I am experiencing now, and it's hard for me to say I feel any different than I did when I was sixteen. If you watch Leave it to Beaver, or even the Brady Bunch, the kids were silly kids and the grownups were all adults who wore suits and ties and made Responsible Decisions and did Correct Things. I guess I always thought that sometime I would stop feeling the way I did when I was sixteen, and start feeling like Ward Cleaver must have felt. But in truth, I can't say I feel any different.

I my dream I was yelling into the telephone, crying, with tears running down my cheeks, saying "I have to be a grownup now, but nobody told me how to do it! How do I do it ?!?" I honestly don't know. Probably I was thinking when I was sixteen that someday in the future I would be able to face the world with total confidence. That is, after all, what Ward Cleaver's gray flannel suit projected: confidence, stability, and the self-assuredness that comes from being a grownup. Except that it's a bunch of baloney. If my life has taught me anything, it's that the things you count on the most can shift and change, and betray you, and disappear. I feel drawn to the ancient liturgical tradition for the ongoing stability that it offers. But what does that say about my faith? That my faith is strong only because the world is weak? That's depressing too. I don't know. I just pray, as usual, that my own mind and body can be empty and contain God and be used by God to serve and worship him. What does that mean? I have no idea. Your Daily Officer, as usual, is clueless.

Dionysius the Areopagite

Dionysius the Areopagite appears today in Acts. Legend has it that he became the first bishop of Rome after his conversion. I remember walking around Athens back on my extended trip through Greece and Turkey. I stood on the rock where Socrates was supposedly judged; I walked the Agora where St. Paul met Dionysius the Areopagite. (The Areopagus is a big hill in Athens next to the Acropolis; the city's chief court met there and Dionysius was a member.) There is much controversy about him. Many mysitcal writings exist which he supposedly wrote, but their origins are pretty vigorously disputed. Those who say the writings are not truly of the Biblical Dionysius date them from the fifth century and call their author Pseuso-Dionysius. The tradidtional Catholic position is that the writings are from this period, i.e. not from the Dionysius mentioned in the Bible, but from a Syrian who used "Dionysius the Areopagite" as a pseudonym.

Getting more practical here: I may one of only two people in Chicago sticking with Esther this year. (See the first Comment on the previous post to find the other person.) I know there's more action in Judith, but in just two chapters Esther has already given us pleas for naked dancing (1:10-11), 180 continual days of revelry (1:4), all with an open bar (1:7-8), a nationwide search for beautiful young virgins (2:2-3), and the description of a spa treatment (2:12) that takes an entire year to complete! Can you say harem?!? Anyway, let's keep watching as Esther grows from being a simple young beauty to a wise and rightous woman who saves her people. Right on, Esther!


Remember how I said I was lonely, sad, and depressed in my last post? Well I still am. But look what the Book of Common Prayer sent me tonight:

¹ The Lord is my shepherd, *
I shall not want.
² He makes me lie down in green pastures; *
he leads me beside still waters.
³ He revives my soul *
And guides me along right pathways for his Name's sake.

Some very familiar and comfortable words, for sure. Peace, everyone.

Sadness

A short entry tonight. It hasn't been a good day. I recently got divorced when my partner of 7 years left me. There have been a few days recently when I've felt almost "normal" again, but most days the hurt just keeps on going and going. I was feeling particularly lonely and depressed tonight, and then along comes the Office. The Psalms, which had been generally happy lately, full of praise and love for God, have returned to lamentations. Tonight we read Psalm 73, a song from a sad soul who sees himself trying to be good but suffers continually anyway, while the people who mistreat him continually prosper. His faith in the Lord keeps him going.

I feel kinda the same way. My whole life got torn apart by this divorce. I was in love; pretty happily overall, and I was looking forward to decades and decades more as a married person. But now I'm alone and quite sad. My own words fail me. It's just not possible to describe how horrible this feels. But there's genuine comfort in the Psalms. When I read the bitter and lonely verses I know that someone else out there, 2500 years ago, felt just as bad as I do today. The important thing is that is faith sustained him. I pray that my faith can sustain me.

Changing the subject: I went to Morning Prayer again at Ascension today. (I always seem to go there on cold and rainy mornings.) I walked in and there was a nun leading Prayer, but no other people. Just me. I was frightened; my social anxiety kicked in and I was fearful that I would say the wrong thing, or stand up at the wrong time, or remain seated too long, or in some other way grossly offend God and all his church. Nothing like that happened, but it was a strange experience, and not just because I was the only person there, but also because the Sister had a thick accent and I could barely tell where we were in the service. I had actually thought she might be saying it in Latin or something (a thought that wouldn't have occurred to me before starting to read the Breviary). I made it through okay though. No major embarassments during Morning Prayer. But then right afterwards at mass, the priest dropped the wafer he was about to hand to me. It hit the ground and he scrambled for it. It fell between my knees. I was paralyzed as he reached for it, found it, ate it, and then handed me a broken pie-slice from the priest wafer. It was terrifying.

Another wrinkle in my plan: they chose to read Judith. (I was reading Esther.) Now I'm stymied and I don't know what to do. For most of 2006, that's been my predominant feeling. I guess you could say I'm getting used to it.

Job, Psalms, and the Leviathan

Things are still busy. We are more than halfway through Proper 19; Job has left us; we celebrate the feast of St. Matthew; and we are currently nestled nicely in the middle of three days of fasting and abstinence.

Job ended on a great note. The Daily Office lectionary decided to go out of sequence a bit to wrap up the book with a very beautiful and poetic meditation on seeking wisdom. I found it to be quite approproate. I'm also excited about starting Esther--an odd book, kind of like a novel or short story, with frankly very little theology in it. Some argue that the book exists simply to justify the rather secular festival of Purim. Come read it with me, and we shall make up our own minds.

Tonight we read Psalm 74 (and by the way, your Daily Officer follows the 7-week Psalm cycle), and it will be instantly familiar to:

1. regular readers of the Office, and
2. fans of the Leviathan.

Unfortunately, the Leviathan doesn't fare to well this time. But on a happier note, office readers will appreciate these familiar lines from the Psalm:

¹⁶ Yours is the day, yours also the night; *
you established the moon and the sun.
¹⁷ You fixed all the boundaries of the earth; *
you made both summer and winter.

These lines, of course, are sometimes said as a "sentence" at the beginning of Evening Prayer. Which brings up an interesting question: unlike the Anglican Breviary, the Book of Common Prayer doesn't tell the user explicitly which sentence of scripture to say; it merely offers a selection of eight to chose from. (The Breviary has it all spelled out according to excruciatingly detailed and completely incomprehensible rubrics. Selecting the proper sentence or antiphon from the Breviary requires the use of a Kalendar, a slide rule, an Excel spreadsheet, and an astrolabe.) Anyway, the BCP offers eight sentences with which to begin Evening Prayer. How you you choose which one to say?

Here's what I do: I say the first ("Let my prayer...") on Sunday, the second ("Grace to you...") on Monday, the third on Tuesday, and so on. I say the eighth along with the first on Sunday as well. (Being a Sunday, I decided it deserves two sentences.) I came up with that idea myself. Any other people want to comment on how they select an appropriate sentence?

Rebuked

Well, no more overnights in the hospital until the second week in October... so if I’m tired out between now and then, I have only myself to blame.

Br. Joseph Basil, thanks for your comments. I think the reason that Keren-happuchi’s name isn’t translated is because “Horn-of-eye cosmetic” is a pretty weird name for a woman, even by OT standards. I think it sounds more like something you put on before going out on a big date:

“Mom, how do I look?”
“You look beautiful. But put on some more horn-of-eye cosmetic.”

In answer to your question, your Daily Officer is planning on reading Esther this year. Please remind me in 2008 that I said that, so I won’t forget to read Judith then. They’re both great and unusual books. (And with that in mind, one actually could celebrate both of them at once, by reading Esther within the Daily Office and then dressing up as Judith for Halloween--complete with sword, horn-of-eye cosmetic, and Holofernes’ bleeding and severed head in a duffle bag.)

We have more Biblical humor today, this time from Acts. Paul and Silas run across a slave-girl who “has a spirit of divination,” which means she runs around for days announcing to everyone that Paul and Silas have found a new way to salvation. Maybe she’s right, but she obviously drives the Apostles up a wall, because they finally cast the spirit out. Not because the woman was wrong, one assumes, but because she wouldn’t give them a moment’s peace.

“These two have found a new way to salvation!”
“Yes, quite right, but it’s midnight, and we have to get up early tomorrow.”
“These two have found a new way to salvation!”
“Okay already. Really, we like you and all, but we have to sleep.”
“These two have found a new way to salvation!”
“Paul, I’m tired, please rebuke her.”

Lots of people in the Bible get themselves rebuked. That happens in this day and age too. For example, one of my patients sees Satan on a daily basis. I asked her how she dealt with him, and she said simply, “I rebuke him.” Sounds simple enough. Also, two weeks ago a nurse in the clinic said she was having problems with her computer. When I walked by later, she was happily typing away. I said, “I thought you were having problems with your computer.” “Yes,” she said, “but I rebuked it.” I guess it worked.

One final note: my plan for Ember Day fasting led to a great deal of personal suffering. Wow. I’ve skipped meals out of necessity before, but today was different because I had means, motive, and opportunity to eat and yet still abstained. I’m not kidding, it was tough. But my first food of the day was the Host at mass, and it was immeasurably satisfying. Tomorrow there’s a reprieve: the feast of St. Matthew. Then back to fasting again on Thursday and Friday. Pray for me, and I shall pray for you. Peace.

Ember Days II

There seems to be a lot going on right now. In the Office we wind our way towards the end of Job; Paul, Silas, and Timothy travel through about 57 countries trying to spread the Word; and Jesus enters Jerusalem triumphantly on a donkey, with crowds waving palms in the air around him. (The Leviathan also returns for a wonderful and almost comic appearance in Job. He was last seen on Pentecost, in the Sunday lectionary.) In my personal life, I'm working about 10,000 hours per week--or at least it feels that way. I worked overnight Saturday into Sunday (with no sleep, ouch) and I'm on call again at a different hopsital tonight. The irony is that when I don't have work to do at the moment, I stare at my pager, almost too anxious to sleep for fear I might miss a page. So sleep is fitful even when there's time to lay down.

As if all this weren’t enough, tonight is the eve of the autumnal Ember Days, and Thursday is the Feast of St. Matthew. In cooperation with the Church calendar, which welcomes us tomorrow into autumn, it’s going to be windy, cold, gray, and about 40 degrees outside tonight. As I said earlier, I think that marking the Ember Days with some sort of personal devotion makes sense and sounds really wonderful. Those studying for Holy Orders use the Ember Days to write letters to their bishops; what about those of us in the laity?

St. Mary of the Angels (in Hollywood, of all places) has created an Anglican guide to feasting and fasting, which recommends "fast and abstinence." By fasting, they mean reducing the quantity that you eat, maybe by eliminating breakfast or lunch. By abstinence, they recommend leaving out a particular food item that you enjoy—just like many Anglo-Catholics abstain from meat on Fridays.

So here’s my personal devotion for the upcoming Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday: attend mass, skip lunch (fast), and avoid meat (abstinence). I challenge all my readers to find some personally meaningful way to mark these days as summer ends, the year moves into autumn, and ordinary time drifts closer towards Advent. If anyone has any other ideas for Ember Day devotions, think about posting them in the comments section here to share with other readers.

I've had to put my study of the Breviary away for a while, until work cools off a little. But here's my over-ambitous, grandiose, self-important idea as it stands so far:

• Master either Vespers or Lauds
• Translate it into Rite II language
• Add it to my daily devotions (or else substitute it for Morning or Evening Prayer)
• Then use Rite I during Lent, and Rite II for the rest of the year

Sounds like about a million years of work. I've got to be nuts.

Lazarus Falls

The story of Lazarus continues today and tomorrow. (I listened to it this morning again at Ascension. There were fewer nuns today, but it was still a great and worthy service. I loved praying in their close and empty space, with the northern-facing stained glass windows illumined from without by just enough cloudy light to give the colors tone.)

This portion of John is, as most of this gospel, inscrutable and complex. We have Judas pictured as a thief and betrayer: not only will his word lead to Jesus' crucifixion, but he also plans to steal the 300 denarii (a year's wages) from the collection taken for the poor. What's up with Judas? In Kazantzakis' novel, Judas was the second-most important figure in the whole passion story. Without the betrayal, no crucifixion; without the crucifixion, no redemption. Are we to see him as a noble, good, and tragic man, struggling against an awful destiny, as Kazantzakis sees him; or as little more than the common criminal depicted in John?

Kazantzakis has a great image surrounding the passages around today's reading from John. The Jews decide to kill Lazarus, because the miracle of his resurrection was drawing Jews away from their leaders and towards Christ. In Kazantzakis, the Jews actually stab Lazarus, freshly awakened from the dead; he collapses, his hands holding the cruel knife, in awe and pain, very, very confused; he crumples to the ground not understanding any of it. His blood flows from him and he returns to the dead.

Jesus does not raise him a second time.

Of course, we assume Lazarus believed and therefore was granted everlasting life, but what a bizarre and cruel way to get there. His stinking, foul corpse was re-animated by Jesus, barely long enough for him to pull his own burial shroud from his face, before he found himself knifed and killed. Poor Lazarus; I'm sure he was bewildered from the moment he rose until the moment he died. Again.

The gospel of John doesn't say that he was actually murdered; just that the Jews planned to do it. Did Jesus stay their hand? Did Lazarus gain any temporal benefit from his resurrection? Did he grow old and die happy? Did he spend many more happy years with his family, watching their corn, wine and oil increase? Or was his resurrection just a sufficient action to give him belief, and therefore eternal life, which he was immediately granted, through murder? There are no easy answers.

I leave you tonight with a passage from Rilke's Book of Hours (see the previous post):

You create yourself in ever-changing shapes
that rise from the stuff of our days --
unsung, unmourned, undescribed,
like a forest we never knew.

You are the innerness of all thigns,
the last word that can never be spoken.
To each of us you reveal yourself differently:
to the ship as a coastline, to the shore as a ship.

Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, d. 1179

The year was 1990 and I was busy writing my senior thesis, a somewhat overblown and self-important treatment of death imagery in fin-de-siecle German literature. (I know, I know. Insufferable. I'm still embarassed.) My college dorm was a neo-Cambridge college gothic building with trees and a wide grassy yard around it. Inside, we were a great co-ed mix of people. We had party monsters who were always having kegs and loud music, but we also had the guy who was doing his thesis on alchemy and somehow managed to turn his room into a medieval set piece from Foucault's Pendulum. I was somewhere in the middle.

Well, spring break came and I didn't have anywhere to go. Plus, I was way behind on my thesis. I had lots of ideas, and a youthful sense of how important they were, but I didn't really have much in the way of words on a page, if you know what I mean. And my deadline was approaching. So a few fellow procrastinators and I decided to forgo a traditional spring break vacation and stay in that wonderful gothic building with the lead-pane glass windows, and write our theses. The partiers left to South Padre or wherever those people go. The funny alchemy boy stayed behind.

It just so happened that the weather in that spring was overcast, dreary, and quiet. There wasn't much reason to go outside into the gloom so it was easy to concentrate on writing. Pretty soon I settled into one of the oddest routines of my life. With no real obligations, and no real distractions, I read and wrote when I wanted to, and I ate when I was hungry, and I slept when I was tired, and when I met people in the hallway we would occasionally socialize. After a few days I simply didn't care about the schedule of the world.

Even more remarkable was that the constant gentle and gloomy rain outside erased any way to mark time by looking out the window--it was just either rain or dark. I quit using my clock because there were no schedules to follow. It was bizarre. Wonderfully bizarre. Time meant nothing.

One of the books I was reading for my thesis was Rilke's Book of Hours, so sensing the monastic connection I listened to music from Hildegard of Bingen for most of that week. I couldn't think of a better accompaniment to that wonderful time than her magical, other-worldly chant.

Hildegard had visions. She would see lights within lights, perceived not with her eyes but with her soul, and the voice of God spoke to her in Latin. These experiences were utterly transforming for her. Her doubt, anxiety, and fear would disappear and she would commune with Grace. In 1141, five years after she was promoted to Abbess, she began to write her visions down in word and song. In more recent times people have tried to interpret her visions as temporal lobe seizures. Fine; if so, then those seizures were sent by God. The fact that Hildegard can still transport us with her music 850 years after her death is awesome and chilling. Listening to her is like touching a live wire and feeling a tingling shock of energy.

We celebrate Hildegard today, September 17th, and I find it a wonderful commemoration. I listened again to her music tonight and thought back with love to that cloistered week in an almost empty old dorm room, surrounded by drizzly soft days, dark cool nights, candle light, red wine, friendship, timelessness, and the ethereal music of a saint.

Lazarus Rises

Just a few quick thoughts, because it's been an exhausting week and it's not over yet. Today's passage in John is downright spooky. Very rich, but also pretty unsettling. Check it out. In case you're curious, the word stench is used seven times in the Old Testament, but only once in the new Testament--in today's gospel. I bet you always wanted to know that. Also, with Proper 18 drawing to a close, we're getting ready to bid farewell to Job for two years. Esther comes next. We will be sticking with Acts and John for a while yet, so not everything changes at once.

My friend Luis was over last night and we watched Donnie Darko. (It's a great film, but I forgot how long it was.) Anyway, Luis mentioned that at a church he went to they would switch to Rite I during Lent. That idea sounds incredible. I am guessing it would be too great a change for my church, but it's something I could certainly do in my personal devotions. How nice that the Book of Common Prayer offers us Rite I and Rite II language. Rite I in Lent ... what an appealing idea. Thanks, Luis.

Final note: the Breviary continues to kick my ass. The guides that I have found so far are unintelligible or incomplete. I am still completely baffled by every office except for Compline. May as I figure stuff out I'll share it here. Peace.

The Arrow and Cycle of Time

I just finished the Office of Evening Prayer for Thursday, Holy Cross Day. It was a long service because I felt so caught up in the lessons (or readings) of the daily lectionary that I wanted to include the normal (the "ordinary") daily readings as well as the lessons prescribed for the holy day.

For any of you who are newcomers: the Book of Common Prayer includes a liturgy (beginning on page 933) that takes you through a cycle of readings that covers a great and meaningful portion of the Bible over two years. It also includes a cycle of psalms that repeats every seven weeks. I like to think of a set of interlocking gears for marking time, like you see to the left, with the large wheel being the two-year journey through scripture while a smaller 7-week wheel of psalms rotates within it. But then all these other wheels come into play: for example, the prayer book throws in special readings for holy days (like today, the Feast of the Holy Cross; see page 999). I was actually pretty caught up in the flow of the readings of ordinary time: Job, Acts, John, whom we have been with for about a month now. So as not to miss any of the daily drama, I added the holy day readings to the "ordinary" of Evening Prayer, which made for a long service.

Sticking with the clock analogy, let's look for a second at all those other gears turning their way within the big circle. There's the great yearly cycle, where seasons, each marked by their respective Ember Days, conflow into a liturgical year, its ordinary time punctuated by holy days, lesser feasts, fasts, and the great seasons of Advent, Lent, and Easter. Thankfully the austerity of Lent passes into the joy of Easter again just as the world around us moves from harsh winter into the fresh breezes and gentle rains of spring. But also this cycle is also perpetuated for us every week. On Fridays we mark the death and burial of Jesus, while just days later his resurrection is celebrated on Sunday. For that matter, every single evening, marked by Evening prayer, darkens into night, which brightens into day again; and with Morning Prayer the glory of the Lord is once again aknowledged and praised. But of course there are also invisible and unknowable wheels, parallel to these, perpendicular even; cycles longer and shorter, stranger and more beautiful. We are cut on the teeth of those gears as well.

I see my own life adding other cycles to this celestial clock. My childhood passes into adulthood as my feet walk a great and familiar path; around me are children who remind me of my former self, and older people who remind me of who I am to become. I start my day, I start jobs, I start friendships... all these things end in time, as gears on the wheels complete their circuit and start over again.

It's both odd and comforting that I can neither see the clock nor understand its maker. I can't fathom its vast and unknowable calculus. I can see what's coming on some of the wheels, but for others I have no idea what the next tick of the gears will bring. But it's comforting to know that the clock exists in the first place, set in motion, understood by God, simply present, and moving along through time and space. Someone has counted the teeth of the gears; someone has measured the diameter; someone has set the tension on the spring. Someone understands the linear circularity, the straightforward rotation, and the confluence of paths that trace our lives through time and space. How lonely it would be to do it all alone.

The Many True Churches

As promised, I got up at the crack of dawn and went to Morning Prayer at another Anglo-Catholic curch in the area. It was a beautiful experience. For one thing, the officiant was a nun. Also it was good to finally do "common" prayer in common. I could go back to saying:

V: The Lord be with you.
R: And also with you.

Instead of:

V: Lord, hear my prayer.
R: And let my cry come to you.

The latter, of course, being more appropriate for solitary devotions. But most importantly, all the "we's" and "our's" made sense, not to mention the whole feeling of "when two or three of you are gathered in my name," etc. On the board where the hymns are indicated, they instead had the Morning Prayer psalm and the canticles! It was great. Oh, and the congregation included nuns in habit. Wow. It was fantastic.

This brings up a point. The One True Church has many churches under its roof. Or, more specifically, the Anglican Church allows for astonishing diversity within it. My Tuesday night fellowship group has been talking about some of these similarities and differences and we decided to stealthily observe other churches to see what's up outside of the home parish. (We'll be the ones in funny glasses.) In the last two days I ended up going to mass at two churches, kind of by accident. (I attended mass this morning because it came directly after Morning Prayer.)

Last night's church felt very Protestant... maybe they would recoil to hear me say that; maybe not. But the homily was way more like old fashioned "preaching," with the preacher practically holding a Bible and walking around back and forth a lot. The Eucharist was de-mystified somewhat. Not any less valid, but certaionly shorter and quicker. Things were left out, such as the penetential rite. And the language was strictly Eucharistic Prayer B from the Book of Common Prayer. So no "Lord I am not worthy to recieve you, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed." Also, the priest alone officiated without an acolyte. An interesting experience.

Today, it was full-blown Anglo-Catholic; they even said the Angelus at the conclusion of Morning Prayer. And the text of the Angelus has been pasted in to the inside back over of every Prayer Book in the church! There is also a Lady Shrine, but not as pretty as the one at home. Anyway, enough for now lest I ramble. I'll just say that saying common prayer in common is a great way to start the day.

Paul Gets Stoned

What a nice reading from Acts tonight. (By the way, I'm reading the OT and Gospel in the morning, and the NT at night, as suggested by page 964 of the BCP. I love following rules.) Anyway, it was a nice pleasant reading and it stands in contrast to poor Job, who has been having such a hard time lately:

¹⁷The night racks my bones,
and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest.
¹⁸With violence he seizes my garment;
he grasps me by the collar of my tunic.
¹⁹He has cast me into the mire,
and I have become like dust and ashes.
²⁰I cry to you and you do not answer me;
I stand, and you merely look at me.
²¹You have turned cruel to me;
with the might of your hand you persecute me.
²²You lift me up on the wind, you make me ride on it,
and you toss me about in the roar of the storm.
²³I know that you will bring me to death...

Job has it rough, indeed. But in the reading from Acts, we get a view that you can love God and be with God and spread God's word without suffering all the time. I mean, Paul only gets stoned once.

In other news, Lonelygirl15 was a fake: an actress. Like we couldn't have guessed. (It was the spectacular lighting on her vids that gave it away.) But I promise you, your Daily Officer is real.

One final note: I just found a church in my area that has daily, yes DAILY, Morning Prayer. (Our cathedral, which seems to barely have any masses at all, let alone prayer services, should take note!) It's at 6:40 in the morning. (*sigh*) I suppose there's a certain penetential and sacraficial character to that horribly early hour. But I think I'll go and experience Common Prayer in common. I'll let you know how it turns out. Peace.

Thundering Herds of Pagans

In Tuesday's New Testament lesson, we got the interesting picture of Paul and Barnabas preaching and then being seen as messengers of the local gods. The image is fantastic: the two apostles, running away as fast as they can, probably tripping on their robes, with the loyal priests of Zeus tramping after them, trying desperately to offer sacrifice to them as they flee at top speed.

Priest of Zeus: "But wait, I want to kill this sheep for you!"

Apostles: "Really, it's fine, gotta go."

Priest of Zeus: "No, wait! Come back!"

It seems to me like a scene right out of Monty Python. It also seems like an admonition to not succumb to the charisma of a certain minister or priest. Would your faith be just as strong if a different person were administering the sacraments? Do you worship in a sacramental curch in the first place? If the preacher of your church were replaced by an unpopular person, would that hinder your ability to worship? These are substantial questions. I worship in the Anglican Church, which understands that the validity of the sacraments is independent of the quality of the priest's homily.

But that thundering herd of pagans, trying hurridly to perform sacrafices to the fleeing apostles, remind me of congregations who worship their preacher perhaps independent of the faith that he (or she) represents. It comes to this: do you worship the preacher, the preacher's message, or God?

Ephphatha!

So it's Ephphatha Sunday, the day once every three years in the Episcopal Lectionary when we read that story in Mark where Jesus heals a deaf man by putting his fingers into the man's ears, spitting, and touching his tongue. It's so ridiculous, you gotta love it. I imagine the caption of the woodcut on the left to be "Okay, I'm going to put this finger in your ear now..." Click on the picture to see a larger version, in which you can see that the expression on the man's face clearly says, "Lord, you've got to be kidding." Ephphatha, of course, means "be opened." To which the man replied, Umphthphphbhttt, which means "you can stop touching my tongue now."

In other news, I read through Compline in the Breviary for the first time. It's the simplest office (so they say), but it still took me an hour just to understand all the page flipping. Today was a gray, cold, and rainy day; perfect for sitting still indoors and working on stuff like this. With the weather so dreary outside, it makes it easy to focus inside. Inwardly, that is. I'm still excited by the project of combining elements of the Breviary wtih the Book of Common Prayer. I'll keep discussing my ideas as they come to me. First, however, there's learning how to use the darn thing...

Laugh-out-loud funny

Okay, so my intent with this blog is not to make a traditional online "diary" project. I don't want it to become virtual scrapbooking. (I find scrapbooking vaguely frightening, and I'm not sure why...) These first few posts are more diary-like because I'm still getting used to the whole blogging thing: what multiple posts look like, how the template works, how things are indexed, and so on. But my ultimate goal is to create posts that lead back to the Daily Office and from there back out into life again. I'm not quite ready to launch that concept yet, but when I read tonight's Lesson from Evening Prayer I simply couldn't resist giving it a try.

Who says the Bible isn't a funny book? In tonight's reading from Acts, Paul travels through many places that begin with the letter P and are completely unpronouncable. Finally settling down in Antioch (probably because it does not begin with P), he goes to the synagogue and basically recites the entire history of the Israelites in one paragraph. The greatest verse is when he says "God chose our ancestors and made the people great during their stay in the land of Egypt, and with uplifted arm he led them out of it. For about forty years he put up with them in the wilderness." Hah! God didn't accompany them, he put up with them! Isn't the implication here that the Israelites were just a little bit of a pain in the ass to deal with? Really, they were always doing evil, needing correction, worshipping idols, breaking commanments, and lamenting. Lamenting a whole lot.

It's true that the Greek offers a different translation: "For about forty years he cared for them..." A kinder, gentler version. But I think Paul meant what he said. After all, look at Acts so far: there has been a great deal of preaching to Jews who just don't get it no matter now many times the message is repeated. It goes nicely with the Gospel of John, where for about ten days now each reading has Jesus saying "I am sent from my father, why don't you get that?!? Why don't you LISTEN to me?!?" The readings mesh so well that I have to admire whoever it was who put the lectionary together. He must have really known what he was doing. (Thank you, Thomas Cranmer.)

The broader message, I believe, is that we are all like the Israelites who hear the Word repeatedly and still don't get it. Jesus: "Okay, I just made that blind guy see. Do you believe me now?"

Pharisees: "Ahh, I'm not so sure. Maybe it was a trick. Do something else."

Jesus: (...Rolls his eyes...)

I suppose it makes sense to try to stop making sense of things, instead of doing what we do all the time, like the Pharisees were doing; and just try listening for a change. Be receptive to the message around us, really receptive, instead of trying to chisel reality down into familiar and comfortable shapes. That chiseling, of course, distorts the very reality that we are trying to experience. What a gift to be able to just be with things as they are, instead of how we require them to be.

Ember Days

So what are exactly are the Ember Days? And what should we do about them? The Book of Common Prayer lists three collects for Ember Days (see pages 205-206), but it doesn't say much about what they are. I got interested, so I checked my Episcopalian Dictionary and learned that Ember Days are four sets of three days (always a Wednesday, a Friday, and a Saturday) that were once "set aside for fasting and spiritual renewal." Seminarians traditionally use Ember Days to write letters to their bishops, describing their spiritual journeys as they are unfolding so far. Wikipedia offers a great historical treatment of the subject, and they take sides in what seems like a fierce debate about the etymology of the term. They argue that "Ember" comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for revolution, in the context of revolving seasons. The Roman Catholic Church insists it is a corruption of the Latin quatuor tempora, or four seasons.

At mass this morning, the priest and the deacon said they were both familiar with the tradition of Ember Day letters, but they didn't have a whole lot of suggestions about what lay people are supposed to do. (Write to the bishop? Ahem, probably not.)

I have been really loving the idea of liturgical cycles, and for this reason I feel drawn to the Ember Day tradition. One set of three days at the beginning of each season, for spiritual renewal, seems like a great way to ground the rest of the year. Our next set, or our upcoming autumnal Embertide, if you will, begins on the 20th of September. Between now and then I'll try think of some sensible way to mark the days.

Making my own rule?

The Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer is great. I find it a wonderful way to practice a daily devotion and I'm sad that I didn't find it sooner. The Office of the Anglican Breviary is great too... except that you have to be a doctor of divinity in order to understand how to use it. The complexity comes from the fact that almost every day is dedicated to the commemoration of some saint, sometimes several saints, and the Office changes constantly to reflect this. Then movable days like Sundays come along and conflict with the fixed (calendar) days of all these multiple saints, making it necessary to resolve many conflicts in order to say the Office properly. The feast of a saint may take precedence over a Sunday, or it may be celebrated with the Sunday itself, or it may be transferred to the nearest open weekday (or feria) as appropriate. Difficult.

It is difficult, but also really, really beautiful. The Breviary has a real richness that the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) doesn't. Each of the four BCP services (Morning, Noon, Evening, and Compline) has variable parts, but choosing between those variable parts is generally just a matter of picking one selection from three or four given choices. (I'm not talking about the lectionary, which of course cycles through two great arcs, a 7-week circle of psalms that rotates within a greater 104-week journey through the old and new testaments and gospels.)

I have already started adding celebration of the lesser feasts and fasts to my daily devotions, by using--you guessed it--Lesser Feasts and Fasts (2003). I read the "lesson" about the saint and then add the Collect at the appropriate time, but that's really all that Lesser Feasts and Fasts gives me. The Breviary, on the other hand, has different psalms, antiphons, and prayers for every saint's day, as well instructions for sorting out all the conflicts of who trumps whom.

I'm thinking that I'd like to add to the BCP Offices by using parts of the Breviary to build in a more formal celebration of the saints' days and fasts. However, using the Breviary itself for daily worship ( in place of the Book of Common Prayer) is just impossible. With eight daily offices, one every three hours throughout the day, reciting the Breviary is a major commitment. Maybe I'll do it sometime on a retreat, or after I retire; but right now it's simply a little much. I'll leave it to the monastics. Besides, my brain is too small to figure out all the rules anyway.

But I do think I'll look for some workable way to incorporate a little of the Breviary into the BCP Daily Office--without, of course, changing the essential character of its own centuries-old tradition. (I'm not thinking about changing any BCP Office itself; rather, I'm thinking about adding an Office from the Breviary to my daily worship. Maybe by adding Prime before Morning Prayer, or Vespers after Evening Prayer, or something like that.) Who knows. More later.

The Breviary arrived yesterday

This post is mainly still just to get used to the mechanics of blogging, so although there is some limited "content," you still shouldn't be wasting your time here. Anyway, my copy of the Anglican Breviary arrived yesterday. What a gorgeous book. It's a real work of art. It's also a real piece of work, if you know what I mean. I flipped through the opening pages and was pretty confused; the introduction does nothing to explain how the offices are to be said. Well, it's not that it does nothing--it's more like the instructions require their own set of instructions to explain all the terms. I find it very appropriate that we're in a series of a few BCP feriae now. It's a breather from all the spinning wheels of the Kalendar to come.