19 November 2008
Ad Fontes
12 November 2008
To meet a King
"Oh, I don't know what I will do," he said. "I've never met a king and I want to be sure to address Him, approach Him, and greet Him properly."
Not knowing how to prepare he called upon the wisdom of other stewards and merchants that he knew. Surely they'd help him get ready for this privileged meeting.
Some say "address him as if you are his equal and he will honor you. Stand up straight and give him a firm handshake. That way he'll know that you are worthy of the occasion. Be a 'man' because the king is looking for good sturdy men upon whom to grant favor."
Others to the contrary, "you must bow low to gain His inestimable favor. You are dirt and He is priceless gold--be sure you get that straight. You don't want him to have you arrested for audacious presumption in royal company!"
Perplexed, he went to the library and blew the dust off a book entitled, How to behave in the presence of Royalty. Splendid! A book that will tell me just how to pull it off. Page after page he could be heard sighing, "Deary me, those fellas have never read this book," and "Oh my word, I think I shall have to practice several times a day to get all this straight."
And that he did. Everyone he knew suffered through the fate of playing the king whilst poor Paslted practiced his approach. He stumbled quite a bit on the instruction concerning the proper bow to execute whilst kissing the signet ring. One note read, "the proper way to bow is to bend at the 3rd or 4th vertebrae of your back." No matter how hard he tried he could never seem to bend at the right spot. Making the most of his time, Palsted poured himself into the instructions that would surely meet the King's approval.
The Day finally arrived and Paslted was dressed for the occasion [another fable tells of his travails about picking out the correct vestments to don for this meeting]. Among the fanfare and pomp, Palsted began to feel his knees quiver. "Oh, I hope I don't look a fool and forget something really important!" he cringed. "But worse I hope I don't offend His Majesty with the appearance of being ignorant and unprepared." Just then the King's right hand came into Palsted's view. No time to think now, he simply reacted.
[story pans to a dreamy state in which we've all turned up to school or work in our underpants only]
"So sorry about that 6th-7th vertebrae thing. I guess I must have practiced to much. You know, I am nervous, your Grace."
"As you were, lad. It's good to meet you," the King replied.
"Since I have your company, could you direct me properly upon whether I smooched your signet ring correctly. I mean, is it the fourth facet from the left...or the right, clockwise or counter-clockwise?" On and on Palsted stammered over questionable minutiae until the guards had to escort him away from the celebrations.
I'm sure the King felt very flattered indeed when the poor guy stumbled over the procedure. But after a while don't you think His Grace had had enough of this foolish pandering.
This fable is my witty response to those that insist on "no more-no less" than what the BCP allows for in celebrating either Holy Communion or the Daily Offices. It's what comes to mind whenever I encounter what I can only dub rubrical fundamentalism.
Do let us know when you've removed all the fly scat from your pepper shaker.
17 October 2008
Troll Under the Bridge
When we are young and impressionable, the big folks like to tell us fables, myths, and legends to pique our imagination. Those tales most often have a purpose too. So it is with the proverbial troll that lives under the bridge. Perhaps there was a widespread desire to keep young children away from bridges. Bridges are not safe for young kids-that is easy to imagine. More likely it was to protect the ‘kids’ from what was beyond the bridge. So it may have been common to protect our cubs by fear. "You know," goes the tale, "there is a troll under the bridge that will scare you/eat you/kill you/molest you. So stay far away from that bridge." We don’t need to know what a troll is to be afraid of the bridge. It works…both ways. We are saved by fear and enticed to imagine.
Then we grow and learn how the world works. There are no ‘boogy men’--at least not the imaginary kind. And that troll never has been caught by our eager eyes. We grow up to feel safe about ‘our world’ and physically safe from the danger of the bridge, er uhm the troll. Maturity leads us to ditch the myth but no one really ever tells us it's a myth. No one ever sits us down and says, "we just wanted to keep you safe and close, so we made up the story of the troll." Forget the Viking stories that we crib from, we simply use tales as best suits us.
I write this because of my great angst about evangelicals’ collective, deep-rooted fantasy. It's somewhat like the troll story I describe, but much more sinister. Whether it be the ‘
Imagination is a good tool unless we forge it with prejudice or stereotyping. I’m now convinced that’s what we’ve done with the Catholics. We’ve painted them with our own imaginative ignorance. We, in fact, weaken our own view of God’s power when we portray the Catholics as so very influential that they can prohibit the ‘true’ gospel from peoples’ comprehension. In other words, the legend is too weighty to stand up under the smallest scrutiny. All those ‘things’ adorning the gospel are imagined by evangelicals to cloud the truth and veil the Lord from the people. Most prejudice is simply ignorance. What we miss is that all the ‘adornments’ point to Him.
While I had hurled insults at Catholics, I had never stepped inside a Catholic Church in my life. So it is with many of us. Oh, I know, many people embrace Christ ‘personally’ after having been Catholic much of their lives. Others have a sprinkling of Catholic experience because of mixed family ties. In this latter case I bet they still operated with fear and prejudice when they attended that wedding, or that Baptism. I remember once in my college years being afraid that something would happen to me while attending a Church outside my approved list. Good grief! (Shocking as it may be, Dallas Seminary was not on that list either!) Remember what that troll will do to you!
But the more sinister aspect of our prejudice is doctrinal. We simply do not understand their system. We fearfully and ignorantly reject their Episcopacy, Sacraments, Veneration of Mary and Saints, etc. The best we can muster is, “We don’t need to know what they believe to be sure that they are wrong.” Yet, you cannot disagree with an unknown. Students of history are urged to suspend judgment until they learn history’s content. That doesn’t mean to chuck judgment entirely, but you must have the facts first. Only then can you discern. In fact, then you must discern. Be not afraid of the truth, but neither be unmoved by it. You are at seminary to learn, to forge the habits that will fuel your future. If your time here is only spent learning how ‘wrong’ others are, are you not becoming a prejudiced servant?
Fear keeps us out of the woods like the 2nd generation of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. We feel comfortable at the encampment, secure on the reservation. We don’t want to confuse our younglings with crucifixes, statues, smoke, tradition, stained glass, creeds, chants, wafers, alcohol, icons and beauty. We envision what terrible direction those things will lead their imaginations! Children are better served sitting and staring at the hymnal or the back of bro. Bob’s head. Or worse, we remove them from our company and let somebody else tell teach about the most important action in all creation, namely worshiping God. Even worse still, we remove them from worship for play and activity because they don’t understand everything that’s going on…they are stupid and unable to have, much less cultivate, faith. And they should never take communion for we are not ‘sure’ they ‘truly’ ‘believe’ in our ‘fill-in-the-blank-doctrines-necessary-for-true-spiritual-relationship-with-Jesus’. Yep, those Catholics are truly deluded and misguided.
Evangelicals champion the gospel. That name is from the Greek word for gospel, for goodness sake. Yet the gospel isn’t naked. It never has been. It has been clothed and adorned with beauty, tradition, order, dignity, and many other Catholic things. Neither are its recipients bare. We like to think that we are: that God wipes our slates clean at conversion, tabula rasa. Some folks get very near apostasy before they realize that grace’s landing strip needs maintenance. It is not tabula rasa, but tabula humanae. The human mind is vast. God created it that way. But today evangelicals usually see grace only as a heart and soul issue. I hope that you will engage your mind such that you fulfill your Lord’s summary of the Law, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.” Regarding our estranged brethren in other Churches, I hope you will struggle to honor Jesus’ words concluding the summary, “And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these to commandments hang all the Law and the prophets.” This is especially true if you have family devoted to the Catholic Church.
Those of us that consider ourselves students of The Book would do well to appreciate the entity that for centuries preserved our Book. We would do even better if we considered their preservation of Scripture at least as authentic in devotion to Christ as our modern accretions. I implore you to move beyond folklore to fact. Call a cease-fire between those that damage one another. Most of all, carefully avoid friendly-fire. We have enough to battle with Islam and secularization crowding out anyone that bears the name of Christ. Sadly, most of us would simply rather believe in the truth of our own making. We much prefer the safe fantasy world that our masters confined us within.
O, Canada!
I love to travel.
15 October 2008
The Latest with me/us
We finally found the end of our fertility treatment. Here's a rough recap.
Last year we decided for many reasons to try fertility treatments to have another child. So off we went to a specialist. After the first round we had a miscarriage followed by more blood work. That blood work uncovered a problem with our DNA. So we thought we'd try again with a little more treatment than the 1st time to counter-act the DNA issue. But it failed again with another miscarriage. These two events were very, very hard on the Mrs. [not to mention months of shots and pills etc.]. Still we wanted to see if more could be done so that we could have a baby. After all many, many patients endure multiple miscarriages on the way to parenthood. Well, the only way in reality [says the specialist] is to remove one of the two of us from the genetic equation. This is when it gets really hurtful. Donation, surrogacy, etc. became the only options. Surrogacy is for rich folk because it is cost prohibitive. So we're down to egg or sperm donation. At this point all I knew was that it made me uncomfortable. So I set out to find answers. Was this morally right? How would we deal with this in the long run? Could we go through with this?
Where do you go to find answers like this for such new medical treatments?! Christians are divided over this issue. Some say it doesn't matter, so go ahead and do it. Some don't like the idea, but have very little more than anecdotal reasons. The former group sound very uncritical, even un-reflective. The latter sound very critical and uncompromising. One thing is for sure--they all have Bible verses to share. So where is a detailed analysis of this issue? I'm afraid the Anglican Churches have shied away from the issue with typical via-media posturing. Evangelicals can't seem to reason outside of the specific Bible verses they've found...on one side or the other. Then I found the document put out by Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae. 40 years ago the Church foresaw issues like this. And though HV does not specifically address our particular issue, it does say where life is supposed to come from. It discusses the Sacrament of Marriage, the only origin of life ordained from God. It was only a simple deduction for me to decide that we could not 'remove one of us from the equation'.
So it is not a matter of my wife having a baby, rather it is a matter of us having a baby. Today we only hear the media and lobbyists speak of an individual woman and her rights. They've gone too far because neither man nor woman are in this alone, God gave us each other to produce more life within the marriage relationship. Turning the emotional corner together as a couple was really difficult. We had a lot of intense fellowship! What does a couple do when they cannot have a baby?
We already knew the answer. Our 1st child just turned 5 years old. We adopted him at two days old. He is ours. He is a gift...from God...from his birth-mother...from all those who prayed for us through those days. So what, you may ask, is the difference between adopting a child that is not yours & utilizing egg or sperm that is not yours?
That was the biggest hurdle. It seems like wisdom. If you adopted a child from someone else, then it can't be wrong to receive genetic material from someone else so that you can have a child. Love is all that is important, right? Well, I disagree. We are not dealing with 'raw materials'. Physicians are so used to speaking and thinking that way. If my deduction from Humanae Vitae is correct, we should not breach the covenant we cut for any reason, not even to create life. In the case of adoption we did not create the life, yet we redeemed it through adoption. Fertility treatment is for married couples, not individuals, and this couple went as far as a married couple can go with treatment. The two have become one flesh--we cannot undo that for the purpose of bearing children. Our calling is to adopt kids or only have the one, our burden is that we cannot produce our own. So we trust God to help us heal from this hurt [and the hurt of miscarriages].
Already we have turned our attention to the adoption process again. Our son may yet be an only child and we are coming to grips with this too. What ever the future holds we trust God and walk on. What else can we do? As a very dear friend often says, "Life is what happens when there are no longer any options."
Amen.
