Today PJ our interim was talking about John the Baptizer’s question to Jesus, “Are you the One or should we wait for another?” He said John must have been expecting the Military Messiah, who would assemble an army and deliver us from our oppressors.
I fear the US in Iraq is precisely this False Messiah.
I am reading the book with this title about the recently discovered Gospel of Judas. The authors are Elaine Pagels and Karen King, both good scholars and reliable. This Gospel appears to have been written to oppose the martyrdom theology of the ealrly Church. It severely and angrily condemns those who advocate accepting martyrdom for their faith. It describes them as advocating and doing human sacrifice of adults and children. The Gospel of Judas, and some other early writings as well, advocate a view in which the body is lost and the God within survives and rises. There is no resurrection of the body.
Pagels describes these works as showing the conflicts and quarrels in the early Church. This reminds me that the history of the church is a history of conflicts and quarrels. The present conflicts in the Anglican Communion are nothing new and nothing different. As then, so now.
I also can see that the longings and hopes expressed and the questions raised by the “heretics” are nothing new. They are longings and questions we are still dealling with. We call them “new age” religions these days. The language about the god with in and the inner search for god are much the same. Again, as then, so now.
Pagels also says the the views of the “orthodox” were chosen to support episcopal hegemony. I would like to take a somewhat gentler view, given that what we have is that episcopal hegemony.
Pagels says:
Leaders like Irenaeus devoted decades of their lives to extablishing the structures of reed, canon, clergy, beleiving that the movement’s survival depended on them–and in some ways they may have been right, for there are limits to how many different views any group can accomodate, perhaps especially in times of trouble. But the recently discovered texts show us what was lsot when they consolidated these institutions and silenced so many early christian voices.
The question of “how many different views any group can accomodate” is precisely the question that lies before us in the Anglican Communion in these days.
All in all, worthwhile reading. I may need to go find some of the other writings from Nag Hammadi to read.
Sunday before last, at the adult ed I just listened, but it was mostly didactic anyway. Last Sunday there was more discussion and I was able to join in. I served as a complement to Fr Joe’s teaching, interjecting comments and contributions. I said my usual lain and simple stuff. Since the sessions were about the Trinity, simplicity was a good thing. 
Anyway I let my light shine.
And it was well received. Several people came to me and thanked me and praised my contributions. Fr Joe thanked me too; it was clear he valued my contributions. It was a little like teamwork. But this was the last adult ed of the season. So that was the end of that for now.
So I am feeling impatient to move ahead. Next Sunday is the parish picnic. I will see if I can form some social relationships. I did put on a temporary name tag last Sunday. I also conversed with Nancy the Deacon. I told her much of my story and let on that I am a priest. Joe actually said that to the adult ed group last Sunday too. So I guess I am out of that closet.
I am also impatient to move ahead as a priest. I really should find opportunities to do spiritual direction. It’s one of my best skills and my holiest. I mean that in the sense that i learn and grow in the spirit and in a certain holiness in doing it. I am not sure that my apartment is fit to have guests. the only really comfortable furniture is in the bedroom. I don’t use the rest of the house, or at least the living room, that much. A relationship with a parish or center where I could use a room would be better. But it needs to be in a place I can get to without a car.
I should also connect with the diocese. I guess I really should write a letter to my Bishop, with a copy to the local Bishop. OK, get to work on that, quick smart.
I didn’t sleep well last night. I had a long dream about a dessert festival in which I ate small bits of a large number of sweet dishes, most of them chocolate. I was awakened by florid indigestion. At least it didn’t raise my blood sugar.
The principle, that religion is something we do rather then something we think or believe, raises another question for me, the difference between act and intention. Our acts result in what may not have been intended. “The helping hand strikes again.” This is true in systemic as well as individual instances; indeed I suspect it inheres right at the junction of the two. We all have good intentions for the world and its wellbeing, but collectively we are trashing our world. I am thinking not only of our physical environment, where it is now pretty obvious, but of the moral and spiritual environment. Advertising and the media look to me to have seriously degraded our moral environment. They use sex and greed to sell their product, and we become so inured to it that we stop noticing what it does.
We are also led to believe in our intentions and not look at the results of our acts. We believe in it when we “make nice,” what I call pollyannafication. All will be well if we intend well. This is a bamboozlement laid on us by our culture and its values. If religion is what we do, then maybe we are what we do. We need to be looking at the results and using them to critique our culture and its values. Repentance for our part in the depredations should form a part in this, and amendment of life as well.
What happens to our prayer in the midst of this culture? There are all the appeals to what St Augustine called our concupiscence. But what I notice is the noise. I ride the bus to work every day and the MARTA buses now have televisions. This is very distracting. Mostly I am trying to read and it invades my consciousness. God knows what it would be like to try to pray. And then there are the other people who are equally noisy. Lots of loud talk. And people on their cell phones. I call them yappies, people who need to be talking all the time in order to maintain self-existence.
The noise most affects the most fundamental prayer.
[what is prayer at depth?
[science and prayer
[intellect and study in prayer]
The church thing is going well. My ride is vanishing for two weeks but I have made a discovery. One of the priests talked last Sunday at announcement time about the adult discussion group that takes place during Sunday School before the 11 am Eucharist. So there is adult ed.
I am continuing to experience relief from depression. It was clearly an important thing for me to find my way to worship again. I am reminded that religion is something we do much more that something we think of believe. We practice religion.
Years ago I was told that William Temple said that Christianity is the most materialistic of religions. So true. Sacraments with material means, bread and wine, water, oil, and physical touch. I needed to get to church, really needed it, for my survival as a person, as God’s creature.
I have experienced some good lightening of mood. I am feeling more energetic and happy. I think getting to go to church has done this. Last Sunday I really felt like a participant. My prayer in the Eucharist was where it should be. Now I need to find a way to meet people. I am wondering if and when adult ed might happen. there doesn’t seem to be a coffee hour after the 11 o clock. there is a space of time between the 8.30 and the 11. Sunday School happens then. so I wonder what the adults do. I will have to ask.
At the moment I am less then my best. My sciatica started up again yesterday. I am hobbling about a bit but relatively ok except when sitting and trying to shift my position. But I am not much more depressed by it.
I have just started reading _Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy_ by Barbara Ehrenreich. The introduction really speaks of our Western rational squashing of the ecstatic, from the views of anthropologists and psychologists and psychoanalysts. I have some experience of the ecstatic from my rock days, especially with the Grateful Dead. I also remember going to the festival at the local Greek church in St Louis. I wound up drinking a some beer and getting into the famous Greek line dance, a la Zorba the Greek. It went on for hours, til very early in the morning. I drank a huge amount of beer, but being in August I sweated it all right back out. I was not sick or much hung over the next day. And it all seemed to just keep happening, perhaps best thought of as flow. And I found energy I didn’t know I had. Nor at any point did I feel really drunk, just pleasantly conscious. Makes me wonder how much we have lost. The book will inform me in detail.
April 9, 2007: Easter Monday
Well I am hooked up with a church again. I went to Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil at my local parish. I had visited there some while back and found it felt unwelcoming. there has been a complete change and turn around. All new clergy, including an Interim. And someone I knew in the Diocese of Newark, though I think he doesn’t much remember me.
I guess I should feel ecstatic to have made the connection, but actually I have been feeling a bit let down. Inevitable with so much hanging on this. I am not out to many people as a priest. What’s the point so far. What I should do is write to the Bishop of NC with a copy to the local Bishop, making myself available somehow.
Nevertheless, it does feel good to be back in the church again, so right. And this is a church I can actually walk to, a 45 minute walk. I did it last Friday and Saturday, and got a ride home with the priest I knew in New Jersey. On Sundays I have a ride to and from.
The Church of England is the established church. This is a formal arrangement, political and cultural. I suspect there is informal establishment as well. Look at the history of the US as a “Christian nation,” and at the idea of “Christendom.” This informal establishment is cultural but not political. I remember the story from my old home town of new president of a major local industry being of a different denomination than the previous president, and all the major executives switching from the old president’s church to the new one.
So I suspect there are two kind of disestablishment, formal and informal. we are seeing the disestablishment of the cultural establishment. I suspect that such a move of executives would not happen today. Church is just not that important any more. The theocons, religious conservatives, are working to undo this, to effect a political ideology of Christian establishment in the political and cultural realms. On the opposite side we hear the idea of the “end of Christendom” greeted with various degrees of welcome, some gleeful and some grudging.
I am not sure where I stand on this. The idea of a Christian culture is pretty tempting. On the other hand, it is unrealistic in the world I can see coming into being.