A Thinking Reed

Category: Spirituality

  • Visitation of the BVM

    ghirlandaio_visitation2.jpg

    (click for larger image)

    From John Paul II’s Redemptoris Mater:

    When Elizabeth greeted her young kinswoman coming from Nazareth, Mary replied with the Magnificat. In her greeting, Elizabeth first called Mary “blessed” because of “the fruit of her womb,” and then she called her “blessed” because of her faith (cf. Lk. 1:42, 45). These two blessings referred directly to the Annunciation. Now, at the Visitation, when Elizabeth’s greeting bears witness to that culminating moment, Mary’s faith acquires a new consciousness and a new expression. That which remained hidden in the depths of the “obedience of faith” at the Annunciation can now be said to spring forth like a clear and life-giving flame of the spirit. The words used by Mary on the threshold of Elizabeth’s house are an inspired profession of her faith, in which her response to the revealed word is expressed with the religious and poetical exultation of her whole being towards God. In these sublime words, which are simultaneously very simple and wholly inspired by the sacred texts of the people of Israel, Mary’s personal experience, the ecstasy of her heart, shines forth. In them shines a ray of the mystery of God, the glory of his ineffable holiness, the eternal love which, as an irrevocable gift, enters into human history.

    Mary is the first to share in this new revelation of God and, within the same, in this new “self-giving” of God. Therefore she proclaims: “For he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.” Her words reflect a joy of spirit which is difficult to express: “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Indeed, “the deepest truth about God and the salvation of man is made clear to us in Christ, who is at the same time the mediator and the fullness of all revelation.” In her exultation Mary confesses that she finds herself in the very heart of this fullness of Christ. She is conscious that the promise made to the fathers, first of all “to Abraham and to his posterity for ever,” is being fulfilled in herself. She is thus aware that concentrated within herself as the mother of Christ is the whole salvific economy, in which “from age to age” is manifested he who as the God of the Covenant, “remembers his mercy.”

    See also here.

  • Sing to the Lord a new song

    Neat slideshow at Christianity Today of hymnals from around the world.

  • Our fellow travelers

    Calvinist Richard Mouw reflects on our communion with the saints.

  • Jesus got out of the way

    In lieu of our weekly community group/Bible study, we attended the Solemn Mass for the Feast of the Ascension last night. Lovely as usual. The guest preacher was the Rev. Charles Hefling, a professor of theology at BC and editor of the Anglican Theological Review.

    Fr. Hefling asked: why did Jesus leave? I have to admit this isn’t a question that really ever occurred to me, but it’s a darn good one. As part of an answer he quoted a line from Rowan Williams to the effect that, since Jesus is “the Way” he had to “get out of the way.” This is a clever way of saying that Jesus opened the door to our union and fellowship with God by reconciling us to God, but we now have to go through that door by treading the path he trod.

    But this is only part of the answer because, Fr. Hefling pointed out, we can’t follow this way, at least not by ourselves. Following the way of the cross, the way of self-giving (and forgiving) love, doesn’t come naturally to us. This is why God sends the Holy Spirit. Jesus is God with us; the Spirit is God within us, empowering and enabling us to follow Jesus.

  • Notes on a theocentric ethic of creation, 3

    Heavenly Father, your Holy Spirit gives breath to all living things; renew us by this same Spirit, that we may learn to respect what you have given and care for what you have made, through Jesus Christ our Lord. – Andrew Linzey

    This prayer from Andrew Linzey nicely encapsulates the themes of a genuine Christian ethic of creation. I think in light of earlier posts on this topic, what’s needed is a way of reconciling a due respect and care for God’s creation with a proper commitment to human flourishing.

    However, given that a lot of what seems to drive our abuse of creation is our relentless pursuit of material wealth, and that this pursuit may actually at some point hinder human happiness rather than promote it, the reconciliation may not be as difficult as it first appears.

    For Christians in particular, human well-being isn’t measured by increases in material well-being. It’s important, of course, and we’re called to make sure that those in need have adequate material sustenance. But the energy and resources we devote to what earlier generations of Christians would’ve contemptously referred to as “luxury” may indicate that we’ve strayed considerable from a Christian vision of the good life.

    In a liberal society wealth-creation offers a convenient lowest common denominator-type goal that everyone can agree on despite differences over religious values, the meaning of life, etc. But if we’re pushing against the limits of what is sustainable, this won’t be a viable option must longer.

    What we need to learn, and what any public philosophy founded essentially on self-interest seems incapable of fostering, is self-limitation. What Christians may need to recover is the practice of asceticism, not understood as a form of joyless self-denial, but as a way of orienting the self to love of God and neighbor, the contemplation of truth and beauty and the pursuit of genuine human flourishing.

    In this interview, Linzey points out that there are aspects of the world that our practices of reducing creation to mere “resources” blind us to:

    [Our mistreatment of animals is] an impediment to spiritual pleasure. That’s why I think vegetarianism is implicitly a theological act. It’s not about saying “No” but about saying “Yes.” About enjoying the lives of other creatures on this earth so much that even the thought of killing them is abhorrent. I think God rejoices in Her creatures, takes pleasure in their lives, and wants us to do so too. So much of our exploitation of animals stems from a kind of spiritual blindness: if we sensed and really felt the beauty and magnificence of the world, we would not exploit it as we do today.

    From this point of view, something like vegetarianism may serve as a spiritual practice that actual allows us to see the world differently. Of course, there are other ways of doing this. The novelist and philosophy Iris Murdoch wrote that the necessary precondition for moral growth is learning to perceive reality as existing in itself and not as something for us. She thought art was particularly suited to this since it’s goal is to make reality present to us. By learning to attend to something for its own sake, which often involves hard work, we go out of ourselves and gradually inhabit a less self-centered, and therefore more accurate, perspective on reality. This is the key to human flourishing.

    Obviously human beings need, as Wendell Berry reminds us, to use the world. But spiritual disciplines that teach us to look at the world as something more than mere material for our use may lead us to redefine what our needs are, and to distinguish genuine needs from spurious ones. And, somewhat paradoxically, genuine human flourishing can only occur when we stop seeing ourselves as the center of the world. But Christians of all people should be ok with this, since we have it on good authority that self-seeking is the surest path to self-destruction and that only by losing our lives to we truly find them.

  • anagnosis

    Check out the new blog of regular ATR commenter Josh/Joshie/Joshie (Poo). He’s blogging texts of the Christian mystical tradition, beginning with The Mystical Theology by Pseudo-Dionysious.

  • The thirsty God

    This book I’m reading by Stephen Cottrell is really terrific. It’s part theology, part mediation, part devotional, and incorporates a section on Christian practice into each chapter, connecting the meditation on Christ’s cross with Lenten practices like fasting, almsgiving, Bible reading, prayer, etc. (which really are just Christian practices). He takes the passion according to John as his main text, but draws connections to other parts of the biblical story throughout.

    Cottrell, the Bishop of Reading, uses Jesus’ words “I thirst” to illuminate the passion story. “They are such sorrowful words, so simple and yet so very human: Christ, the thirsty one, one who shares deeply in the mess and muddle of human living” (p. 12). He emphasizes the themes of divine solidarity with human suffering and the love that is poured out through the life and death of Jesus. God not only shares our lot, but the cross is the definitive revelation of God as love, demonstrated by Jesus’ determination to love “to the end.” This is the victory that he wins over the powers of sin and evil.

    On the flight back from DC this morning I finished chapter 4, “The Tenacity of Love,” which I think is fair to call the heart of the book. In previous chapters Bp. Cottrell has dealth with the events leading up to the passion, but here he deals with the crucifixion itself.

    [What happens on the cross] is what I call ‘the tenacity of love’: Jesus keeps on loving those who keep on hating. He defeats sin and death by the resolute persistence of his love. To the soldiers who nail him to the cross he speaks words of understanding and forgiveness: ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’ (Luke 23:34). To the thief who hangs alongside him he promises a share in Paradise (Luke 23:43). These beautiful words spoken out of the horror of the cross embody his life’s teaching, that we should love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, walk the second mile. It is the love that carries on loving, right to the end. (p. 115-6)

    But, of course, for Christians Jesus is not just a good man who persevered and died a martyr’s death. He reveals the nature of God as Love:

    If Jesus had given in to the taunts and indignity and sheer bloody awfulness of the cross, then love would have failed. It would have become less than love, and less powerful than hate. But by allowing himself to be handed over to this passion, and by fulfilling the vocation of love, God triumphs. He triumphs in the all-too-human flesh that Jesus now redeems. He risks the possibility of failure, as today he risks the possibility that we may never recognize the nature of his triumph. But that is the way with love. All it can do is go on loving. It can never coerce, and it can never wantonly hurt or manipulate that which it loves.

    The words ‘I thirst’ sum up this love because they witness to the frightful horror of what is happening — the indignity, the humiliation, the pain. But they also penetrate the deepest purposes of God. ‘I thirst for you,‘ says Jesus from the cross. ‘I do this for you: I am the faithful one who lays down his life for his friends. I do this for God: I drink the cup the father sets before me. I desire your salvation. Like a dry, weary land where there is no water, so I thirst for you and I thirst to do God’s will. See how much I love you. See the depths of the Father’s love. See my arms stretched out in love for you. Allow yourself to be embraced by my love. Allow yourself to be transformed.’ (p. 116)

    To use the all-too-familiar typology, Bp. Cottrell seems to be combining elements of an Abelardian and Christus Victor understanding of the cross. Jesus, in loving to the end, reveals God’s love to us, or, maybe better, enacts it, pours it out. “His silence before his accusers, his forgiveness of those who persecute him, his complete lack of hatred, most reveal the true nature of God’s unconditional love” (p. 108). And yet at the same time, this is the defeat of sin and hatred: “Sin and death are brought to submission by the persistence of Christ’s love. All their forces are spent upon him, but he carries on loving” (p. 116). Love, not hate, has the last word. God in Jesus takes the brunt of our sin upon himself and absorbs it, “[l]ike a lightning conductor pulling the energy of the storm out of the sky and burying it safely in the earth” (p. 115). This turns penal substitution on its head in that it’s not God punishing Jesus, but us (which is clearly much closer to the literal truth of things). And yet this fury and hate is absorbed and defeated by God’s inexorable love.

    Bp. Cottrell goes on to connect this profound understanding of God’s love with the Christian’s practice of prayer. Prayer, he says, is founded on “God’s affirmation of love for us, and our responding with the same heartfelt desire” (p. 132):

    Prayer is first of all about what God says to us. It is about allowing ourselves to be changed and shaped by God’s agenda for God’s world. We come into the presence of God with thankful hearts for all he has done for us in Christ. We thank him for the gift of life — and this can happen anywhere and at any time. We still ourselves: we are in the presence of the one who loves us and we allow ourselves to hear his voice speaking his words of love. Sometimes we need the voice of God that speaks to us through the Bible, or through the liturgy of the church, to communicate this message of love. Or sometimes it is expressed to us through songs of praise. Sometimes we arrive at a place of complete silence, where it is sufficient just to know we are in God’s presence. In each case we allow God to nurture within us, through his Holy Spirit, a deep sense of our being the beloved, of knowing we are loved. Then we can live and act with the same affirmation that sustained Christ, which enabled him to love others, which even made it possible for him to love his enemies. Only by knowing God’s love for us, by knowing that we are worthy of his love, and therefore able to love ourselves more, can we reach out with love to others. (p. 132-3)

    By my lights this is good evangelical stuff in the best sense of the word. Our response to God and to the world is based on the good news of God’s prior act of love in creating, sustaining, and redeeming us. God’s favor is sheer grace, but that grace, which is simply the love of God, calls forth a response from us. And the “the old, old story of Jesus and His love” is one we need to rehearse, in prayer and liturgy, word and sacrament, to make this good news a living reality in our lives.

  • Ratzinger vs. vicarious atonement?

    Continuing with the Holy Week theme, Pontifications has posted an excerpt from then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity that seems quite opposed to the traditional idea of vicarious atonement:

    In the Bible the Cross does not appear as part of a mechanism of injured right; on the contrary, in the Bible the Cross is quite the reverse: it is the expression of the radical nature of the love that gives itself completely, of the process in which one is what one does and does what one is; it is the expression of a life that is completely being for others. To anyone who looks more closely, the scriptural theology of the Cross represents a real revolution as compared with the notions of expiation and redemption entertained by non-Christian religions, though it certainly cannot be denied that in the later Christian consciousness this revolution was largely neutralized and its whole scope seldom recognized. In other world religions, expiation usually means the restoration of the damaged relationship with God by means of expiatory actions on the part of men. Almost all religions center around the problem of expiation; they arise out of man’s knowledge of his guilt before God and signify the attempt to remove this feeling of guilt, to surmount the guilt through conciliatory actions offered up to God. The expiatory activity by which men hope to conciliate the Divinity and to put him in a gracious mood stands at the heart of the history of religion.

    In the New Testament the situation is almost completely reversed. It is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in order to give to him. He restores disturbed right on the initiative of his own power to love, by making unjust man just again, the dead living again, through his own creative mercy. His righteousness is grace; it is active righteousness, which sets crooked man right, that is, bends him straight, makes him correct. Here we stand before the twist that Christianity put into the history of religion. The New Testament does not say that men conciliate God, as we really ought to expect, since, after all, it is they who have failed, not God. It says, on the contrary, that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19). This is truly something new, something unheard of—the starting point of Christian existence and the center of New Testament theology of the Cross: God does not wait until the guilty comes to be reconciled; he goes to meet them and reconciles them. Here we can see the true direction of the Incarnation, the Cross.

    More here.

  • A Marian witness

    As today is the (transferred) Feast of the Annunciation of Our Lord, I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on the talk given by Bishop Steven Charleston on Marian devotion at our parish adult education forum yesterday.

    First of all, Bp. Charleston seemed like a really interesting person. He’s a Choctaw Indian who was born in rural Oklahoma and raised a Southern Baptist. In his teens he joined the Episcopal Church, later becoming a priest and then Bishop of Alaska. He’s been very involved in Native American ministry among other things, and currently serves as dean and president of the Episcopal Divinity School in nearby Cambridge, MA. He came across as a very down-to-earth guy who wore his position lightly, and had a rather quiet but direct demeanor. (He was also yesterday’s guest preacher and preached a very straightforward – and short! – sermon).

    Anyway, I guess I had originally been expecting a kind of theological disquisition on Marian devotion, but Bp. Charleston’s talk was much more along the lines of an evangelical-style testimony or witness! He spoke of his own very vivid experience of the comforting presence and intercession of Mary and how he’s become something of an “evangelist” for devotion to the BVM in the Episcopal Church. I guess that’s what happens when you mix a Southern Baptist upbringing with Anglo-Catholic theology and piety!

    He also spoke movingly of Mary as a kind of salt-of-the-earth working woman, not as the rather frail figure we see in some representations, of seeing her in the faces of Mexican women working in market stalls, or of careworn mothers on the subway. He talked about his efforts to introduce Marian devotion into the very low-church ethos of his Alaskan diocese, and said that, by the time he left several parishes had installed statues of Mary.

    I actually liked this talk better than I probably would’ve if it’d been the kind of theological discussion I was expecting. Like I wrote a while ago, as important as the theology is, there’s something uniquely compelling aobut lived experience (again, assuming that it’s consistent with sound theology). So I found Bp. Charleston’s witness to be very powerful. Proudly brandishing his Rosary, he encouraged us all to mediate on how we might make room for Mary in our own spiritual lives and to share that with others.

    During the brief Q&A period I asked him what he says to people who contend that devotion to Mary risks overshadowing devotion to the Trinity. He said that, first and foremost, Mary only finds her proper place in the story of Christ; she’s not some sort of goddess figure who stands on her own. She prays with us and for us, but this is always oriented toward God. Secondly, he said that God allows us to approach him in a variety of ways, depending on our particular needs at the time. He mentioned asking for St. Francis’s prayers in his work on environmental issues as an example.

    I can see how one might interpret this as setting up “mediators” between us and God in addition to Christ, and it seems clear that, in practice, devotion to the saints has sometimes taken that form. But maybe a better way of thinking about it is that each saint, in his or her uniqueness, shows forth a part or aspect of God in a unique way, like a prisim which refracts white light into a rainbow of colors. Maybe, in asking a particular saint to pray for us, we’re trying to “plug in” to that aspect of God that they refract particuarly clearly.

  • The church that prays together…

    Since last fall I’ve been helping to facilitate a small community group that meets about once a week primarily to study the Bible (we typically read and discuss the Gospel lesson for the upcoming Sunday), pray and socialize. I guess it’s a “small group” in the parlance of evangelicalism.

    Anyway, one of the things I really like about our group is its theological diversity. We have evangelicals, Roman Catholics, lifelong Episcopalians, one guy who’s Armenian Orthodox, and your scribe. We also range from liberal to conservative. The end result is some really lively and interesting conversation.

    Case in point: last night we were reading this Sunday’s lesson, Luke 20:9-19, a.k.a. the Parable of the Tenants. Somewhat naturally, the conversation turned to Atonement theory. Some of the folks from more evangelical backgrounds were suprised to learn that there were ways of understanding how Jesus saves us besides the theory of Penal Substitution. Another guy mentioned that he didn’t really like to think of the Cross in terms of some kind of payment for sin, but preferred to focus on the idea of God coming into our world and suffering alongside us (e.g. Whitehead’s “fellow sufferer who understands.”). Another said that his Episcopalian upbringing had taught him to emphasize the Incarnation more than the Atonement. For my part, I tried to defend a more-or-less Anselmian account.

    Unsurprisingly, we didn’t come to any consensus, just as the universal church hasn’t. But one of the really valuable things I’ve gotten out of this group is the conviction, and experience, that it’s still possible for Christians with serious theological differences (including differences over things like women’s ordination and homosexuality) to read the Bible and pray together (and head off to the pub for a friendly pint afterwards!). In spite of all the nastiness going on at the macro-level, maybe there are seeds of something hopeful there.

    Also, regarding the Atonement, and in the spirit of the Anglican via media, I’ve often been impressed by the way the Eucharistic Prayer A weaves together different understandings of the Atonement:

    Holy and gracious Father: In your infinite love you made us for yourself, and, when we had fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death, you, in your mercy, sent Jesus Christ, your only and eternal Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.

    He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world. (BCP, p. 362)

    I really like how this includes elements of an “Abelardian” account of Christ coming and sharing our nature to manifest God’s love, but without losing all talk of sacrifice or satisfaction.

    Obviously all our differences aren’t necessarily going to be resolved in some harmonious whole, but I like to think that there’s something to that idea of holding seeming opposites in a fruitful tension.