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.