A Living Text

The Book of Common Prayer defines Lent as a time “…of fasting, on which the church requires such a measure of abstinence as is more especially suited to extraordinary acts and exercises of devotion.”

James Jordan has repeatedly argued that one reason we are not to bow to images is that the human person is a deep construct - we have levels within us that we are not even aware of. We don’t know all the reasons why God says to do or not do something, but we can assume that it is important if he says it because he knows our make up far better then we do. Bowing to statues and pictures does something to us over time that we are not aware of. This news may uncover some of the reasons why it matter. It says in part:

The term most often used to describe this new model of mind is “embodied cognition,” and its champions believe it will open up entire new avenues for understanding - and enhancing - the abilities of the human mind. Some educators see in it a new paradigm for teaching children, one that privileges movement and simulation over reading, writing, and reciting. Specialists in rehabilitative medicine could potentially use the emerging findings to help patients recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. The greatest impact, however, has been in the field of neuroscience itself, where embodied cognition threatens age-old distinctions - not only between brain and body, but between perceiving and thinking, thinking and acting, even between reason and instinct - on which the traditional idea of the mind has been built.

“It’s a revolutionary idea,” says Shaun Gallagher, the director of the cognitive science program at the University of Central Florida. “In the embodied view, if you’re going to explain cognition it’s not enough just to look inside the brain. In any particular instance, what’s going on inside the brain in large part may depend on what’s going on in the body as a whole, and how that body is situated in its environment.”

Or, as the motto of the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory of Embodied Cognition puts it, “Ago ergo cogito”: “I act, therefore I think.”

When discussing prayer to saints, one thing I hear is that we are not asking the saints to do anything for us, we are just asking them to pray for us. In other words we are praying to God through them, not praying to the saints themselves and asking them to do anything. However, Orthodox and Catholic liturgies do not bear this out. Take this example from the Coptic Orthodox Compline:

O pure Virgin, draw the veil of thy speedy protection upon thy servant. Remove from me the billows of evil thoughts and raise my sick soul to pray and watch, because it has long lain in deep sleep; for thou art able, merciful, helpful and the birth-giver of the spring of life, my King and my God, Jesus Christ, my hope (Marsh 61).

The Virgin Mary is being asked for protection in this prayer. She is not being asked to in turn ask God for protection. And here is a Syrian prayer for the intercession of the Mother of God:

O Virgin Mother! Shield us from all menaces that confront us and keep far from us the stormy winds and tides of this world (Marsh 108).

Again, Mary is being asked for protection. One might press the issue and say that Mary would only protect us via her prayers, but that is not what is said in these prayers. Consider the Salve Regina from the Benedictine Daily Prayer:

Haily, holy Queen, mother of mercy, Our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you do we send up our sighs mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, your eyes of mercy toward us and after this exile show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
Loving Mother of the Redeemer gate of heaven, star of the sea, assist your people who have fallen yet strive to rise again. To the wonderment of nature you bore your Creator, yet remained a virgin after as before. You who received Gabriel’s joyful greeting, have pity on us poor sinners (Johnson 933).

I think it stretches belief to think that all that is being asked in prayers like this are for the saint to pray for us. The saint is indeed being invoked. Indeed, Hildegard von Bingen says:

You the redeemer’s kindly mother,
you who are still the open gate of heaven
and the star of the sea:
help a falling people
that strives to rise.
You gave birth, as Nature looked on in wonder,
to your own holy maker;
O virgin before and after,
receiving that holy Ave from Gabriel’s lips:
have mercy on us sinners (Sequentia 12).

Who is being asked to help and have mercy on sinners in this case? Mary is. These prayers are not limited to Mary; in the following example St. Benedict is invoked:

Admirable Saint and Doctor of Humility, you practiced what you taught, assiduously praying for God’s glory and lovingly fulfilling all work for God and the benefit of all human beings. You know the many physical dangers that surround us today often caused or occasioned by human inventions. Guard us against poisoning of the body as well as of mind and soul, and thus be truly a “Blessed” one for us. Amen. [link]

It seems clear to me that praying to the saints involves much more than just asking them to pray for us - which in itself is presumptuous, Scripturally unwarranted, or as the Anglican formularies say “…repugnant to the Word of God” [Articles of Religion XXII].

Johnson, Maxwell ed. Benedictine Daily Prayer, A Short Breviary. Collegville, Mn: Liturgical Press, 2005.
Marsh, Richard ed. Prayers from the East. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004.
Sequentia. Canticles of Ecstasy. BMG, 1994.

In a scalding article in the Weekly Standard, ex-Mormon Kenneth Anderson writes:

Yet the worship of sales and marketing is not exactly unknown among the numerous evangelicals who promiscuously deride Mormonism as some kind of weird, even dangerous, sect but who themselves gather weekly to–well, what? Sing their country-rockified, feel-good, self-help-book ballads, lovingly serviced with the Word of the Therapeutic God by blow-dried yet humble, down-home yet suburban preachers whose cavernous mega-churches resemble nothing so much as the Wal-Mart of the soul on sale. And you ridicule Mormons? One need not be Christopher Hitchens to think that if there is something funny about Mormons, there is something funnier about a certain brand of evangelicals’ condescending to them.

And:

And if our sects are to be thus put under the microscope, then perhaps evangelical Protestantism is best understood as a syncretic cargo cult promising self- and relational-fulfillment through Jesus, a religious movement marching relentlessly forward to embrace a secular culture of therapy in the name of the Nazarene. For this the saints suffered to be torn to pieces by wild beasts and submitted to the flames?

Although his animus is over the top, I have to agree with his charges. This is why I want to be part of a serious and humble orthodoxy in the Anglican tradition, not an ‘evangelical’ church where everyone wears jeans, plays video clips and treats Jesus as a boyfriend rather than a Holy God. I think the heart of the matter is that most modern churches lack all seriousness. They are not serious about God, they have no sense of holiness or propriety, they have veered completely into the realm of entertaining and dumbing down in order to attract the biggest crowd possible. I don’t think that they have self-consciously examined what they are doing, but they are doing it nevertheless. And I’ve had it with that. I have checked out of this nonsense that produces un-believing louts from teenagers. Why should a teen take church seriously when it is a joke-filled fun-zone and an embarrassing imitation of cable TV culture? Look, if I want real entertainment I will go to somewhere that does it well, like Hollywood. Christians imitating that garbage come off looking twice the fool: first for doing it and second for doing it poorly.

Can you imagine the 12 apostles swaying to “Shout to the Lord” in a sanctuary with pastel colors on the ’stage’  in Antioch or Jerusalem? Of course not. Sure, times change, but if you measure what we do in light of what they did back then, you quickly see the absurdity, just read Revelation to see what worship looks like in heaven. So I think if we simply use being serious as a yardstick, most of what passes for modern church fails at every level except being a serious joke.

James Jordan writes about the dominion church:

What is distinctive and new about the New Covenant is that God pushes the battle back to the citadel of the enemy. Now the enemy is defined as Satan’s legions, the fallen-angelic principalities and powers. The Church is called to destroy them. Now the war is against the Garden-enemy (Satan), not primarily against the Land-enemy (evil men). Church discipline is what is most important, and excommunication comes in as a more powerful tool than execution.

For this reason, the New Testament focuses almost exclusively on ecclesiastical warfare, which is liturgical warfare. We cannot rest with a mere victory against Cainitic culture. We cannot rest until men are converted, and Satan is fully bound from influencing the hearts and minds of men. We must cast down strongholds of ideology, not merely bring criminals to justice.

If the Church is faithful in her calling to prosecute liturgical warfare, there will be little need for the magistrate to carry out capital punishment. We can see that this has indeed happened in Christian societies, for there is far less tyranny, brigandage, and murder in them than in non-Christian lands. The crimes that brought the death penalty in the Old Covenant are not often committed in Christian lands. Of course, as the Western world has rejected Christianity, the old crimes of rape, incest, homosexual seduction, murder, and the like have once again become major concerns in our society.

God plants the Church in specific places to exercise dominion over those places. The Church does this by faithfully obeying God in worship: weekly communion with real bread and real wine; singing all the psalms and other Bible songs; excommunicating rebels; recognizing the government of other churches; tithing; praying specifically for the people within her area, whether believers or not; etc.

But there is more. The Church is to claim territory. The old word for this is “parish.” The Church governs a parish spiritually, and within her parish she oversees what is going on. A full parish is about the size of a political precinct in our state-centered age.

The young are attracted to tradition and mystery, not tackiness and innovation. The NY Times talked about it yesterday:

A sense of the holy and the mysterious pulls across generations, drawing in children and their parents, who themselves are often too young to recall the Tridentine Mass.

“I have no memory of the Latin Mass from my childhood,” Anne McLaughlin said at St. Leo’s. “But for me it’s so refreshing to see him facing the east, the Tabernacle, focusing on Christ.”

Her daughter Aine, 15, agreed and said, “It’s so much prettier.”

Experts on the church say they have been surprised that young people have shown such interest.

“There’s a curiosity, and it is consistent with people looking for the transcendent and holy, which they maybe didn’t see in the Mass they attended growing up,” said the Rev. Keith F. Pecklers, professor of liturgy at Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

Peter Leithart has helpfully charted a course for Protestants to reclaim a solid theology of ritual. These notes (made by someone else) of his talk a few years ago are very helpful at getting to the core of what he is saying. In the quote that follows, Leithart addresses the objection that rituals are an old testament phenomenon:

Rituals in Leviticus and Numbers; and the religion of Israel was bound up in rituals. It’s thought that moving to the New Covenant (NC) that we’ve outgrown the necessity of those. In the childhood, the people of God needed these; now in the NC we don’t need those. We don’t need the externals; religion is a religion of the heart. To think of our sacraments as ritual seems to be Judaizing.

But the move from the Old Covenant (OC) to NC isn’t a move from ritualized to non-ritualized; rather, from an old set of rituals to a new set of rituals. Augustine: The rites are simpler, easier to performer, and fewer. But we still have our rituals as part of the life of the church.

To reject rituals smacks of Marcionism. Tendency in our rejection to say that the OC was a completely different kind of religion from the NC – an internal-kind of religion. That’s not the trajectory of movement from OC to NC; it’s a transformation of the rituals from the old into the new.

Leithart elaborates on this theme in his The Priesthood of the Plebs: “New Covenant rites and signs are thus not grudging concessions to the weakness of the flesh but are necessary to develop redemptive themes in the symphony of universal history. Practically, this means that words do not give place to silence, nor external rites to interior piety, nor does the New Testament open a gap between signs and realities that was not apparent in the Old. In both Old and New, Augustine implies, worship involves the performance of sacramental signs and confession in a particular form of words. The difference is wholly in the times.”

Two of my friends and I are meeting on Saturday mornings for prayer and conversation. For a long time now my desire has been to figure out how to live something of a monastic life in the middle of suburbia, the blur of life with kids, and 2 hours of commuting every day. One of my new friends showed me a book a couple weeks ago that I promptly bought, it is Benedictine Daily Prayer, A Short Breviary. This ’short’ breviary is about 2,671 pages of prayers, psalms, hymns, scripture, readings from the fathers and more. It is an amazing book and aid for ordering your life around the hours of monastic prayer no matter where you are.

Now, I am new to this and very un-disciplined. I’m lucky if I pray 2 or 3 of the hours, and do it at the right time. But my hope is that it will become a discipline which will start reshaping my life back in a Godward form. I’m seeing the need for discipline all over my life, and have a desire to unclutter, shedding stuff and hindrances, and doing things that I need to do to serve God and live the good life, defined as:
((What are the ends of human existence, and how do we attain them? His answer, roughly, is “happiness,” or the good life, which is to be attained in a community of family and friends who can satisfy one another’s material and social needs, behave justly toward one another, and, according to their capacity, contemplate the Good. Such an ideal - if it is a true ideal - does not change from age to age. It is valid in a Greek polis, in the Roman Empire, in medieval Christian France, and in post-Christian America. The material necessities - and the means of getting them - will take different forms, but the goal remains the same, as do the means (generally speaking))

Things like this make me want to do the same. Go to bed earlier, quit listening to crappy NPR and ESPN on my drives and instead download some good stuff onto my iPod and listen to it instead. Get centered on prayer, the word, and learning the faith better. Write, read, pray, serve. Look, I only have a few years on this earth. There is a wealth of Christian knowledge on every subject under the sun to be learned, and I need to get about learning it. Our entire ethical and philosophical heritage in the west is known by only a few. I need to absorb it and start living it to make a difference here on earth instead of being some kind of shallow cipher who thinks that whatever blather is out there is what I should be thinking about. I need to turn off the matrix and open up the church fathers.

So this Breviary is a great step, in line with the Book of Common Prayer. Another practice I am picking up from my friend is to write the prayer requests of others in a journal and open it up when offering prayer. This is instead of saying “I’ll pray for you” and then forgetting the next minute what it was that you were going to ‘pray for.’  “I’ll pray for you” is more often than not a Christian way of blowing people and their needs off.

September 29th is the feast day for Saint Michael and All Angels.

O Everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angles and men in a wonderful order; Mercifully grant that, as thy holy Angels always do thee service in heaven, so, by thy appointment, they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

“There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon;”

“…in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.”

“This is he (Moses), that was in the church in the wilderness with the angel which spake to him in the mout Sinai, and with our fathers…”

Thank you Lord for your holy Angels.

When sitting in a church service, there are two options for taking out mints, coughdrops, and the like. One is the long, drawn-out, gradual removing of the wrapper which makes noise for thirty seconds or so on and off, all in the hopes of not disturbing others. The second is to do the immediate unwrap of the entire candy and suffer the much shorter but potentially louder noise. I believe the shorter path is better than the longer; for though you try to avoid attention the long way, you end up being even more annoying.