Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director in advance of our session for February. I’ve been writing these for several years now, primarily in order to help me focus my mind before we talk. It’s not a record or an agenda of our sessions. (Often enough, we start discussing something else and never get back to it.) I archive them to the blog so I can go back later and see what I was thinking about a given topic at the time I posted them.
Hi Sister —
Hope you’ve had a good month — I’ve decided that this year spring started Feb. 1 on St. Brigid’s Day. Anyway, to commemorate the season, here’s my usual note to confirm our Zoom appointment Monday and share what I’ve been up to spiritually since we last met.
Not much to report. I’ve been pretty much in a holding pattern overall, and the same goes for my spiritual journey. I’m still waiting out a bad-to-ambiguous CT scan — apparently the trouble spots were so small, the doctors want them to grow some more so they can have a better look at them. So it’s a waiting game for the next few weeks. But if the docs aren’t running around like it’s a five-alarm fire, I’m not going to get too excited until they do. Physically I’m feeling fine.
In the meantime, Debi and I start back Sunday with our parish book study, reading “The Color of Compromise” by Jemar Tisby. It’s a history of the American churches, mostly mainline Protestant and evangelical, with an eye to their complicity in structural racism, and the book study will take us into May. We’re also continuing to meet with the Dominican associates’ group that’s learning about SDART [the Springfield Dominicans Anti-Racism Team] and anti-racism work in general.
So it keeps me busy, and, more importantly, it keeps me focused on something outside our health issues.
We’ve also started auditing a survey of church history, all 2,000 years of it in six Zoom sessions, sponsored by the Central/Southern Illinois Synod (diocese) of our branch of the Lutheran church. Most of what I’ve written in the past month has been for that course, but I did write a reflection on the story in Mark 9 about the boy whom Jesus healed possession by an unclean spirit — focusing more on the boy’s father and his faith, or lack thereof.
We’re invited to journal our reactions for the church history class, and I’ve been posting them to my blog so I can get back to them later.
But first, the reflection on Mark:
I headlined it “‘I believe … I cannot believe’: A mantra from Luther’s Small Catechism to lead me on when the night is dark.” Link here:
It’s hard to paraphrase. In writing it, I couldn’t decide whether it was going to be lectio divina or an Ignatian contemplation, so it has elements of both. The quote in my title is a paraphrase of Luther’s catechism by Timothy Wingert, a scholar who has written extensively on the Lutheran confessional documents. Luther’s original reads:
I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith […]
Hence the ellipsis in my headline. (Wengert’s paraphrase doesn’t have one, which makes sense in terms of his discussion of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith. But it leads me off into the theological weeds and not where I want to go, which centers on my faith and doubt.) Somehow I segued from Luther and the gospel of Mark to an evangelical Protestant book for cancer patients with a very literal interpretation of the story in Mark, and managed to resolve it all (I hope!) with a meditation on the Irish Jesuits’ website that quotes Cardinal Newman on praying when “the night is dark and I am far from home.” Yay again for the Irish Jesuits! They keep putting things in a way I can understand.
(By now you’re probably thinking, yep, I can see why he didn’t want to paraphrase this stuff! But writing it out helped me think it through.)
Two bits from the church history reflections that might be worth mentioning:
1. From the first week, which I headlined “What do Constantine and the 4th-century Byzantine church councils tell us about the separation of church and state today?” Link here:
One thing I got from rereading about the fourth- and fifth-century Christological debates was a strong reminder of how far removed they are from my reality today. I read about them before, when I was studying for an MA in history. And I formed the opinion then that Christians have mostly debated peripheral matters throughout history. In the 1950s, the hot-button issues were whether you were baptized by sprinkling or total immersion. Or, in my Episcopal church, whether you said the Kyrie in English or the original Greek. (Now it seems to be abortion and same-sex marriage.) Reading our text, an excellent 2-volume Abingdon Press history by Justo L. González titled “The Story of Christianity,” I found very little to change my first reaction to the creeds. I wrote:
When I was a kid, all of this stuff went over my head. When we recited the Nicene Creed in church, I’d cross my fingers when we got to the part about believing in “one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God; Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father.” I didn’t know what any of that meant, and I sure didn’t want to get caught lying about it. Especially in church.
Later, I read about the fourth-century heresies as a history major in college. I still didn’t understand them, but at least I recognized their historical importance. Somewhere along the line, I came across one of the fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers named Gregory of Nyssa. I learned from reading González that he had a lot to do with getting the Nicene Creed into final shape at the Council of Constantinople in 381 (SOC 1:213-14). But I first knew of him from a quote of his about the controversy over the Arian heresy in Constantinople:
The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf [of bread], you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask ‘Is my bath ready?’ the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing.
As much as I liked González, his discussion didn’t get the creeds sorted out in my mind.
2. The second reflection was on the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginnings of the medieval church. I titled it “As Rome fell, a pope fought with Huns, Vandals and Byzantine Christians who had a slightly different version of the creed.” Link here:
The pope I referenced in the headline is Leo I the Great. For all the legends about St. Peter and St. Paul appearing in the sky when he negotiated with Attila the Hun in 452, González’ account made it clear the guy must have been a skilled negotiator in real life. Not only did he convince the Vandals not to burn the city of Rome a few years later, González says he was able to broker a deal on the divinity of Christ at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Negotiating with Attila the Hun was bad enough; getting these guys on the same page must have taken the political skills of a Chicago alderman.
But, again, the Christological debates at Nicaea, Constantinople and Chalcedon still left me perplexed — what were these guys *thinking* about? Reading up on it reminded me of something else I’d seen before — Franciscan author Richard Rohr’s idea of a “Great Comma” in the Apostle’s Creed between “born of the Virgin Mary” and “suffered under Pontius Pilate” that dismisses Jesus’ ministry with a punctuation mark. In a headnote or epigraph to my reflection, I also quoted Rabbi Harold Kushner’s “To Life!: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking,” which makes much the same point about the early Christian church:
At this point, we begin to move from the religion of Jesus (love your neighbor, turn the other cheek, prepare for the End of Days) to the religion about Jesus (he was the Son of God who died to absolve us of our sins). The key figure in this shift was a Jew named Paul, known in Christian tradition as Saint Paul, author of many of the books of the New Testament. […] He brilliantly combined the strenuous moral teachings of the Jewish tradition with familiar elements of pagan religion that had not been part of Jesus’ original message — the leader, born of a divine father and human mother, who dies and comes back to life.
It’s good to read up on the early church, but for myself, I think I’ll stick with Fr. Rohr and Rabbi Kushner.
[Uplinked Feb. 3, 2024]
Ordinary Time 