Work In Progress

I might be working on Sunday’s sermon, for which I do have the germ of an idea — but instead, I’m sketching the preface to the published version of the Winslow lectures and ruminating about my presentation to the Ekklesia Project in a couple of weeks.

Relative to the latter, I find myself (that’s for Debra and the Seabury writing group) musing about the ideological implications of the first three commandments. For those who don’t have them memorized, those go roughly as follows:

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage.
You shall have no other gods but me.

You shall not make for yourself any idol.

You shall not invoke with malice the Name of the Lord your God. (BCP)

or

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. (NRSV Ex 20:2-7; cf. also Dt 5:6-11)

I’m working on the notion that the first commandment asserts God’s unique priority over all other considerations; in the context of a resurgent sense of Empire, that unique priority refuses all compromise with any nation’s claims to historic, or economic, or theological privilege. (I’m intrigued that at this point, God does not claim unique existence — “As for all the gods of the nations, they are but idols” (BCP, Ps 96:5); rather, the First Commandment simply insists that all other rivals be subordinated to God’s authority.) The Second Commandment then insists on God’s aniconicity, the extent to which God’s people must not affix their allegiance to any specific (tangible, visible) representation of God. That which is sacred can’t be figured in a way that captures the divine nature (so that our representations themselves can never be objects of worship). And the Third Commandment warns that we may not use God; whereas one might plausibly reason that knowledge of the Divine Name gave us a kind of leverage, a power-with God if not a power-over God, the commandment stipulates that we invoke God at our own peril. Even God’s name, the uniquely fitting alphabetic/phonetic representation of God, comes to us not as a tool to be used, but only as a means of recognizing that greater truth, greater promise, by which we order our sublunary efforts to orient ourselves toward the sole source and end of all that is, and of all that should be.

For about forty minutes. That’s what I’m thinking right now.

Curious Consumer

I’m thinking about portable digital audio recording. Not the “sneak-it-into-a-Stones-concert kind,” nor the voice-memo kind, but the kind suitable for recording a lecture, or an interview, or a chapter of a Creative-Commons-licensed book. I would have thought that such devices were relatively inexpensive and common, but my cursory overview of the market suggests an abysmal gap between utterly casual memo machines (I can’t see one of them without thinking of Michael Keaton in Night Shift) and semi-pro music-recording devices.

The most appealing in-between choice would be a MiniDisc recorder, but it looks as though Sony has made it so difficult to transfer data back and forth that it’s not worth the expense of the MiniDisc technology. Am I missing something here?

Welcome, Baby Delaina and Mother Susie

Congratulations to Anna and Clifton Healy on the birth of their new daughter Delaina (on the anniversary of Anna’s late brother Delane’s birth). Three cheers to Delaina, Anna, and Clifton — and a special extra cheer for big sister Sofie.

Congratulations also to dear friend Susie, on her ordination to the priesthood. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, but I hear you were surrounded by friends and supporters. Prayers for you and your ministry, and for your clergy spouse Luke!

Three Named Sources

From the treeware media, three columns called to my attention. First, Kevin called my attention to a column in the Telegraph, one that might have been titled “No Theology Please, We’re Anglicans.” Even though I’m a vocational theologian who winces at the author’s suggestion that he daydreams past “the concern for Jesus, for the Church’s mission, the affirmation of doctrine,“ and that he likes his religion privatized, I think the columnist hits something just right. A large part of church-going, of caring about the church, lies in this: people are drawn to the church’s inchoate expression of something shared, something deep and true, something so powerfully right that it need not bluster and threaten to make its point. That truth comes explicit in the language of familiar hymns and traditional liturgy — such that well-intentioned efforts to spruce up those timeworn formulas risk losing exactly that which attracts many people to church in the first place. That’s not simply hidebound narrow-minded conservatism; rather, it’s a genuine affirmation of a faith less ephemeral, less topical, less contemporaneous than the liturgical or musical catch of the day. Yes, absolutely, I advocate liturgical change (there’s no need, really, since liturgical change will happen whether anyone likes the idea or not); but yes, absolutely, it’s a much more delicate operation than most sponsors of liturgical change admit — in part, I suspect, because there are more people who want to write new liturgies (in their own words!) than there are people with the gifts to revise respectfully, elegantly, and inconspicuously.

Anyway, if church leaders were to begin by appreciating and encouraging people’s inclination to come to church out of loyalty and happy habit, and work from there to help them see the deeper dimensions of their words and actions, I would expect a stronger practice of evangelism. Indeed, this points, I suspect, to the tragic flaw of the strong “traditionalist” current in Anglicanism. Whereas their great strength lies in exactly their concern to preserve the precious liturgical and theological endangered species of church life, they endeavor so to do with a forcefulness that’s out-of-keeping with the spiritual calm that the tradition’s liturgies bespeak (whereas the church modernizers affect the tradition’s serenity even if they’re promulgating prosaic, didactic petitions to a Liberal Democrat of a deity).

Speaking of Democrats, Bob Wyatt asks what I think of an op-ed in the Sun-Times that points out how unlikely it is for Democrats to prosper in the rhetorical economy that rewards Karl “Frog March?” Rove for ascribing manifestly false motives to Sen. Durbin and his comrades, whereas Sen. Durbin speculated (manifestly soundly) that most of his listeners would not readily believe that U.S. interrogators were capable of the inhumanity exemplified in Guantanamo. What do I think? I think that the present partisan environment pits the fearful (led by the duplicitous) against the cautious (led by the compromised). For the time being, I anticipate only the rival demagogueries of toadies and equivocators, a disheartening spectacle all around. (I should say that the interview with Sen. Hagel in today’s NYT Magazine, registration required, sorry, suggested a bracing alternative on the Republican side of this set-to.)

Finally, I appreciated a motif latent in Judith Maltby’s column in the Guardian. Maltby laments the Church of England’s unwillingness to call women to the episcopacy; she asks, “Can anyone reasonably believe that if the selection of bishops was based purely on ability, we would, at present, have an all-male college of bishops, or that only men would sit as spiritual peers in the House of Lords?” Now, the traditional argument includes a premise that Maltby conceals, namely that the “ability” in question constitutively includes gender as a qualification — so indeed (the argument runs), the present bishops possess an ability that able ordained women lack. I don’t assent to that premise, of course, but it’s an element of the case.

But the point that especially caught my eye was Maltby’s next paragraph: “the Christian must always be ill at ease with arguments based on ‘merit’ in this way. At the end of the day, ordained ministry is not about how qualified or able a person is, though that is no excuse for slipshod practices in the professional work of the clergy.” Though this is not the main point of her column, she strikes a glancing blow at the neuralgic funnybone of the church’s predicament. In the name of inclusiveness and grace, the church has developed a lingering indifference to excellence. Until the church learns how to encourage excellence without reinforcing elitism, we can look forward mostly to a painfully protracted series of task forces, committee meetings, partisan salvos, huffy defensivenesses, and overall tawdry decline. One doubts that this is a mark of the indwelling Spirit.

Memento

Doc’s pages in memorial to Susan Camusi offer a compelling witness to why we might wish we had known Susan and how we would miss her; to the Web’s capacities for memoriousness (I keep telling churches that they need to pick up this particular clue phone); and to Doc’s gentle, affectionate heart. Doc illustrates what it might have meant to have a friend such as Susan, and that in turn shows us what a blessing it would be to have such a friend as he.

Recommendation




Mommie

Originally uploaded by AKMA.

I encourage everyone to rush and download ArtRage, the free natural-media paint program from Ambient Design. One never knows how long a generous company will prolong its generosity, and ArtRage offers a variety of top-notch tools for the unbeatable price of naught. (I was hoping Pippa would like it as much as it turns out that she does!)

My only desideratum would be a slight tweak of the trace tool (which Pippa used in painting this portrait of my beloved). In its present iteration, the trace tool reproduces across its whole width and stroke the color it finds at its starting point. It would be truly niftily handy if one could use the paint tools to apply stroke and paper texture, but have the color change with the color of the underlying photo (I believe Painter does this, or used to). But zowie, this is a very slick tool.


Aha!

It took a while, and then I forgot to look online, but if you click here, you will see the Christian Century’s version of my post on whether clergy should wear distinctive clothes. Of course, this is just a convenience for you, since most of you deluged your local bookseller for copies of the print edition.

Behind the Scenes in the Artist’s Studio

It’s no secret that I’m very enthusiastic about Pippa’s painting. As much as she has impressed me in the past, though, she continues to surprise me in various ways.

A while back, Pippa worked on a very large canvas that Margaret and I picked up on sale; that canvas and the tempera paints we bought for her really sparked her current productivity. She would spend hours down in the basement, listening to NPR and toiling at a three-by-four foot canvas of a pond in the woods. After weeks of work, though, Pippa lost interest in that piece (page, work, substance, text, material, post, truc) and moved on to smaller canvases, and to oil paint. She disliked the way that tempera cracked when dry, and she felt frustrated at the way the composition worked (or didn’t).

So a few days ago, I asked if I should wash the tempera off the big canvas so that she could have at it again, for a different composition, with different paints. She thought about it for a while, considered the costs and benefits, and agreed that it made sense. Today I hauled the monster out into the back yard with the hose, and started spraying. Should be easy, right? Tempera, washes right off?

First, I was astounded at what the washing-off process revealed. Layer after layer of underpainting: the near-solid green background of the forest trees yielded to a marvelous patchwork of leaves of distinct hues; the large rock in the foreground showed alternating layers of black, white, and gray; the lily pads disintegrated from solid green pads to blossoming lilies, to white-struck-with-black, back to green; the black water of the pond revealed a sky blue patch. And — being Pippa — she had painted the edges of the canvas as well, not simply in continuity with the first layer of color, but layer after layer, treating the edges as integral aspects of the whole.

After forty minutes of scouring spray, I still face a canvas with a green upper half, a gray lower half, and a vast patch of white paint in the foreground. I’ve only been able to get three or four layers of paint off. Maybe later in the afternoon I’ll have at it again, to scrub away the inadvertent Rothko into a more nearly blank field for Pippa’s next venture.