It is a gift to be able to create. As human beings, we have been given the ability to imitate our Creator by exercising and developing our creativity. God creates from the beginning, bringing out of what is formless and void, giving it design, structure, function, and purpose. We create out of what God has made and entrusted to us, ordering our little worlds after the order, or logos, by which He made the heavens and the earth.
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When I was eighteen, my home life and family of origin underwent a sudden change from which it never really recovered. I still remember the lurch of what I thought was permanent and untouchable suddenly shifting under my feet. Like Lewis, I felt afraid. I felt cut off, even when surrounded by people. I felt deaf to the words they were trying to say to make me feel better, and even when their words got through, part of me still wanted their kind words to just go away. Yet I was terrified of being alone. Starting to sound familiar?
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One of the great questions in the Church’s understanding of Christ concerns the properties of His resurrected Body. From the time Jesus exits the tomb, there is something evidently different about His embodied life from how it existed prior to His Resurrection. The Evangelists take special care to demonstrate that Jesus continues to have a body, that His body is continuous in some ways with the body the disciples had known before the Passion; yet His body now possesses new properties that begin to reveal and oblige a new relationship that Christ will have with His disciples as He ascends to the Father and the Spirit comes upon them. For the final entry in our series on mystagogy, then, we turn to the sense of ‘touch’ and its place in our worship of the risen Lord.
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I remember the first time I received Holy Communion in an Anglican Church. It was after a long season of participation in non-denominational churches, for which communion was infrequent, instrumental to the point of a sermon, and individualized as a private devotional response to the pious atmosphere of the day. This was different from my childhood experience of Sunday mornings in a traditional and conservative Methodist church, at which communion was a regular movement of the liturgy. As I went searching in early adulthood for those Wesleyan roots, I entered a beautiful a-frame church near my college and knew that I had come home.
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During my years of altar service while preparing to receive Holy Orders, one of the roles I fulfilled most often was that of thurifer, the one who carries the thurible in which the incense is burned. I remember getting acquainted with the rituals of lighting the coals, the smell of fresh grains of frankincense, and the intricate metal-work of the chains holding the bowl of the thurible, which would instantly kink up if you even looked at them the wrong way. The thurifer remains near the thurible throughout the service, and so by the end they have been thoroughly coated by its smoke. It is a scent unlike anything else, and it lingers for hours. Long after the service, on a Sunday afternoon, the church still smells of that deep and sweet and spicy smell. When I would arrive home after church, my family or friends would instantly know what I had been doing, and where I had been. I still smelled like church.
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One of the most frequent refrains in the New Testament are the words: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” On the surface, this may sound to us like an unnecessary and obvious command. What else do ears do but hear, after all? We take for granted that our ears hear, but take a moment and listen. Now listen for the sounds that you had previously filtered out, perhaps the sound of an air conditioner or fan, the sound of people or birds outside, the sound of the refrigerator condenser or dishwasher. Did those sounds begin to exist when you heard them, or did you begin to attend to them with your ears? If you had not done so, would your life have been different?
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There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘anxiety.’ Like all words that get used casually and frequently, there comes a point when we need to redraw some definitions. Anxiety is a word that likely comes from a very old word meaning “to choke.” It describes the sensation of having one’s breath cut off–and the panic that results from the sensation. In more recent use, anxiety refers to a clinical psychological diagnosis referring to a spectrum of nervous conditions arising from a spectrum of causes ranging from heredity to traumatic experience. In popular use, it is often used as a synonym for ‘worry,’ when concern for the uncertain outcome of an event becomes distracting to the point of interrupting our lives.
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What did we see? Holy Week knows some of the most visually-engaging and emblematic moments of the Church year. One of the iconic sights of Holy Week comes with the Easter Vigil: the lighting and procession of the Paschal candle. It is right to begin our mystagogy with this sight. As the Psalmist writes, “In Your light will we see light.” It is by this light that we begin to see everything else.
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One of the great gifts of being a priest is being able to have frequent, good conversations with children in the parish. Their questions are my favorite because they come from an unpretentious—and often unrelenting—sense of curiosity. But one must be cautious. Their occasional and developmentally appropriate tendency to pepper adults with questions proves disarming until, all of the sudden, they ask something so central to the human heart and the life of faith that we can only be halted. For those who’ve been given the privilege of teaching children, our role is always to be ready for these moments. They can and do have the potential to make a life-long impact and much depends on what we are prepared to say when the opportunity arrives.
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In the past, I’ve written that healthy shame will turn toxic unless acted upon and held in health by a power beyond itself. Individuals and communities–including churches–will repeat cycles of toxic shame until someone intervenes. I have seen in pastoral conversations many attempts to ‘manage’ the voice of shame by negating it. We do this either through ignoring it or by trying to persuade ourselves that shame can tell us nothing and is merely a figment of a general atmospheric moralism. But no matter how boldly we shout I am not ashamed! we still are.
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It sometimes surprises new practitioners of Lenten disciplines when they do the math and find that there are not forty but forty-six days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. How do we account for the additional days? It is then that they learn of Sunday as a blessed relaxation of the Fast in observance of our weekly remembrance of the Lord’s Day of Resurrection. The Lenten Sunday puts a point on what is true of every Sunday: it is both a looking back and a looking forward. It is a perpetual memorial of Easter until Christ returns to raise and judge the quick and the dead.
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Like all real and good things that take practice, prayer doesn’t always come easily. In fact, as we grow in prayer, we can expect to have seasons where it is downright difficult to pray. There are a lot of reasons for this. When the newness of a habit begins to wear off and we settle into a pattern, we begin to experience new challenges to our disciplines of prayer. It is important for us to remember that difficulties in prayer are not necessarily a sign we are doing something wrong. In fact, experiencing difficulty in prayer can be a sign that we are doing exactly what we need to do. Here are some of the common difficulties that face a person who is learning to pray:
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My sourdough starter, Xeno, turns ten this year. Short for xenophilius or, roughly, ‘the one who loves the stranger,’ he has helped us to create food both sweet and savory to host anyone who comes to our house, to provide a gift for friends and family in seasons both festive and mournful. Xeno has sired many starters over the years, and the last I checked is now officially a grand-starter with his composition of yeast and lacto-bacilii replicating as we speak in mason jars all over Southern California.
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One of my most formative educational experiences came in the first weeks of my first class as an undergraduate in the English Department. The impassive professor of my British Literature survey called on me to define the term ‘romantic.’ I offered a vague, listless response, which revealed nothing but that I had not adequately prepared for our seminar that day. With a stern gaze through thick glasses he stared at me and declared, “Butler, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
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In his Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis tells the story of a young boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb who, through habitual self interest and a careless fixation with a dead dragon’s hoard of gold, becomes a dragon himself. When the dragon-boy encounters the Christ-figure of the novel, the great lion Aslan, Eustace is informed that in order to become ‘un-dragoned,’ he will have to wash off the dragon skin in a nearby well. Eustace sets to work, and begins to scrub layer after layer off of himself, diminishing his dragonish stature until he reaches one final, intractable layer of dragon-skin that scrubbing cannot remove.
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This year we said goodbye to a brother priest in our diocese. After he reposed in the Lord, his widow sent a box to the cathedral containing some of his belongings—vestments, a chalice and paten, and some books. Among these items, I unpacked a prayer rope that had clearly been in use for many years. Its outer threads revealed the effects of friction as the knots were passed through the fingers with each Jesus Prayer. His prayer rope had become threadbare through love and prayerful use. Far from reducing its value, though, these marks of use made it all the more special: it had known a prayerful priest over many years.
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One of the gifts of good liturgy is that we do not have to question it every time we approach it. Good liturgy is elegant, challenging, and familiar; it draws us out of ourselves without fear of harm. From time to time, however, it is good to ask why we do what we do in order that we might remember that there are reasons for what we do, that we are able to articulate those reasons, and so that the faithful might have greater confidence in the soundness of the liturgy and thus more willing to submit themselves to it.
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Let’s return to that seminal prayer by St. Anthony: “Lord, I want to be saved, but these thoughts will not leave me alone. What shall I do in my distress? How can I be saved?” I imagine that we have each asked that question in our struggle to be quiet, stable, attentive and prayerful. We have perhaps felt where there are soft targets in our hearts and minds for the logismoi to invade. We have perhaps found prayer elusive. We might be asking ourselves along with St. Anthony: “how can I be saved?”
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Cultures of optimization have been prevalent since the industrial revolution, but what distinguishes this current one is that it demands women to not just appear more perfect but actually to change themselves mentally and physically to meet an unattainable standard. I remember a mentor pointing out to me that the ‘it girl’ ideal shifted like a pendulum every decade from at least the 1890s onward in order to maximize consumer energy and disincentivize wardrobes that could be retained and bestowed between generations. This meant that each new decade one might find themselves more or less within reach of the cultural norm. By the 2000s, though, the use of digital and surgical technology enabled the creation of an appearance that no one could actually possess, and which made everyone inadequate.
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In our last post, we concluded that acedia or sloth is much more than the stereotype of the lazybones. Evagrius notes that “acedia is a simultaneous, long-lasting movement of anger and desire, whereby the former is angry with what is at hand, while the latter yearns for what is not present.” As the modern monastic writer Gabriel Bunge elaborates: “Everything available to it is hateful. Everything unavailable is desirable.” Where there is anger that things are the way they are and there is an indefinite desire for something else, whatever that may be. Acedia is a restlessness that manifests in a refusal to commit to one place or purpose. In the meantime, acedia makes us lose our taste for what is significant and what is insignificant as we fail again and again to discern between demands for our attention.
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