"Here are my mother and brothers!"

Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?

A Dominican friend of mine once explained the fascination with the Virgin Mary to me this way, which made sense even to a Protestant who grew up with sola scriptura on her tongue:

“What is it that makes a saint, Em? What makes a person truly holy?”

I pondered for a minute, knowing to avoid an answer that had anything to do with holy actions, as if the fruit of a holy life were the cause of the holiness. Faith could have been a viable answer, but it seemed a bit vague and would cry for further description, and I knew that I Corinthians 13 had declared another virtue superior even to faith.

“Love,” I finally concluded. “Love of Christ is what makes us holy.”

“Absolutely,” he answered. “And assuming that some of us grow further in love for Christ than others, who do you think loved Christ the most?”

When he put it that way, the answer was obvious. I love my nephews something fierce, but I know my sister-in-law’s love for them trumps mine from the beginning; I love my mother something fierce, but I know her love for me trumps that as well. And it was with that love, the intimate love of a mother that finds its object within her, that Mary loved Christ.

The rest of us are learning to love, some more quickly than others, some more purely than others. My own growth in love is often severely neglected, taking a back seat to other more pressing demands of teaching and research and homeownership and social demands, and now Advent has come and gone almost unnoticed in the bustle of my superficially significant pursuits.

Yet like the baby in Mary’s womb, Christ has been present all along, present within me and bursting out into the world around me. Maybe what is so fascinating about Mary is not what is unique to her—that she carried the physical body of Christ growing within her own body—but the mysterious sense in which she is an archetype of what is happening to all of us (though in our case, in a much less obtrusive, more ignorable way). Mary could not ignore him like I have over the past few months, yet even in my case he is present, spiritually and (sacramental theology would insist) physically.

There is grace to me in that reminder, grace to remember that, whether or not I have been aware of it, Christ has come within me and without me. My own journey of holiness will be a process of learning how to love the Christ who is already there.

Hidden Valley

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of being an explorer. In fact, I remember the day when I sadly realized, like the scene in The Truman Show, that everywhere had already been discovered, and there would be no secret continents hiding in a corner of the ocean. Instead of continents, my explorations would have to remain where they had always been: the 80-acre forest that surrounded my childhood home, owned by the old widow Mrs. Obadiah who refused all offers to sell family land.

Though there were lovely glens where the river (read: creek) would cascade (read: trickle) over boulders that were family favorites for woodland adventures, I preferred to find my own havens, precisely because they would be my own. I found a place where the honeysuckle vine hung as a thick blanket over overhanging branches to create a sweet-smelling hollow. I found an old trail left by loggers that made me feel like a character from The Lord of the Rings on my way through Mirkwood Forest. I found an old stump that kept more bark than tree and shaped itself like a throne, and I imagined it the throne where God would sit during his similar strolls through Mrs. Obadiah’s forest. And my crowning discovery was when I found the stumps that stood at the top of a cleared hill in the middle of the forest, giving me the sensation of standing on a mountaintop. I named it Hidden Valley.

The first time I stumbled on my private mountaintop was exhilarating enough to keep me coming back with a strangely sacramental assurance that God was really present at Hidden Valley in a more tangible way than he was on my walk there, and it became a favorite pastime for me to tote a lunch there, sharing a meal with the God I knew would join me for the simple reason that he had once before. The very contours of the ground declared the glory of God, and the sloping valley (such as it was) proclaimed the work of his hands.

Soon after my discovery of Hidden Valley, I dragged my childhood best friend out to see it on an afternoon when she was unfortunately tired, hungry, and about to go home. She didn't want to cross the long field to get there (a prairie in size, as I recall), but I described the view vividly enough to convince her to come.

"There," I said when we arrived. "Stand on this stump to get the best view."

"This is it?" she asked incredulously, her tone betraying her utter disappointment, as if I had promised wealth and delivered a penny.

"Uh..." I hesitated, noticing that my mountain seemed to shrink before her gaze, and feeling suddenly quite foolish. "Maybe not. I must forget how to get there. We can go back home." I had suddenly developed a desire to be anywhere other than Hidden Valley whose magic had become temporarily invisible, even to me, knowing that I did not possess the power to make the magic return.

"Well, we already came all the way out here," she conceded with needless graciousness. "We can look around for it if you think you can find it again."

"No," I struggled in a brief panic, forced to lose face by admitting this was the place I had described so superlatively. "This is actually it, but it looks different now. I think some trees must have fallen and blocked the view." (It probably commends me that I was such a bad liar. It evidently didn't occur to me that we would have to see fallen trees for them to be obscuring our view, not to mention that trees are more obtrusive when standing up.)

At any rate, I never took anyone else out there, and the sacramental magic of the place from that time on remained more in the memory of what it had once looked like than in my future views. It was as if God had once removed a veil to reveal the splendor of his creation that he wondrously created and even more wondrously restored, and I knew the secret afterwards even if the veil had returned.

According to GoogleEarth, there is a subdivision now in the places of my childhood explorations. I suppose that must mean Mrs. Obadiah is dead, and that I might have been the last person to experience that hill as a place of wonder where God's glory may choose to dwell for an afternoon. I like to hope at least that some family's driveway is paved over it so that some kid can get the raw exhilaration of riding down it on his bike and thereby experience a bit of the wonder I felt, if that is not a profane use of what is surely sacred ground. And two decades and 700 miles removed from my afternoons at Hidden Valley, I pray that God may lift the corners of the veil again from time to time, and that my desire to save face never allows even a friend to put it back. In the mean time, I will keep looking for him in the meadows he has strolled with me before.

While Waiting

There was a photo on the cover of the April, 2004 edition of Touchstone Magazine that depicted a girl looking wistfully toward the clouds with a pained expression on her face. Below her in the background you can make out the outer edge of the architecture of Mont Saint-Michel in northern France, and above her hangs the heading “While Waiting for Heaven.”

The girl was my little sister, who, as I recall from when I snapped the photo, was not waiting for heaven but for lunch.

When my family moved to Paris, my sister was ten years old, an age almost ideally selected to be as traumatic and disorienting as possible (admittedly not quite as ideal as when they moved back when she was thirteen). I remember the day she and my mom arrived in the city and the three other family members who had preceded them by a month showed them around the city. There was a rude juxtaposition of one of the world’s most popular tourist cities and my tortured sister whose life had just been shattered.

“Our apartment is down that street about a kilometer-and-a-half,” I pointed from the top of L’Arc de Triomphe with tourists all around. “That’s a little more than a mile, so it’d be about the same distance as the walk from our old house to Food Lion…” I realized too late my error of bringing up the home she had just been torn away less than a day earlier, and I gave her the privacy of pretending not to notice her tears.

It was a mocking irony: the girl’s agony set against the glow of Europe. Paris is a genuinely lovely city, but there was no conceivable way she could have enjoyed it that day.

In order to compound the irony, her health was a little spotty over her three years in Europe, and she always seemed to get sick whenever my family took mini vacations in the surrounding area: Belgium, Rome, the Italian Alps, Greece, Egypt, Prague. She was in a place of wonder whether she could enjoy them or not, but it is hard for anyone to appreciate an alpine ski resort or a Grecian cruise ship while throwing up.

And I wonder if I am there with her, lying on a hotel bed in Cairo with a stomach bug or dragging myself through the streets of Venice with a migraine. It is undoubtedly a world saturated with the miraculous: whether in the Sacraments of the Church or the sacramentals erupting from a world brimming with life that enters the world “trailing clouds of glory” (as Wordsworth says) and still bears hope of glory’s fulfillment, God is oozing from his creation.

Like my sister, I am incapable of appreciating the wonders that are nevertheless present around me, that I trip over just as certainly whether or not I appreciate their presence. I think part of the purpose of various disciplines in the Church, regular prayers and sacraments and fasts and celebrations whether you can engage or not, is a matter of conditioning our souls to appreciate those very mysteries. I pray that as I approach something closer to health, heath of body and heath of soul, I’ll be able to enjoy these mundane wonders a little more. I’m waiting for it, at any rate.

Sacrament of summer days

Sacramental theology, the belief that the spiritual realm and the physical realm are in fact the same realm, completely inseperable, came quite naturally to me even though I didn't come from a sacramental background. I did not need the theology behind it to know that God himself is revealed in the eruption of the color green each spring, in the grandeur of the Southern pines that towered over my little head, in the wooded groves and creeks of my childhood stomping grounds. In those sweaty summer days, God was as present as the dirt under my fingernails; I may have been tempted to think he was present in the dirt under my fingernails.

Today after sleeping off some jet-lag after the long journey home that ended last night, I walked out the door of my parents' house in the country and was halted by what I saw: the explosion of the color green. Having been in Italy for two-and-a-half weeks, I had missed the unfolding of my last spring in the South, and instead was shocked by the vibrant brightness all at once upon my return. Though I'm normally not a fan of Emily Dickinson (is that as bad as not being a fan of Jane Austin?), it brought her fitting words to mind.

These are the days when Birds come back —
A very few — a Bird or two —
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies resume
The old — old sophistries of June —
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee —
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief.

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear —
And softly thro' the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.

Oh Sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze —
Permit a child to join.

Thy sacred emblems to partake —
Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine!

-Emily Dickinson

Therefore let us keep the feast

When I was a kid, I found myself baffled by the idea of eating crackers and grape juice to remember the crucifixion. Really, I wanted to tell the adults, if remembering is the goal, then surely we could come up with better ways to remind ourselves. Even when I pondered the connection between the Jewish Passover customs and Christ’s death as our Passover Lamb, communion didn’t quite make sense. Why would we eat the things that remind us of Jesus? Isn’t that a bit disrespectful? (I was a bit of an odd, overly-pensive child, I’ll freely admit!)

Holy Week in Rome is a bit too heavy for me to sort into short and pithy posts, but I can at least say that with a Sacramental understanding of, well, of the Sacraments, there is nothing more beautiful than the idea of eating Jesus. Christ entered our world not just spiritually, but physically; Christ enters the sanctuary not just spiritually, but physically; Christ enters us not just spiritually, but physically. Just as he comes to heal our broken souls, he comes physically to nourish our needy bodies. Just as we receive the whole of Christ, he receives the whole of us, bodies and all.

Receiving the whole of Christ, of course, is not only wonderful; it is offensive (and until I saw true evil at work, I never realized how offensive its redemption can be). As I mentioned once before, it is not a mere matter of “trading our sorrows” for his joy. We enter with him into his suffering as Mary and John and the daughters of Jerusalem did on Good Friday. We embrace it willingly, as Christ who prayed “Lord if it be possible let this cup pass from me, but not my will but yours be done.” In a Catholic Good Friday service, we even embrace it physically as the congregation processes to the cross and kisses it.

It is because our sufferings are united with his (wholly, sacramentally, physically) that Christ can tell his followers who will mostly all be martyred one day, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Christ has prepared the way through suffering into resurrection...

...but I am getting ahead of the story. Tonight, suffering is not to be triumphed over; it is only to be embraced.

If a tree falls...

“I hate philosophy,” I heard a girl in the table next to me say. It was startling enough that I looked up from my coffee to the table of undergraduates bustling beside me.

“Philosophy is retarded!” one of her friends agreed. The friend had the look of an engineer, and I was not surprised at his opinion or his inaccurate adjective. I looked back down at my coffee, trying to tune out the philistines.

“I took this philosophy course my freshman year,” she went on, “and we spent half the semester discussing when a tree falls in the middle of the forest with no one to hear if it makes a sound. I spent the whole class wanting someone to shoot me. I wanted to shake the professor and say, ‘This is retarded! It makes a sound already! Get over it!’”

As much as I hate to say this, perhaps the undergraduate was right. Perhaps it is ridiculous. Only humanity could ever come up with such a question; only we could imagine that our perception of the world changes reality.

Perhaps, at least, it is ridiculous (in a damaging sort of way) the way I have enacted the if-a-tree-falls principle in my faith. One of the things that drew me into sacramental theology six years ago after my Pentecostal/Evangelical/Baptist background was the deep peace I encountered in the realization that God’s presence is not dependent upon my ability to perceive it. In a way, sacramental theology is the faith that if a priest breaks bread in the middle of a church with no one paying attention, Christ is still present. And if I come forward without any spiritual epiphanies or transformational feelings, I am still receiving him.

These days, as my initial wonder and surprise at that notion has drifted into confidence and joy, it is a belief that fills me with great hope. There are too many things in my life dependent upon the efforts I can concoct; let the work of redemption, at least, be God’s work.

Manna

Sometimes I need God to show up physically. I have always imagined that if I were a better Christian I would be able to sustain my faith with the ephemeral knowledge of God's presence in my soul. I would be able to be joyful when life crumbles, to feel content in pain, to feel God's presence in isolation, all because of an intimate knowledge of God's friendship in my spirit. Whether or not that is true, I don't seem to be that Christian yet. I rather doubt I ever will be.

On Wednesday I crashed. I went home that afternoon and begged him to be near me, to let me know his nearness, to meet my physical needs with more than an ephemeral hope. A God who would take on our flesh and resurrect it must, I hope, intend to redeem the flesh and blood of our world. Banking on that, I scribbled down a prayer.

And you were always near as air
When I was battered in the war—
But I am broken flesh, and your
Ephemeral love won't mend this tear.
You may have spoken in the wind and tongues
But I would have you feed more than my lungs.

And I have loved you, in a way—
The way a cripple loves his staff
Or as a slave his master's laugh—
At least I limpingly obey.
But lest I feed your sheep here with a cane
I'll have to ask you firstly for the grain.

And you had hinted there'd be rest
Though I have only found your yoke;
But souls that never slept awoke
To find the thief become a guest.
And you would dine with me despite my fear
That I have only loaves and fishes here.

Right as I put the finishing touches on my poetic demand for God's tangible presence like the Israelites had in the wilderness all those years ago, transcribing it from my journal to my poetry book and reading it through one last time there in my cozy green cottage God provided for me almost three years ago with a green picket fence, my phone rang. It was the graduate director of one of my number 1 schools from that bleak application season. It was a long-shot school that I wasn't particularly sure accepted anyone, offering me a position with funding early enough in the season that I hadn't even had time to start getting nervous.

I don't know if the saints and martyrs had been able to get on without physical reminders of God's presence. I'm grateful that so far God does not seem to be expecting that kind of sainthood of me.

In a Country Churchard

I knew I was in Northern Ireland and not the Irish Republic when I took a stroll through a graveyard. The difference between the Protestant graveyard and the Catholic ones I was growing accustomed to in the rest of the country was quite surprisingly great, though they were both certainly beautiful. But as I wandered through the northern churchyard, weaving my way around cross after cross, I realized something that surprised me.

I was missing Mary.

Not just her. I was missing the human element that warms the Catholic graveyards I had been exploring in the towns down south, the statues of saints who have lived and died before us who may yet (according to Catholic theology) be actively praying for us who are still alive. A Catholic graveyard is an active place; even in its stillness it is a junction of the living and the even-more-living. And in that intersection, they have faith that the loved ones they bury are not actually gone, not anymore than Mary and the other saints are.

At least, so I gather.

One way or another, the marble crosses in Northern Ireland felt a little bit cold in contrast, as if they proclaimed a disembodied abstraction—an abstraction that was certainly true, and that the abstract pieces of me could touch, and that offered hope of reaching completely when I would eventually become an abstraction too. They were still quite beautiful, and probably a little theologically safer, but a little deader (if I can use that word for a graveyard), certainly a little farther away.

One of the headstones in a little graveyard in the town where Patrick had built his first church comforted its Catholic grievers with these words (right behind a little statue of a praying Mary):

Those who die in grace
go no further than God,
and God is very near.

A stumbling block

For the LORD spoke thus to me with his strong hand upon me, and warned me not to walk in the way of this people, saying: "Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. And he will become a sanctuary and a stone of offense and a rock of stumbling to both houses of Israel, a trap and a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And many shall stumble on it. They shall fall and be broken; they shall be snared and taken."

Bind up the testimony; seal the teaching among my disciples. I will wait for the LORD, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will hope in him.

One of my favorite posts I’ve written came from reading one of my least favorite books I’ve ever read. After suffering through painful pages of Austen I pondered whether the stereotypical format of an Austen novel might follow the story of Grace: everything gets worse and worse throughout the whole story, finally climaxing with the Unspeakable Tragedy, which to everyone’s shock puts all the pieces together with remarkable speed and completeness. Grace trumps all. Evil gets consumed by reverse entropy, the force at work in the world that puts everything together. Death is swallowed up in Victory. It becomes part of the very gears of redemption.

But in the tragedies of this year, reverse entropy does not sound as comforting as it did when I first wrote the term. This spring marks the first time in my twenty-six years as a Christian that I have been scandalized by the message of the cross, “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” I like the notion of everything getting consumed by the great snowball of Grace and Redemption, until I realize what is getting consumed in it. Evil becomes part of the wheels of redemption? Murder, rape, child abuse... these become instruments of good? It sounds victorious when it is an abstract idea; it sounds downright scandalous when it is a real-life situation. I don’t know if I like that kind of redemption.

Evil becomes part of the wheels of redemption? The Cross... it becomes an instrument of good? Humiliation, torture, the suffering of the innocent... are part of the gears of redemption? Until this spring, I never realized what a scandalous, offensive, shocking redemption that is.

A Catholic friend of mine enthusiastically told me the other day, “We ask for bread, and he gives us Eucharist.” Maybe it is a good thing we don’t know what we’re praying for sometimes. Who would ever pray for Daily Bread, not to mention the redemption of Jerusalem or of ourselves, if we knew at what cost it would come?

Peace of Christ

“So, I just want to get this straight,” I asked the priest after mass one morning. “I can’t take the sacrament of the Eucharist, but my baptism counts, so I’ve had one of the Sacraments.”

“So far,” he answered with a smile, enjoying the fact that my friendship with him has given his brain more work than it has had to do since his seminary days.

“Are there any others I can do, or is Baptism the only one?” I asked. “What about Confession? Can’t I confess?”

He squirmed good-naturedly. “I can hear your confession; I just can’t absolve you.”

“Aw, that’s rotten,” I smiled. “You can’t proclaim absolution for a Baptized member of the Church?”

“That actually gets into one major difference between Catholics and Protestants,” he explained. “You tend to be very vertical in your faith; it is a matter between you and God, and confession and forgiveness is a matter of reconciling your individual self to God. For us, faith always must be both vertical and horizontal, so confession and forgiveness must also involve being reconciled with your brothers and sisters.”

Of course, there is good, sound theology behind that picture of the Church. It is why the liturgy includes passing the peace with confession. It reminds me of Ephesians 2, a major salvation-chapter. “For he himself is our peace,” Paul says, right after the famous passage of being saved by grace through faith, “who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility…that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross.” The horizontal and the vertical happen together.

I was thinking about that this week in the context of the difference between the Anglican and the Catholic prayers of confession. When I first heard the Catholic prayer, I thought it was missing a significant part, the part a three-year-old once prayed: “You have to forgive me for all the bad things I’ve done.” Perhaps a Catholic hearing our prayer would feel a similar significant hole.

Anglican prayer of confession
Most merciful God, I confess that I have sinned against you in thought, word and deed, by what I have done and by what I have left undone. I have not loved you with my whole heart. I have not loved my neighbor as myself. I am truly sorry, and I earnestly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on me and forgive me, that I may delight in your will and walk in your ways to the glory of your name.

Catholic prayer of confession
I confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do; and I ask the Blessed Mary ever virgin, all the angles and saints, and you my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.

Brokenness and Grace

Rich Mullins, who no doubt influenced my adolescent faith more than was good for it, once said in a concert:

But my theory is that for those of us who are too weak to remain single, God gives us a spouse. For those of us who are too hung up to handle marriage, God gives us celibacy. So, pick your weakness. Pick your poison, I guess. But anyway, for those of you who do choose to be in love and stuff, go for it. And I think it's a good thing - I've heard a lot about it.

I thought about those words yesterday as I attended a wedding of some old college friends, looking at a small cross-section of my college friends represented in the ones who attended (and in some way the ones who didn’t). I found myself surprisingly struck by our brokenness, brokenness that showed its face in different ways among the different people represented.

I thought of the brokenness of those of us with too many grandiose dreams of serving a God we slowly realize we do not believe is gracious, and the brokenness of those of us who give up those dreams because we realize we are too lonely to serve God the way we wanted. I thought of the brokenness of those of us with too much idealistic cultural rebellion to slip easily into what looks like a pre-packaged life, and the brokenness of those of us who take the package and hope the ideals can fit inside. I thought of the brokenness of those who lose the girl and keep the friends, and the brokenness of those who get the girl and lose the friends. It made me want to weep.

And as we took communion, I thought about the Incarnation, about Christ entering the broken places of our lives and making them holy. Christ’s life sanctifies the broken pieces of the single life, and his first miracle sanctifies the broken pieces of marriage. Since we have been given a Messiah who takes on our pain rather than destroying it, perhaps in some ways he pronounces goodness over it. Far from simply healing our brokenness, he sanctifies it.

If that is the case, I suppose all the places that looked like brokenness become openings for Grace. Perhaps just as marriage can be an opening for Grace to those of us who are lonely, singleness is sometimes an opening for Grace to those of us with too many hang-ups. One way or another, there is Grace to the overly-strong, Grace to the weak, Grace to the idealists, and Grace to the idealess.

If that is the case, it is reason to rejoice, here on the eleventh day of Christmas.

Collect for the second Sunday after Christmas Day

O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Come and have breakfast

I was reading John 21 yesterday morning. Of the precious few stories we hear of interactions with the resurrected Christ, two are about food. It strikes me as interesting that Christ conquers death, and one of his first acts as the Firstborn of the New Creation is to eat, whether with unsuspecting travellers on the road to Emmaus, or with sleep-deprived fishermen who are winded from a miraculous catch of 153 fish. “Come and have breakfast,” he tells them.

There is so much sanctifying of eating going on in Scripture. Levitical sacrifices were mostly feasts, as if God were sanctifying one of the most mundane acts of our existence. He makes the mundane holy, which is why there are so many laws about pots and storage and cleanliness.

And one of the few stories that all four gospels contain (up there with crucifixion and resurrection) is Christ feeding a hungry crowd of people. If I were Catholic I would read that Eucharistically, but even though I’m not (yet), I still find it interesting.

Then Christ dies and rises again, takes on Death and defeats it in the same act, begins the process of restoring creation, and he makes breakfast for his friends.

I’m notoriously bad about eating (or more precisely about not eating). Sometimes I seem to be too well indoctrinated with some form of Christian dualism that tells me that I need to focus on ‘spiritual’ things, and the physical things are less important. But the Incarnation itself, to say nothing of the specific things that the incarnated Jesus did, tells me that dualism is wrong, that the physical has become the holy. And that means food too.

“Come and have breakfast.” I suppose I should.

Beware of the Greeks!

Years ago, right as I enrolled in the first of a series of philosophy courses that would change my life (at least my life as a reader), a friend who had taken classes with the same professor gave me a warning I didn’t heed.

“Beware of the Greeks!” my Christian intellectual friend warned.

I believe his beef was with Aristotle, no doubt the least compelling philosopher I was ever to read in that course. Since I was not likely to succumb to any Aristotelian whiles, I soon forgot his warning.

No, Aristotle will never be the man for me. Plato, on the other hand…

Perhaps because C. S. Lewis was somewhat of a Christian Platonist, Platonism initially struck me as a hair or two away from Christianity. I mean, “life is but a sojourn” is practically in the Bible, after all; and if one considers God to be the ultimate reality like Plato’s Forms, the Christian can join Plato in saying “If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.” God could be the great Universal that gives meaning to the shadowy particulars. I quickly fell in love with Plato (Platonically?).

I even found the notion of Platonic love appealing. I flattered myself to think that my own love was, as Plato defined it, “the joy of the Good.” I imagined that I loved a man’s compassion or courage or strength or worldview; the man was the vehicle through which I saw a greater Ideal.

Of course, if the greater Ideal was God himself, it seemed fine to assume that the man became the vehicle through which I saw God. And therefore, I could ease my way right into a Plato-endorsed, intellectually-sanctioned idolatry. (I’m not the first to fall into it that way, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron reminds me.)

A more incarnational, sacramental worldview would have let me know I was wrong, that the physical and the spiritual are not separable, that unembodied brains are not beautiful but are actually disgusting, that dualism is still a heresy no matter how many Christians disregard the physical, that it is people whom we love—not ideas. It would have reminded me, as the Anglican houseblessing service asserts, that Christ’s coming “made our flesh the instrument of [his] self-revelation.” Our flesh… not just our souls.

Love's not so pure, and abstract, as they use
To say, which have no mistress but their Muse...
-John Donne

I’m not even twenty-five, and I’ve already stumbled into (and hopefully out of) one of the oldest Christian heresies!

And to that old friend, if you’re out there reading blogs, I should have listened to you. I will be much more wary of those wily Greeks in the future.

The Holistic Collect

This week's collect had been my favorite Lenten collect from last year. One of my housemates didn't like it for some reason that I don't recall right now, but I remember being comforted by the holistic plea for God's help: not just physically as if the practical is all that matters, and not just spiritually as if the body does not matter at all. Last year that same housemate succeeded in a sneaky scheme to teach me that my body did need sleep, and in the year that has passed since I last heard this prayer I have learned my dire need to take better care of my soul. Hopefully I am more in the position to take this request before my Heavenly Father, and more in the position to receive his answering of this prayer.

Third Sunday in Lent

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

I will make my dwelling among you

Almighty and everlasting God, grant to this home the grace of your presence, that you may be known to be the inhabitant of this dwelling, and the defender of this household; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

One of the priests at my church came to my little green cloister to conduct a houseblessing service yesterday. I think any hope that I might return to my old Gnosticism is just about shattered; the Incarnation seems to become more compelling to me every day. The Almighty God who wore the flesh of the man Jesus dwells, in a way that is mysterious but is no less real, in a one-room cottage with me. Just as we believe that God is somehow present in the physical objects of bread and wine, we have asked his presence in my home.

Brother Lawrence once prayed,

Lord of all pots and pans and things…
Make me a saint by getting meals
And washing up the plates!

I pray that here. I pray that I may live constantly aware that the physical aspects of my life are the spiritual, that God is present in the most gritty, tangible parts of my existence. May that presence make them holy; may I wake up tomorrow on a holy couch and put holy tea on the stove. His presence has been invited in this house; may he fill it.

He has been invited even, as it turns out, in the bathroom. The bathroom of this characteristically masochistic enemy of maintenance has been blessed with these words:

O holy God, in the incarnation of your Son our Lord you made our flesh the instrument of your self-revelation: Give us a proper respect and reverence for our mortal bodies, keeping them clean and fair, whole and sound; that, glorifying you in them, we may confidently await our being clothed upon with spiritual bodies, when that which is mortal is transformed by life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Amen. Come Lord Jesus!