To better integrate my blog with the SJEC Iowa website and Facebook page, I am "crossing over" to Word Press.
You will find all past and new theological opinings at the new blog address, which is http://nealobstat.wordpress.com/
Register there to receive email notifications of new blog posts. Or visit the SJEC Iowa website and link to my blog from there. Or 'Like' SJEC Iowa on Facebook and read my blog there.
I look forward to continuing my conversations with you.
Pax,
Tom Neal
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Return. . .
I have not died, or gone into seclusion, or fled Des Moines or the Church! I have just been lost in a sea of learning the last month, blessed be God, though I am now steeling my psyche for return to regular work and kids’ new school year and the general panoply of life’s wondrous daily demands.
So, if this is good news to you, I am glad to say I will write again soon.
If it is bad news, be forewarned!
So, if this is good news to you, I am glad to say I will write again soon.
If it is bad news, be forewarned!
Saturday, July 23, 2011
O Man, Remember Who You Are
Remember?
I thought I would risk boring any readers that might exist out there with an extended reflection on a lecture I offered this week on ‘liturgical anamnesis’, which was itself inspired by the penetrating work of Jerome Hall.
It offered me an astounding variety of insights into the liturgy, memory and such.
I will post it in installments as I write up my lecture notes (which I spoke free form, so I need to write them out, now).
Just Do It
A preface: anamnesis, which means something like “remembrance”, is the Greek word used ((Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24-25) to render Jesus’ extraordinary interpolation of the Passover liturgical texts at the Last Supper: “This is my body…this the cup of my blood…do this in remembrance (ἀνάμνησιν) of me.” I say ‘render’ since we assume Jesus’ original words were in Aramaic or Hebrew, and not in Greek.
Exploring the Corners of My Mind
So what is this ‘memory’ all about? I set on an exploration, with Hall as my thinking companion, that was more than a mere Biblical exegesis of a few texts.
Vast amounts of ancient, medieval and modern ink have soaked into paper in service to exploring the question of memory, especially as it relates to growth in the Christian life. This is one of my favorite examples of such scholarship.
Ensouled Brains
Memory, in the human person, is a complex reality that reflects the complexity of our identity as embodied souls. The Christian tradition affirms that cognitive memory, like its sister faculties of intellect and will, is a spiritual (and so non-material) reality that reflects our being made in the divine image.
Setting aside the notoriously thorny problem of defining exactly what memory is, we can say here that cognitive memory is the unifying reservoir of all that we come to know. Memory synthesizes knowledge in a manner that constitutes our more-or-less unified sense of identity - who we are as individual persons. The awareness I have of being an I is rooted in memory's unifying power. Memory, therefore, is the ‘soul’ of personal identity. It is also the soul of our capacity to relate to others as a person, and so to love God, self and neighbor.
One need only think of a victim of Alzheimer to realize how devastating to identity and relationships the loss of memory is.
Narrative Memory
I also argued that the essential structuring form of our memory is ‘the story’ – our memory is essentially organized in narrative form.
We think of who we are within the context of story-sequences that unite disparate facts into a coherent, meaningful narratives that invest those fragmented facts with intelligible meaning. Our essential identity is structured around the many ‘stories’ we have taken in, formed and re-formed; and, if we are more-or-less unified persons, we have a central master-narrative of ‘who we are’ by which we judge all other alternate narratives.
If you think of your self as a ‘center of narrative gravity,’ your existence depends on the persistence of that narrative.
Of Blessed Memory
Blessed John Paul II understood this well, and in his book Memory and Identity, he challenged Europe, as it rushes into an ever-increasingly secularized identity, to return to its authentic and unifying memory which was profoundly shaped by the Judeo-Christian narrative. Both he and Pope Benedict have vigorously argued that the power that secularization is exerting globally is gradually - or not so gradually – erasing the memory of nations and cultures and replacing those memories with a new narrative that is suffused with Capitalist tropes like consumerism, materialism, and the postmodern marketplace ethic that Papa B16 famously identified as the ‘dictatorship of relativism’. {Important to note, though, that Benedict has argued secularism need not be so corrosive.}
So memory as identity must be understood not just on the level of individuals, but also on the level of groups - families, communities, nations.
But, in keeping with my fragmented style of thought, I digress.
Re-minding My Kids
This way of thinking of memory, identity and narrative impacts the way parents think of forming our children's identity.
Among the most powerful influences on children’s identity-construction are the stories we tell them; or the stories we allow to be told to them. Stories are ‘told’ to children in many ways, though the most powerful story-telling is the one they live day to day in our home, our church, our school. This is the ‘lived narrative’ that is life itself. This ever-unfolding, lived story is meant to give credence or give lie to the ‘other’ stories they hear/see in books and movies, songs and video games - stories told at the foot of the bed or the floor beneath the TV.
So many competing narratives filling their memories, seeking to shape their identities, especially those narratives that insert themselves into the imagination – movies, video games, TV shows, and especially music. How carefully we must shepherd them through this maize of narratives and insure that the primary stories we wish to form their identity stand out as the most powerful, most true, most compelling and most frequently featured in their exceptionally impressionable worlds.
Critical Toolbox
In addition, parents must labor hard to insure that children are given the age-appropriate tools to critically negotiate the marketplace of narratives out there. The temptation these days is simply to allow culture more or less unfiltered and unfettered access into our children’s minds, memories, imaginations, leaving a generation of young men and women shaped by fragmented or shattered narratives that give birth to their daughters, moral anxiety and spiritual depression.
But I, wholly fragmented along with my generation, digress still further; though you will see it is related to liturgical anamnesis – that great healer of memory, with the power to restore and reconstitute our memories in the unshakable memory of God and of God’s people.
I thought I would risk boring any readers that might exist out there with an extended reflection on a lecture I offered this week on ‘liturgical anamnesis’, which was itself inspired by the penetrating work of Jerome Hall.
It offered me an astounding variety of insights into the liturgy, memory and such.
I will post it in installments as I write up my lecture notes (which I spoke free form, so I need to write them out, now).
Just Do It
A preface: anamnesis, which means something like “remembrance”, is the Greek word used ((Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24-25) to render Jesus’ extraordinary interpolation of the Passover liturgical texts at the Last Supper: “This is my body…this the cup of my blood…do this in remembrance (ἀνάμνησιν) of me.” I say ‘render’ since we assume Jesus’ original words were in Aramaic or Hebrew, and not in Greek.
Exploring the Corners of My Mind
So what is this ‘memory’ all about? I set on an exploration, with Hall as my thinking companion, that was more than a mere Biblical exegesis of a few texts.
Vast amounts of ancient, medieval and modern ink have soaked into paper in service to exploring the question of memory, especially as it relates to growth in the Christian life. This is one of my favorite examples of such scholarship.
Ensouled Brains
Memory, in the human person, is a complex reality that reflects the complexity of our identity as embodied souls. The Christian tradition affirms that cognitive memory, like its sister faculties of intellect and will, is a spiritual (and so non-material) reality that reflects our being made in the divine image.
Setting aside the notoriously thorny problem of defining exactly what memory is, we can say here that cognitive memory is the unifying reservoir of all that we come to know. Memory synthesizes knowledge in a manner that constitutes our more-or-less unified sense of identity - who we are as individual persons. The awareness I have of being an I is rooted in memory's unifying power. Memory, therefore, is the ‘soul’ of personal identity. It is also the soul of our capacity to relate to others as a person, and so to love God, self and neighbor.
One need only think of a victim of Alzheimer to realize how devastating to identity and relationships the loss of memory is.
Narrative Memory
I also argued that the essential structuring form of our memory is ‘the story’ – our memory is essentially organized in narrative form.
We think of who we are within the context of story-sequences that unite disparate facts into a coherent, meaningful narratives that invest those fragmented facts with intelligible meaning. Our essential identity is structured around the many ‘stories’ we have taken in, formed and re-formed; and, if we are more-or-less unified persons, we have a central master-narrative of ‘who we are’ by which we judge all other alternate narratives.
If you think of your self as a ‘center of narrative gravity,’ your existence depends on the persistence of that narrative.
Of Blessed Memory
Blessed John Paul II understood this well, and in his book Memory and Identity, he challenged Europe, as it rushes into an ever-increasingly secularized identity, to return to its authentic and unifying memory which was profoundly shaped by the Judeo-Christian narrative. Both he and Pope Benedict have vigorously argued that the power that secularization is exerting globally is gradually - or not so gradually – erasing the memory of nations and cultures and replacing those memories with a new narrative that is suffused with Capitalist tropes like consumerism, materialism, and the postmodern marketplace ethic that Papa B16 famously identified as the ‘dictatorship of relativism’. {Important to note, though, that Benedict has argued secularism need not be so corrosive.}
So memory as identity must be understood not just on the level of individuals, but also on the level of groups - families, communities, nations.
But, in keeping with my fragmented style of thought, I digress.
Re-minding My Kids
This way of thinking of memory, identity and narrative impacts the way parents think of forming our children's identity.
Among the most powerful influences on children’s identity-construction are the stories we tell them; or the stories we allow to be told to them. Stories are ‘told’ to children in many ways, though the most powerful story-telling is the one they live day to day in our home, our church, our school. This is the ‘lived narrative’ that is life itself. This ever-unfolding, lived story is meant to give credence or give lie to the ‘other’ stories they hear/see in books and movies, songs and video games - stories told at the foot of the bed or the floor beneath the TV.
So many competing narratives filling their memories, seeking to shape their identities, especially those narratives that insert themselves into the imagination – movies, video games, TV shows, and especially music. How carefully we must shepherd them through this maize of narratives and insure that the primary stories we wish to form their identity stand out as the most powerful, most true, most compelling and most frequently featured in their exceptionally impressionable worlds.
Critical Toolbox
In addition, parents must labor hard to insure that children are given the age-appropriate tools to critically negotiate the marketplace of narratives out there. The temptation these days is simply to allow culture more or less unfiltered and unfettered access into our children’s minds, memories, imaginations, leaving a generation of young men and women shaped by fragmented or shattered narratives that give birth to their daughters, moral anxiety and spiritual depression.
But I, wholly fragmented along with my generation, digress still further; though you will see it is related to liturgical anamnesis – that great healer of memory, with the power to restore and reconstitute our memories in the unshakable memory of God and of God’s people.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Culture
Gospel
Today's Gospel is all about discerning the quality of culture vis-à-vis receptivity to the word of Christ - whether that refers to the culture of the heart, of a marriage, a family or a nation. Is it hardened? Is it shallow? Is it choked by the tangles of self-consumed prosperity? Or is it well-cultivated?
Cultivated Culture
Jesus praises cultivated soil, and locates the success of his ministry in those souls that had already done the back-breaking work of splitting up hardened clods and readying the soil for his seedy Gospel.
But what kind of cultivated people do indeed respond well to Jesus? Prostitutes. Tax collectors. Lepers. The general lot of 'sinners.'
These are the cultivated ones?
Humus
Clearly the core cultivated quality of character that Jesus seeks is humility, which Aquinas succinctly defined for us: “Humilitas est veritas.” Humility is truth.
Humility is the capacity to see and accept the truth about oneself, others, God. Humility is the capacity, and the desire, to be taught, corrected, called to greatness. Humility is also the capacity to see this truth: the good of God-and-neighbor is inextricably intertwined with my good. Hence, humility can be said also to be the capacity not so much to *think less of myself* as it is to *think of myself less*.
Self-less. Yes.
Think Zacchaeus after the saving seed enters his wee-little humbled heart: "Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount" (Luke 19:8).
Bettered not embittered
Those who readily responded to Jesus are the ones who have allowed the inevitable blows of life to break up their hardened clods, and who see God not as a pending means of self-promotion but as the mending force of self-less devotion; devotion to the needs of others for the greater glory of that same God.
Religion is not for the betterment of me, but for the betterment of thee by me to the glory of the One in Three.
See?
Today's Gospel is all about discerning the quality of culture vis-à-vis receptivity to the word of Christ - whether that refers to the culture of the heart, of a marriage, a family or a nation. Is it hardened? Is it shallow? Is it choked by the tangles of self-consumed prosperity? Or is it well-cultivated?
Cultivated Culture
Jesus praises cultivated soil, and locates the success of his ministry in those souls that had already done the back-breaking work of splitting up hardened clods and readying the soil for his seedy Gospel.
But what kind of cultivated people do indeed respond well to Jesus? Prostitutes. Tax collectors. Lepers. The general lot of 'sinners.'
These are the cultivated ones?
Humus
Clearly the core cultivated quality of character that Jesus seeks is humility, which Aquinas succinctly defined for us: “Humilitas est veritas.” Humility is truth.
Humility is the capacity to see and accept the truth about oneself, others, God. Humility is the capacity, and the desire, to be taught, corrected, called to greatness. Humility is also the capacity to see this truth: the good of God-and-neighbor is inextricably intertwined with my good. Hence, humility can be said also to be the capacity not so much to *think less of myself* as it is to *think of myself less*.
Self-less. Yes.
Think Zacchaeus after the saving seed enters his wee-little humbled heart: "Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount" (Luke 19:8).
Bettered not embittered
Those who readily responded to Jesus are the ones who have allowed the inevitable blows of life to break up their hardened clods, and who see God not as a pending means of self-promotion but as the mending force of self-less devotion; devotion to the needs of others for the greater glory of that same God.
Religion is not for the betterment of me, but for the betterment of thee by me to the glory of the One in Three.
See?
Friday, July 8, 2011
Corapi
Perfunctory
It seems that in the Catholic world of news and commentary, everyone has something to say about (Fr) John Corapi; and on a day when the liturgy presents us with a Gospel that speaks of sheep and wolves, it seems an opportune time to share a few thoughts.
Myriad
I have innumerable thoughts about this complicated case which has truly become a macabre spectacle, and I will not repeat much of what has already been said; and said better that I could. But let me share a few of my more pressing ideas.
Truth is true
A most basic point: whatever Corapi said in his ministry that was genuine and true and brought about conversions of mind and heart to a Christ-like way of life is still true and good. An ancient dictum runs like this: "if God can speak through Balaam's ass, he can work through the most hardened sinner."
This is what allows me to sleep at night, and why I chose Balaam's ass as my patron saint. (yes, I believe God raised that dead donkey to glory)
Mercy
As Christians, our engagement with this case must be shaped by a fearsome mercy. Mercy, in Christianity and in Judaism, does not overlook wrongdoing but rather seeks to overcome wrongdoing and lead wrongdoers to repentance, reconciliation and restoration. So, whether in word, deed or prayer, our goal should always be to serve as co-workers with God in healing the damage wrought.
Ego
The Corapi case signals the dangers of mixing grace and America's pathological celebrity culture, or, in the felicitous phrase of Thomas Day, of Ego Renewal in ecclesial leadership. Jesus proffered a stinging critique of this lurking danger to his apostles.
Clearly, there are deep structures of disorder (e.g. narcissism) at work in Corapi that transcend mere moral evaluation, but the wild success of someone like him requires a culture that shares the basic features of that disorder.
As an aside, Corapi claimed a spectacular conversion from a life of drugs, promiscuity, greed and narcissism. How important it is for people of faith to not be naïve. Those who experience radical moral conversions to the faith, and those who wish to enlist their witness for the Church, must be highly aware that who they were before the conversion still abides after and will require a lifetime of graced hard labor, radical honesty and structures of sustained accountability to renovate and recreate them in the image of Christ.
S.O.L.T.
That said, I believe that a great and grave burden of responsibility rests with S.O.L.T. for allowing this to go on for as long as it did. Let me allow one of their own members voice this judgment:
Father Sam Medley, webmaster of the Society of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, attributed the scandal to a lack of fidelity to the society’s charism. “This whole Corapi conundrum would have never happened if we would have been faithful to our SOLT Charism of ecclesial teams-communion,” he said.
Father Medley added:
“I was asked years ago by my superiors if John Corapi could come and work in the community life of the media apostolate I was running at the time,” Father Medley recounted. “YES, I cried! Please bring him back to community life! Canon law tells us that no one from a community should live outside for an extended period of time. This would have also meant the regulation of his bank account and other violations would have been remedied. Sadly this didn't happen.”
The Cross
Let me close these brief reflections with a turn toward Corapi's signature theme: the cross. He wrote his dissertation on this: The Cross of Christ in the Magisterium of John Paul II
Many have observed that his present actions, and blogged commentaries on those actions, betray the core of his thesis. Of all times in his priestly life, this would have been the most momentous to live this most-radical of all Christian dogmas: that we are redeemed by means of self-denying obedience, suffering and death.
San Juan de la Cruz
I will part with the words of a dear saint companion of mine, St. John of the Cross, and share here three of his ten counsels to members of his discalced religious order. They are illuminating for us all.
To practice the second counsel, which concerns mortification, and profit by it, you should engrave this truth on your heart. And it is that you have not come to the monastery for any other reason than to be worked and tried in virtue; you are like the stone that must be chiseled and fashioned before being set in the building. Thus you should understand that those who are in the monastery are craftsmen placed there by God to mortify you by working and chiseling at you. Some will chisel with words, telling you what you would rather not hear; others by deed, doing against you what you would rather not endure; others by their temperament, being in their person and in their actions a bother and annoyance to you; and others by their thoughts, neither esteeming nor feeling love for you. You ought to suffer these mortifications and annoyances with inner patience, being silent for love of God and understanding that you did not enter the religious life for any other reason than for others to work you in this way, and so you become worthy of heaven. If this was not your reason for entering the religious state, you should not have done so, but should have remained in the world to seek your comfort, honor, reputation, and ease.
The second counsel is wholly necessary for religious so they may fulfill the obligations of their state and find genuine humility, inward quietude, and joy in the Holy Spirit. If you do not practice this, you will know neither how to be a religious nor even why you came to the religious life. Neither will you know how to seek Christ (but only yourself), or find peace of soul, or avoid sinning and often feeling troubled. Trials will never be lacking in religious life, nor does God want them to be. Since he brings souls there to be proved and purified, like gold, with hammer and the fire [Ecclus. 2:5], it is fitting that they encounter trials and temptations from human beings and from devils, and the fire of anguish and affliction. The religious must undergo these trials and should endeavor to bear them patiently and in conformity to God's will, and not so sustain them that instead of being approved by God in this affliction he be reproved for not having wanted to carry the cross of Christ in patience. Since many religious do not understand that they have entered religious life to carry Christ's cross, they do not get along well with others. At the time of reckoning they will find themselves greatly confused and frustrated.
To practice the third counsel, which concerns the practice of virtue, you should be constant in your religious observance and in obedience without any concern for the world, but only for God. In order to achieve this and avoid being deceived, you should never set your eyes on the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the work at hand as a motive for doing it or failing to do it, but on doing it for God. Thus you must undertake all things, agreeable or disagreeable, for the sole purpose of pleasing God through them.
It seems that in the Catholic world of news and commentary, everyone has something to say about (Fr) John Corapi; and on a day when the liturgy presents us with a Gospel that speaks of sheep and wolves, it seems an opportune time to share a few thoughts.
Myriad
I have innumerable thoughts about this complicated case which has truly become a macabre spectacle, and I will not repeat much of what has already been said; and said better that I could. But let me share a few of my more pressing ideas.
Truth is true
A most basic point: whatever Corapi said in his ministry that was genuine and true and brought about conversions of mind and heart to a Christ-like way of life is still true and good. An ancient dictum runs like this: "if God can speak through Balaam's ass, he can work through the most hardened sinner."
This is what allows me to sleep at night, and why I chose Balaam's ass as my patron saint. (yes, I believe God raised that dead donkey to glory)
Mercy
As Christians, our engagement with this case must be shaped by a fearsome mercy. Mercy, in Christianity and in Judaism, does not overlook wrongdoing but rather seeks to overcome wrongdoing and lead wrongdoers to repentance, reconciliation and restoration. So, whether in word, deed or prayer, our goal should always be to serve as co-workers with God in healing the damage wrought.
Ego
The Corapi case signals the dangers of mixing grace and America's pathological celebrity culture, or, in the felicitous phrase of Thomas Day, of Ego Renewal in ecclesial leadership. Jesus proffered a stinging critique of this lurking danger to his apostles.
Clearly, there are deep structures of disorder (e.g. narcissism) at work in Corapi that transcend mere moral evaluation, but the wild success of someone like him requires a culture that shares the basic features of that disorder.
As an aside, Corapi claimed a spectacular conversion from a life of drugs, promiscuity, greed and narcissism. How important it is for people of faith to not be naïve. Those who experience radical moral conversions to the faith, and those who wish to enlist their witness for the Church, must be highly aware that who they were before the conversion still abides after and will require a lifetime of graced hard labor, radical honesty and structures of sustained accountability to renovate and recreate them in the image of Christ.
S.O.L.T.
That said, I believe that a great and grave burden of responsibility rests with S.O.L.T. for allowing this to go on for as long as it did. Let me allow one of their own members voice this judgment:
Father Sam Medley, webmaster of the Society of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, attributed the scandal to a lack of fidelity to the society’s charism. “This whole Corapi conundrum would have never happened if we would have been faithful to our SOLT Charism of ecclesial teams-communion,” he said.
Father Medley added:
“I was asked years ago by my superiors if John Corapi could come and work in the community life of the media apostolate I was running at the time,” Father Medley recounted. “YES, I cried! Please bring him back to community life! Canon law tells us that no one from a community should live outside for an extended period of time. This would have also meant the regulation of his bank account and other violations would have been remedied. Sadly this didn't happen.”
The Cross
Let me close these brief reflections with a turn toward Corapi's signature theme: the cross. He wrote his dissertation on this: The Cross of Christ in the Magisterium of John Paul II
Many have observed that his present actions, and blogged commentaries on those actions, betray the core of his thesis. Of all times in his priestly life, this would have been the most momentous to live this most-radical of all Christian dogmas: that we are redeemed by means of self-denying obedience, suffering and death.
San Juan de la Cruz
I will part with the words of a dear saint companion of mine, St. John of the Cross, and share here three of his ten counsels to members of his discalced religious order. They are illuminating for us all.
To practice the second counsel, which concerns mortification, and profit by it, you should engrave this truth on your heart. And it is that you have not come to the monastery for any other reason than to be worked and tried in virtue; you are like the stone that must be chiseled and fashioned before being set in the building. Thus you should understand that those who are in the monastery are craftsmen placed there by God to mortify you by working and chiseling at you. Some will chisel with words, telling you what you would rather not hear; others by deed, doing against you what you would rather not endure; others by their temperament, being in their person and in their actions a bother and annoyance to you; and others by their thoughts, neither esteeming nor feeling love for you. You ought to suffer these mortifications and annoyances with inner patience, being silent for love of God and understanding that you did not enter the religious life for any other reason than for others to work you in this way, and so you become worthy of heaven. If this was not your reason for entering the religious state, you should not have done so, but should have remained in the world to seek your comfort, honor, reputation, and ease.
The second counsel is wholly necessary for religious so they may fulfill the obligations of their state and find genuine humility, inward quietude, and joy in the Holy Spirit. If you do not practice this, you will know neither how to be a religious nor even why you came to the religious life. Neither will you know how to seek Christ (but only yourself), or find peace of soul, or avoid sinning and often feeling troubled. Trials will never be lacking in religious life, nor does God want them to be. Since he brings souls there to be proved and purified, like gold, with hammer and the fire [Ecclus. 2:5], it is fitting that they encounter trials and temptations from human beings and from devils, and the fire of anguish and affliction. The religious must undergo these trials and should endeavor to bear them patiently and in conformity to God's will, and not so sustain them that instead of being approved by God in this affliction he be reproved for not having wanted to carry the cross of Christ in patience. Since many religious do not understand that they have entered religious life to carry Christ's cross, they do not get along well with others. At the time of reckoning they will find themselves greatly confused and frustrated.
To practice the third counsel, which concerns the practice of virtue, you should be constant in your religious observance and in obedience without any concern for the world, but only for God. In order to achieve this and avoid being deceived, you should never set your eyes on the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the work at hand as a motive for doing it or failing to do it, but on doing it for God. Thus you must undertake all things, agreeable or disagreeable, for the sole purpose of pleasing God through them.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Menagerie of musings
Summer
I love summer. It's a time for vacations. And if you ever wondered where vacations came from, read about it! We can thank the Methodists and physicians in particular for its U.S. form, but we have the Greeks and the Jews to thank in particular for the consecration of leisure as essential to being human.
Interlude
Seemingly unrelated to theology is my recent obsession with the Iowa-esque dance-song, Interlude, by Attack Attack.
I love dance, though I am, as my kids would say, a "Fail" when it comes to artful dancing. So, imagine when I crank this song early in the a.m. at home and start at it, my feet thundering on the floor in graceless thuds.
Good aerobics, good cardio-vascular, good Mass preparation.
One of the reasons I love dance is for its sheer uselessness. Oh, I realize that it has psycho-somatic benefits. But, just like liturgy, it courts the spontaneity and wonder of unproductive 'play'. Play: a sheer joy and celebration of existence, where freedom can lead imagination and thought unfettered into a choreographed creativity and exploration within the vast expanses of the true and the good and the beautiful. In play the dramatic nature of existence - with its joy and sorrow, laughter and lament, violence and gentleness, labor and rest, virtue and vice - is rehearsed and performed in playful abandon.
Play is re-creation, as it participates in the sheer just-because act of God who created the cosmos ex nihilo out of the unfettered freedom of sheer joy and love; and re-deemed that same cosmos out of that same sheer-motive.
David totally got this liturgical aspect of dance, to Michal's chagrin. The Son of David, who stripped himself of glory when he entered the Ark of the Covenant, was greeted by the dance of the Baptist in his mother's womb.
But at Mass we need not stick dance moves into the ritual - the ritual is already highly stylized and crafted as a choreographed dance.
The Eritreans really understand this - they have grace-full rubrics that make clerics poetry-in-motion. Same with the Orthodox Dance of Isaiah, done at weddings and baptisms.
And we Latin Rite Catholics can dance our rubrics and rituals well if we know how to play before the Lord. As an AME pastor said to me once after he attended the Easter Vigil: "You Catholics got all the moves, you just gotta loosen up!"
Whew
All that from Interlude.
Dance!
I love summer. It's a time for vacations. And if you ever wondered where vacations came from, read about it! We can thank the Methodists and physicians in particular for its U.S. form, but we have the Greeks and the Jews to thank in particular for the consecration of leisure as essential to being human.
Interlude
Seemingly unrelated to theology is my recent obsession with the Iowa-esque dance-song, Interlude, by Attack Attack.
I love dance, though I am, as my kids would say, a "Fail" when it comes to artful dancing. So, imagine when I crank this song early in the a.m. at home and start at it, my feet thundering on the floor in graceless thuds.
Good aerobics, good cardio-vascular, good Mass preparation.
One of the reasons I love dance is for its sheer uselessness. Oh, I realize that it has psycho-somatic benefits. But, just like liturgy, it courts the spontaneity and wonder of unproductive 'play'. Play: a sheer joy and celebration of existence, where freedom can lead imagination and thought unfettered into a choreographed creativity and exploration within the vast expanses of the true and the good and the beautiful. In play the dramatic nature of existence - with its joy and sorrow, laughter and lament, violence and gentleness, labor and rest, virtue and vice - is rehearsed and performed in playful abandon.
Play is re-creation, as it participates in the sheer just-because act of God who created the cosmos ex nihilo out of the unfettered freedom of sheer joy and love; and re-deemed that same cosmos out of that same sheer-motive.
David totally got this liturgical aspect of dance, to Michal's chagrin. The Son of David, who stripped himself of glory when he entered the Ark of the Covenant, was greeted by the dance of the Baptist in his mother's womb.
But at Mass we need not stick dance moves into the ritual - the ritual is already highly stylized and crafted as a choreographed dance.
The Eritreans really understand this - they have grace-full rubrics that make clerics poetry-in-motion. Same with the Orthodox Dance of Isaiah, done at weddings and baptisms.
And we Latin Rite Catholics can dance our rubrics and rituals well if we know how to play before the Lord. As an AME pastor said to me once after he attended the Easter Vigil: "You Catholics got all the moves, you just gotta loosen up!"
Whew
All that from Interlude.
Dance!
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