January262012
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Reading some Robertson Davies. #thisismyvoice

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January122012

This guy is apparently from my hometown. While I’m not the biggest country music fan it’s pretty cool to see shots of Bedford and Bloomington in the video. Here are a few of those I identified:

0:52 shots of IU campus
1:19 I believe this is a shot of Highway 37 near Washboard Road, a stretch of road I drive every day
1:23 a flash of Dunn Memorial Temple, a building in downtown Bedford, a few blocks from my house
1:34 Kenny’s Instruments - I went to church with Kenny for years
2:02 shots of my high school, Bedford-North Lawrence
2:24 another shot of highway 37
December122011

The Trinity as a fist, from Piers Plowman
December52011
“Insofar as ascetic precepts - doctrines of self-mortification and world-flight - are based upon the philosophical presupposition that nature and its phenomenon are evil, God - if he is to be found at all - will be found in the unnatural, the extraordinary, the abnormal.” Kirk, The Vision of God, p 48.
December12011
“The Lord’s coming is threefold. He came the first time in the flesh, the second time he comes to the individual soul, a third coming will be at the Last Judgment. … How blessed is he who can confidently say: My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready!Having gathered the fruit of grace from the Lord’s first coming, they will reap a harvest of salvation and glory from the second; for the first opens up the way for the second, and the second prepares us for the third. Lowly and unspectacular in his first coming, secret and gentle in his second, Christ will come openly the third time, and his final coming will fill the world with dread. He came to us at his first coming in order to come into us at the second, and he comes into us at his second coming in order not to have to come against us at the third. At his first coming he showed mercy, in the second he brings grace, at the third he will give glory, for Scripture says: The Lord will confer grace and glory.” Peter of Blois (today’s reading from the patristic lectionary)
November292011

The Office-Eucharist-Devotion Rule and the Trinity

Martin Thornton, in English Spirituality, explains how the Office-Eucharist-Devotion Rule, which underlies the Prayer Book, expresses our faith in the Trinity:

Acceptance of the transcendence of the Father, or in H.H. Farmer’s terms, of God as “ontologically and axiologically other”, is manifested in the objective offering of the daily Office of praise. The absolute demand made, and the perfect succour offered, by God the Son, form the basic ascetical attitude of worship in the Holy Eucharist. The immanental and rightly subjective religious element in personal devotion is inspired by the Holy Ghost conceived as indwelling Spirit: the Paraclete.

The Rule allows us to absorb this doctrine of God. Imbalance in any element of the Rule leads to an imbalance in our spiritual lives. Neglect of the Office (which teaches us about the Father’s transcendence) in favor of private prayer can lead to “subjectivism, sentimentality, pantheism, Quietism, and the like.” Neglect of personal devotion (which teaches us about the indwelling Spirit) in favor of the Office can lead to “legalism, formalism, and all the dangers of the Pharisees.”

November252011

The Rosary, says Martin Thornton, is a devotion meant to unite the Roman Catholic church - pope to peasant. Although its origins are unclear it is thought to have been an imitation of the daily offices created for those laypeople who wished to imitate the practice of the monks.

But Thornton argues that, although Anglicans may pray the Rosary, it will only be a private practice for them. Our unitive prayer is the twofold office. The Rosary must not be used as a substitute for it.

November242011

St Thomas Aquinas defines perfection thusly: “a being is perfect in so far as he attains to his proper end, which is his highest perfection. Now it is charity which unites us to God, the last end of the human soul, since, according to St John 4.16, ‘he that abideth in charity abideth in God and God in him.’” (Summa II.II.184, i)

Thornton then draws this conclusion:

Therefore our prayer, worship, and life are to brutes; man is equally, if less obviously in error when he tries to pray as the angels. That is the fundamental mistake of what is properly called Puritanism, the quest for “pure spirituality” which precludes the use of the senses, the body, and mental imagery. It is significant that in the traditional celebration of the Eucharist all five senses - sight, taste, smell, feeling, and hearing - are employed. And the Eucharist is the extensible core of the whole Christian life within creation. (English Spirituality, p 131)
November222011

The neglected mark of orthodoxy

Not that we need any more accusations of unorthodoxy flying around, but Martin Thornton (English Spirituality) does make an interesting point about a neglected mark of orthodoxy - a neglect which, it seems to me, clearly illustrates our biases:

The greatest Benedictine achievement (from this point of view) is the final consolidation of the threefold Rule of prayer which is absolutely fundamental to all Catholic spirituality: the common Office (opus Dei) supporting private prayer (orationes peculiares) both of which are allied to, and consummated by, the Mass. To call this the greatest Benedictine achievement is not to exaggerate, for here Dom Cuthbert is unquestionably right. Here is the basic Rule of the Church which, varying in detail, is common to East and West, monastic and secular, to all the individual schools without exception, and which forms the over-all structure of the Book of Common Prayer. Amongst all the tests of Catholicity or orthodoxy, it is curious that this infallible and living test, is so seldom applied. We write and argue endlessly about the apostolic tradition, about episcopacy, sacramentalism, creeds, doctrine, the Bible - all very important things - yet we fail to see that no group of Christians is true to orthodoxy if it fails to live by this Rule of trinity-in-unity: Mass-Office-devotion.
November172011

Allchin quotes F.D. Maurice on the purpose of doctrines:

In asserting the doctrine of the Atonement, we assert redemption, liberty for mankind, union with God, union with each other. … When we assert the doctrine of the Trinity, we do so because we believe it to be the grand foundation of all society, the only ground of universal fellowship, the only idea of a God of love. … All we want is to maintain a principle without which, we say, men would be divided from each other; a principle which, while we maintain it enables us to claim fellowship with every man who will not disclaim it with us. For the sake of the poor man - for the sake of the denier of these truths … we assert and uphold them; for we find them to be the keynotes to all the harmonies of the world, and that without them, all would be broken and dissonant.

But far too often we hold them in order exert control over other people or to assure ourselves that we “possess” God:

We cannot over-estimate the damage done to our whole understanding of what knowledge of God is, and what it is for, by the exigencies of polemic and controversy. God’s revelation of himself has been treated not as a transcendent gift to man, given for the healing and restoration of human life, but as the possession of a particular group of men, a weapon to be used for the annihilation of their opponents.
November102011

I like this mainly for its purple prose:

The one God, the first and only Deity, both Creator and Lord of all, had nothing coeval with Himself, not infinite chaos, nor measureless water or solid earth, nor dense air, not warm fire, nor refined spirit, nor the azure canopy of the stupendous firmament. But He was One, alone in Himself. By an exercise of His will He created things that are, which antecedently had no existence, except that He willed to make them.

Hippolytus of Rome, The Refutation of all Heresies (10.32), quoted in Aquinas on Creation.

November82011
“The fundamental presupposition of the fundamentalism of everyday life, then, is that the self in its truth is naked, pure, unadorned. Only insofar as the self degenerates - over time, through distraction, stress, lack of attention - does it need the help of some cosmetic alteration to return to its original state. But what this fundamentalist illusion hides is the fact that there is no pure, naked self but always a self-in-alteration, a self constructing itself out of countless layers of adornment, display, acting, both for itself and for the gaze and expectations of others.” William Egginton, In Defense of Religious Moderation, p 26
12PM
“

When frightened by catastrophe we reach for certainty, and there is something very reassuring about the idea that underneath the complexity and apparent contradictions of everyday life a simple truth lies hidden. Fundamentalism is comforting. It tells us that confusion, complexity, and contradiction are illusions masking a simple reality, and that to reach that reality we need only break the code.

…

It probably makes sense at this point to make something perfectly clear. By criticizing the belief that “the truth is out there” I am not thereby criticizing truth or embracing so-called postmodern relativism (although I confess a certain fondness for democracy and pluralism). Rather, what I am questioning is the belief that the truth in question is out there, that is, that it already exists as a kind of knowledge, waiting to be discovered, copied down, or translated. Truths, in other words, are statements about the world; they are not things we can round up and measure but statements about the things we round up and measure. That means that we can compare statements as regards their truth value, criticize them, and ultimately reject some as false without ever accepting the idea that the truth itself is out there prior to our formulating it.

” William Egginton, In Defense of Religious Moderation, p 25
November42011
“While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water — laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service stations guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there’s a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girlfriend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more than he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.” Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
November22011
“

The love of our neighbor is all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.

This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.

Only he who is capable of attention can do this.

” Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”
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