Month: March 2005

I had falling culpably behind in posting Pippa’s works to flickr, so this afternoon I uploaded several sketches and more polished pieces. I mentioned to Pippa that some of her sketches look as good as commercial comics, and she said, “Yes, but the trick is drawing the same character again.” We’ll have to pick one of her works to enter in the Seabury Spring Art Show — but which one?

Instead of selecting one of the images I just uploaded, though, I chose this picture of my office in its present condition. On Tuesday, supposedly, I’ll begin moving into the next office over. I’ve been reminded that many people manage their vocational lives just fine without offices at all, so it ill behooves me to complain about the scale of my quarters; still, having a distinctly larger space to work in will help me somewhat, at least, in some of the roles that Seabury expects of me. I’ll show you the new look when I move in.

Thursday evening, when I returned from my Adult Ed gig with Margaret and Pippa, we went through an hour or so of thinking that I’d lost my wallet. As it turned out, Margaret did a third check in the car and found my wallet between the front seats — but for a while, we were girding ourselves to cancel all our credit cards, re-apply for my driver’s license, get a new library card, and manage without all the fortune-cookie slips that I’d been saving.

This morning, we were rousted from bed by a phone call at 8:30 (didn’t someone tell them it’s Saturday, the first day after term?) from MasterCard security, checking to see if we really had charged our dinner at a Mexican restaurant last night. Now, a couple of things: First, we hardly ever charge anything less expensive than four burritos; why did that attract MasterCard’s attention instead of, say, the loads of books we order from Amazon, or the birthday presents Margaret bought this week? They’re protecting us from the massive problem of burrito-based identity theft?

Second, how did they know that I had lost my wallet?

Today was the last day of Epiphany Term here at Seabury. No classes next week, as I finish commenting on papers, grade final exams, move offices, prepare for Easter Term classes, work on upcoming presentations, and enjoy my copious free time with my favorite theology grad student in the whole cosmos.

Now, if N.C. State can hold on to beat Wake, and if (ideally) Duke can win the ACC Tournament, my weekend will have been perfect.

Though Margaret’s flight was considerably delayed — throwing our exquisitely-timed plans off — she arrived safely. I had an Adult Ed gig in Park Ridge, so Pippa and I hopped into the car, drove out to O’Hare to pick Margaret up, and went from there to St. Mary’s.

Margaret and Pip waited in the rector’s office while I sketch the relation of the Nicene Creed to the Bible, and after the presentation we rolled home, delighted to be together again.

Evanston’s getting a spring snowfall this afternoon, a last-gasp-of-winter snowfall that serves mostly to try to cover up the lovely weather we had over the weekend, warm and sunny weather that betokens the inevitable return of spring. This snow doesn’t even look like regular winter snow — it recognizes its belated role, forestalling the rightful advance of the seasons just out of spite and cold-heartedness.

Plus — and this doesn’t affect my outlook on the weather at all — it’s delaying the flight that will bring my sweetheart back home to her family. The snow will be gone in hours, days at most; why must it indulge the puerile temptation to prolong my separation from Margaret?

I was given to understand that the odds of winning a free iTune were one in three, and the odds of winning a free bottle of soda were one in six — but I’ve gotten something like six consecutive “free soda” caps, and only a couple of free tunes since the promotion began.

I don’t want your soda, I want the [more probable] music!

I woke up this morning in the midst of a dream that involved an end-of-year conversation with my first-year students (not this year’s students — they were the anonymous extras provided from Central Casting of the dreamworld). They were adopting a favorite moment from their Early Church History class as the theme for next year’s orientation. It seems that I’d been talking about the controversial ministry of some leader — Gregory of Nazianzus during his Constantinopolitan tenure, perhaps, or John Chrysostom. I described the impact of his ministry on civic life, using a sequence of four vivid nouns: “Riot! Rebellion! Something! Devastation!” [I don’t remember what the third element in the series was, just that there had to be four.] I then noted for the class, “You can expect that sort of response if you dare to work for truth and excellence in the church.”

Evidently the students in the dream had loved the idea of causing trouble by working for truth, so (to my surprise) they had made that their organizing motif. Wish I could remember that third noun — but apart from that it was a pretty gratifying dream.

Pippa and Si have inaugurated a marathon listening session for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by way of preparation for the upcoming Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, and it occurred to me that the Guide makes a plausible analogue to the Wikipedia (if you cut Douglas Adams a little slack for not getting absolutely every detail right). I figured I’d Google the combination, and the first few pages of results suggested (improbably) that I might be the first person to blog that comparison.

Plunging further into the results, though, I discovered that not only had the comparison occurred to somebody else who wrote it up online, but that my forerunner had gone one better by making the connection between the Hitchhiker’s Guide and the Encyclopedia Galactica (on one hand) and the Wikipedia and the print encyclopedias. Well done!

I’ll be preaching Wednesday, assuming I don’t wig out from paper-marking and administrative responsibilities. The readings will be Isaiah 49:8-15, Psalm 145:8-19, and John’s Gospel 5:19-29. At this point I haven’t the foggiest notion what I’ll say, but if something occurs to me, you’ll find out almost as soon as I do.

This morning, I felt a moment of frustration about the attacks some observers launch against the “emergent” church when emergent congregations pick and choose liturgical elements to lend an air of mystery, or to allude to a tradition of worship that congregants self-consciously repudiate, or just because they like this or that.

I’m pretty pronouncedly Anglo-Catholic about the kinds of liturgical expression I’ll support. I’m from the stream of worship-tradition that falls to the left of the upper-case-“O” Orthodox and the ultramontane Roman Catholics, and to the right of most Roman Catholic congregations I’ve visited, and virtually all Protestant congregations. That’s not a claim about quality or authenticity or divine favor — it’s a rough assessment on a spectrum between two poles. It places me in the zone where “being able to make a clear claim about the coherence and continuity-with-tradition” carries immense weight.

But friends — the very liturgical sensibilities that formed me to think the ways I do derive from a retrospective repristination of selected liturgical practices in Victorian England. Likewise the “liturgical movement” of the mid-twentieth century sent liturgical scholars scouring ancient texts to scoop out some prayer or practice that centuries had concealed with dust, polishing them up, and plopping them into contemporary liturgies.

“Continuity” is always a fictive thing — not fictitious, but fictive, something made. When it suits us, a detail from the Gelasian Rite fits right in to our worship. If (on the other hand) a particular detail irritates us, it constitutes a grave departure from the coherence of the tradition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We aren’t just making it up; the way we customarily think about things like liturgy guides us to regard some changes as natural and harmonious, and others as pernicious. Without having an outlook at the start, we couldn’t make judgments at all about “what is coherent” and “what isn’t.”

So, however grouchy I feel when a start-up congregation skims my missal for congenial words and gestures, the Apostle reminds me (charitably, I hope) that “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”

Face of Jesus Seen on Crucifix!

The Rev. Mosely Baskerwithe summoned reporters, photographers, best-selling novelists, and some parishioners to annouce that, in his words, “I suddenly noticed that one of the statues in St. Euphrasia’s Church bore a miraculous resemblance to Jesus — or at least, to Jim Cazeviel. . . .”

He noted that since this astonishing event, he’s observed that many of the windows, sculptural ornaments, and paintings in the church bear an uncanny resemblance to Jesus, too.