Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director in advance of our session for March. 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 —
Not much to report this month — not a whole lot has been happening with me spiritually. I’ve been doing a lot of writing on church history, Lutheran theology, etc., for Sundays@6, the parish book study group that Debi and I moderate, and a Zoom class on church history from the Apostles all the way up to next Sunday’s sermons. It keeps me busy, but it hasn’t left much time for spiritual exercises. However, I did manage to do a lectio divina-style meditation on an alt-country song I found on YouTube. (Call it YouTube-io divina?) I’m kinda pleased with it, and want to do more like it. I’ll link below.
First, some good news (well, as good as it gets when you’re my age). Had a telehealth appointment with my urologist down in St. Louis, the guy who did my radical cystectomy, and he took a look at the CT scan we’ve been worrying about the last couple of months. Upshot was he thought the trouble spot near my ileal conduit was some kind of inflammation, not malignant, so that was a relief. Then at the end of the month I went to the ER for what turned out to be another COPD flareup. (These aren’t part of my daily routine, but they’re not unexpected.) They did another CT scan, and the hot spot in my lungs turned out to be pneumonia. Again, this isn’t the first time I’ve had test results come back and learn, “woo hoo! Glory be! I’ve got pneumonia!” Doctors deal in probabilities rather than certainties, of course, and I have a more rigorous set of CT scans coming up in a couple of weeks. But this came as quite a relief.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately, much of it on the early church, the third- and fourth-century creeds and heresies, and the whole idea of original sin and atonement, that whole Augustinian ball of wax. We got into it in the Zoom class that Debi and I are auditing from our synod (the ELCA Lutheran equivalent of a diocese). I’ll link you to something I posted about St. Anselm, Luther, substitutionary atonement and the Episcopal bishop of Newark, N.J., a popularizer who has written several books trying to update scripture for secular readers. I’ve also been reading Elaine Pagels on the early church and the gnostic heresies.
I’ll link you to what I wrote, but what I got out of all the theologizing is pretty well summed up in a quote I used for an epigraph:
- “God is not a noun, that demands to be defined, God is a verb that invites us to live, to love and to be. — The Right Rev. John Shelby Spong
- https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/02/07/church-history-3/
I had fun writing it, but that’s not always a good sign.
Another bit that I had fun with, and I think turned out pretty well, was my lectio/visio/YouTubeio divina on an alt-country song by Tyler Childers, a musician from eastern Kentucky who has a hard-to-categorize fusion style that blends southern Appalachian folk, gospel, blues and the kind of alternative rock the Grateful Dead played. It’s titled “Way of the Triune God,” and the video incorporates material from a regional arts center called Appalshop in Whitesburg, Ky.
My title, or headline, is “‘Fit me for the builder’s use’ — a lectio divina meditation on an alt-country song by Tyler Childers.” The quote from the headline is in the song, and I explain it, or say what it means to me, here:
- The echoes of the King James Bible remind me of home, and the Great Commission, the call to spread the gospel to all nations, is remindful of the charism I try to live by now as a Dominican associate. (One difference: I try to do it by example, preaching from the pulpit of our daily lives as the saying has it, rather than handing out tracts like the old-time sidewalk preachers did back home in Knoxville.) “Fit me for the builder’s use?” A reference to the stone the builders rejected? Who? Me? I’ll have to think about that.
- https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/02/28/triune-god-lectio-visio/
I like the song, and the idea of fitting myself for the builder’s use appeals to my sense that I ought to be grateful for my gifts, and I ought to put them to work in whatever time I have left. So I figured I’d just follow the steps of lectio and see where they led me. I liked where I wound up, and I want to do it some more on some other songs that have been floating around in my head. Don’t worry: I promise to *not* try it on “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels!”
One last link. It’s to a scratch outline I used in 2020 when I presented a paper on Swedish immigrant church history at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum here in town. About the same time I was in the ER last month, the synodical Zoom classes had us researching Lutheran church history in the US, a topic that was barely touched on in our textbooks. So I got to thinking about the paper in the context of unfinished business — things I might want to fit for the builder’s use, if you will — in whatever time I have left. So I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but I dug up the outline. I’m posting it to my blog for future reference.
And I’ll copy the first part of it below. It pretty well explains — “better than the abstract” as I said at the time — my subject matter and hypothesis. I’m still thinking it through, but I think I might be able to pitch a rewrite in the context of cultural pluralism and white Christian nationalism.
Looking forward to our session Monday.
— Pete
***
UNPACKING THE TITLE: Between the lines, it’s about immigrants from a state church culture in Sweden and how they adapted to freedom of religion and religious diversity in America (RW’s garden)
BUT FIRST – DEFINING TERMS — A TYPE OF ACCULTURATION CALLED CREOLIZATION – (not in the title) – a term from cultural anthropology for blended, or hybrid, cultures that combine old-country and New World elements and “put things together in new ways” (Ulf Hannerz). They like to quote post-colonialist novelist Salman Rushdie, who once said his writing “fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.” I also like to slightly misquote a folklorist named James Leary, who wrote about “polkabilly” bands of the 1930s and 40s — “here reside North Coast creoles.”
INSERT A – Ulf Hannerz and cultural anthropologists The terms are clunky, but they have the advantage of reflecting the complexity of the process better than earlier studies of “Americanization” that tended to assume that immigrants simply shed their Old World cultures and became Americans, when in fact the cultural interaction was, and is, a complex multidirectional process.
In a nutshell, I argue that the Swedes who in 1860 created the Augustana Lutheran Synod headquartered in Rock Island developed such a creolized, or blended, Swedish-American culture. […]
The Swedes had to adapt quickly to American norms, partly because of the competition and partly because they received funding from Congregationalists and Presbyterians in the American Home Missionary Society, whose Calvinist theology demanded what theologians call a gathered community of saints, or of the elect. […] For Swedish Lutherans, you became a member of the church when you were baptized. But the American expectation was that you had to document you first had a conversion experience, i.e. you had been “saved.” The Home Missionary Society made this a condition of helping fund startup congregations. It was a nice, and unusual, ecumenical gesture, but it created problems.
INSERT C — Esbjörn “The Swedes have been members of a State Church,” explained the Rev. Lars Paul Esbjörn of Andover, who received funding from the AHMS, “and the greater number of them have lived in places where the true religion, conversion, and new birth and sanctification are unknown or mentioned with contempt and disdain.”
Esbjörn feared, with some justification, if he tried to enforce the Home Missionary Society’s rule, he would lose members to the Methodists who were actively proselytizing in the area. So after some drama, the Swedes worked out a compromise. As it was finalized in 1853 by Pastor Erland Carlsson of Immanuel Lutheran Church, Chicago, prospective new members from Sweden would be vetted by the pastor and congregational council and then reaffirm their baptismal and confirmation vows and promise to follow church discipline. [And so it went.]
Links and Citations
“Svenska evangeliska forsamlingen i Andover och dess historia, med fyra plancher,” Korsbaneret: kristlig kalendar för 1880 (Chicago: Enander & Bormans, 1879). Google Books https://books.google.com/books?id=gMQSAAAAYAAJ&dq
[Uplinked March 9, 2024]
Ordinary Time 