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 The widow of Martin Luther King, Jr. passed away in Mexico yesterday. She was a giant in the world of civil rights, human rights and the peace movement. Her body arrived in Atlanta today. NPR has a musical tribute, which is appropriate, since before becoming Mrs. Martin Luther King, she was set for a career as a concert artist.
Here is the official schedule for memorial events in Atlanta. A bit of controversy arose over funeral arrangements. Mrs. King's body will lie in state in the Georgia Capitol Rotunda, then a public viewing at Ebenezer Baptist, followed by a musical tribute / memorial service across the street. But the official funeral will be at suburban megachurch in Lithonia GA, some miles outside Atlanta, an establishment where Mrs. King's daughter Bernice is an elder. Eventually, CSK will be interred beside her husband at the King Center for Non-violence but she will be temporarily buried at a large cemetery until a new crypt can be prepared.
Diablo Cody's all-purpose lapsed-Catholic (but not totally lapsed) confession of faith in City Pages is incredibly moving, despite the clever, hip, former-sex-worker tone. Read every word, there are some real gems of writing there.
I saw the above slogan (but without the question mark) on a very large banner on the outer wall of the Methodist Mission in Nottingham city centre. This is just so wrong on so many levels. It presumes that 1) civilisation and Christianity (or Protestantism? or Methodism?) are antithetical; and it presumes that 2) civilisation is a bad thing and that perhaps the luckless masses exposed to it need treatment to ameliorate their suffering; and it presumes that 3) what is wrong with the "modern world" is the presence of civilisation, rather than its all too conspicuous absence. You see, this is what happens when people who are far too shallow and stupid to understand any philosophy at all are allowed to read or hear a little about post-modernism. All I can think is, poor old John Wesley must be rolling around in his grave.
This is priceless. Here's a little snippet to whet your appetite:
We are Unitarian Jihad. We are everywhere. We have not been born again, nor have we sworn a blood oath. We do not think that God cares what we read, what we eat or whom we sleep with. Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity notes for the record that he does not have a moral code but is nevertheless a good person, and Unexalted Leader Garrote of Forgiveness stipulates that Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity is a good person, and this is to be reflected in the minutes.
Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day.
By Jon Carroll, from SFGate.com. I received this from a friend on a mailing list.
Like Jeanne, I too meant to blog about the story of Ashley Smith, a suburban single mom who subdued a "dangerous" murderer with home-cooked food and acceptance and talk. And like Jeanne, I am glad someone else did a good job of explaining the importance of this compelling story. Instructions for Care: What Ashley Smith Reminded Us is an article by peace activist Susan Van Haitsma in Common Dreams.
Soldiers to a comrade in Iraq? Police officers to a fellow officer in trouble? No, these were the words of one member of an evangelical church in Oklahoma to another - and in this case the other was a gay teenager threatened by the infamous Rev. Phelps. And it wasn't just one church member speaking for himself either; the whole congregation rallied round Michael Shackleford of Sand Springs Oklahoma to assure him that God loved him and they were still his church. I got the link to this beautiful story in the Washington Post, Coming Out for One of Their Own, through a mailing list. And I have to say it sort of made my day.
Love has come again like wheat that springeth green . . .
A summation, from a very liberal and yet theologically unchallenging point of view, of the points made in the last three posts, can be found in the article Easter's Hawks and Doves by Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser. As Dr. Fraser says: "The Easter of the hawks insists that sin always has to be balanced, or paid for, with pain. It's the theological equivalent of the refusal to be "soft on crime". From this perspective, Easter is the story of Jesus paying off the debt of human sin with his own suffering and death. . . What is remarkable about this theology of debt is that it is precisely what Jesus rejects when he invokes the spirit of the Jubilee at the outset of his ministry. The Jubilee tradition argues for the regular unilateral remission of debt so that people are not imprisoned by a liability they cannot ever meet. . . Jesus, however, takes up an alternative tradition found in the psalms and the writings of the prophets: "I desire mercy and not sacrifice," Jesus repeats from the book of Hosea. He thus attacks the religious authorities and is murdered for so doing. Jesus does not oppose the brutality of his treatment by an equal and opposite show of force. And in not returning violence with violence he initiates a fragile and vulnerable community of non-retaliation known as the kingdom of God."
But that's all Good Friday material. I just wanted to re-state it, or perhaps to let someone else who states it rather better have a chance. Today is Easter Sunday, and I turn my attention to the Resurrection. And as I turn my attention to the story of the Resurrection, my attention is caught by Mary Magdalene. It would be a digression to get into all the stuff that has been written about "the Magdalene", what she was or wasn't, did or didn't do. This and this are only a very small sample of the material on that subject available just on the web. Today I am only concerned with the Resurrection, and I have three questions about that: first, did it really happen? is Christ truly risen? Second, assuming the belief that he is risen, and that Mary of Magdala was there and saw him, what did it mean to her, and what did it mean that it was her, and why are all the stories about her so conflicting? And finally (and I hope that the Magdalene will provide a key to answering this question) what does it mean to me? For this last post in the series, I am pulling out all the stops. I am putting words and images of some of the most powerful scenes in my own inner spiritual life up here and sharing them. You can get a clue from the painting and the line from a traditional Easter song that head this post.
So, to get right to it, what about the Resurrection - did it really happen? The kind of people who want to have "the historical Jesus" (who are not bad people in my book, but a bit misguided) have a lot of explanations: that Christ was in a coma, that another person died on the cross in his place, that his body was stolen for political reasons and in the mass hysteria of the times, people hallucinated seeing him. All perfectly plausible. And you could say similar things about Lazarus, who had been also raised from the dead a few weeks earlier, according to the Gospels. It all sort of misses the point, though. To a stubborn rationalist, you can never explain the difference between fact and Truth, between falsehoods and powerful myths, in any way that will mean a thing; such people simply cannot see such things, any more than a colour-blind person can see gradations of reds, for instance. But for the person who is open to faith, yet feels loyal to science, this wonderful article at Correction on the subject of Negative Capability provides an answer. Now, this is a 3000 word essay on historical biblical criticism, as the author apologetically notes at the beginning, so I will summarise it in his own words, because I know not one of my readers is going to read the whole thing, and my great spew of purple prose:
"And this is really the crux of the matter. We modern Christians want to have the world both ways: we want a life that is dominated by our faith, but we also want to live in a modern, scientific universe where the dictates of faith don't really apply. This is just too much to ask of ourselves. Once you deconstruct a Bach melody and express it in mathematical terms, you have strayed far, far from the experiential beauty that is its entire reason for existing in the first place. There's nothing wrong with your mathematical expressions per se, they just aren't the point. So it is with miracles and biblical minutiae; we can hold them up to the light and compare them and cross-reference them all day long, but in doing so we have already stepped out of the circle of light that they describe. There's nothing wrong with doing this, but it's not the intended experience. It was never meant to respond to such probing and so the results thereof are unsatisfying."
So, yes, my answer to the first question is yes. I will not say, necessarily, "I believe Jesus died and was raised up" but rather "I have faith in Jesus's resurrection and eternal life". To me there is a subtle and yet very important difference between those two. There is a difference between belief and faith for one thing. And the other thing is that focusing on whether Jesus died is very scientific and misses the point - the point being eternal life.
What is the difference between belief and faith? Like most English words, both "belief" and "faith" have a primary and a secondary meaning. The primary meaning of both words is the same, but the secondary meanings are vastly different. If you were a witness to a crime and you were testifying in court, and an attorney asked you "Did you see the accused carrying this gun?" you might answer "Well, I believe I did". It is thus a way of saying that your senses and your memory tell you so, but that you are aware that both senses and memory can be tricked or can fail. On the other hand, if you are involved in a political movement, you might give a speech and say "I have faith in the Labour party". (People do in fact say things like "I believe in the Labour party, but I think that's just lazy diction, because it could be construed that you believe in the existence of the Labour party.) Another way to approach this semantic dissection - "belief" can be conflated with "credulity", but "faith" is never treated that way. Because in "faith" there is a suggestion of will and choice and responsibility that is just not there in "belief". So I always refer to my religion as a "faith" and not a "belief". In fact, I have been known to say, in a multi-layered play on words that I am sad to say not one person has ever "got", that "I don't believe in belief".
There is a song on Roberta Flack's album "First Take" that I have never heard anywhere else, and I don't know much about it or where it comes from. I cannot even say what genre it is, jazz, I suppose, because it is not like any other song I know. It completely sums up the nature, the feeling, of my faith. The song is called "I told Jesus". I see from my search that it's listed as a Nina Simone song, but these lyrics, although clearly the same song, are not the ones Roberta Flack sang. Well, never mind. This is the kind of faith I have, although you wouldn't really know it to look at me. I rarely go to church. I never pray in public. I do not evangelise. But the inner relationship I have with Jesus is very powerful and personal, and at times I get a call from him, to do something difficult, like forgive someone, or let something go that I thought I could not live without. I can't say honestly that I always respond to these calls. I am, after all, a sinner, and sin means error. Sin, however, does not mean evil or bad, any more than faith means perfect. I may fail Christ's calls, but I don't hang up on them.
I think that Mary Magdalene must have had a relationship like that with Jesus, with the added factor that she saw him in the flesh. And indeed, the Gospels say that she, along with a few other women, "ministered to him" during his days of travelling and teaching. (That was just one of the very unconventional things about Jesus's life.) I recently found a really rich resource on all the relevant Mary Magdalene material - at the BBC website of all places. It has information about the Gnostic gospel accounts of Mary, including the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip. In Philip, there is the very controversial story about the other disciples jealousy of Mary, because "Jesus often kissed her on . . . " (Most scholars have accepted the learned guess that the key missing word here was "the mouth", but we will never know for sure, because there is a gaping hole in the manuscript.) "Like the books found at Nag Hammadi, the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene is also considered an apocryphal text. The story it contains begins some time after the resurrection. The disciples have just had a vision of Jesus. Jesus has encouraged his disciples to go out and preach his teachings to the world, but they are afraid to do so because he was killed for it, and they say if they killed him, they are going to kill us too. It's Mary who steps forward and says, don't be worried, he promised he would be with us to protect us. It says she turns their hearts toward the good and they begin to discuss the words of the Saviour. In texts like the Gospel of Philip, Mary was presented as a symbol of wisdom. However in the Gospel of Mary, she is the one in charge, telling the disciples about Jesus' teachings. "
I think the key and important thing about Mary Magdalene, the thing that distinguished her from the other disciples (aside from being female of course) was that she understood Jesus's message of love far better than any other contemporary person. I think she was meant to be the leader of the church, and that Jesus's acts in showing his special favour of her and also of appearing to her in the first moments of his resurrection, showed that he meant to do this. Unfortunately, it was all too easy for the men who surrounded Jesus in life to freeze her out and gradually over the years for the church, which strayed ever farther from its original message, to edit her out. In ways that we will probably never even know of, she was willing to suffer for love, and she remained faithful to the end and even beyond it.
So what does this mean to me? A lot of women say that a major stumbling block to being a Christian is its lack of female role models. I would find it very hard to live a life "in imitation of Christ". It would be beyond me. But to live a life in imitation of Mary Magdalene, this is something I can do. Mary was an outcast at times, but she was also a scholar and a leader of men. She was left alone to carry on, but when Jesus was with her, she loved him totally and understood him deeply. She may or may not have been a great sinner, or possessed by demons, and she may or may not have spent her last days as an ascetic penitent. She obviously troubles the Catholic church a lot, because two things they have done in regard to her are very strange. One is the recanting of the church's identification of Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman who washed Jesus's feet. And the other was to make her a saint, despite the fact that there is no story of either martyrdom or miracles associated with her. (Does someone have a guilty conscience perhaps?)
So, this is my faith; this is my story (and I'm sticking to it.) Christ is risen. You are loved and you are forgiven. All that God requires of you are the three gifts of a simpleton: to love, to practice forgiveness and to know that you, and all of Creation, are free. Proclaim the Jubilee.
It's not just me, you know. In my Google-fueled "research" for this installment, I came across this dissertation for PhD candidate John Mabry at the California Institute of Integral Studies. It has this to say:
Our liturgies are in desperate need of reform, especially the Eucharist . . . Eucharist rites themselves contain sexist language, support spirit-over-body and heaven-over-earth dualities, and promote an ecclesiastical manifest destiny . . . One woman . . . wondered whether or not she could continue to call herself a Christian at all if she had to accept uncritically the teachings of her church. Many women remain silent during offensive parts of their church's liturgy, since they cannot speak the creeds or other sections in good conscience.
Well, I don't know what's so special about women. (I guess it's because this dissertation is about some aspect of feminist theology.) But the thing is, I am comforted to know that others feel the same as I do, and I know it's not confined to women.
It's not the sexism, or even the body-spirit duality, that I find offensive. It's the sado-masochism of it. No, not even that. I am not sure that a little sado-masochism isn't a healthy thing, although at first glance it's a weird thing to base a religion on. But then I realize what it really is, and I think maybe it's not so strange. It's the whole theology of punishment and pay-back. It's the antithesis of Jesus's message of unconditional forgiveness and unconditional love. Or as this quote from Carter Heywood in the above paper says:
Any theology that is promulgated on an assumption that followers of Jesus, Christians, must welcome pain and death as a sign of faith is constructed upon a faulty hermeneutic of what Jesus was doing and of why he died. This theological masochism is completely devoid of passion. This notion of welcoming, or submitting oneself gladly to, injustice flies in the face of Jesus's own refusal to make concession to unjust relation.
Ha! Take that, Mel Gibson.
I also stumbled upon some interesting writings by cult stud types and psychotherapist types about the punishment motifs and homoerotic masochism in protrayals of "the Passion" and other Christian martyrdoms. (And these were written before Mel's film, too.) Lisa Starks here quotes an article by Kaja Silverman:
[In Christian masochistic fantasy,] the external audience is a structural necessity, although it may be either earthly or heavenly . . . the body is centrally on display, whether it is being consumed by ants or roasting over a fire . . . [and] behind all these 'scenes' or 'exhibits' is the master tableau or group fantasy--Christ nailed to the cross, head wreathed in thorns and blood dripping from his impaled sides. What is being beaten here is not so much the body as the "flesh," and beyond that sin itself, and the whole fallen world.
Consider if you will, the two-thousand years of abuse and punishment meted out to innocent children, by father or a Father of the church, or by mother standing in as a proxy, always with the image being fixed in their minds of the sad Saviour who had suffered and died to make them good, and now they were disappointing Him. Consider the violence of all the struggles for control of this engine of oppressive power that "Christ's" church had become, and all the punishment, slavery, wanton cruelty, exclusion and painful death that were visited on the losers in the struggle. (And all this in the name of one who allowed prostitutes to sit at his table, who forgave everyone he met, even those who tortured and killed him, and who made as plain a case as can be made that sacrifice was not what God wants, and that retaliation and punishment were the real root of all sin.)
So viewed from that angle, you can see why the focus on Jesus's gruesome death, and the expectation that Christians down through the ages would either re-live it, or "yearn for it" or feel guilty about it or at least struggle like mad to be "worthy of it" is actually an excellent basis for a religion. That is, if you see religion, not as its original meaning would imply, as a force that reconnects us to our most authentic selves and thus to God, (re-ligion, etymologically is "to re-tie") but rather as a hierarchical force for social control, that binds us to un-natural laws of thought and behaviour, and seeks our own cowed complicity in that binding. Well, I have made my case for which type of religion I choose and cherish.
So I celebrate Good Friday with chocolate and whisky and gratitude. Yes, Christ died on this day (although as DH says, "vat was two-fousand years ago, mate!") but not for my sins or the "sins of Mankind" (sic). Jesus died on this day to illustrate that death has no dominion, that we do not owe a sacrifice to an angry Father, that, indeed, there is no angry Father. He died as he lived, to teach a great lesson of love, forgiveness and freedom.
Today I again attended the services at The Great Meeting - the Unitarian Chapel in Hinckley. Today is, in case you don't know these things, Palm Sunday. For some reason, we sang the hymns from the older hymnal. I have a really bad habit in my church attendances: I cannot tear myself away from reading the lyrics of hymnals, looking for old favourites and discovering new gems, whether gems of beauty or of sheer horrible naffness. So my attention kept wandering during the sermon, and instead of following the thread of it, I wondered why all preachers, vicars and priests in this country preach with that peculiar sing-song intonation. (Another thing that drives DH crazy and keeps him out of churches, although I doubt that alone would be enough.) So I had another little talk with "Jim" afterwards in the coffee time. (His real name is not Jim, but I could have called him J, I suppose.) I told him about the Death of Christendom series, and I was a little nervous to bring it up, being in a church and all, and not knowing him that well. But to my slight surprise he quite enthusiastically agreed with me. The church as we know it is going to wither away, probably in a matter of mere decades, he said, and it must in order for something better to take its place. I have to say that this was a serendipitous thing for me to hear and gave me heart to carry on the series to the end.
Another serendipitous thing was that the sermon, the one I couldn't really focus my attention on, did mention the colt of an ass that Jesus rode. The scripture was even cited (and Unitarian sermons do not consistently relate to a Bible passage the way Methodist sermons do.) The passage is, so I learned, in Mark 11:1-7. The preacher interpreted the meaning of this choice of a mount as being Jesus's way of saying that he was lowly and not the militant, mighty Messiah-King that people were waiting for, although he was deliberately fulfilling prophecy that the Messiah would not only be of the royal house of David, which Jesus was, but also would ride an ass into Jerusalem. My interpretation is different. It has to do with a radical message of love, forgiveness and freedom. I believe this was Jesus's core message, and that it represents a quantum leap from the message of Micah, of caring, fairness and humility. Also, Micah and other late post-exilic prophets said God does not require sacrifices of animals (or humans, obviously). Jesus was saying "the only sacrifice acceptable to God is of yourself, and freely given". Viewed in this light, so many of the slightly mysterious actions and words of Jesus make perfect sense.
Here is the Bible text of the story of the unbroken colt:
'When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, "Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, 'Why are you doing this?' just say this, 'The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.'" They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, "What are you doing, untying the colt? They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it.'
Ask yourself: what are the two unusual things about this story? The first is that Jesus knew where this colt was to be found. The second is that the colt allowed Jesus to ride upon him even though he was not "broken", and possibly not even old enough to be ridden. To my mind, the first one is not that remarkable. Jesus could have had a follower (he had thousands at this time) offer him the colt, or he could have sent someone ahead to find it. It was possibly tied outside the house specifically in waiting for Jesus's disciples to come for it. Yet like a magician setting up a scene, using a little mis-direction, the gospel's author lets this little mystery overshadow the true mystery following it. And yet maybe that is not so mysterious either. There are folk-tales of Jesus and his way with animals, how birds would alight in his hands and fish would leap into the boat with him. But to me the important thing, and this was an insight given to me in my meditations on ahimsa, is that a broken animal is a slave, which has no choice of whether to be ridden. The only way Jesus could ride any animal into Jerusalem, and not violate his own powerful message of non-harming, his message not merely of caring, justice and humility, but of love, forgiveness and freedom was to have a freely offered ride.
The 11th chapter of Mark goes on to relate the story of the clearing of the temple. It is widely accepted that the thing Jesus objected to was the "changing of money" in the temple. Yet I believe this too was a mis-direction. In the forecourt of the temple, small animals were sold to worshippers so they could sacrifice them inside. The animals had to be paid for with a special sacred temple currency, so the Jews would change their Roman coins for temple coins, buy the animals, and take them in to a priest. The priest would kill them, burn part, keep part, and give the rest back to the family to eat. Supposedly, Jesus overturned the tables and drove all of these businessmen out of the temple yard, either because he disapproved of filthy money in the vicinity of the temple, or because they were dealing dishonestly. But if the theologians of the vegetarian, pacifist, Essene-trained, hereditarily Nazorean Jesus are right, his more likely objection is to the sacrifice itself. The website Humane Religion has this to say:"It was the cult of sacrifice that Jesus tried to dismantle, not the system of monetary exchange. In all three gospel accounts of the event, those who provided the animals for sacrifice are mentioned first: they were the primary focus of Christ's outrage." And further: "It is ridiculous to claim that the religious leaders of Christ's time would have plotted his death because he undermined the function of the moneychangers. Nor would the crowd have been "amazed at his teachings" if Jesus was simply telling them to make sure they were not short-changed when they purchased Temple coins. What the people were amazed at was his condemnation of animal sacrifice; it had been hundreds of years since that kind of condemnation had been heard in Jerusalem."
Isaiah is often said to be the prophet who most foreshadowed Christ's coming and his message. It is in Isaiah that we read these challenging words, calling us to a much deeper understanding of love, forgiveness and freedom than we are able to comprehend, any more than the ancients in the Bible or the Jews of Jesus's time:
"They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain
For all the earth shall be in full knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea."
Karen Armstrong, in an article titled The Eve of destruction, traces the origins of the constantly resurgent misogyny in most modern-day religions. It's not as simple as you probably think.
Quote on Islam:
The Prophet Mohammed, for example, was anxious to emancipate women and they were among his first converts. . . There is nothing in the Koran about the veiling of all women or their confinement in harems. This practice came into Islam some three or four generations after the Prophet, under the influence of the Greek Christians of Byzantium, who had long covered and secluded their women in this way.
Quote on Christianity:
Jesus . . . and St Paul had women disciples. They did not ordain them as priests, because there was no Christian priesthood until the third century. The early Christians espoused a revolutionary egalitarianism; a priestly hierarchy was too reminiscent of Judaism and paganism, which they were beginning to leave behind. Those who today condemn women's ordination as a break with tradition should be aware that priesthood and episcopacy are themselves innovations that depart from the practice of the primitive church.
I have further thoughts, too, on this article, which is sparked by the looming possibility of a breakaway Anglican "wing" which only allows male priests. There are still (and probably always will be) some things about the British psyche that are totally impenetrable to me. Quite a number of them have to do with the Anglican church. This is a country that is almost aggressively secular, not compared to France, obviously, but certainly compared to the US. Less than 10% of nominally Christian Britons are churchgoers or practitioners of any religious devotions such as prayer or meditation. Yet the Anglican church, due to Establisment of Religion, wields enormous if narrowly-channeled power. That's why this ongoing controversy over the ordination of women and female bishops really puzzles me. My own church in the US (United Methodists) is far more conservative on many social and "lifestyle" issues than the centre of the Anglican church in the UK, and yet has had female bishops for decades. The UMC had one major schism in the 19th century over slavery, and has been threatened with another over "reconciling" with gays and lesbians, but the ordination of women was relatively serene, and they (the women) are now some of the most popular and influential bishops. So what accounts for the Anglican hysteria? Misogyny? God forbid!
This article on the depressingly popular "Left Behind" series is not so much a book review as a history lesson and exegesis of a body of paranoid literature.
"The worldview. . . propounded in the books was first popularised by the Protestant theologian John Nelson Darby in the mid-19th century, and it is disturbing how it has become an underlying meta-narrative for American life: progress for the righteous, doom for the enemy. It has even found a role in US politics – with a large lobby of North American citizens who believe that the Middle East roadmap should be opposed because it conflicts with their interpretation of end-times prophecy."
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
No, I haven't converted to a millenarian sect. My vision is no more apocalyptic than it ever was. But these words from Yeats's "The Second Coming" keep coming back to me. The two stories I have been tracking the most intensely - the upcoming trials at Guantanamo Bay, and the looming schism in Christianity (it's not just the Anglican church, although that's the one on the boil at the moment) over the Godliness, or maybe even the human-ness of homosexuals, have both appeared in headlines today at crisis point.
There is a thread that connects the stories, and that thread is two men, very alike in their positions in the world, and very, very alike in the fury and disappointment and betrayal that their former supporters are now feeling. Those two men are Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both men have revealed themselves as weak and mistaken and the tools of a joined up force embodied in, at present, the US administration of George W. Bush (aka the Smirking Chimp, aka aWol, aka the Shrub Who Stole the Presidency) and the world-wide dangerous cult of Christian right-wing evangelism.
Here is the story of MPs' (both leftist Labour and opposition parties!) fury at the PM for caving in entirely to Bush & Co. over the two British detainees at Guantanamo facing military "trials". Here is the story of liberal Anglicans' pain about the Archbishop caving in entirely to evangelical pressure, even to the point of forcing the resignation of Canon Jeffrey Johns from his appointment to the post of suffragan bishop. Note the similarity. Note the fact that both Blair and Williams have been eloquent champions of such lofty ideals as democracy, radical Christianity, tolerance, uncompromising defence of human rights, and most tellingly, "speaking truth to power". The best lack all convictions. . .
Why Is Bush Afraid of Franklin Graham? from BeliefNet.
BeliefNet also has Prayer Circles for servicemen and women in the Iraqi War, for the coalition, for innocent victims and POW/MIAs.
My friend Leta from Georgia sent an e-mail about collective prayers worldwide at 9 pm Eastern time for troops, "our" citizens (you can make that of the world, I think) and world peace. An excellent idea and one I will participate in.
I don't know how legal this is to publish like this, but I don't have a link for it and I am not even sure that it's on the web. Anyway, thanks to my good friend Lance for mailing it to me, and thanks also from numerous friends that I forwarded it to.
From: Goldsberry, Lance
Sent: 05 December 2002 15:36
Subject: A Protestant Rediscovers Mary
A Protestant Rediscovers Mary
My church dragged Mary out at Christmas and placed her at center stage.
After, we packed her in the creche box and ignored her.
By Kathleen Norris
Reprinted from "Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary" with
permission of Westminister John Knox Press.
A friend who had spent a sabbatical working with refugees in Southeast Asia
once sent me a homemade Christmas card that put the more colorful cards to
shame; it consisted of a black-and-white snapshot of a Cambodian mother
holding her infant in her arms. What struck me most was the youth of the
mother and the fact that this unposed photograph was instantly recognizable
as a madonna and child. The mother beholding the child, in love and wonder.
I don’t think it matters what breed of Christian my friend is—he is, in
fact, a Roman Catholic bishop—but what is significant is that he “got” Mary.
In silence, the photograph spoke powerfully about Mary as a presence in our
world, a constant reminder that in the incarnation the omnipotent God chose
to take on human vulnerability. And a vulnerability of the most extreme
sort, a child born not to wealth and power but to an impoverished peasant
woman and her uneasy husband in the rural backwater of a small, troubled,
colonized country.
I think that many Protestants, if they think about Mary at all, get hung up
on what they are supposed to believe about her. And she doesn’t make it
easy. It’s as if her calm visage belies our seeking after labels. Is Mary a
cultural artifact or a religious symbol? A literary device or a theological
tool? A valuable resource for biblical exegetes or the matrix of an
extrabiblical piety that we, as Protestants, must avoid at all costs? The
point about Mary is that she is all these things, and more, always more. She
is poor yet gloriously rich. She is blessed among women yet condemned to
witness her son’s execution. She is human yet God-bearer, and the Word that
she willingly bears is destined to pierce her soul. Had we a more elastic
imagination, we might be less troubled by Mary’s air of serene
contradiction. But ours is a skeptical and divisive age. We are more
comfortable with appraisal than with praise, more adept at cogent analysis
than meaningful synthesis.
Mary is useful to us as a corrective to our ordinary state of mind, the
epitome of “both/and” passion over “either/or” reasoning. She has a
disarming way of challenging the polarities that so often bring human
endeavors to impasse: the subjective and objective, the expansive and the
parochial, the affective and the intellectual. Mary’s designation as both
virgin and mother, for example, no longer seems to be an impossible “model”
for women that justifies their continued oppression within church and
society. Instead, Mary constitutes a challenge as to what is possible for
me, as a married, childless, Christian woman: to what extent can I remain
“virgin,” one-in-myself, able to come to things with newness of heart, and
in what sense must I become “mother,” losing myself in the nurture and
service of others and embracing life’s circumstances with the ripeness of
maturity? This Mary is a gender-bender; she asks the same question of any
Christian man.
If Mary points us beyond our traditional divisions, ideologues of all
persuasions—conservative and liberal, feminist and anti-feminist—have long
attempted to use Mary to argue their causes, with varying degrees of
success. But Mary ultimately resists all causes. Like our God, she is who
she is. And Mary is, in the nationally televised words of the Rev. Jimmy
Swaggart (who prefaced his remark by saying, memorably, “The Catholics got
one thing right”), “the mother of God.” From the Council of Ephesus to the
less-respectable reaches of contemporary American evangelism, Mary holds her
own.
As theotokos, Mary is also the mother of Wisdom. Unlike Zechariah, who
responds to his annunciation concerning the birth of John the Baptist by
inquiring of the angel, “How will I know that this is so?” Mary asks,
simply, “How can this be?” It’s an existential question, not an intellectual
one. God responds to Zechariah by striking him dumb—for the entire gestation
of his child, a nice touch—while Mary finds her voice, making the ancient
song of Hannah her own.
For me, the essential question is not what author placed Hannah’s words in
Mary’s mouth, and with what theological intent. What is far more important
is how I respond to this threading of salvation history from 1 Samuel to the
Gospel of Luke. How do I answer when the mystery of God’s love breaks
through my denseness and doubt? Do I reach for a reference book, or the
remote control? Am I so intent on my own plans that I ignore the call, or do
I dare to carry the biblical tradition into my own life’s journey? When I am
called to answer “Yes” to God, not knowing much about where this commitment
will lead me, Mary gives me hope that it is enough to trust in God’s grace
and the promise of salvation.
When I first began visiting Benedictine monasteries some twenty years ago, I
was so ignorant of Scripture, despite an upbringing in Methodist and
Congregational churches, that I did not know where the prayer the monks and
nuns prayed each night came from. Gradually, I learned that it was a passage
from the first chapter of Luke, and that for centuries before the
Reformation it had been employed as the church’s traditional vespers
canticle. It was called the “Magnificat” because it begins with that word,
in Latin translation; in English, it reads, “My soul magnifies the Lord.”
I did not know that I was one of many Protestants, both laity and clergy,
who had begun filling monastery guest rooms and choir stalls, and
discovering there much common ground. What could be more refreshing to a
Protestant than a daily immersion in Scripture, not only in communal prayer
based on the Psalms but with a rhythm of hearing and responding to entire
books of the Bible read aloud? I sensed that I was drawing from the tap
roots of Christianity, from traditions and practices of prayer that had
existed before the church split into the Roman Catholic and Orthodox
churches, and long before the Reformation. I could claim as my prayerbook
the entire Psalter (and not just psalms deemed suitable for Sunday morning);
I could open my eyes and ears to the literary and theological treasurehouse
of the early church; and I could reclaim Mary as a significant figure in my
Christian faith.
No doubt it was my repeated exposure to the Magnificat in monastery choirs
that led me to make it the focus of encountering Mary in the Scriptures.
Each time I pray, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God
my savior,” I am compelled to ask, with Mary, “How can it be” that salvation
has ways of working around all of the obstacles of sin, ignorance, and
defiance that I place in its path? “How can it be” that God troubles with so
wretched, self-centered, inconstant, and spiritually impoverished person as
myself? Who, after all, am I?
The correct answer, to paraphrase a line from the Episcopal hymnal, is that
I am called to be a person whose soul, like Mary, can be God’s earthly
sanctuary. Like Mary, I am invited each day to bring Christ into the world
in my prayers, thoughts, and actions. And each evening, as I pray the
Magnificat, I am asked to consider how I have done in this regard. Have I
been so rich, stuffed full of myself, my plans, and my possessions, that I
have in effect denied Christ a rightful place on earth? Or am I poor and
despairing, but in my failures, weakness, and emptiness more ready and
willing to be filled with God’s purpose?
The church in which I was raised had a curious attitude towards Mary, an odd
mixture of hubris and bashfulness. We dragged Mary out at Christmas, along
with the angels, and placed her at center stage. Then we packed her safely
in the crèche box for the rest of the year. We effectively denied Mary her
place in Christian tradition and were disdainful of the reverence displayed
for her, so public and emotional, by many millions of Catholics around the
world. The more pilgrimages Catholics made to Lourdes, or Knock, or
Czestochowa, the more silent we became. Even when the feminist movement
opened the way for increased study of women in Scripture, few Protestants
wrote about Mary, few preachers discussed her in their sermons. Mary was
mysterious, and therefore for Catholics; our religion was more proper, more
masculine. Anything we couldn’t explain—or explain away—was either ignored
or given short shrift. I recognize the church of my childhood in this
description by Nancy Mairs: a church with “all the mystery scrubbed out of
it by a vigorous and slightly vinegary reason.” But mystery endures, and I
end this foreword as I began, by contemplating a madonna and child. The
young woman’s face is calm, yet creased with worry, expressing both love and
pity. She knows hard times, all the pain and suffering this world can bring,
and she knows that this child will someday die. But salvation always has a
price. For now it is enough to hold the child, holding life and death all at
once in her arms. It is enough to hold on, and to gaze at the child with a
look of love and joy that is eternally comforting, both human and divine.
From Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary, edited by Beverly R.
Gaventa and Cynthia L. Rigby. © 2002 Westminster John Knox Press. Used by
permission of Westminster John Knox Press.
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while we're on the subject?
