Palm Sunday

Get this. Christian Palm Sunday processions go back at least as far as the fourth century. A Christian pilgrim to Jerusalem at that time recorded a series of interlocking services on Palm Sunday that involved processing with palms and singing Psalm 118 from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem, just like Jesus did three centuries before. This pilgrim, a woman, included the detail that the procession went slowly to accommodate the elderly and parents with infants. Isn't that fascinating! Somehow, knowing this will make my experience of Palm Sunday all the richer. I will be doing as my brothers and sisters in the faith did over a millennium ago.

The Die Is Cast!

I received a good grade on my first paper, but there's no rest for the wicked. Now I'm focusing on the second, which is to be a liturgical theology of a feast day or sacrament. I've chosen Palm Sunday, and now that i've started the research, so there's no going back now. I'm looking forward to it, actually--to studying the history of this rite and unpacking some of the theological meanings of its texts, symbols, and gestures.

I was talking over dinner with a fellow theological student who went through the discernment process to decide whether or not to take vows to become a Benedictine monk. He decided not to for the present, but he was telling me and another student about the experience of staying in a monastery. We got on the topic of prayer, and he talked about how hard it was, initially, to wake up in the middle of the night (it was 2 or 3 AM) EVERY day to pray. No breaks . . . ever. We moaned in sympathy, but he pointed out that they do go to bed at 8PM. Seeing an opportunity, I couldn't help myself. "Eight PM?" I said. "No wonder those monks are so holy. I figure 90 percent of all my sins have been committed between 8PM and midnight!"

There's something to that, don't you think? I say we all take on a modified monasticism and start going to bed at 8:00 but scrap the middle-of-the-night prayer! Lord help me.

First Paper Done!

Turned in my paper today. Following is what I think think is the strongest part of it:

A third thesis of Aidan Kavanagh in On Liturgical Theology has very much to do with cosmos. Kavanagh argues that, figuratively speaking, over time the church left civilization for the outer reaches of society, where individuals would have the freedom to reduce all of experience to that between one and oneself.

Kavanagh wants to blow the doors off this paradigm and insist that the church, to be the church, transacts with “the real.” He disparages exclusivism and “false cosmologies,” cosmologies that are merely human constructs developed to help us feel good about our solipsism, whereas true cosmology is accessible only when the church is at the center of civilization a witness to the redemptive power of Christ. The liturgy is addressed primarily, not to the assembly, but to the world; it is a public enactment of the church.

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners in DC and author of the best-selling God’s Politics, says God is personal, but never private. I suspect it would prompt no great controversy in a Christian forum to say members of the church have privatized their faith or to say that in many cases we have become so heavenly minded we’re of no earthly good. I suspect most would simply nod their heads in agreement. Why has this happened? Part of it has to do with our post-Christian times. People no longer want a passive chaplain to culture, which they did want back in the fifties. Kavanagh points to Rousseau’s elevation of the human individual. Another reason for faith’s privatization is that Christians have felt as though they had to give the world all the answers to its problems. They finally realized they don’t have all the answers, were ashamed, and thus retreated from the world to lick their wounds and console themselves with their own company.

But what if we did have the answer all along and didn’t know it? And what if the answer is not a list of propositions but an event to which we invite all to come? And what if this event is an encounter with the living God? Maybe the greatest service we can offer civilization is showing up for worship to demonstrate for the uninitiated as well as each other that walking to the brink of chaos by the grace of God is something we can do. We can do it, even if we leave with a limp.

One reason any people becomes anti-Christian, as I would argue American culture has become, is because such a people recognizes the violence inherent in an encounter with God. To this the Christian can answer, yes, you’re right, there is a violence to encountering God; let us endure it together, for the wounds will be “as deep as they are salutary.”

A Word to Wander . . .

Think about how utterly odd a race of people would be if they lived as humans ought to live.

Ever Present

Today Irwin touched on, among many other things, the idea that we do the Eucharist not strictly as a remembrance but to perpetuate the experience of Christ crucified. Yes, Christ died on Calvary's hill in AD 33, but the idea behind Eucharist is to perpetuate the experience of all that this event means. This is a profound theological datum. Think of it: an event that started 2000 years ago continues through the ritual of the Eucharist to this very day. On Sunday mornings we still experience Christ's death and resurrection; it goes on and on.

The idea prompts the question of whether there are other realities worth perpetuating, and of course there are. The kingdom of God broke into the world at the incarnation; the church's privilege and obligation is to perpetuate that kingdom, to keep unrolling it throughout the world and time.

I'm reading some Romero while I'm down here. This morning's reading likened the sensation of placing a scraped hand in salt to the truth that wherever the world is fractured, the presence of Christians should burn. How's that for a different nuance to being the salt of the earth!

Blessed Mundanity

Finished my first class. Irwin is obviously passionate about the subject, so I'm psyched. One highlight from his lecture was his material on how the cosmos (the world, creation, the earth) enters into liturgy. He pointed out that liturgy has always used elements of the cosmos in worship to God. He is wary of a oversacralized liturgy--a liturgy that becomes too detached from creation. He reminds that one of the main reasons we use water in baptism is because water means life; what better element to use during a celebration of rebirth than that element which gives life (not to mention water comes forth at the first birth as well)?

In my reading, I was struck with Aidan Kavanaugh's observation that in the past, poverty was a PREREQUISITE to faith. You could not be baptized into faith unless you took a vow of poverty. Period. You'll find this in Basil. Since then, poverty has become reserved for mendicants and others ordained for ministry.

Way led onto way in my thoughts, and I arrived at the notion of how utterly mundane holy living is. There may be times of heroicism for the awake saint, but by and large she goes about her days in monotony: rising early, praying, doing hard work ("sleep the sleep of hard work," someone said), eating sensibly, and going to sleep at an hour that will allow her to do it all again tomorrow. This kind of monotonous everyday slog is the real stuff--the guts--of the Christian life, whether we like it or not. Let's face it: sin is often a lot more exciting than holy living.

Even so, I want to argue that we all have a certain meaning quotient that we must meet to feel human. It's simply in the nature of who we are. Here's the thing. Holy living requires that we seek meaning by being attentive and creative. In the mundanity of wholesomeness, we must be on the lookout for what God has to show us. We must be active in our search, otherwise we will go without the sustenance of meaning.

The temptation is to seek meaning in other ways, or not even meaning but diversions from the reality that we are bereft of meaning. We resort to watching mindless TV, eating badly, addictive behavior, and various other pathologies.

So I want to cultivate a fondness for blessed mundanity. I want to invite mundanity willingly, even adoringly. I say "blessed" because it is this mundanity that can be a platform from which to look out on the terrain of our lives (our work, our families, etc.) and the world around us to see what there is to see--to find the meaning that God offers for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Under the Dome

I am safely ensconced in my dorm digs and just finished my reading for tomorrow's class. This "liturgical theology" stuff is entirely new to me, so we'll see how it goes. Kevin Irwin, the professor, points to distinctions between theology of liturgy (distilling from liturgy a systematic theology), theology drawn from liturgy (using liturgy as a theological source), and doxological theology (theology that is informed by a recovery of an overall reorientation toward praise of God).

Irwin also writes about tradition as being not simply about the past but "the present shaped by past experience"; thus, "the present is integral to tradition." Normativity is made up of those elements of liturgy that have perdured over time and thus suggest a way to perform certain liturgical acts, though not blindly. Irwin is obviously very sensitive to the agenda of indigenization, which calls for enough flexibility for a local community to appropriate a given rite.

He emphasize the importance of analyzing a liturgical act not simply by looking at the texts involved but by looking at the history of the act, how the elements within the act relate to one another, what is the experience of those participating in the act, and is this experience appropriate to the intention behind the rite. One last question, which is of particular interest to me, is: what difference does the liturgical act make in an individual's or community's life?

That's it for now. I have to go hunt down some books. I know better than to promise to write daily on this blog, but I will attempt to use this space as a place to reflect and gather my thoughts.

Basilica of the Sacred Heart

I'm pumped. This Sunday I head down to Notre Dame to take a class, and the thing I'm looking forward to most is being in Notre Dame's Basilica of the Sacred Heart. It is a stunning place to behold. To get in, you have to exert a small amount of effort to open the large oaken doors, and then the place just opens up to you. Walking in can bring me to tears. Here's what it's like: The space above lifts away so that you immediately feel lighter, the scent of lingering incense fills your nose, and the water in the baptismal font glistens with life. It is a place of sacred bliss. I'm not kidding: simply being there nourishes me, fills me up. And I can't wait.

Down with Ecclesiology!

I’m taking a class in liturgical theology starting next week, so I’ve been doing some of the reading in preparation. One of the texts for the course is On Liturgical Theology by Aidan Kavanaugh, a monk of the Archabbey of St. Meinrad and professor of liturgics at Yale.

Kavanaugh points to the fascinating reality that before the modern era, there was no such thing as ecclesiology per se, but this was not because premodern theologians did not care about the church. “Earlier theologians,” he writes, “did not ignore the Church any more than healthy people ignore health.” By implication he’s saying people who focus on the church to the point of creating an ecclesiology may be betraying an unhealthy deficit in their lives. We obsess over that which we do not have. His point, to frame it in my own words in the hope of coming into more ownership of the concept, is that the lives of earlier theologians were so firmly rooted within the church, it did not often occur to them to take up the church as an external object of study and reflection. They lived ecclesiology, so they had no need to build a conceptual framework about what the church is and should do. The church to them was a holistic enterprise that encompassed all of life. This was reflected in their Sunday worship, which was comprised by an all-day series of interlocking services that involved praise in the morning, a procession through city center, multiple sermons, litanies of prayer, and at the close of day lamplighting and vespers. Mind you, people were not expected to attend the whole shebang.

It was, perhaps, the length of worship as much as anything else that made worship an overall more human affair than we experience today. What I mean is that today, in most churches members sit quietly in their pews for an hour, standing to sing when appropriate, and so on, and then we leave. Kavanaugh writes, “Chrysostom sometimes preached for over two hours as his hearers wept, cheered, pounded their breasts, and applauded.” Sounds more like a football game than a church service! It had to be a more formative experience than is worship today.

Today, Christians live outside the church most of the time. Practically speaking the church today is a place we enter and exit; it is not an organism we embody at all times and in all places. It’s a garment we put on and take off at will, not a lens through which we see everything.

I long for a more holistic faith, and I applaud the efforts and vision behind such church communities as Quest and Monkfish Abbey in the Northwest—communities that are trying to practice whole-life faith, whereby faith is not cordoned off from the rest of life.

Your Clever Little Blog Could Get You Fired

Find the article here.

Interesting article . . .

. . . about an upper middle-class woman who became a Catholic hermit:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8186598/site/newsweek/

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