Outward Journey / Inward Journey

To take the holy scriptures and read them is the first thing we have to do to open ourselves to God’s call.  Reading the scriptures is not as easy as it seems since in our academic world we tend to make anything and everything we read subject to analysis and discussion.  But the word of God should lead us first of all to contemplation and meditation.  Instead of taking the words apart, we should bring them together in our innermost being; instead of wondering if we agree or disagree, we should wonder which words are directly spoken to us and connect directly with our most personal story.  Instead of thinking about the words as potential subjects for an interesting dialogue or paper, we should be willing to let them penetrate into the most hidden corners of our heart, even to those places where no other word has yet found entrance.  Then and only then can the words bear fruit as seed sown in good soil.  Only then can we really “hear and understand” (Matthew 13:23).

-Henri J. M. Nouwen (1966) Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life.  Doubleday, New York.  135-136.

This via catholicanarchy:

Yes, happy 4th of July! According to the calendar of the Church, July 4th’s real significance is that it is the feast day of St. Elizabeth of Portugal (1271-1336), a patron Saint of peacemakers.

The sad fact, however, is that if you were to attend Mass on this day, the chances of your priest mentioning this feast are slim to none. Instead, you are likely to participate in a Eucharist which has been transformed into a syncretistic ritual of american civil religion. Thank God that, despite the sectarian tendencies of the american Church, the transnational Church calls us Catholics to be a peculiar people who mark time differently than the rest of the world, and the rest of our nation.

St. Elizabeth, pray for us, that we american Catholics may truly take our place in the one, transnational Body of Christ that resists the dismemberment caused by our tendency to cling to national allegiances. And on the day that the rest of the united states celebrates its foundational myth of violence and the sacrifices of soldiering which parody the Cross, let us be ever more formed by the words of Jesus in the Gospel reading for July 4th: “Go and learn the meaning of the words, I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

You know, you’d think that we Reformed folk would be somewhat innoculated from the nationalism-as-religion bug, what with our emphasis on God’s sovereignty, which makes American booyahism look like a sickly imitation of the real thing.  And yet, I saw last night that the (nominally RCA-affiliated) Chrystal Cathedral’s ‘Hour of Power’ program (don’t get me started on so-called ‘television churches’ — that’s a whole ‘nother post) is advertising that ‘the world’s largest indoor American flag’ being raised in their ’sanctuary’ during a ‘worship service’.  This makes me wonder what, exactly, is being worshipped.  How sad that people are being misled by the great civil religion lie.  St. Elizabeth, pray for us!

The Romanist collect for today:

Father of peace and love, you gave St. Elizabeth the gift of reconciling enemies. By the help of her prayers give us the courage to work for peace among men, that we may be called the sons of God. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Amen!

And what is the object of my love?  I asked the earth and it said: ‘It is not I.’  I asked all that is in it; they made the same confession.  I asked the sea, the deeps the living creatures that creep, and they responded: ‘We are not your God, look beyond us.’  I asked the breezes which blow and the entire air with its inhabitants said: ‘Anaximenes was mistaken; I am not God.’  I asked heaven, sun, moon, and stars; they said: ‘Nor are we the God whom you seek.’  And I said to all these things in my external environment: ‘Tell me of my God who you are not, tell me something about him.’  And with a great voice they cried out: ‘He made us’.  My question was the attention I gave to them, and their response was their beauty.

-Augustine of Hippo (397) Confesssons, Book X, vi (9a).  Trans. by Henry Chadwick (1991).  Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 183.

With the mind and intellect which you have given them, they [philosophers] investigate these matters [measuring the constellations, tracing the paths of the stars].  They have found out much.  Many years beforehand they have predicted eclipses of sun and moon, foretelling the day, the hour, and whether total or partial.  And their calculation has not been wrong.  It has turned out just as they predicted.  They have put the rules which they discovered into books which are read to this day.  On this basis prediction can be made of the year, the month of the year, the day of the month, the hour of the day, and what proportion of light will be eclipsed in the case of either sun or moon; and it happens exactly as predicted.  People who have no understanding of these things are amazed and stupefied.  Those who know are exultant and are admired.  Their irreligious pride makes them withdraw from you and eclipse your great light from reaching themselves.  They can foresee a future eclipse of the sun, but do not perceive their own eclipse of the present.  For they do not in a religious spirit investigate the source of the intelligence with which they research into these matters.  Moreover, when they do discover that you are their Maker, they do not give themselves to you so that they may preserve what you have made.  They do not slay in sacrifice to you what they have made themselves to be.  They do not kill their own pride like high-flying birds, their curiosity like ‘fishes of the sea’ and their sexual indulgence like ‘the beasts of the field’, so that you, God, who are a devouring fire, may consume their mortal concerns and recreate them for immortality.

-Augustine of Hippo (397) Confesssons, Book V, i (4).  Trans. by Henry Chadwick (1991).  Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 74.

Awhile ago, my seminary friend Luke and I had a conversation on this blog, and he implied that I was overly concerned with the opinions of dead white guys. I chose to discontinue the discussion because I was becoming needlessly cranky with it, but I have been mulling over the matter since. It came up again in my in-care meeting, when I talked about our fascination with novelty — a trend I think the Church has aquired from American culture. Look at Cleveland’s slogans on behalf of the UCC: ‘Our faith is over 2000 years old; our thinking is not.’ ‘Cutting edge theology.’ Ad nauseum. No thanks. I was given a hard time at that in-care meeting, and I can’t help but wonder if I would have had an easier ride if I had read less Antony the Great and more queer theology dreck. This thought gives me heartburn.

I am unrepentant. I think the best way of knowing where the church is today is to read the dead people. Incidently, they’re not all men. Or ‘white’, whatever that means in pre-modern contexts. What I am not advocating is that we adopt an uncritical, neophobic position when we read the Fathers, the Reformers, and others. What I do advocate is that we pay careful attention to them, their writings and teachings, their liturgies, and their lives. I have long thought that if a Martian visited the typical American Protestant church today, she might think that we believe God plopped us in the middle of the 20th century with no historical context whatsoever. We need to recover our sense of the historical, one, holy, catholic Church established by Jesus Christ, over which he is Lord and King, and which Protestants are a part of. The church is not a country club, nor is it a Political Action Committee, nor a social service agency, nor the amen corner for American triumphalist nationalism. It is the sacred community of believers to which Christ gave his grace-imparting sacraments. The more we recover and pay attention to the Fathers, the Reformers, and others, the more we can recover the Church as catholic and the Church as the mission through which God acts to reconcile all things to Himself.