Not Ladies in Nightgowns

Yesterday was the Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels.  I’ve alluded to this already in the post for St. Michael’s Day and how in the popular imagination angels look something like this.

Apart from anything else, I think this arises as a degradation of the artistic tradition depicting angels carrying souls to Heaven, where the soul is represented as a small, swaddled infant or as childlike in comparison.

Over the centuries, the representation of angels has dwindled down to the sugary imagery we are all too familiar with today.  Then there’s the popular misconceptions, such as that in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” where we get an “apprentice” angel who has to “earn his wings” or the notion that after death, humans acquire wings, harps and halos and spend eternity floating around on clouds.  Even more recently, as in the film “Wings of Desire,” is the idea that angels can ‘fall’ and become human.  Humans do not become angels and angels never were nor never will be human, though they can indeed fall.

Much of this, of course, is a misunderstanding of Scripture: the ever-popular bit from Genesis about the sons of God and the daughters of Men, and all the associated legends about the Grigori and the Nephilim and their offspring, the giants and mighty men of old.  Add to that the Gospel passage where Jesus instructs his disciples about “who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?” by taking a child and telling them “See that you do not despise one of these little ones.  For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven,” then it was all too easy to associate angels and children and let sentiment have free rein.

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iMonk Classic: East Of Eden

Editor’s note: With today being something called “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” (see yesterday’s Saturday Ramblings for more on this), I thought it good to revisit what Michael Spencer had to say about Christians and politics. This essay first appeared in October, 2004, and has been edited for length, and it is still long. But it’s worth reading to the end.

Christians talking about what the Bible says about politics: is there anything scarier? Well, it’s October. Let’s get scary. I want to talk about a Christian and Biblical approach to politics.  I want to suggest what the politics look like out here “east of Eden.”

Remember that phrase? It occurs twice in Genesis. First, in Genesis 3:24, at the conclusion of God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. We hear it again in Genesis 4:16, when Cain is expelled from his home. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

The phrase says more than it says. It represents the entire human condition. We are fallen. All of us, all the time, in every way. But more than that. We are not in Eden any more, and we aren’t going back to Eden. Ever. Nothing can take us back to where we were before sin wrecked our reality. Even when the Kingdom of God arrives in full in history, we are not going back to paradise, but forward into God’s new heaven and new earth.

Everything we do, we now do “east of Eden.” Family life. Marriage. Work. Art. Knowledge. Politics. It is a fundamental fact. An inescapable and inexhaustible reality. Of course, we don’t want to believe it. We nod in agreement when someone says we are sinners. We agree that we are fallen. But give us an opportunity, and we will spend our money on a scheme that promises paradise. Religious shortcuts to heaven. Psychiatric promises to make us happy with a pill. Educational utopianism that believes ignorance can be cured with enough good schools. And of course, the primary prophets of going back to some kind of Eden—politicians.

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The Descent to God

This month, while Chaplain Mike is on sabbatical, Jeff has asked me to provide some Sunday meditations.  I find that daunting.  I’m not a scholar or a preacher, but I’ll give you the best I have.  Ironically, the best I have is other people’s words, but these are words that have taken up residence in my head and heart, that sing in my mind when I can’t find my own words, that fall like rain on dry soil, that give me hope.

For Lotte Bielitz (Written at her request)

By Rainer Maria Rilke

It is hard, the descent to God.  But see:

You’re plying your empty vessels in distraction,

When to be child, girl, women’s suddenly

Enough to give him endless satisfaction.

 

He is the water; you need only mold

The cup out of two hands extended yonder;

And if you kneel as well – why, then he’ll squander,

And pass all your capacity to hold.

 

This poem rings true to me because it expresses the same kind of backwardness or paradox the scriptures do.  God is far above us, yet to find him we descend.  We struggle effortfully to please him when all he wants is us.  We need no vessels to receive the living waters, only hands cupped in prayer; and when we ask him, he’ll pour out all the riches of his love, a good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over.

Fifty Years Ago

By Chaplain Mike

1:46 pm. October 1, 2011.
One of the greatest feats in baseball history was accomplished at 1:46 pm on October 1, 1961, as Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single season record. That’s when Maris walloped his 61st home run at Yankee Stadium in the year’s final regular game. A dramatic race for the record had taken place throughout the season between Maris and teammate Mickey Mantle, who ended the season with 54.

The season did not start well for Maris. He hit .204 in April, with 4 RBI’s and only 1 home run. By that time, Mantle already had 7. A month into the season, on May 16, Mantle was batting .309 with 10 homers and 26 RBI’s, while Maris continued to struggle, hitting a full hundred points lower with only 3 round-trippers.

But at that point, Roger Maris found his timing. He hit 4 home runs in the next 4 games and by the end of May had 12. Then in June, the Yankee star hit 15 homers in less than 3 weeks. In the same month, the team’s ace pitcher Whitey Ford went 8-0, and the team was well on its way to the pennant. Maris found himself ahead of Babe Ruth’s record pace, and 5 in front of his teammate Mantle.

As the “M & M boys” began knocking the ball out of the park with regularity, an increasing number of writers began gathering around their lockers after games. Maris was not comfortable around the press and was portrayed more and more as an arrogant whiner. It did not help him that Mantle was a media darling who would hold court with the press and tell hilarious stories as he recounted his exploits.

In early July, Mickey Mantle caught up with his fellow slugger and thus began a back-and-forth race between them that linked them together in a shared experience that few others could understand. By the All Star game, Maris had surged ahead again, by 4 homers. He was 12 games ahead of Ruth’s pace, while Mantle was just 1 game behind it.

On July 17, both men hit home runs in Baltimore against the Orioles, but they were nullified when the game was rained out before it became official. On that very day, baseball commissioner Ford Frick, self-appointed guardian of Babe Ruth’s record, announced that if Ruth’s record was broken after 154 games (the number of games in a season when Ruth hit 60), then a “distinctive mark” would be placed in the record book to note that 60 home runs was still the true record. Roger Maris was getting accustomed to a lack of respect.

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Saturday Ramblings 10.1.11

October? It’s October already? Spring Training just ended, didn’t it? What happened to my beloved Reds? What? Really? Sigh…ok…welcome to the Cincinnati Reds-less baseball playoffs edition of Saturday Ramblings. Grab your mitt and get ready to ramble.

Oh my. Not only is it the baseball postseason, it is the wackiness known as presidential campaign time. And what goes better with a presidential campaign than the labeling of a candidate as the Antichrist?  Matthew Sutton of the New York Times opines as to why the Antichrist matters in politics in the first place.

And what is the opposite of the Antichrist in politics? Well, God-fearin’ Evangelicals, of course. But just what makes one an Evangelical in politics? Jim Wallis takes a stab at defining just what such an animal looks like.

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Third Quarter Listening Report

Here we are at the end of September already, and it is time to give my reviews of some of the popular music that was released during this third quarter of 2011.

As I say in each of these posts, I don’t have the resources to check out a lot of music, so I generally stick to artists I know or about whom I receive recommendations. I have eclectic tastes and enjoy many different kinds of music, but the reviews here are limited to more popular releases.

This quarter, we have…

Something new that sounds old,
Something that’s more of the same,
Something that’s jumpin’ and blue,
And something so good it’s insane.

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Fullness and a Future

Ordinary Time Bible Study 2011
The Book of Ruth (12, conclusion)

The story of Ruth, Yohanan

All the people who were at the gate and the elders replied, “We are witnesses. May the Lord make the woman who is entering your home like Rachel and Leah, both of whom built up the house of Israel! May you prosper in Ephrathah and become famous in Bethlehem. May your family become like the family of Perez – whom Tamar bore to Judah – through the descendants the Lord gives you by this young woman.”

So Boaz married Ruth and had sexual relations with her. The Lord enabled her to conceive and she gave birth to a son. The village women said to Naomi, “May the Lord be praised because he has not left you without a guardian today! May he become famous in Israel! He will encourage you and provide for you when you are old, for your daughter-in-law, who loves you, has given him birth. She is better to you than seven sons!” Naomi took the child and placed him on her lap; she became his caregiver. The neighbor women named him, saying, “A son has been born to Naomi.” They named him Obed. Now he became the father of Jesse – David’s father!

These are the descendants of Perez: Perez was the father of Hezron, Hezron was the father of Ram, Ram was the father of Amminadab, Amminadab was the father of Nachshon, Nachshon was the father of Salmah, Salmon was the father of Boaz, Boaz was the father of Obed, Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of David.

• Ruth 4:11-22, NetBible

The story of Ruth, Boaz, and Naomi ends with a surprise. Not only does this book give us an exemplary tale of people who show extraordinary love (hesed) toward one another that God providentially uses to overcome adversity, but in the end we discover that this story is also a piece that fits perfectly into a much larger puzzle.

We receive a clue that this is coming when we hear the blessing that the people of Bethlehem pronounce upon Boaz and his bride (4:11-12). They evoke the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel and pray that Ruth will be as fruitful as Rachel and Leah, mothers of the twelve tribes. Furthermore, they point to the line of Judah and express the hope that the family will be like that of Perez, who was born through Tamar. The mention of Judah and Tamar may have caused the audience to reflect on the similarities between that story and what had happened in the case of Ruth. Both women were foreigners who showed unusual courage and took bold initiative to save their family line from extinction. And in the end, both perpetuated the royal seed of Judah.

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My Secret Place

Dear Chaplain Mike,

I am really excited for your sabbatical, though the thought of filling your shoes, even for a month, is rather daunting. I will do my best not to drive away too many readers in your absence. And I am really excited you can spend a week on retreat at once of my favorite places in the world, the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Michael Spencer once told me about a retreat he had taken at the monastery in Kentucky. He didn’t make it through the whole weekend because, he said, the silence became too loud for him. That alone sparked my interest. The first time I visited there was on my way from Ohio back to Oklahoma. I allowed myself an hour to just to walk around. After visiting the bookstore (and sampling some bourbon fudge the monks make there), I thought I’d go and pray in the church for a while. Ha! As if. I sat in an empty sanctuary, with stark white walls and black chairs for lay visitors to sit in, all alone, and felt the crushing weight of God’s presence like never before. I honestly thought it might kill me.

I stayed in there as long as I could–maybe three minutes. I have never felt the power and presence of God as I did there.

I immediately went to sign up for my own retreat, which would not be until several months later. I scheduled myself for Friday thru Sunday, but only made it until Saturday night. The silence just was too loud for me.

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The Feast of Michaelmas

For those of you whose name is Michael (or Michelle), congratulations!  Your patronal feast day is 29th September, the Dedication of St. Michael the Archangel.  This feast also honoured all the other angels as well (under the name of the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels) up to the start of the 17th century when Pope Paul V made the Feast of the Guardian Angels, until then a local celebration, a feast of the Universal Church by adding it to the Roman Calendar to be celebrated on 2nd October.  Everybody knows (everybody does know, right?) the prayer to your Guardian Angel that we all learned as kids: “Angel of God, my Guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide.  Amen.”  Remember, we still have our Guardian Angel, even as adults.  But that’s not the feast we’re talking about here, so let’s leave the Guardian Angels and turn back to the Archangels.  Forgetting all about discussing the Nine Choirs of Angels or the natures and species of angels (though if you really want to know, the Catechism says that “As purely spiritual creatures angels have intelligence and will: they are personal and immortal creatures, surpassing in perfection all visible creatures, as the splendour of their glory bears witness” and the theological study of angels is known as “angelology”, where you can indeed earn a degree in angels).

So, nowadays Michaelmas is the Feast of Ss. Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, Archangels (as represented in these paintings, one from the Western and one from the Eastern traditions).

This bundles in the feastdays of Gabriel (formerly 24th March, the day before the Feast of the Annunciation, which makes sense as he is identified as the angel of the Annunciation) and 24th October for Raphael.  Poor old Uriel is not accepted as an official archangel, or the rest of the traditional seven archangels for the seven days of the week or any named in the Book of Enoch.  The spoilsport Church decided that it would only celebrate those angels mentioned by name in Scripture – which for us includes the Book of Tobit, so that’s how Raphael makes the cut, but Enoch is considered apocrypha – and you thought us RCs weren’t literalists!

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Looking forward to “Sabbath”

If there is no Sabbath — no regular and commanded not-working, not-talking — we soon become totally absorbed in what we are doing and saying, and God’s work is either forgotten or marginalized. When we work we are most god-like, which means that it is in our work that it is easier to develop god-pretensions. Un-sabbathed, our work becomes the entire context in which we define our lives. We lose God-consciousness, God-awareness, sightings of resurrection. We lose the capacity to sing “this is my Father’s world” and end up chirping little self-centred ditties about what we are doing and feeling.

• Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 117

He is so right.

I easily become absorbed in what I am doing, saying, and thinking. I become consumed with my work.

I start to think that my contributions are what make the difference. God gets pushed to the margins, or forgotten altogether. Of course, I seek his help, but I define that in human terms. I think of a “helper” as an assistant, someone I bring in to help me complete my agenda. When the Bible says God is my “Helper,” it means I’m in desperate trouble and need him to rescue me. I have lost my way with regard to his agenda, and he picks me up and sets me back on course. In human terms, helpers may be optional. In God’s terms, without him I’m toast.

Of course God calls me to work. He does not call me to work autonomously. Nor does he call me to work compulsively, frantically. Even Jesus said, “My Father works, and I work,” putting the emphasis where it belongs. I am not God, and my work is but one small part of the picture. My work is a puzzle piece designed to fit just so within the landscape he’s creating. This means I work in partnership with others also — in no way does this all depend on me! It is God who finds my place and the places of those around me. It is God who fits us together to make something more than any of us could make alone. Also, at times the One constructing the puzzle needs to set a piece aside until it becomes apparent just where it fits. Imagine if puzzle pieces were autonomous little creatures running around trying to find their places in the big picture! No, there is a time and a place for my contribution and yours, and his eyes see it, and his hands fit us in properly.

When I am working, caught up in what I am doing, I find it hard to lift up my head and look around. Nose to the grindstone, I am focused on the task at hand. All well and good. But do I appreciate the larger work around me, the full scope of the production, the end product we’re creating? I cannot unless I take time to step back, come out of my little corner of the shop, and look around to take it all in, to remember the company name, mission, and vision, to take pride in the widgets we make and the good they do in the world; to wear the logo enthusiastically. Without that, it’s just time and a paycheck, and I’m livin’ for the weekend.

And so, I await October. Starting Saturday, and then especially in the middle of October when I will step back from everything for a couple of weeks, I’ll be seeking Sabbath. That is to say, I’ll be seeking Jesus as my Sabbath rest by taking an actual, physical and vocational rest.

This is my Father’s world, and I can’t wait to step out of my cubicle to see it.