Yr. B, Wk. 19: Behold, I Stand at the Door

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Worship and Gathering
Scott led worship with excerpts from Evening Prayer II with selections from honorees of the week, John Chrysostom (Jan 27) and Simeon, whose song Nunc Dimittis is read Feb. 2 for the Feast of the Presentation.

Nuno was exempted from answering the gathering question, What have you been waiting for that has finally arrived? Scott had just about quit on a poem after 30 days of drafting it... Jessica got a third verger to help... Marilyn got snow (more on that, later)... and Pete's looking forward to a 26th anniversary February 1.

We were concerned for Kathy, her husband, and Susan's sinusitis.

Living Faithfully in a Multicultural World, Unit 3, Developing a Sustaining Spirituality:
1st yr: Jessica; 2nd yr: Susan; 3rd yr, Pete, Nuno, Marilyn, Kathy ; 4th yr, Scott. Mentors: Susan and Scott. Absent: Kathy, Susan.

Discussion of the Readings
Jessica shared what she read in Yee’s book. We can see the evidence in Scripture of both the power of women early in the formation of the nation of Israel and of the ways chroniclers during the monarchy undercut their importance. Jessica was also fascinated by how the nations were gendered in the Hebrew Scriptures and how nations still are gendered in our popular imagination today.

Opposites showed up in a lot of our comments. Julian of Norwich finds joy “through the tunnel of physical pain.” Y3 read about opposite approaches to God through what’s said about him in kataphatic prayer and what cannot be said about Him in wordless apophatic prayer; Marilyn imagined the space between those two approaches.

The opposites of iconophilia and iconoclasm took us into a wider appreciation for the aesthetics of the eastern Orthodox tradition and their different emphasis from our familiar western Christianity. Scott remembered from reading McIntosh for class years ago that the Orthodox church never developed the notion of a punishing God who demands the death of Jesus for our sins. The Orthodox are mystified by the prevalence of that idea in Western culture. (See Scott's blogpost on McIntosh, ch. 6, Jesus Saves, but How? at The Word Sanctuary 01/2019)

Theological Reflection
From her current home in California, Marilyn shared photographs to document her story about driving in deep snow and thick fog last week. We focused on the moment at the Mobil station when Marilyn tried the handle under the CLOSED sign and the door opened -- not a moment too soon for Marilyn's pressing needs.

The world of the story is beautiful but also dangerous. The closed door is certainly a disappointment, but maybe not "brokenness." The sin would have been not to try the handle. Nuno pointed out that such a joint would be "foul" during the hot summer, but that warm little restroom was redeemed by this situation.

We got a little silly. Does the Psalm really say "Thy loo hast been a lamp unto my feet?" We did find apt Scriptures: Behold, I stand at the door and knock... no room at the inn but a manger in the stable... Knock, and the door shall be opened to you... Moses parts the water that blocks the path.

Pete reminded us that a CLOSED sign hangs on the gate to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

We shared our "positions" on this situation: Never judge a book by its cover… You never know until you try… When God closes a door He opens a window… and Pete's fatherly contribution, "What are you doing out there driving in those conditions?"

Reviewing our reflection, Marilyn connected it to our discussion of opposites, how we find the deepest joy in the darkest of circumstances.

We made a start of a collect, but Scott was suffering symptoms from a sinus infection and we "let it be." The next day, Scott put a collect together from our images, with a lot of help from the Third Song of Isaiah (BCP p. 87):

Collect for Epiphany: When Our Way is BarredLord of light, you promise your gates will always be open for those who stream to the brightness of your dawning: when we find doors closed against us, keep your light in our hearts that we may find the boldness, creativity, and persistence to enter into the fullness of your will for us. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.

For Next Week
Nuno thanked us for being flexible with our meeting time to allow him to serve on the board of Wonderful Days School. For Tuesday next week, Susan leads worship; Jessica brings a source for the TR.

Yr. B, Wk. 18: For Unto Us

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[NUNO'S PHOTOS: Tomas Emmanuel Gray Nuñez was born at 10:01 Wednesday night.]

Worship and Gathering
We took turns reading from the Thanksgiving on p. 836 and then, through chat, offered these prayers and messages for our absent friends:

Dear Heavenly Father, we ask that you be with our friends Kathy and Nuno and their families. Heal the sick, be present with the joyous, and give guidance to those who care for them. We ask these things in your most gracious and loving name.

We pray for Kathy, her husband, and for their caregivers in the hospital; we pray for patience and endurance. Kathy, I am praying for you and your spouse. I wish your husband the best recovery. Please keep our loved ones safe and strong in the palm of your hand. May Kathy’s husband’s illness be brief and the pain manageable.

May the birth of Nuno’s baby be filled with joy and may the labor be full of love and light. Welcome to the world Baby Nuñez. Amen.

(My very best wishes to you and your spouse, Nuno. From what I've seen, you are the best Dad EVER! - Pete)

Gathering Question: What TV show or movie have you been living in, lately? For Jessica, it's Mama's Family; for Scott, creating a spread sheet was like breaking the Enigma Code in The Imitation Game; Marilyn's living with The Brady Bunch of dogs; Pete recently re-lived The Family Stone, a film about how "quirky works in a family until you bring in an outsider"; and Susan is experiencing Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Living Faithfully in a Multicultural World, Unit 3, Developing a Sustaining Spirituality:
1st yr: Jessica; 2nd yr: Susan; 3rd yr, Pete, Nuno, Marilyn, Kathy ; 4th yr, Scott. Mentors: Susan and Scott. Absent: Nuno, Kathy.

Discussion of the Readings

Susan was bothered reading so many details about the arcane process of checking authorship of the Epistles. Jessica was bothered by the justification of plunder in I and II Kings before she saw it through the perspective of the gung-ho young men who honored warriors over negotiators. She was also bothered by Solomon who worshiped other deities and had 700 wives. For what does he deserve his reputation for wisdom? Jessica cited his judgment in the case of the contested baby (it was a split decision) and his reputation for knowledge of the natural world.

That led us to Aristotle. Pete said Aquinas brought Aristotle back "into the conversation." Susan recommended a book Aristotle’s Children about the influence of Aristotle and how he was reinterpreted late in the Medieval era.

The church of the Medieval Era was the subject in Y3's chapter “A Church for All People.” Pete enjoyed this medieval reading. We discussed how people in that time had a sense of God close to them, with the end of the world something they expected any time. Pete was fascinated by offshoot from the Church – Dominican and Franciscan friars – and remembered how his father brought Dominican order to the family while his mother emphasized the gentleness of Francis. Marilyn loved how Francis, viscerally disgusted by lepers, realized HE was the one who needed to be healed. Francis taught that all created things are good, and we share in the creation of Christ. In statues of St. Francis, he lifts his hand to show the stigmata. We spoke of the rise of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Marilyn and Pete both told how important that doctrine was in their Catholic families. Aquinas popped up in this context, too, having written, Faith, our outward sense befriending / makes our inward vision clear and through the sacrament we perceive You in ourselves.

Sacraments gave Scott an opening to share his favorite idea from McIntosh. Stories from Scripture, the author notes, are treated either as historical accounts to be judged on their accuracy OR treated as ancient mythology, relics of a credulous age. McIntosh suggests a third alternative: For Episcopalians who hear excerpts of Scripture every Sunday and read it every day, they are SACRAMENTS – OUTWARD signs of inward reality – we are all IN the stories.

Developing the story idea, McIntosh relates the analogy Dorothy L. Sayers made between her relationship to characters in her detective fiction and God's relationship to us: the characters do not have being except through Sayers, but she frequently has to re-think her plans for them as they develop inner lives of their own.

Theological Reflection
Pete brought us something very familiar, the song "Let it Be." Is "Mother Mary" the Virgin Mary? She said to Gabriel, "Let it be to me according to thy word." Is the phrase about acceptance, resignation, or retreat?

We skipped ahead to connect the phrase to our own experience, and got some great examples: : Divorce – letting go... Letting the students work through their difficulties without me... Letting our children is extremely rewarding, but also dangerous... Medically, things happen that you didn’t bring on that you just have to go through… Butting in when you should have minded your own business. We realized that there's an arrogance (disrespect?) in not letting another have agency; redemption comes at the moment of acceptance of things you cannot control, when you realize it’s still gonna be okay. We thought of prayer / confession of responsibility / forgiving ourselves, asking others for forgiveness.

A couple of insights emerged: We have choices. We can help others and ourselves if we focus on what is instead of what is not.

It was 9PM, and we'd already composed a prayer, so we let it be.

For Next Week
We meet on Monday, January 30. Scott will send out the usual link. We hope that Kathy will lead worship, and Marilyn will supply a source for the TR. We're doing the readings for week 19 - Yee, Romans, the new Rome (Byzantium), and "The Humanity of God." I also recommend the paragraph about the role of artistic imagination in worship, RRG 125.

Yr. B, Wk. 17: Church Buildings, Building Church

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Worship and Gathering
Before worship, we held up our ailing friend Pete, Marilyn's little dog Ocho, and concerns from last week.

Jessica led us in prayers for evening time, including O Gracious Light. Her gathering question got us laughing when she asked us for clever ads. Examples for some reason mostly dated from three to five decades ago, e.g., plop, plop, fizz, fizz... where's the beef?. Jessica told of Kit Kats, and the Taco Bell chiahuahua has fans in Susan and Marilyn. Scott relayed an interview with a "hot-dogger" who drove Oscar-Meyer's Weinermobile for a year. Does Starbucks misspell names on orders just for the social media exposure from annoyed customers? Nuno wonders.

Living Faithfully in a Multicultural World, Unit 3, Developing a Sustaining Spirituality:
1st yr: Jessica; 2nd yr: Susan; 3rd yr, Pete, Nuno, Marilyn, Kathy ; 4th yr, Scott. Mentors: Susan and Scott. Absent: Pete.

Discussion of the Readings

Kathy started discussion by agreeing with MacCulloch that a church's architecture can have a great influence on the worship experience, for good and for ill. We shared our experiences with a church shaped like a UFO, a 3-D crucifix that looks like jacks, and an Anglican church in Quebec City that covers every surface with words -- teaching Scott that worship is not, or should not be, so bound up in what we read and say. Marilyn commented on church spires, rare in CA and ubiquitous in the South. Kathy remembered one in Port Gibson MS with a pointing finger at the tip. [Photo: from Scott's bike ride through Port Gibson MS in 1992.]

Both Y1 and Y3 dealt with the construction of awe-inspiring temples for worship that also siphoned off wealth from the laity to aggrandize religious leaders. Corruption and hypocrisy were as common to the priesthood in the days of Samuel as to the Church of the the Medieval era. "We make a mistake when we try to separate our church from the scandals of church history," Nuno said, "because hypocrisy is what [atheists and agnostics] see when they look at us." We should all make a point to know about it, and we should tell how God works us through it. Priests were "celibate out loud but not in the dark," Marilyn quipped.

Susan with Acts and Scott with McIntosh both spoke of the church's growing because of strong spiritual experiences, not primarily because of arguments and logic. Reminding us that "it's the journey, not the destination," Nuno noted how spirituality and strong bonds formed among pilgrims even if the tourist attractions were dubious: in this way, the church was built.

Another theme emerged from Jessica's reading, as she took Collins's suggestion to read separately the two opposing strands merged in the Biblical text about David and Goliath. It was eye-opening. Kathy said, "We have to remember, the Bible is not just a book, but a library."

Theological Reflection
Pinch-hitting for Pete, Nuno hit a double with two poems alluding to the Crusades. We were drawn to a line about "heretics who believe" in a context that suggested these were insane people. Our approach moved quickly past ideas of outliers whose beliefs were violent or harmful -- Eric Hoffer's "True Believers" and the Heaven's Gate cult -- to thinking of outliers whose beliefs became orthodoxy: Christians, but also proponents of germ theory.

We found many connections:

• Culture: The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity (Yeats)...Edward Murrow – exposing Joseph McCarthy for liar and demagogue...Play Inherit the Wind in which the Clarence Darrow figure breaks down the resolve of the fundamentalist politician and jury...The trope of the insane person who’s really the hero in movies mostly in the 70s They Might Be Giants… One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest… King of Hearts… Total Recall…
• Tradition: John the Baptist… Jeremiah… Desert Fathers and Mothers… Russian Orthodox tradition of Holy Fools… St. Paul “fools for Christ” ... Shaman/witch doctor... Christ opposing the orthodoxy of Pharisees and Sadducees... madness as demon-possession

Looking for insights, we collected these: Error of self-assurance, we fall into bad traps and patterns … truth from people who look outside themselves for what the truth is (empirical evidence) ... Our words for outliers all stem from roots that mean "self" -- Idio – auto – heretic -- suggesting a deep-seated belief that someone disconnected from community is a danger. (Are the outliers of our tradition -- John, Jesus, hermit saints -- so disconnected?)

Scott took suggestions from everyone to compose this collect following class:

Collect for the Outliers Creator outside of creation yet in our hearts: prophets speaking your word were cast out by their peers, while your Word, casting out spirits, restored demoniacs to reason: we pray that our habits of study and worship together will make us sensitive to earnest outliers, that we may be receptive to genuine insight and wise in our responses to the deluded. To Father and Son through the Spirit we pray, Amen.

For Next Week
We do readings for Wk. 18, including the "respond" section of the RRG. We hope that Pete will be back to share his source for a TR; Kathy will lead worship and ask a gathering question.

Everyone: Mark EfM - January 30 on your calendar. Henceforth, during only the last week of every month, we will meet on Monday instead of Tuesday.

Yr. B, Wk. 16: Spirituality in the Digital Age by Steven Charleston

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Charleston's latest book relates to our TR.  Holy Synchronicity!

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Worship and Gathering
We spoke our prayer concerns: Marilyn and her dog Ocho; the "Angel" who visits Scott's mom putting her dog out of misery; Susan’s colleague; Jessica’s employee in surgery. Scott led worship with a collect for Epiphany and prayer "Before Worship" from p. 833 in the Book of Common Prayer, delineated for each of us to participate. (We ended the evening with the beautiful prayer "For Quiet Confidence" on p. 832.)

Our gathering question was about our return to routine after the holidays: what's something you enjoyed getting back to? Knowing what to expect is good (tho’ this week wasn’t normal!)... Getting into a rhythm… routine is comforting -- until about 10 am or 2 PM … Nice that Ruthie’s back in school.... Nuno spoke of getting into a new normal with new commitments and a polite, well-trained Standard Poodle C.S.Lewis ("Lewy"), who led his rambunctious sibling around by the lead. (Awwww!)

Living Faithfully in a Multicultural World, Unit 3, Developing a Sustaining Spirituality:
1st yr: Jessica; 2nd yr: Susan; 3rd yr, Pete, Nuno, Marilyn, Kathy ; 4th yr, Scott. Mentors: Susan and Scott. Absent: Marilyn, Kathy.

Discussion of the Readings
Regarding the title of our new unit, Scott observed that he had read three different definitions of "spirituality" in the past 24 hours. What does it mean to us? Pete spoke of a force inside yourself that sustains you, leads you, and encourages you to explore. Jessica offered a place between the head and the heart where you have room to grow. Nuno elaborated what this week's author had written, that spirituality is a message to yourself, a communication between what we see, what we feel, and what we believe. We now had three more definitions!

We all had read Steven Charleston's address to a conference from 2014 regarding new ways technology can assist the mission of the Church. "Steven Charleston is a Native American elder, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, and a bishop in the Episcopal Church." (stevencharleston.com). He told how a diverse on-line community formed in a "crystalline" manner around meditations he offered every morning on Facebook. A tech-skeptic at first, he became a social media star.

Our own Jessica has been a fan for a long time, now. She responds to his connecting God to the Choctaw "Spirit of Life" and his redefining church as a body in which everyone feels empowered to participate. [Typing this, I realize, that's St. Paul, too -- one body, many members with their own contributions.] Susan found it interesting that the online community clamored to have a print-media collection (what we used to call a book). Here's a sampling of our other reactions to his essay:

• Pete: Charleston's online community is non-denominational and it's there when you want it. "I felt inspired." Pete especially liked Charleston's feeling that people came to his site, not empty and wishing to be filled, but full of experience that they wished to share.
• Susan: He's using the term "evangelical" in a new way. There's a danger: She remembered a "meltdown" of misunderstanding and vicious responses on a professional Listserv from otherwise thoughtful, goodwilled philosophers.
• Nuno: Charleston has an appealing vision of redemption through the sharing made possible by technology. We are less optimistic about that since 2014. There has been a "spiral" downward because of a "lack of human connection." Charleston does elevate the human connection as something necessary that the tech can assist, but not replace.

Scott asked how else we might update Charleston's essay from our experiences since 2014. Our responses followed three different lines:

• Sharing of experience and beliefs is what draws people to social media. Various interfaces allow for artistic expression and collaboration. An online church community could be also a learning community (after the book about revitalizing the Vestry, Beyond Business as Usual).
• Caveat: none of these platforms is as egalitarian as they pretend to be. Neither is print, for that matter. There are controlling influencers behind both.
• While we learned a lot about the potential of online community during COVID, we all long for personal connection, sharing of meals (including communion), singing in chorus.

Nuno, Pete, and Jessica agreed that church members want to get back out into the community to make a difference. This tied to our previous reading, in which De La Torre indicts churches for spiritualizing scripture that calls for literal, physical service to our communities -- feeding, housing, healing.

Theological Reflection
Susan brought us The Jacob's Ladder by Denise Levertov.

We were drawn to the part where "the cut stone consoles his feet" as wings "brush past" on the way down and the "poem ascends." Pete took that as an image of the struggle of life, and that's how we reflected on the image.

From Jessica's rock climbing experience, we learned that finding your footing in the rock is a relief or "consolation." From Susan's vicarious experience of boot camp, and Pete's personal experience of it, we got into the ways institutions can break us down to remake us. It sounds like a bad thing, but we thought about religious communities of nuns and monks, too. When we put "culture" and "tradition" into dialogue, we got these insights: Paul has to be broken down before he can see the light. You have to see the harm before you change your life... Repentance is to acknowledge our brokenness; that‘s different from being broken down.... We let go of our egos -- a painful loss -- to see the truth…There is also relief in giving up the ego we were holding onto… SURRENDER: Jesus broken on the Cross … bread broken for us… Surrender in his last breath… (not my will but thine).

After collaboration in a breakout room, Jessica sent this collect for us:

Dear God, our rock and our foundation: You draw us up out of ourselves and give us strength and relief as we journey through this life. We pray that you assist us in our day-to-day spirituality so that we may ultimately be drawn closer to you. Amen.

For Next Week
We will be doing all the readings for our years listed for Wk. 17, and read the paragraphs for "All Years" in the RRG, pp. 115-6. Jessica will lead worship and ask a question for our gathering; Pete will bring a source for our TR.

We are considering how we can accommodate a change to Nuno's schedule. Now that he's on the board of Wonderful Days School, he will have to miss the last Tuesday of every month. Scott has choir every Wednesday. During just the last week of every month, could we meet on Mondays?

One great thing about our technology is the way we can follow up on what interests us. Every webpage has the potential for self-directed learning. With that in mind, here are some links that relate to what we read and discussed:

• Poems that Scott happened to write on topics that came up tonight: Cliff Hanger, Angels Never Know, and On Track, an expression of how he sees his life after reading Scripture from the Margins.
• Steven Charleston
• Denise Levertov
• We discussed online learning and collaboration. Here's a link to an online gallery for new art relating to Epiphany
• Technology provides us with media for creating and sharing. Scott wrote an article that imagines how creating and sharing could be an integral part of whatever we do at church - study, worship, socializing, community involvement. See Art + Faith: Joy and Discovery in Making Church