Light in Midwinter

Introduction at "Light in Midwinter," St. Francis Church, 12 Feb. 2017

We welcome you to this evening’s presentation, Light in Midwinter.  We gather in the cold, as the sun has nearly run its course, to explore and perhaps to meditate a bit on the design of this space where the people of Saint Francis gather to praise God.  Thanks to the generosity of many of you and the skill and hard work of others of you, this church was renovated during the course of last year. 

Our architect and designer, David Tozer, is also among those who gather here to pray week by week.  He will discuss some of the alterations that were made: their inspirations, purposes, and unified effect in filling this space even more completely with light, color and harmony.

It might be helpful, though, to begin our story many centuries before anyone ever broke ground at this place to build a house of God.  Church architecture, more than most crafts, bears the weight of centuries of tradition and symbolic intention.  David is creative, to be sure, but his is a creativity normed by a deep and respectful awareness of what has come before. 

Many of the world’s oldest and most beloved buildings were designed for religious worship.  Part of their enduring power lies in the message behind their use of balance and proportion, light and shadow. 

Ponder: "capable of filling life with new splendor"

“Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the ‘way of beauty’ (via pulchritudinis).  Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendor and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties.  Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus...If, as Saint Augustine says, we love only that which is beautiful, the incarnate Son, as the revelation of infinite beauty, is supremely lovable and draws us to himself with bonds of love.  So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith."

Pope Francis, Evangelium Gaudii, 167.

Ponder: "only Christ suffers in his face"

"[Separation between face and body] is a main point in one of European culture's principal iconographic traditions, the depiction of Christian martyrdom, with its astounding schism between what is inscribed on the face and what is happening to the body.  Those innumerable images of Saint Sebastian, Saint Agatha, Saint Lawrence (but not of Christ himself), with the face demonstrating its effortless superiority to the atrocious things that are being inflicted down there.  Below, the ruins of the body.Above, a person incarnated in the face, who looks away, usually up, not registering pain or fear; already elsewhere.  Only Christ, both Son of Man and Son of God, suffers in his face, has his Passion."

Susan Sontag, qtd, in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion (2015), 81.

Ponder: "the revolution of tenderness"

"For just as some people want a purely spiritual Christ, without flesh and without the cross, they also want their interpersonal relationships provided by sophisticated equipment, by screens and systems which can be turned on and off on command.  Meanwhile, the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence that challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction.  True faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from reconciliation with others.  The Son of God, becoming flesh, summoned us to the revolution of tenderness."

Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 88.

Ponder: "receptivity over activity"

Eudaimonia, then, is not joy. It is not “the summit of integral well-being.” It does not fulfill all desire. For we can intelligibly desire what we cannot intelligibly intend, what we cannot bring about through our agency. One of the ways in which Christianity upended pagan thought was in elevating receptivity over activity; if God is our final good, that good is not, contra standard pagan thought “something we can achieve for ourselves.” God is the ultimate, if imperfectly known, object of desire. What we desire is not simply that we be properly responsive to God in and through our agency. More than this, we desire fellowship with God, a participation in perfected relationship with God, one aspect of which is its fruition: the enjoyment of God. Joy is not simply a matter of objective relations; it is intrinsically experiential, an experience of fellowship, of finding fulfillment in God."
Jennifer Herdt, The Task and Gift of Life

Ponder: praise, the "appointed consummation"

"I think that we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.  It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete until it is expressed.  It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with (the perfect hearer died a year ago).  This is so even when our expressions are inadequate, as of course they usually are."

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

Ponder: Joy in the "middle voice"

"Because it is so supremely intimate to oneself yet also intimately related to an other, joy is a reality best understood in the “middle voice”— that is, a reality that is not purely passive, happening to us, nor simply active, something we do; but partaking of both receptivity and dynamism. Other, equally significant phenomena in Christian life are also framed in the middle voice; the Koine word for feeling compassion is σπλαγχνίζοµαι (splagchnizomai), which is another crucial “action” that is in the middle voice; and a similar thing can be said of ελθών (elthon) “to arrive” or “to come”, which is used for the Prodigal Son’s recognition, amidst the swine, of the reality to which his life has come (of longing for the quality of life of pigs).  Hence human agency may be implicated in the achievement of joy in a slightly less indirect way than it can be in the attainment of happiness, which may be why St. Paul repeatedly exhorts people to be joyful (not happy)—e.g. Philippians 4:4 “Rejoice in the Lord always; and I say again, rejoice.")
Thus understood as an excess rapture, catching us up into a reality in the “middle voice,” joy is a sort of sacramental state: in Creation yet prompted ultimately by something beyond and before Creation, a reality simultaneously speaking of immediacy and transcendence, something done to you yet something you manifest, express, realize and participate in. Here and there, now and not yet, you and another, creation and Creator—joy can serve as a synechdoche of the Christian life as a whole.

Charles Mathewes, "Toward a Theology of Joy" (2014).

Ponder: The Debt that Must be Paid

"The loss of joy has many causes, but chief among them is a certain impotence in us, which derives from of our inability to shed the guilt that plagues us, to discharge the debt we bear (whether we know it or not, and we mostly do not) on our hearts, an incapacity that has arisen precisely because we have become too “advanced” in our power and knowledge to know what to do about the hard and immutable truths regarding sin, guilt, and atonement. It is a cruel but common illusion for us to think that joy is our natural state, and automatically results from the banishment of those alien and inhuman concepts of sin and guilt. Something closer to the opposite is true. Sin is the debt that must be paid. Our moral nature demands it. Which is why only the frank and humble acknowledgment of guilt, and a full embrace of the means available for our cleansing of it, can open us to the possibility of joy. That may be the one possibility that our secular age is unprepared, and unwilling, to admit."

Wilfred McClay, "Some Reflections on Joy, Happiness...and Guilt" (2014)

Ponder: The Unbought Grace of Life

It was with the advent of modernity, and of what we call “the Enlightenment,” that a decisive change comes, creating the idea of happiness that dominates our own time— an idea which envisions happiness as something that all human beings can rightly aspire to, in the here and now, without resort to world-denying asceticism, as a natural expression of their natural human endowment... What does this suggest about joy, and about what makes joy so dramatically different? To begin with, it suggest that joy is something radically different precisely in that it is free from the self-mastering, self-engineered, and self-referential character of happiness. Joy is perhaps a little bit more akin to ecstasy in that regard, that it places a much lesser emphasis on self-consciousness and self-direction, and a greater emphasis on self-yielding, on emptying the ego of its compulsion to direct and manage all things, and reveling in the world as it presents itself to us. It is less about action than passion, less about possessing and more about being possessed, less about human ingenuity and more about what Edmund Burke called “the unbought grace of life.”

Wilfred McClay, "Some Reflections on Joy, Happiness...and Guilt" (2014)

Ponder: "a welcome look away from self-focus"

"This dynamic of being watched, of having a sense of always being on display, is a significant "block" to joy since joy is found in an experience of losing oneself, of being caught up in something bigger, something beyond.  Such experiences of joy do not require the dissolution of consciousness, but they do seem to require a release from self-consciousness.  Joy is a mode of receptivity wherein one is most aware of others, of an Other, even a Giver.  It might include awareness of the "blessings" one enjoys, of a reality that one re-appreciates.  But that recognition and awareness seems linked with a welcome look away from self-focus and narcissistic fixation.  Insofar as our society seems bent on fostering (if not fomenting) the latter, it seems we shouldn't be surprised by the absence of the former, i.e. joy."
James K. A. Smith, Diagnosing our Joylessness: Some Hypotheses," (2014).

The Springtime of the Fast has come

“And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites.”  St. Matthew 6:16

When I was a junior in college, I spent my spring semester studying Greek and Byzantine history in Athens.  One of things about my time that I remember most vividly was the way that the Greeks celebrated this particular season, the days right around the beginning of Lent.  A time of feasting and celebration led up to the beginning of Lent, which comes on a Monday for the Orthodox.  I went to a costume ball, and spent two days in an island village where the natives dressed in goatskins and danced in the streets to celebrate the Carnival.  The wine flowed.  Meat was grilled out in the streets, as the butchers worked to empty their shops before the fast began. 

And then, on Clean Monday, as they call the first day of Lent there, everything changed.  The simple café where we took most of our meals switched over to Lenten fare: fish roe salad, bean soup and big blocks of sesame-seed cake.  On the afternoon of Clean Monday, in the big park by the ruins of the ancient temple of Olympian Zeus, the skies were filled with color.  The Greeks fly kites on the first day of Lent, kites of all shapes and colors, kites shaped like birds and flowers and dragons, some with streamers blazing. 

The beginning of Lent is a kind of celebration for them, because with its disciplines comes an opportunity for the renewal of the soul.  In Lent, one of my Greek friends told me, the fasting helps our souls rise up like the kites, we can soar, free from our sins.  An antiphon from the Orthodox liturgy of the week before Lent expresses the kind of joy in the fast that the kite flying shows so boldly:  “The springtime of the Fast has dawned,” it says, “the flower of repentance has begun to open.”[1]

He is the new wine

“The mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’”  St. John 2:3

A friend of mine made her debut on reality TV a few years ago.  Now, this was in England, where they spend even less on broadcast production than here, and where they seem to find the clergy endlessly fascinating.  She was part of a series that followed newly ordained clergy in her rural diocese in the West Country.

And when the time came for her to officiate at her first wedding, the BBC camera crews were on hand.  She was nervous, of course, and I guess her hands shook a bit, and she would be the first one to say that she’s always been a little clumsy.  She took the rings, as she practiced many times before, and laid them on her open prayer book for the blessing.  And then she dropped them—right through enormous cast iron grate on the chancel floor, down into the belly of a Victorian coal furnace.  I think they ended up calling the local fire department to get them out.  Of the hundreds of hours of film they shot that summer, well you can guess which scene got top billing in that episode.

Costly Devotion

From Covenant, 6 Jan. 2015

Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. — Matthew 2:11

A few years ago I went on retreat at a convent, and, because the guest dining room was being renovated, I was invited to take my meals with the nuns. This was a very traditional community, all black habits and plainsong. For years, the nuns had operated schools, but most of them were older now, and their main ministry was hosting people on retreat. The meals that the nuns were served were among the oddest I have ever eaten: a gathering of opposites. The main dishes were brutally simple: oatmeal, baked fish, bean soup — the food of ascetics. But at the end of the serving table was a little tray with all the recent gifts to the community: exotic jams of many colors, preserved figs, little French cheeses, even a chocolate layer cake.

It’s easy to understand how this worked: an old student would come back to visit her former teacher, and she wanted to bring a little something. But what in the world do you give a nun? Well, something to brighten the common table, a little delight you had enjoyed and wanted to share. And because these nuns were much loved, and probably also because they had a reputation for austerity, lavish, expensive foods arrived to grace every meal.

Christmas Makes People Crazy

“I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  St. Luke 2:10-11

Perhaps you’ve noticed that Christmas makes people crazy.  About a month ago, my neighbor affixed a two foot-tall stuffed antler on either side of her SUV and a red pom-pom the size of a basketball on her front grill.  She’s a very sensible person really, a German, for heaven’s sake, but—you know, it’s Christmas.   Only at Christmas do we get up on ladders to affix dozens of tiny lights to our down spouting.  It’s our only time for drinking out of vessels that look like a deer’s head or an elf’s boot.  Christmas is the only time quite a few of us would be caught dead singing in public.

It’s not just that we become silly at Christmas.  It’s also the season for generosity.  We remember to greet people at Christmas.  We set aside a little gift for so many of those folks that we usually take for granted: the poor fellow who delivers the newspaper so early in the morning, our children’s longsuffering teachers.  I heard a story on the radio last week about an anonymous man who went into two Walmarts in Cleveland and paid for everything on layaway.  He spent over $100,000 buying items from socks to big screen TVs for people struggling to get by.   And of course, he did it at Christmas. The official Walmart spokesman put it this way: “Christmas is a time of year when many people go above and beyond to give back to their neighbors and communities.  When customers anonymously pay off others’ layaway items we’re reminded of the amazing things people will do to support each other.”[1]

Life for Paris

The front page of today’s Washington Post showed a crowd of thousands packed into the plaza in front of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, the congregation for a requiem mass offered for the victims of Friday night’s terrorist attacks.  The Eiffel Tower, notably darkened these days, is surely the structure most deeply associated with the City of Light today. 

But the Cathedral, on the Ile de France, has a much more central and iconic role in the city’s history.  The Kilometre Stone, from which all French roads are measured, is etched in its plaza.  It is probably the world’s most famous example of Gothic architecture, which originated at the nearby Abbey of San Denis and reached its highest point in the Northern French cathedrals of the high Middle Ages.  Notre Dame speaks of an era when France was truly the center of Europe, an age of great monasteries, the world’s finest university, and the home of chivalry’s fairest flower, the saintly King Louis.  The French kings took the Virgin’s emblem, the fleur-de-lys as their standard, and the Cathedral is dedicated to their beloved patroness. 

Rejoicing and Responding: Thoughts on the Sunday Collection

From The WORD of St. Timothy's, Herndon, November 2015.

“Then the people rejoiced because they had given willingly, for with a whole heart they had offered freely to the Lord.” I Chron. 29:9.

I’m so grateful to Bob Kimmel, Sean Kenis and Elaine Horsfield for reflecting on Christian stewardship in such thoughtful and compelling way in the lead up to our Consecration Sunday celebration.  Though as I write the big event hasn’t yet arrived, there really seems to be excitement throughout the congregation about focusing on this part of our spiritual life.  A number of you have come to thank me for talking directly about the importance of giving.  Others have stopped by my office to share why financial support of the church is such an important part of how you practice your faith. 

Opening up the topic in this way has also led to some helpful questions.  One of our head ushers, Jim Wallis, mentioned a concern to me about the fact that people who make their donations electronically don’t have anything to put in the plate on Sunday mornings.  Their gifts, also, he noted aren’t blessed as part of our worship service.  Should we do something about this, he wondered.

The Anchoress in the Loft

 

“Happy are they who dwell in your house! * they will always be praising you.”

Psalm 84:3

“How did we get a recliner and a coffee table up in the Rood Loft?” I asked Father Philip.  “Oh,” he smiled, “I guess you haven’t heard the story about our anchoress.”

But let me back up a bit.  I was a seminarian at the time, and a member of the congregation and an altar server at Pusey House.  Pusey House is technically not a church, but a “house of piety and learning,” and it’s the chaplaincy for high-church Anglican students at Oxford University.  It is housed in a beautiful neo-Gothic chapel, designed by the great Temple Moore, and the chapel is dominated by a life-size rood, a statue of Jesus on the Cross with St. Mary and St. John.  The rood is placed on a large platform called the rood-loft, a kind of balcony that goes across the breadth of the church about ten feet up, dividing the Chancel of the Church from the Nave.   If you’ve spent much time poking around old churches, you will know the Rood Screen, which is a smaller version of this—we had one in my last congregation that was maybe a foot wide.  But the Rood Loft at Pusey House was really a room of its own, 6 or 8 feet wide, with a tall stone parapet on either side.  I had been sent up onto it to retrieve some obscure liturgical implement, and that’s where I discovered the dusty recliner.

The Rood Loft, Father Philip went on to tell me, had been the home of Pusey’s resident anchoress for a few months a decade or so before.  An anchoress is a person called by God to a life of solitary prayer.  It’s a bit like a hermit, but while hermits tend to live in caves in the wilderness, anchorites or anchoresses live inside churches.  Back in the Middle Ages they were quite common, and Julian of Norwich, the beloved mystic quoted by Rev. Mary Thorpe in her sermon last week, was an anchoress in the Church of Saint Julian in Norwich back in the fourteenth century.  These days, they are much rarer.  In fact, as far as I know, the one from Pusey’s Rood Loft may have been the only anchoress in the modern history of the Anglican Communion.

For Meditation: that He should find His joy in our love

From my morning reading, Hughson's With Christ in God.

"It is no wonderful thing that I, knowing what God is, knowing how gracious He has ever been to me, and conscious of the blessings that He is continually preparing for me, should love Him, and thirst for Him, as for the One in whom alone I can find ultimate satisfaction and joy.  But it is a wonder beyond our knowing that He, knowing us, and how we have wounded Him and offended Him, and how we shall again and again do Him the same despite, should love us; and more than this, that He should desire that we love Him; and that He should find His joy in our love, and His grief in our neglect of Him."  (51-52).