Another Look: Church Year Spirituality

(From Nov. 2010 and updated)

Tomorrow is the first Lord’s Day in the Church’s Liturgical Year. On Sunday, Christians who follow this calendar will begin a new year of living in the Gospel with the commencement of Advent.

The diagram on the right gives an overview of the annual Church calendar.

  • Advent is the season when we prepare for Christ’s coming. (4 weeks)
  • Christmastide is the season when we celebrate Christ’s incarnation. (12 days)
  • In Epiphany, we remember how Christ made God’s glory known to the world. (up to 9 weeks)
  • The Lenten season leads us to the Cross, the climactic event in Holy Week, which concludes Lent. (40 days plus Sundays)
  • Eastertide (the Great 50 Days) celebrates Christ’s resurrection, new life, and his ascension to glory. It concludes on the 50th day, Pentecost, the day of the Spirit’s outpouring.
  • The Season after Pentecost (or Trinity, or Ordinary Time) is the time of the church, when by the Spirit we live out the life of the Gospel in community and in the world. (up to 29 weeks)

I don’t know why so many Christian groups think they need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to “discipleship programs.” This time-tested annual pattern for the life of individual believers and the Church together that is focused on Christ, organized around the Gospel, and grounded in God’s grace, is sheer genius. It is simple enough for a child. It offers enough opportunities for creativity and flexibility that it need never grow old. Each year offers a wonderful template for learning to walk with Christ more deeply in the Gospel which brings us faith, hope, and love.

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Saturday Ramblings 12.1.12

December? Did I hear the calendar turn to December? What year? You’re kidding me. It’s already December of this year? My oh my. Where has this year gone? If you are new to these pages, each week here at the iMonastery we grab the broom and clean up the leftovers, gleanings we were unable to get to during the week. And just because it’s December, don’t settle in for a long winter’s nap just yet. We have a lot of stories to discuss today. So buckle up … it’s time to ramble.

Where to begin? Honestly, I cannot make stuff like this up. Stuff like what? Well, there apparently is a vampire on the loose in a village in Serbia. Townspeople are encouraged to stock up on garlic. Really. That’s the kind of week it’s been.

And I’m not the only one who has noticed. I have received many stories from our fellow iMonks this week, like this from Randy Thompson about the sea in Australia turning “blood red,” turning tourists away. Could a plague of frogs be next? (And keep your Frenchmen jokes to yourselves, iMonks…)

Or brianthedad who came across this unique way one Ohio church is attempting to attract men to its services. God and guns, alive and well in my home state. What Would Jesus Shoot indeed …

And we haven’t even gotten to the weird stuff yet. I guess there is a TV show called Two And A Half Men. I’ve never watched it, and will die a happy man if I can keep that streak going. This week, one of the stars—the “half a man”—said the show is “filth” and encouraged others not to watch it. Seems young Angus Jones is now a Christian, and doesn’t feel it’s right to be a part of a show that is filled with sexual innuendo. In an interview with Christianity Today, he refers to himself as a “paid hypocrite.” CNN asks how many of us perform jobs that go against our beliefs. Good question.

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The Common Teaching of Holy Church

Today is the last of our series on Julian of Norwich. Damaris and Martha have walked us through Amy Frykholm’s book about Dame Julian, as well as exploring themes that Julian introduced six hundred years ago. I hope you’ve enjoyed these discussions this week. JD

And yet in all this time, from the beginning to the end, I had two manner of beholdings.  The one was endless continuant love, with secureness of keeping, and blissful salvation,— for of this was all the Shewing.  The other was of the common teaching of Holy Church, in which I was afore informed and grounded — and with all my will having in use and understanding.  And the beholding of this went not from me: for by the Shewing I was not stirred nor led therefrom in no manner of point, but I had therein teaching to love it and find it good: whereby I might, by the help of our Lord and His grace, increase and rise to more heavenly knowing and higher loving. (Julian of Norwich)

In Amy Frykholm’s contemplative biography, she makes a great point of Julian being a woman, writing in English, at that particular time.  Julian of Norwich’s “Revelations of Divine Love” is thought to be the first published work written in English and by a woman, so it is important.  But for Frykholm, it is not important merely for being the first such work that we have any record of; she deems that Julian was standing in opposition to the official Church of her time –  she refers to the “extraordinary personal risk” Julian was running, writing on theological matters for the laity while being a layperson – a laywoman, moreover.

And I can see why Frykholm would think that; the 14th century was a time of great upheaval both in England and in the wider continent of Europe.  Firstly, in 1347, the Black Death (bubonic plague) appeared in Europe.  The first wave lasted from 1347-50 and one estimate by a chronicler of the time was that a third of the population of Europe died – this would have been some twenty million deaths.  Nobody knows for sure how many really died.

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The Church Of England, Women Bishops, NT Wright & Complementarians

Mike Bell sent me a link yesterday to a blog written by Scott Lencke, an American serving as pastor of a church in Brussels, Belgium. The particular post Mike wanted me to read was one he felt should be shared with all iMonks. I agreed, and Scott graciously gave his permission to share it here. Read this carefully, then comment.  JD

I know I am a little late to the game (as I’ve been both busy and ill) but a week ago today, the Church of England voted to not allow women to function in the role of bishop within their church setting. Allowing women vicars (pastors) is ok. Women bishops, not so much. At least not yet, they say.

In response to the voted decision, famed Anglican theologian and former Anglican bishop, Tom Wright, shared some of his thoughts, which you can read in full here. Wright is in favour of allowing women bishops. But, suffice it to say, he said this is nothing about ‘progress’ in the 21st century. He is convinced it is about getting back to the Bible and one specific and important event to which the Bible testifies – the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Wright articulates it this way:

All Christian ministry begins with the announcement that Jesus has been raised from the dead…Part of the point of the new creation launched at Easter was the transformation of roles and vocations: from Jews-only to worldwide, from monoglot to multilingual (think of Pentecost), and from male-only leadership to male and female together.

Of course, there was some backlash from a few complementarian evangelicals, which would argue against women in leadership (this is in contradistinction to egalitarians who would allow for women in leadership, the view to which I personally hold). In particular, we have Denny Burk’s thoughts here and Doug Wilson’s thoughts times two, here and here. And I was interested to read Gerald Bray’s thoughts as a Facebook comment to Justin Taylor.

What is interesting to note is that most of these complementarian pastors and theologians have missed the main point of Tom Wright’s article. Yes, he does make a side comment about 1 Timothy 2 (the ever-debated passage). He also notes three important women in Scripture: Mary Magdalene (the first to see the risen Christ), Junia (most likely a woman apostle mentioned in Rom 16:7) and Phoebe (a leading minister in Cenchreae who read Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, Rom 16:1). But how much can you say in an article of about 850 words?

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Tis Easier To Give Than Receive

I am not a Bible scholar. No one is ever going to ask me to be on a Bible translation team. I don’t read or understand biblical Greek. I have written books, but none even close to being considered “academic.” But I do want to offer my interpretation of Acts 20:35.

The traditional rendering of this verse, from the King James Version, is

I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.

Updating it a bit, we read the same passage from the Good News Translation as

I have shown you in all things that by working hard in this way we must help the weak, remembering the words that the Lord Jesus himself said, ‘There is more happiness in giving than in receiving.’

I would like to offer this rendering of Jesus’ words, based on my personal experience.

“It is easier to give than to receive.”

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Julian Of Norwich: Grounded and Rooted in Love

Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball.  I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be?  And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.  I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness].  And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it.  And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.

In this Little Thing I saw three properties.  The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it.

This is one of the famous images from Julian’s writings, the vision of the smallness of all of creation.  Now, one argument some atheists use is that they can’t believe in the God of the Bible because it and he are too small; now that science has revealed to us the vastness of the universe, the notion that a transcendent entity would care particularly about the doings of some beings on a dust-mote of a world that is utterly insignificant in the scale of things is ridiculous, and the legends of a tribal god who protects his own particular people are just that – the legends of a tribal deity.  In this kind of presentation, it was easy for people ‘back then’ to believe because they had no idea of the real size or importance of things; they all (mediaevals included) believed in a flat earth beneath a dome of sky that was the only thing there was, so naturally they believed the creator deity was intimately involved with it.  The corollary of this argument is that the wonders and marvels of the vast, infinite universe revealed to us by science are more than enough to enthral and fascinate the seeking mind, and no deities need apply.

As C.S. Lewis discusses in his “The Discarded Image”, that’s not necessarily so.  Educated people of the mediaeval world knew the earth was round, had a good idea of geometry, and were perfectly aware that the earth was small in comparison to the stars, while the distances between the earth and the stars were computed to be vast by their standards (an example from the “South English Legendary” says that if you travelled 40 miles per day, you would not reach the stars in 8000 years, a distance of at least 116 million miles).  So Julian was probably as familiar as most people of her time with the notion of the celestial spheres, which is why she would have had a shrewd idea of the relative size of the earth and the heavens.  Note that she says “all that is”, that is, the entire visible creation – this includes the starry heavens as well as the earth beneath.  And it is not some huge, impressive array that a god would naturally be interested in, as our forebears are assumed to have conceived of their place in the universe – it’s a small thing, only as big as a nut, that looks like it would fall apart.

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Julian’s Divine Revelations

As mentioned, we know very little about Dame Julian.  We don’t know if she was, as the saying goes, “maid, wife or widow”.  We don’t even know what date she entered her anchorhold, or what were the circumstances that led her to make this choice.  Frykholm has an imaginative reconstruction of Julian’s life, a proposal that she had a circle of support in other devout women and a spiritual director in the friar or “religious” that she mentions as being present in her sickroom, but we have no idea what her life was like.  Was she like St. Catherine of Sienna, an unmarried younger daughter living with her mother?  Or was she a wife and mother who was bereaved in one of the periodic bouts of plague that swept through England?  We don’t know.  What, then, can we say about Julian and her life?  What we know of her, we know from her writings.  First, she wrote down her experiences soon after having them in a version known as the “Short Text”, preserved in a compendium of devotional writings from 1413 when she was mentioned as still being alive, and secondly, the “Long Text” which she wrote fifteen or twenty years later.  This “Long Text” is the basis for what is now called “The Revelations of Divine Love in Sixteen Showings”.

We know that she decided – at some point – to become an anchoress; that is, to be someone set apart from secular life and totally devoted to prayer and adoration while still acting as a spiritual advisor for the lay people of his or her community.  Anchorites could be men or women, but the majority of them were women – laywomen who had chosen not to join a convent but instead had devoted themselves to living in a small house beside the church, which they would never leave again.  Some of them even had the door bricked up, so doubtless this is the source of the trope in Gothic novels of the 18th century of the “nun walled up alive in the convent dungeon and left to die” and the ancestor of the ever-popular horror fiction and movie “skeleton or mummified body found walled up in the basement”. Continue reading “Julian’s Divine Revelations”

The Three Desires of Julian of Norwich

When Julian was a young girl, she expressed to God three desires:

The first was minde of his passion;

The second was bodily sickness in youth;

The third was to have of God’s gift three wounds.

In other words, she wanted to understand and always remember Christ’s passion.  She wanted to come close to the door of death while still young enough to profit from what she might see through it.  And she wanted to participate in Jesus’ sufferings through her own wounds.

This is as far from the prosperity gospel as it’s possible to get.  When we move from the extreme of the prosperity gospel to the comfortable center of modern Christianity, we can imagine praying to be spared from suffering or for strength in suffering; but not many of us ask God to wound us and bring us to the brink of death.

Should we?  Perhaps Julian’s prayer is an example of medieval extremism on the opposite end of the spectrum to the prosperity gospel, while balanced Christians should aim for the sane middle ground.  Her seeming fascination with mortality and illness may be a neurotic reaction to living through the Black Death.  But I don’t think that’s the case, because she’s not alone in her embrace of suffering.  The saints throughout the centuries have been not just willing but avid to suffer with Christ and on his behalf.  And when their prayers are granted, they like Julian pass on to us a message of joy and grace.

I don’t pray for suffering.  My most heartfelt pleas are to avoid it, and my most thankful prayers are for my physical comforts.  Am I missing something?

What do you think?

The Constant Seeker: Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich was an English contemplative Christian who lived during what Barbara Tuchman has called “the calamitous fourteenth century.”  A small child when the Black Death first devastated her home city of Norwich in eastern England, she experienced several recurrences of the epidemic during her lifetime.  This was the time of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France as well as the disgraceful episodes in the history of the papacy called the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Papal Schism.  With only a few exceptions, most notably St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget of Sweden, women throughout Europe were quiet and unlettered.  Julian is an enigmatic character, not greatly learned and yet the first woman (and one of the first people) to write in Middle English instead of scholarly Latin or courtly French.  How she learned to write we don’t know, but why she wrote we do know:  she wanted to communicate to “even” Christians (common Christians, her fellows) the visions that God had given to her beginning in her thirtieth year.  Her “Revelations” or “Showings” contain most of what we know about her as a person, and that isn’t much.

Given that we know so little, writing a biography of Julian – even a slim one – is a challenging task.  Julian of Norwich:  A Contemplative Biography by Amy Frykholm attempts to paint a portrait of this distant woman, with mixed success.  It was wise of Frykhom to use the term “contemplative” in her title, because in writing this book she is employing a technique beloved of contemplative Christians:  imagination.  A common medieval meditative technique was to take a story from the Bible – Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, for example, or Martha’s conversation with Jesus on the death of Lazarus – and to place oneself through imagination in the time and place of the story.  The meditator would try to make the scene real by picturing the surroundings and actions, the conversation and thoughts, of the people involved.  He or she would know that these embroideries were not factual, but the meditation was a way to warm the affections toward and participate more fully in the life of the Gospel.

Frykholm in the same way takes the scraps of information we have about Julian and embroiders them for us.  She incorporates the little we know with what we understand about medieval life in England and with her expectations of common feelings and experiences we might have with Julian.  The result is in some ways unsatisfying, to me at least.  I would find a dry scholarly tome more trustworthy; a fully developed novel would be more gripping.  If, however, this short biography stimulates anyone to read Julian’s own writing, it will have served a useful function.

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