Metanoia

George Herbert: Prayer

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Of what an easy quick access,

My blessed Lord, art thou! how suddenly

May our requests thine ear invade!

To show that state dislikes not easiness.

If I but lift mine eyes, my suit is made:

Thou canst no more not hear, than thou canst die.

-- George Herbert, "Prayer (2)" in George Herbert: The Complete English Works

Stanley Hauerwas - Life is Sweet When We are in Love

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Loving Lord, where would we be without friends?  We would literally be no place.  Alone in your creation, yet unable to recognize it as creation.  It would be just another lonely place.  But you place us next to one another, and being so placed we are forced to recognize that others exist.  Bodies.  Attraction.  Recognition.  Friendship.  Love.  How wonderful and frightening.  We are not alone.  You created us passionate beings hungry for one another.  You want to make us your friends, and in that doing make us friends of one another and even ourselves.  Life is sweet when we are in love.  Praise you for giving us one another. Amen. -- Stanley Hauerwas in Prayers Plainly Spoken.

Thinking Christianly About War

There continues to be concern about the administration's political will and acumen with respect to the Afghan War. Much of the rhetoric seems to presuppose that the question of handling the war is simply one of pragmatism. Some on the left object to our making war in Afghanistan simply because they believe we ought to devote our resources to domestic projects.  Others on the right criticize the president because they believe the administration is not prosecuting the war with sufficient seriousness to protect essential American geopolitical interests.  But whenever good and patriotic American Christians reflexively embrace pragmatism as our moral framework for thinking about war, we forget the moral compass entrusted to us by virtue of our baptism and run the risk of steering our nation into shoal waters. 

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John Howard Yoder: Reading History Doxologically

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"To read history doxologically means that the criterion most apt for validating a disposition, a decision, an action, is not the predictable success before it but the resurrection behind it, not manipulation but praise. Hope is not a reflex rebounding from defeat but a reflection of theophany."

-- John Howard Yoder, “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical

Jean Vanier: There is a myth about community

 

There is a myth about community, just as there is a myth about marriage.  The myth of marriage is "they lived happily ever after."  The reality of marriage is that it is a place where a man and a woman are called to sacrifice their egos on the altar of their desire to create one body.  Community also means death to ego, in order that people might grow to become one body, truly belonging to each other, not in a closed way but in a mysterious way where each one is growing in inner freedom. 

--Jean Vanier in From Brokenness to Community

George Herbert: How to Behave in Worship

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When we say in our creeds that we believe in the communion of saints, we mean not only that we read Scripture alongside and in conversation with those walked in Christ before us, but also that we are gathered by the Spirit in worship alongside them. In other words, in the mystery of eternal life, Grandma and Grandpa are watching when we worship, and so, too, are our unborn great-great- grandchildren! For that reason, it is helpful from time to time to remember what our forbears would expect of us as they watch us learn together what it means to be the Household of God, the Body of Christ, and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The great Anglican divine, George Herbert, reminds us how to behave when we pray:

[The parson], having often instructed his people how to carry themselves in divine service, exacts of them all possible reverence, by no means enduring either talking or sleeping, or gazing, or leaning, or half-kneeling, or any undutiful behaviour in them, but causing them when they sit, or stand, or kneel, to do all in a straight and steady posture, as attending to what is done in the Church; and every one, man and child, answering aloud both Amen and all other answers which are on the clerk's and people's part to answer, which answers also are to be done not in a huddling or slubbering fashion, gaping, or scratching the head, or spitting even in the midst of the answer, but gently and pausably, thinking what they say, so that while they answer, "As it was in the beginning, etc...." they meditate as they speak, that God hath ever had his people that have glorified him as well as now, and that he shall have so for ever. And the like in other answers. This is that which the Apostle calls a reasonable service (Romans 12), when we speak not as parrots, without reason, or offer up such sacrifices as they did of old, which was of beasts devoid of reason; but when we use our reason, and apply our powers to the service of him that gives them." 

-- George Herbert in The Country Parson, His Character, and Rule of Holy Life

Schooled by the Spirit: How Christians Learn to Think Christianly #5

In the first post of this series, we saw that the epistemic role of the Spirit is at the heart of Christian ethical behavior. But that assertion does not explain how the Spirit forms Christians ethically. In the previous post, we explored the New Testament foundations of our trinitarian doctrine. In this final post, we'll reflect on the theological implications of our claims about how the Spirit forms us.

David Bentley Hart: Changeless Beauty

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Creation, says Gregory [of Nyssa], is a symphonic and rhythmic complication of diversity, of motion and rest, a song praising God, the true, primordial, archetypal music, in which human nature can glimpse itself as in a mirror.  We are music moved to music; finitude is not a condition of violence, a wounding of the universal syncopated by the holocaust of the particular; and so there is no ontological warrant for violence, only a causal one, an aberrant series, born of a perverse desire, turned from the light of the infinite toward nothingness - which determines nothing.  Creation is, as its first word, a partaking in the inexhaustible goodness of God; and its ceaseless flow of light and shadow, constancy and change, mirrors both the "music" of God's ordering words and the incomprehensibility of his changeless nature, while the restless soul, immersed in the spectacle of God's glory, is drawn without break beyond the world to the source of its beauty, to embrace the infinite.

--David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite

Schooled by the Spirit: How Christians Learn to Think Christianly #4

In the last post of this series, we reviewed the Old Testament foundation of our claims about how the Spirit forms us. In this post, we continue remembering the Scriptural foundations of claims about the Spirit by turning to the witness of the New Testament.

The Holy Spirit in the New Testament

Paul and the Evangelists presuppose the portrait of the Spirit we find in the Old Testament.  The subsequent development in pneumatological doctrine that we have inherited results from the early Church’s development of christological, corporate, and eschatological doctrine. In particular, the New Testament emphasizes both the conception of the Spirit as one who equips individuals for special tasks and the more communal conception of the Spirit as one who makes obedience and holiness possible for all members of the family of Abraham by leading them to truth. Especially evident in Luke and Paul is the eschatological dimension. Luke emphasizes the role of the Spirit in bringing about God’s purposes in the world, while Paul emphasizes that the Spirit empowers disciples to anticipate the future fulfillment of God’s purposes in the present and thereby be transformed into members of the resurrection community. John extends this portrait with a conception of a the Spirit who is both immanent and transcendent, the one who causes disciples to recognize and embody truth in their common life as they seek to follow the Way of Christ.

Walter Brueggemann: Against a closed sky....

We pray against a closed sky;

our hopes reduced to auto-suggestion;

our petitions are more habit than hopes;

our intercessions are kindly gestures of well-being.

Sometimes more, many times not,

because your silence and absence,

your indifference and tardiness are glaring among us.

We are drawn to lesser gods,

easier loyalties,

many forms of self-trust,

that do not even fool us....

We pray for new measures of passion,

for fresh waves of resolve,

for courage, energy, and freedom, to be our true selves...

waiting in confidence,

and while waiting, acting our life toward you

 
  your ways of forgiving generosity.

We pray in the name of Jesus who trusted fully, and

who is himself fully worthy of our trust.  Amen

-- Walter Brueggemann, from "Against a Closed Sky" in Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth