About the week's readings, we spoke of Purgatory, ramifications of the Black Death, and different kinds of "piety". One upshot of the discussion is (from Sedgwick) that faithful habits lead to understanding, more than the other way around. We discussed what Sedgwick means by "Post-Modern". We found a tension between Scripture that tells us in Ezekiel "you're responsible for your own actions" and a strong sense that the community is responsible. Susan pointed out that the ancient Israelites were dealing with relatively small communities where the sins of the fathers were well-known to descendants in the villages.
Yr. D theme: Living into the Journey with God Class: Marilyn, Nuno, first year; Christine, third year; Mariel, Gene, fourth year; Scott and Susan, co - mentors. Absent: None.
After we found analogs in our own lives, Christine suggested the metaphor: You're emerging from a dark cave, and you're hit by a cold waterfall.
After looking at analogs in Tradition, Culture, and our own beliefs, we had some insights: All of us are quick to judge without having enough information … A bucket of cold water can be good for us… don’t think their truth is the truth… comic trope of the bucket of cold water – this is something we can laugh at (laugh at our own weakness)(like cocky walk on banana peel) … something to learn even from this situation…
Christine bravely volunteered to compose a Collect from this.
PS - When EfM mentor training turned to discussion of metaphors, I brought up our cave-and-waterfall. The trainer asked us what the cave was like, and we filled in a kind of backstory: dark, dank, we don't want to go back, and we regret having entered the cave in the first place; ahead is light and promise of air and warmth and freedom; BUT there's this cold splash of water which will be a shock to the system, though also potentially refreshing. Buy in: I suddenly remembered quitting the university chapel choir, which would be liberating, but I had to face the director's scorn for reneging on my commitment. Tradition? That lame man beside the pool for 30 years, "stuck in the cave of his self-pity" until Jesus challenges him: "Do you want to be healed?"
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Year One: Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Collins chapters 17-18
The weight of prophecy is heavy. The stakes are high and the pitfalls numerous. These figures must have had such strong faith to speak out. God must have instilled such strong faith in them. I know everyone likes to think “if God would just show himself to me, then my faith would be sure”. But what comes next? Without these intense visions would they have had the confidence to speak against the institutions and rulers of their time? That appears not to have stopped their contemporaries from saying what they thought people wanted to hear.
Jeremiah was not from a prophetic family, he wasn’t a priest, or anyone special. He felt it in his bones. Ezekiel on the other hand was already a priest from a specific tradition and would have had a lot of education in Jewish mysticism. I think he would have struggled against a sense of being chosen. God continues to remind him of his place by addressing him as “Mortal” throughout. He may have struggled to separate imagery from his own imagination and from his conceptualization of God. His vivid imagery is not just awe-inspiring but terrifying and confusing. Ezekiel tries to capture it by describing visual details, an attempt to contain a spiritual experience that falls short of conveying the meaning behind the encounter. Would the meaning behind such intense visions have been apparent to the prophet or to an audience of the time? There was a tradition for having these types of visions, that Ezekiel would have been aware of, but was his imagery original? Was the significance for him of the encounter simply to say that he was commissioned by God himself? He combines the traditions of a storm theophany and a vision of the heavenly throne. He does not seem to be concerned with the still small voice Elijah heard.
Nuno, I find it’s nearly impossible to describe other-worldly experiences to those who have never had such experiences. There’s no common ground or language. Here’s an interesting excerpt from an article discussing Dr. Bruce Greyson’s book on near-death experiences:
“During surgery, Al the lorry driver became aware of his mother's presence beside him. She had died in her 50s, 20 years earlier, and now she appeared much younger, the way he remembered her as a child. She spoke to him, and guided the surgeon's hands. Al was profoundly moved that she was watching over him, and during his recovery felt thrilled to know that he would see her again when he finally died. But his wife didn't want to hear anything about this, and forbade him to talk about it. She married a happy-go-lucky guy, she said, 'not some Old Testament prophet’."
In the preface to 2008 Edition of Timothy Sedgwick’s book “The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety,” the author describes the purpose of the book as seeking to offer a moral theology grounded in a renewed sense of the worshipping community. He acknowledges building on the writings of Anglican theologian Kenneth Kirk and A.G. Hebert.
In his introduction he states the book's basic premise: that the presence of God in worship is inseparable from the call to a “covenant of hospitality.” He sees this as “practical piety” - a turning from one’s own desires for fulfillment to a new life given to the embrace of others. He see the purpose of church as a way to live into God’s calling of all people into a covenant of hospitality.
In Chapter 1, “Describing the Christian Life,” Sedgwick identifies the central claims of the nature of Christian faith and moral life as reflected in the Ten Commandments, and in the central claims of Roman Catholics and Protestants.
He begins with two questions: “What is important to us” and “What do we truly love and desire?” He admits he struggled with the different stories of Christian faith, and didn’t quite understand how those fit in with the world of ordinary living (work, home, family, civic duty). He calls this “the problem of piety.”
Sedgwick uses “piety” to describe a way of life, as did Jeremy Taylor in his 1650 book on “The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living” - i.e., sobriety, justice, and religion. Sedgwick then describes three kinds of “pieties” - modern, postmodern, and traditional. Traditional piety was experienced by the author primarily through his grandmother, born in 1882 in Minnesota, who believed in order, discipline, hard work, and performing one’s duty at home and work. As a youth, Sedgwick experienced modern piety, believing in the promise for a better, more just world in the near future. Then, after the Vietnam War, racial injustice, and political murders of the 1960s and ‘70s, he experienced postmodern piety, in which his focus turned back to the present, to finding God’s grace in the midst of suffering (Job, Jesus).
Sedgwick discusses the importance of the Ten Commandments as foundational to understanding the love of God and the love of neighbor. He compares and contrasts how the writings of St. Augustine were developed in different ways by Roman Catholics and Protestants. He concludes that the Roman Catholics prescribe religious acts to achieve the “beatific vision” of knowing God, while Protestants emphasize the need to hear the gospel and accept God’s grace, and out of which flows faith, hope, and love. He claims that, instead of the language of virtue as habits of perfection, Protestants were more likely to speak of this new life in terms of the fruit of the Spirit.
The RRG asks us to respond to Sedgwick’s views. Except for his judgment of Roman Catholic v. Protestant perspectives, I found this first chapter to read more like a lecture to first year seminarians than an exposition of the author’s views. His personal testimony of transformation from traditional to postmodern piety helped explain his interest in this topic. I appreciated his acknowledgement of classroom discussions as motivation to develop this book.
Mariel's exposition of Sedgwick gives me entree to discussing Ephesians. Sedgwick's "worshipping community" sounds like what the author of Ephesians has in mind in the first several chapters concerning the church's unity in Christ. Sedgwick's practical piety and "covenant of hospitality" are ideals envisioned by those exhortations to spouses and masters and servants to love, respect, care for each other.
Ephesians is mostly a sweet book. Powell lays out a table of ways that the letter differs from Paul in style, vocabulary for key concepts, and some distinctive concepts. Because much of the letter seems to be taken from Colossians, a reasonable theory is that the author used Colossians for a template to write a general letter to all the churches around. (Ephesus is never mentioned in this letter. The name presumably stems from a copy's being found there when the canon was being collected.)
One of those distinctive concepts is an emphasis on the kingdom of heaven being here and now in the way we experience life in our church, with commensurate de-emphasis of the second coming of Christ. That, too, seems compatible with Sedwick.
Sedgwick, The Christian Moral Life – Practices of Piety, Chap. 1, Describing the Christian Life
Sedgwick begins by defining piety – first by explaining that it now has a negative connotation (judgmental) but that originally it described people who “habitually acted ‘with reverence and obedience to God’…”
He then goes on to try and describe traditional piety (a sense of duty, a need for order, discipline and hard work) that his grandmother valued; modern and post-modern piety. In Sedgwick’s mind this traditional piety can lead to a rigid, judgmental way of thinking.
Modern piety looks to the future, something that traditional piety doesn’t do well. Modern piety focused on reconciliation and focused on the larger community but seemed to lose the focus on human responsibility. Post modern piety focuses back on the broken present and the grace of God. I think.
Sedgwick then starts to try to answer what the pious life looks like, and uses the Ten Commandments as a starting point. Breaking the commandments down, he notes that the first four establish the relationship between God and humans, with particular emphasis on #1 (One God) and #4 (keep the Sabbath Holy) while the last six are moral commands that govern relationships between humans, noting that the last (do not covet) is unusual because it addresses an issue of the heart rather than an action.
Sedgwick then goes into a long explanation of the difference between Catholic and Protestant ideas of the Christian life. If I understand him correctly, the basic gist is that the Catholic church traditionally was more concerned with right behavior, which in turn would lead to a closer relationship with God, even if only by habit; whereas Protestants focused on the relationship with God first, which would lead to a moral life as one of the fruits of the relationship with God.
The imagery found in Jeremiah, was similar to that found in all the prophets…nature and plenty…water, fruitful trees, vines, and people - that was contrasted with destruction, distress, despair, decay, and death.
Beliefs that sustained The people of God during Jeremiah's time were the promise and hope of peace. And that God is good, and that good would follow those who followed Him.
A spiritual practice, that sustained them would be maintaining Sabbath.
The vision of wholeness or goodness that is held up is the promise of peace. Some stateworthy elements that distinguish the book of Ezekiel are:
1) That it is more highly structured than other prophetic books. There are great visions of glory, oracles of judgment, oracles against foreign nations, oracles of consolation, and restoration. (Judgment on Jerusalem, judgment on foreign nations, Consolation for Jerusalem.)
2) Another distinctive feature is that the dates are used 15 times, mostly in chronological order. The latest date is the 27th year of Exile, similarly to Priestly tradition.
It begins with visions of the destruction of Jerusalem and ends with the Restoration. The prominence of priestly concerns and much deals with holiness and purity. He doesn't distinguish between moral and ritual laws. The impurity of Jerusalem causes its downfall.
He emphasizes the importance of Recognizing the hand of the Lord in the fate that befalls them.
The two traditions that combine in Ezekiel's opening vision are.
1) A storm theophany, the presence of the Lord is associated with fire, and YHWH rides a chariot.
2) The Jerusalem Temple, where YHWH is enthroned above the cherubim, combining features of animals with wings. The beings he saw were inspired by these, but his were more bizarre and had fire around them, called "the appearance of the likeness of the glory of God. " He also mentions the role of the Watchman - to give warning of impending danger.
The symbolic action of the prophets is to help the people recognize their guilt and their impending punishment.
As far as Ezekiel influencing my beliefs – I think each person is personally responsible for their own sins, and that actions have consequences. An individual’s behavior impact individuals mainly, not generally the whole population, and that good people have a capacity for doing bad things and that those that have been bad, can change and do good things.
"The kingdom of heaven is here and now" - love that.
Beautiful truth. 🙏🏻
Year 3
MacCulloch, Chapter 16 Perspectives on the True Church (1300-1517)
One of the main topics in this chapter is centered around the “Black Death”, likely the Bubonic Plague. The plague affected all people, including the wealthy, royalty, and clergy. Though, young males seemed to be most affected. Being heads of households and often the strongest or healthiest, their deaths were most distressing and hit communities hard. The statistics seem to indicate that 1 in 3 individuals contracted the plague and died. Death was a prevalent and frightening occurrence and was at the forefront of everyone’s minds. People started to wonder if God was punishing them. This idea grew as “loved ones” sometimes passed away after clergy had visited. Clergymen spread the disease as they visited their church members for ministerial aid, guidance, and even last rites. No one was safe from the Black Death.” As worry grew concerning God’s wrath, people also wondered if God’s Kingdom, heaven, would welcome them.
Purgatory and it’s complex “industry of prayer” captivated the Europeans as they knew they would have to spend time there before passing into heaven. “Easing the passage of souls through purgatory with the prayer of the Mass or simply with the prayers of good Christian folk addressed that age-long human sense of bafflement and helplessness in the face of death, for it suggested that there was indeed something constructive to be done for the dead.” (p555). Also, individuals could pray for the dead who were already in purgatory...to help lessen their time spent there. Indulgences became the way of “purchasing” a shortened stay in Purgatory as well via almsgiving, donations, contributions, etc. The Church was able to fund capital projects using these funds....next chapter, The Reformation...
Good book to read on the Black Death: "The Black Death: A personal history," by John Hatcher. This was a book recommended by Fr. Roger.
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