Yr. C, Wk. 15: Life in Christ, part II

Christine led worship, an order for early evening, including a portion of Psalm 119. Noting the start of the new year on the Liturgical calendar, Christine asked us what new beginnings we foresee? We shared our answers during a brown bag meal. Mariel summed up a lot of our responses as "looking forward with hope, backwards with regret."

Yr. C theme: Living as Spiritually Mature Christians Class: Matt, Pete, first year; Christine, second year; Mariel, Gene, third year; Erica, fourth year; Scott and Susan, co - mentors. Absent: Gene.

We responded to the last three chapters of Gatta's book Living in Christ.

Chapter Three, "The Liturgical Round"[Photo: A representation of the liturgical calendar on display in the Sunday school wing of St. James]

• It's comforting to realize that reading and interpreting Scripture is a communal activity, with communal meaning.
• Comforting, too, is what Gatta wrote about Psalm 119 and other scriptures that bother us with bloodthirstiness or tribalism. We don't have to start with the premise that God approves of the human behaviors and expressions in Scripture; rather, God asks us to reflect on the question, "Where am I in this scripture?"
• We found appeal in the idea that we join others around our community and world when we pray.

Chapter Four, "Prayer in Solitude"
• It's a primer on prayer techniques.
• Apophatic prayer presented Pete and the rest of us with a challenge that we liked, to approach God by emptying our minds of matters, images, and preconceptions that are not God. In Gatta's words, such prayer "washes everything away."
• Lectio divina was another appealing approach.
• We were struck by Gatta's observation (illustrated by Flannery O'Connor) that prayer doesn't always take away pain, but can intensify suffering.
• Mariel was interested how Gatta dealt with the efficacy of prayer for others. "I know that prayer changes the pray-er," Mariel said, "but does it do anything for the person we pray for?" Gatta says yes; Mariel reserves judgement.
• Erica shared how she has recently re-discovered the value of the kind of improvised colloquy prayer that many of us grew up with in evangelical traditions. She loves liturgical prayer, but allows that it can grow monotonous; the other style has been a refreshing change.
• Scott was especially interested in the "examen prayer," and Erica volunteered to lead an "examen" for worship in our first meeting of the new year.

Chapter Five
• Another primer on practices for deepening faith alone, by living under "a rule," or going to a retreat.
• Erica shared her experience with six days of silent retreat. We discovered that some of us harbor monastic fantasies!
• Scott shared Fr. Daron's recommendation of Into Great Silence (2005), a nearly three-hour documentary of life in a silent monastery in the French Alps.
• Pete, Erica, and Matt shared experiences with confession, and we did a little research on praying the Rosary.
• When Matt shared an app for saying the Daily Office, several of us shared how we were already doing some form of liturgical prayer each day, or how we wanted to start.

Theological Reflection

In his absence, Gene left us copies of the image reproduced here:



Susan knew what it was, but let the rest of us puzzle it out. That was more than half the fun, as we wondered about odd details -- the disembodied hand in the upper-left, what accounted for the evident change in characters on the left when we see them again on the right, the identity of the figure in repose at the bottom, the nature of that odd "noodle" object that sprouts from that figure and frames the other scenes.

The world of this creation was "intricate," and we found joy in its mysteries. If only we had the "key," it might speak more clearly to us as it evidently did to its original audience. Finally, Susan teased out of us the realization that this represents the "branch of Jesse's tree," Emmanuel. We Googled it, identifying it as a miniature dating ca. 1200 from the Lambeth Psaltery. 

Collecting our thoughts from the whole reflection, the theme emerged of the "great cloud of witnesses" and continuity over time. Our draft of a collect was missing something that Christine had offered, the joy that we found in the artistry of the design. Susan worked on pulling all these threads together.

CollectCreator God who walked with us and shared our human experiences, who continues to inspire and nourish us: As You made Jesse the root of your incarnation in history, help us to root our selves in your Holy Word so that we may mirror your glory and love in all we make and do. Amen.

Next Meeting will be January 7: We're doubling up with readings from both week 16 and 17. Brown bag dinner. Erica will lead the "examen" prayer. Pete will be bringing us a source for a TR.

Yr. C, Wk. 14: Life in Christ, part I

 With half the class ailing and away, we prayed the Daily Office for Early Evening, ate Scott's "goulash" dinner, and discussed the first half of Gatta's Life in Christ: Practicing Christian Spirituality.[Image: Icon of the Anastasis, "Harrowing of Hades," referenced in Gatta.]

Yr. C theme: Living as Spiritually Mature Christians Class: Matt, Pete, first year; Christine, second year; Mariel, Gene, third year; Erica, fourth year; Scott and Susan, co - mentors. Absent: Christine, Mariel, Matt, Erica.

Discussion of Gatta's book, highlights:
• We were struck by Gatta's insistence that spirituality is communal: We pray "our Father" and "we confess that we have sinned."

  We might...let attendance slip because we harbor some complaints [about clergy, parishioners]. We might tell ourselves that we can meet God during a walk in the woods or sitting quietly on our back porch, and of course we can. (p.62)

  But after some initial "church-shopping," the Catechism calls it our duty to commit to attendance. Like stones in a bag, she writes, we rub each other smooth (63).
• Gene brought up Gatta's insistence that coming to church is not to "recharge our batteries." Rather, we are mandated to come "because we're part of the family: we need them, and they need us" (64).
• We all responded to the way that Gatta draws her examples from the Cultural Source as well as the Tradition Source.
• Knowing that Gatta was on the faculty when Fr. Roger was in seminary, we found many resonances between Gatta's text and messages that Fr. Roger drives home in his sermons and in his approach to liturgy.
• Gatta's emphasis on suffering struck some as negative. The illustration from Narnia of a dragon's painful shredding of skin to be restored to human form (13) was helpful. In connection to suffering, Scott read aloud Gatta's striking words, "Suffering and death are everywhere, from roadkill to mass shootings to tsunamis: We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves... (Rom. 8.22-23)" (30).
• Pete was struck by the idea that we are united with Christ and with each other in the "silence of God." Gatta quoted extensively from Silence by the Japanese novelist Shusako Endo (34). Gatta quotes the book to drive home the idea that baptism, in "marking us as Christ's own forever," gives us both an obligation to serve the world, but also a vision, that "Suffering serves as a kind of connective tissue for the whole human race," as even Jesus still carried his wounds in resurrection (36).
• Susan was struck by Gatta's use of time, the idea of anamnesis, translated as "remembrance" (51). It means that the past and future are "present" in the here and now. Gatta applied that to the sacraments of baptism, of passover / feast of unleavened bread (50), and eucharist. Even the corporate reading of scripture is a way to make the past present (67).
• Scott imagined giving a sermon to his students, based on the chapter "Reliving Christ's Death and Resurrection." He would say, "Do some Christians see belief in Jesus as a way to ward off suffering? Baptism, communion, and trinity teach us the belief in Jesus is a way to dignify the suffering that connects all of us." (Scott was later reminded of a similar idea expressed by Christian Wiman, poet and essayist who suffers excruciating bone-breaking cancer. See Scott's blogpost Beyond Belief in My Bright Abyss.)

Next Week: Brown bag dinner; Christine leads worship. We will be presenting Gene's TR in his absence. We are all reading Gatta, p. 86-end.

Yr. C, Wk. 13: Hidden God in a Messy World

For worship in this penitent season of Advent, Erica led us through the Great Litany. As we consumed our brown bag meals, she asked us to share what had made us grateful that day. We were variously grateful to leave work for EfM; to be home after a week of long-distance driving; to find the right response just in time for a neighbor's dog in need, for a parent, for the kids.

Yr. C theme: Living as Spiritually Mature Christians Class: Matt, Pete, first year; Christine, second year; Mariel, Gene, third year; Erica, fourth year; Scott and Susan, co - mentors. Absent: Pete, Mariel.

Everyone offered what amazed / bothered / confused / delighted them in their readings for the week. (Mariel, absent, participated by email.)

When we'd covered the board with specifics, we discerned a few overarching themes:
• Between Judges and Saints, we saw "superheroes" of faith.
• We saw an evolution in the way we perceived God -- or, in the way God reached us -- throughout the development of a kingdom called Israel, through the developments of the early church in Acts, on into the reshuffling and institutionalization of the church in its first 1000 years.
• We all responded strongly to an excerpt from Erica's reading that delighted her, that recast the sense of God's "absence" as "God's divine hiddenness." The idea that God is hidden while we are free to find our own ways related to all the failures and false starts we'd seen in our respective chronicles.

Theological Reflection
Scott turned to the RRG's instructions for theological reflection that begins with a "provocative" word (279), but, not wishing to provoke anyone, he offered what he called an "evocative" word, clean.

The word did evoke a wide variety of responses. Many of our associations with the word involved anxiety, even resentment over demands from childhood on, to be clean, to be neat, to clean up. Christine opened another angle on the word, associating the word with beauty and freshness. We all added names to a list of old-school commercial cleaning products. We saw moral judgement in the word, as in "clean living," a phrase that formerly connoted abstinence from immorality, that now connotes abstinence from unhealthy substances. We noted that a certain kind of grunginess is now looked upon as "authenticity." We cited religious / ritual cleanliness in our own Church and in traditions of other religions.


Energy seemed to rise most when we noted how the concept of being "clean" has been used for millennia to distinguish any dominant "us" from "them" -- people of another gender, class, nation, race, or faith, said to be unclean or, more recently, to carry diseases. We noticed an inconsistency all along, that those who have been disdained as unclean often are the ones who do the cleaning. Mark "them" as unclean, and they go from being different to being abhorrent - no sympathy or common civility required.

 References from our tradition included white robes "washed in the blood"; ritual cleansing by altar guild and priests; the stories of the much-abhorred lepers whom Jesus touched and St. Francis kissed; and Peter's dream in Acts that ended with the voice commanding him to eat, because "what God has declared clean, let no man declare unclean." At this point, Erica reminded us of a TR from last year that found spirituality in the messiness of conception, birth, and aging. "Thou didst not abhor the virgin's womb," we say in the Te Deum: God got down into our dirt when he was delivered through his mother's labor and laid in a manger.

We shared some insights: Once we've ensured health, safety, and efficiency, any further pursuit of "cleanliness" is idolatry. Someone came up with a succinct summary, "Cleanliness is not a destination."

Collect Suggested by "Clean" Loving Creator, for our sake you came down from heaven to experience the messiness and pain of this world, touching and healing lepers and the woman of the unclean spirit: open our eyes to see the dignity of all your creatures, that we may not shrink from what you have made clean. In Jesus' name. Amen.

I couldn't come up with the right search terms to find Erica's TR from last year, but I did run across another time that we dealt with some of these same themes:

For a TR, Gene brought us a poem that Jimmy Carter made from his mother's letter home from her stint with the Peace Corps in India: "Miss Lillian Sees Leprosy for the First Time." We focused on one line, "I faced her treatment every week with dread / and loathing -- for the chore, not the child."

Discussing times in our lives when we "steeled" ourselves to do a loathsome duty, we settled easily on the metaphor of putting on armor. (see post in 11/2018)

Next Week: Scott brings dinner; Christine leads worship; Gene offers a source for a TR. We are all reading Gatta, from the introduction through p. 86.