What makes us human?

The other day in our Education for Ministry (EfM) group we did one of the exercises known as “common lessons.” The exercise asks each of us to write our own creed by answering a series of questions.

The questions are as you might expect – who is God? Who is Jesus? Who is the Holy Spirit? All rich questions for thought and conversation.

I’ve done this exercise many times before in EfM groups. But there was one question this time around I found most intriguing:

What makes us human?

We had many answers, starting with the obvious: our DNA. But what else makes us human? What connects us as human and makes us different than any other living creature on this planet?

We had many answers.

Is it human intellect? Not all humans have intellect.

Is it technology? Other primates make tools.

Is it language? Chimpanzees and whales have language.

My answer: Humans have story.

A wise sage once said there is no past and there is no future. There is only the present. We give the past and future shape by the story we tell, and how we tell the story.

We certainly have secular stories and call it history. The story of wars, heroes and villians, national myths and traditions. Science itself is story by the selective examination of the facts that science discovers. The fact of the cosmos – the stars and planets and this earth, our island home – is a story.

Quran, 11th century, North Africa
British Museum

Our stories connect us as human because at some level each of us become part of the story.

Human religious traditions are essentially story, whether it is the Hindu saga of many worlds, or Moses leading the exodus out of Egypt, or Muhammad’s prophetic vision, or Jesus Christ dying on the Cross.

Each of the religion tells the story its unique way.

The Christian story is a continuum connecting the people of God to the primal story of creation, to the desolation and redemption of the Jewish people, to the story of Jesus of Nazareth and his Resurrection, and to the people of God who came after living into the hope and promise of salvation.

Baptism is story.

When Christians are baptized they enter into the story and thereby continue the story of salvation into the next generation and beyond.

It is true that there are many things going on in baptism – the initiation into the Church and the outward and visible sign through symbols of water and words of the inward grace of the Holy Spirit present in the person being baptized. All that is true.

Yet there is something more to baptism that makes it completely human: When we are baptized we enter into the great story of salvation history. The ancient story continues onward through us.

It doesn’t matter our age or intellectual capacity to understand because baptism brings us into the story. It doesn’t matter that we fall short, or whether we are a sinner or saint or combination of both. We continue to write this story of baptism the rest of our lives.

It is no accident that Christians use the Apostles’ Creed at baptism. Unlike the Nicene Creed, which is an abstract (and hard to access) statement of the definition of the Trinity, the Apostles’ Creed is a story. It isn’t abstract. Hear the Apostles’ Creed again, and hear it as a story without an ending:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth;
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit
and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

+ + +

This Lent I am offering a special course for adults who have not been baptized or confirmed in the Church. The course, entitled “Journey of Faith,” begins this Sunday at 11:30 am at St. Paul’s, and will continue for seven weeks. All you need to do to get into the class is show up.

Even if you have been baptized or confirmed, the course is a good way to explore your faith, your doubts, and this great story we share together as the people of God. Come ask the hard questions of faith and life and meet fellow sojourners on the path.

For those adults who are interested, the course leads to baptism at the Great Vigil of Easter on April 7 at 7:30 pm. We are also offering baptism for babies and children on the following Sunday April 15, and for information on that please contact our office.

For those who are interested, the course leads to confirmation or reception as an Episcopalian at a special service Wednesday April 18 at 5:30 pm with Bishop Shannon Johnston.

You can still take “Journey of Faith” even if you aren’t interested in receiving any of these sacraments. I hope you will join me beginning this Sunday.

Proclaiming our faith: Earth, land, sacred meals, Resurrection

This religion we practice, this faith we profess, has many angles, many elements, many ways of experiencing it. We tell the biblical story of God’s creation and salvation, and our role in it. We write creeds, prayers and songs. But sometimes there is something so obvious that we might overlook it.

Our religion is also about the land.

The Daily Office readings this week, though somewhat difficult, drive home the point. We hear about the wars of the Maccabees, the visions of John in Revelation, Jesus healing an epileptic, and paying taxes in Capernaum.

The readings have this in common: all are about concrete places with names and descriptions. Heaven is not imagined existing out there, but as becoming a concrete place here, on the Earth's land.

The Bible makes a great deal of fuss about the land: The Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark; the Promised Land and the Valley of the Dry Bones; the Red Sea and the Sea of Galilee; Mount Tabor and Mount Zion; Solomon's Temple and the pools of Bethesda. We hear of real places, like Jerusalem, and places imagined, like the New Jerusalem.

Depiction of Solomon's Temple

People fight over the land, they dream about the land, they lament over lost land, and they celebrate when they win back the land of their ancestors. They build, destroy, and rebuild. They proclaim their faith as they flourish or endure on the land in the real world.

This religion we practice is grounded in the ground itself. It is about concrete things – land, buildings, food on the table and bodies that win battles, or bodies that hurt and die. We talk of religious things that are real and physical.

The biblical faith is many things, but one thing it is not is dualistic. It is not about a second universe existing side by side with ours, or some kind of amorphous spiritual ether. God creates this universe and it cannot exist apart from God.

The religion we practice proclaims the presence of God not as metaphor, but as reality. We may understand that reality through the imagery of metaphor, but that underlines how our understanding is always physical.

The religion we practice proclaims that God exists in every dimension and in every place and time. This tradition we follow always connects itself to real places, whether inside the walls of Jerusalem, or to a monastery in Iona, or the “thin” place of a mountaintop, or in a small country church in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. God exists everywhere, but we feel God’s presence keenly in physical spaces we discover are sacred.

The biblical readings assigned in the Daily Office this week especially underline the physicality of faith.

In the Revelation of John this week, the author is not talking about people being whisked off to a misty heaven in some kind of spiritual rapture. Rather, the author is talking about heaven physically coming to earth (Revelation 21:1-8). God remakes earth, and the new earth – the New Jerusalem – is a place of physical healing and wholeness:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

The biblical faith is the promise of physical divine presence.

Our experience of religion is grounded in the physical. We remember the events of Jesus not just through words, but also through the physicality of a meal: the bread and wine at our Holy Eucharist. Even the words of our remembering have a physicality. The words ring in our ears, jump from the page, fill our minds. We cannot experience or understand this apart from our bodies. We touch the religious experience.

We remember the death of Jesus on the Cross as the real death of a real human being. We remember that his disciples experienced his resurrection not as an idea or a dream, but as physical.

They could touch him, eat meals with him, yet he was completely changed in ways they could not easily describe. Christ was the same, but different, but the same.

Our religion is fully human, and our human way of remembering involves all of our human senses. Our own human physicality – our bodies – become part of our spiritual imagining and awakening.

Medaba mosiac map of
Israel, 6th century

In today’s reading from Revelation 21:9-21, the writer describes the physical presence of angels showing him Jerusalem made new. He describes this vision physically. Holiness is connected to the land and to a real city, Jerusalem. Notice how John describes the renewal of the Holy City in precise gleaming detail:

The angel who talked to me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls. The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width; and he measured the city with his rod, fifteen hundred miles; its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall, one hundred and forty-four cubits by human measurement, which the angel was using. The wall is built of jasper, while the city is pure gold, clear as glass.

The ultimate mystery of our physical bodies is what happens to us after we die. I’ve been much thinking about this lately having lost several dear friends, one after the other. What happened to them? Where are they? Are they still present with us? Can we still touch them?

I have been around death many times, and there is nothing romantic about it. Death is physical, and so is its aftermath.

Our memories of the departed are physical memories even after the image of their face fades. It is not unusual to have a physical reaction when we remember someone we love, or even feel them physically again in odd moments. Our bodies remember the departed, and that is a clue about how we really experience the divine.

Yet our culture has given into an idea that our bodies don’t count when we die. They are “empty vessels” and the real us is now unencumbered by the constraints of a corrupted body. We use the euphemism “passed away,” as if the dead have flown away to somewhere else.

But that is not the faith proclaimed by the ancient Jews, or Jesus, or Paul and the early Christians, or the cloud saints who came after.

Seder plate

The ancients proclaimed their outrageous belief in the Resurrection as a physical reality. Our bodies die, become dust of the earth, and we are dead. But God makes us new – resurrected – living in God’s eternal time with bodies that are made whole and healed. We don't fade away.

The ancients proclaimed we are embodied as who we are, yet as Paul says, “changed in the twinkling of an eye.” We are still us, yet resurrected, made new. We have not “passed away,” but we have “passed on” to eternity.

That is why Jews say the Kaddish for a year after someone has died. The Kaddish it is a prayer praising God’s glory – not a lament. And for the same reason, we proclaim these joyful words at the end of an Episcopalian funeral:

You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.

Yom Kippur and our own atonement as Christians

Tonight at sundown begins Yom Kippur, the holiest of days on the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur is the day of atonement, the day to ask God's forgiveness and to forgive all those who have wronged us.

Christian concepts of Lent and atonement come directly from these ancient Jewish theological concepts, and some might argue (as I would) that we ought to understand these Hebrew concepts to better understand our own.

To do that, I would also argue, requires our own atonement for the terrible atrocities committed by Christianity and Christians against Judaism and Jews for two millennia. The Nazis were not Christians, but there is a direct line from the anti-semitism of popes and Martin Luther to the genocide of the Holocaust. Christian bigotry made it possible.

Below is a commentary posted today by Stanley Abramovitch on CNN's website. Mr. Abramovitch was born in Poland, and he lost his mother and two brothers in the Holocaust. He worked for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee for 63 years before retiring in 2008 and he continues to consult for the organization. Mr. Abramovitch is seated second from the right in the photo above. This is a tough read, but I commend it to you today:

My Faith: Yom Kippur 1945, in a camp for Holocaust survivors

By Stanley Abramovitch, Special to CNN

In October 1945, I spent Yom Kippur in the displaced persons camp in Landsberg in Bavaria, Germany, as the representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), working with displaced persons.

The liberated Jews who had been imprisoned in the nearby Dachau concentration camp, as well as those who had been forced to work in ammunition and other factories in Bavaria, were gathered into Landsberg and nearby Feldafing camps. Many Jews from other concentration camps had been forced-marched to this part of Germany, where the U.S. Army liberated them.

In Landsberg there was a spacious German Army barracks confiscated by the U.S. Army, in which some of the liberated Jews were housed. Basic food and medical care were provided by the Army, supplemented by assistance from JDC.

The Jews elected a committee which assumed responsibility for the internal administration of the camp. Synagogues were organized for the high holidays by different groups, often on the basis of the origin of the participants. There was a synagogue for Jews from Poland, another for Hungarian and Lithuanian Jews.

Smaller groups - Hasidic Jews or those from Marmarosh, an area on the border of Rumania spilling into Hungary and Slovakia - had their own places of prayer.

I attended morning services in the synagogue for Polish Jews. The prayers were charged with emotion, very moving, very painful. The tears shed came from the depths of their hearts, mourning those who were lost, murdered in the camps. It was rare to find among those present individuals whose siblings or more distant family members had survived.

The older generation was almost not there. They were the first victims, since they lacked the physical strength to withstand the horrors of the camps. Few children survived. They, too, succumbed quickly. The survivors prayed, remembered, wept and found a little comfort in those tears.

After morning prayers, I decided to visit other synagogues and spend some time with other groups. I left the synagogue and walked across the half empty streets. There were many people who remained in the street and refused to attend services. They were angry at G-d.

Among them were formerly religious Jews who could not accept the apparent indifference of G-d to the suffering; the torture, and the tragedy they had both witnessed and experienced in their homes and in the camps.

They could not reconcile their former beliefs and convictions of an All-Merciful, Almighty Divine Being, with the catastrophe that had struck their communities. They would not pray. When they heard the recitation of the Kaddish, the special prayer of mourners expressing praise of the Lord, they reacted angrily that G-d did not deserve the Kaddish.

They were broken in spirit. They could not reconcile recent events to which they were witnesses with the contents of the Hebrew prayers.

These Jews roamed the streets. They wanted to express their anger, to show G-d that they defied Him, as he seemed to have abandoned them. Some ate their food on the fast day publicly in the streets, as a gesture of defiance – of revolt.

In one of the streets, I saw a large group of people standing in a circle. I approached nearer to find out what was going on.

In the middle of the circle stood a seven-year-old girl, embarrassed, perplexed. She could not understand why all these people stood around her.

She, of course, could not know that they were surprised to find a Jewish child. So they stood, silently, and just looked at this miracle of a Jewish child in their midst. They could not tear themselves away from this one child who said nothing and to whom nothing was said. They just stood and gaped.

A special prayer is normally recited on Yom Kippur for the departed members of one's family. It's called Yizkor, the memorial prayer.

As those people looked at the little girl, they remembered their own children, or their younger brothers and sisters, the nephews and nieces who at one time were their pride and joy, and who were no more. Each one of them looked and remembered, recalled the beloved children who were cruelly exterminated.

As they remembered, they recited without any words the Yizkor for all those who once were part of their lives and now were gone forever. This was a silent, most moving Yizkor, without words, without prayer books, recited in that street in Landsberg, by a group of Jewish survivors, watching a bewildered little Jewish girl.

It was the most moving, most eloquent, most heartfelt, most silent Yizkor I have ever heard.

Guest blogger: Number my rabbis

Sorry, folks, our internet connection has been down the last day. So I am late posting today's entry into the blogosphere. Today I want to bring you a guest commentator, my friend Ilana Debare. As you may recall she is one of my journalist friends, and she is preparing for her Bat Mitzvah in middle-age. This is from her blog Midlife Bat Mitzvah. Enjoy...

Number my rabbis

By Ilana DeBare

What is it that makes us human — the capacity to love? to act morally? our self-awareness? our ability to envision our own mortality?

Nah.

It’s our compulsion to make lists.

After all, when was the last time your caught your cat making a grocery list? Or your schnauzer compiling names of the 10 hottest (female dogs) on the block? Do birds keep life-lists of the different varieties of humans that they have spotted?

This dramatic epistemological revelation popped into mind today when my friend Melissa alerted me to an annual Newsweek feature of which I had been blissfully unaware, a list of “The 50 Most Influential Rabbis in America.”

Actually, Melissa called my attention to a COUNTER-list of influential women rabbis called “The Sisterhood 50,” compiled by The Forwardnewspaper because only six out of Newsweek‘s 50 were of the female gender.

I of course looked immediately to see if either of my temple‘s two wonderful women rabbis were on the Sisterhood list. (They weren’t.)

Then I marvelled at how, in the space of just 40 years, we have had such a blossoming of female rabbinic leadership in America that you can have a Top 50 list plus hundreds of women rabbis who don’t even make it onto that list.

And then I thought about how silly this all is.

Why on earth should Newsweek, of all places, care about the top 50 rabbis in America?

Newsweek doesn’t in fact pick those 50 itself — it just reprints a list compiled for the heck of it by two Hollywood executives, Sony Pictures chairman CEO Michael Lynton and Time Warner executive vice president Gary Ginsberg.

(The old stereotype had it that the Jews ran Hollywood. Now apparently that is all wrong. It is Hollywood that is running the Jews.)

Or, as Melissa put it:

I’m still wondering why Newsweek does a 50 most influential rabbis list, and why the head of Sony gets to pick them….

In any case, why do people insist on doing these rankings? The US News & World Report college rankings have wreaked enough havoc on the world of higher education, with universities purposely trying to recruit larger and larger pools of applicants just so they can turn them all down and raise their selectivity statistics.

Perhaps that’s the next step for the rabbinate. I can see it already: Rabbis across the country doing marriages like crazy and encouraging their congregants to breed, breed, breed, just so that they can decline to do brisses and naming ceremonies:

“Oh, Rabbi Gudnick is so influential! Everyone wants him to do their baby’s bris, but US News & World Report says he only accepts 8.7 percent of those that apply.”

Newsweek and its CEO-arbiters ranked their rabbis, one through 50. So perhaps somewhere in some shul tonight a rabbi is tearing his or her heart out over why they were ranked number 27 and not 26.

Meanwhile, The Forward’s list of women didn’t rank its 50, just listed them alphabetically — which I guess is a little more feminist and egalitarian.

But still. Why are we driven to do (and read) this stuff?

I don’t quite think this is what Moses had in mind when he wrote a book called, in English, “Numbers.”

Sabbath Saturday: A day of rest

My friend Ilana, who you may recall is studying for her mid-life Bat Mitzvah (and writing about it on her blog which you can read by clicking HERE), asked her husband Sam Schuchat to write about his observance of Sabbath on Saturdays. I love what he wrote, and it is reprinted in full below.

Incidentally, the Sabbath for Christians is also Saturday, not Sunday. Saturday is the seventh day, the day when God rested and therefore so should we. For Christians, Sunday is the day of Resurrection, the first day of the week, a day of celebration. So enjoy your Sabbath today, and please enjoy Sam's reflection:

I don’t work on Saturdays.

Okay, it would be more honest to say that I try not to work on Saturdays. From sundown on Friday night until sundown Saturday I don’t do e-mail, participate in meetings, or read anything that isn’t fun. I try very hard not to shop, although like any reasonably skilled Jew I am good at making fine distinctions. For instance, shopping for dental floss is not appropriate on the Sabbath. Sales at REI on the other hand clearly fall under the category of “recreation”. Generally speaking, I try not to do anything that in any way resembles what I do for a living, engaging instead in activities that are enjoyable and relaxing. Napping is high on this list, as well as bicycling.

Birdwatching - a form of Shabbat non-work at which Sam (left) excels

I started down this road several years ago for no particular reason other than to see if I could do it. Maybe because I wasn’t raised an Orthodox Jew, it’s much harder than I thought. It’s not just because we live in a work obsessed culture, or that we have the tools to work all the time, anywhere. It would certainly be easier to observe the Sabbath in an all-Jewish community. Several years ago I happened to be on a kibbutz in the Negev on a Saturday. Just for the heck of it, I went to the Saturday morning service in their chapel. Afterwards, I was quite surprised to see that the lunch included an elaborate and complete display of hard liquors. It’s not too hard to refrain from labor when you spend the morning in the synagogue and then have a few shots of whiskey at lunch!

Napping, another Shabbat activity at which Sam excels

Observing the Sabbath is way, way high up on the list of things Jews are supposed to do. The Sabbath is considered the most important holy day in the Jewish calendar, even though it happens every week. (Maybe if we rebranded from “the Chosen People” to “the Folks Who Invented the Weekend” we’d have more converts?) Jews don’t get married (or buried) on Shabbat; Ilana and I were married after sundown on a Saturday in October, and then only after the short Havdalah ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath was concluded. It is commandment number four out of ten, coming ahead of adultery, murder, and theft, and the seemingly simple commandment “you shall not do any work” (Ex 20:10) has spawned an enormous literature of commentary and custom dwelling on what, exactly, one is and is not allowed to do.

In orthodox neighborhoods in Israel and Brooklyn, for example, the elevators are programmed to run up and down all day, stopping at all the floors, so no one has to do the “work” of pushing the button and summoning it. Likewise one can, and a non-Jewish friend of mine just did, buy a “Sabbath ready” refrigerator whose light stays on all day on Saturdays so opening the door doesn’t turn it on.

Generally speaking, “work” is considered to be anything that uses, creates, or transforms energy. So no cooking, driving, flying, lighting fires, and so on. Sex, on the other hand, is encouraged. “Marital relations, ” as it is delicately referred to in Jewish legal commentary, is a positive duty on the Sabbath. It’s good to have something to do outside of the synagogue!

The longer I have persisted in trying to observe the Sabbath, the more I’ve realized the wisdom and utility of the practice, regardless of why we do it. It’s really about stopping and looking around at everything that is wonderful around us, and reconnecting with what we each, individually, are, rather than what we do. When you meet someone new, what do you ask sooner or later? “What do you do?” Are we only what we do for a living? Are we not more? Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:

“The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on Sabbath we try to become attuned toholiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.”

Although I am more likely to understand the creation of the world through science than through God, the hummingbird and the redwood tree are no less miraculous and beautiful. I can’t appreciate them, or my family, or my friends, or my community, or much else until I put down my tools, take a deep breath, and relax.

Give it a try. You don’t have to be Jewish, and it doesn’t have to be Saturday. Pick one day a week (furlough Friday for us state workers?) and don’t work, whatever that means for you. Spend the day with your beloved, take a hike, do some yoga, build a sand castle, go fishing. Do whatever it takes to take your mind away from your to-do list and towards a deeper appreciation of the world around you and your place in it.

If that doesn’t work, you can always go shopping. The REI midwinter sale starts this Friday!

Blessing in the New Year, and The Feast Day of the Holy Name

Blessings to you and yours this New Years Day. I hope you had a safe and sane evening, and are enjoying whatever you enjoy on this special day.

Today is the Feast Day of The Holy Name, the day commemorating when Jesus was circumcised, the ritual Bris milah, or Brit milah, the traditional ceremony for infant Jewish boys to name and mark them as Jews.

Today's feast day won popularity in the Church in the Middle Ages, and various monastic orders considered it particularly important probably because of its emphasis on the vows taken on behalf of Jesus.

The familiar emblem on the blog today is thought to have gained popularity from Saint Bernardino of Sienna (1380-1440) who associated it with the circumcision and naming of Jesus.

The day is a reminder that Jesus was first and foremost Jewish; that he was brought up in the traditional faith of his mother and father; that all of his references to Scripture -- to "the Law and Prophets," to Torah -- are all references to the Hebrew Scriptures, the "Old Testament." Jesus challenged the religious authorities of his day from the stance of being a devout Jew.

All that may sound obvious, but Christian history is strewn with the bloodshed and persecution of Jews, and there are Christians today that deny that Jesus was Jewish, or who are simply ignorant of the origins of their own religion. The Feast Day of The Holy Name is a good time to stop and think about our own history. When Christians have persecuted Jews, they have persecuted Christ himself. It is a good day to collectively repent and ask again for G-d's forgiveness.

Today's Collect:

Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Prayer Part II: Spontaneous or written? How about both?

Yesterday I wrote about my daily prayers with the Bible, and the texts assigned for each day in the Episcopal Daily Office. Today is a continuation of that conversation, and again, this is personal, and what I mention may not work for you.

Today I am writing about the weekday “offices” and how these ground my prayer so that it is not merely embedded in my imagination. It may help if you have handy a Book of Common Prayer while reading this; you can access the on-line version of the prayer book by clicking HERE or by scrolling down aways on the left side of your screen and clicking on the red prayer book photo.

It may help to know something of Jewish prayer tradition from whence ours comes (after all, Jesus was Jewish). Judaism honors the concept that prayer can be both spontaneous and fixed words on the page.

Both ways of prayer have value, and can give balance to each other. Spontaneous prayers are immediate and represent the longings of our hearts and minds. But such prayers can become shallow and too self-focused. Fixed written prayers represent the wisdom of the ages, often are elegantly written, and are words said by millions of other people, giving us a connection to all those who have prayed the same words. But written prayers can become dry and rote.

Each way of prayer can bring life to other. The Spirit, I am convinced, enters both.

My spontaneous prayers tend to be those in the mediation I described yesterday. When I have finished my silent mediation, I then return to the prayer book and read the fixed written prayers of Morning Prayer, from page 96 onward. The prayers, or “collects,” on the page somehow seem more vivid to me after my meditation. Sometimes a phrase or word will jump off the page in a way that it had not on another day.

Here is a morning collect that often does just that for me (page 100):

Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray you so to guide and govern us by your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life we may not forget you, but may remember that we are ever walking in your sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I usually alternate between the two versions of the Lord's Prayer (page 97), and then read the collects on the next pages. The General Thanksgiving (page 101) is a good way to wrap together all of these prayers. Sometimes I wait to do that prayer until later, making it my Evening Prayer. I also highly recommend the simple but elegant Compline prayers, beginning on page 127, as a way to end the day.

There are other prayer books and devotional works that I sometimes use, just to change up my routine. There are poems I've meditated upon as well. Many years ago I meditated every morning on Gary Snyder's poem, Endless Streams and Mountains and I return to that from time to time (I wrote about that here in October; you can see that by clicking HERE).

I think it important to underline that the Christian tradition of “offices” or “hours” has it roots in Judaism. Beginning in about 100 AD, the rabbis developed a structure of prayers in increments throughout the day. The rabbis spoke of such prayer as a “service of the heart”

(avoda shebalev). You can read more about the Jewish history of prayer by clicking HERE.

Christians developed their own practices of regular hourly fixed prayer, with echoes from their Jewish forebearers.

One of my seminary professors once said that all that is really needed for Morning Prayer is a candle and a psalm from the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament). I think that is true.

Most of our church history is Medieval history. We cannot escape it – it is a single era that lasted more than 1,000 years in the collective memory of Christians. While much of that history is ugly – the Crusades against Muslims and Jews in particular – there was considerable development of Christian spirituality and mysticism in those centuries. The incubators for Christian spirituality were the monasteries and convents of Europe.

The Rule of St. Benedict is the model upon which all monastic orders and structured, and Benedict had a cycle of work and prayer. The monks and nuns prayed the “offices” or “hours” each day, in three hour increments. The chants typically were of the psalms.

We still live in the echo of their prayers. Spiritual giants from the Middle Ages, including Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Hildegard of Bingen to name only a few, have left us a rich legacy of their prayers, songs and practices.

In the English tradition, from whence the Episcopal Church comes, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer authored and edited the first two versions of the Book of Common Prayer (1549 and 1552). Cranmer retained the monastic offices, hoping that ordinary Christians would adopt the monastic practice in their daily lives. But to make this practical, he simplified it into two offices, Evening Prayer and Morning Prayer. And he took it out of Latin and put it into English.

However, by the 19th century, Morning Prayer had become the primary worship on Sunday, with Communion occasionally celebrated once a month or maybe once a year. That was far from Cranmer’s intention, nor the practice of the Early Church. Cranmer wrote his prayer books with the idea of elevating the Eucharist as a weekly celebration for all the faithful (and not just for the clergy). Cranmer’s idea was that the prayers of the weekday offices would lead to the Sunday Eucharist and enfold the Eucharist in prayers throughout the week.

Next week we will take few more turns in the labyrinth and see where we go with some of the big-hard-questions.

Jewish perspectives on life and liberty

From time to time, particularly when I am teaching a class on something-or-other in a church, I am asked "What do Jews believe about this?" My standard answer is (1) I am not qualified to answer, but (2) if I was qualified I would tell you that would depend on which brand of Judaism you are talking about and which Jew you are talking to (just as it would with any other religion).

Yet, let's not dismiss the question lightly. Speaking as a Christian, there are good reasons to ask about Judaism. First, the rest of us might learn something and benefit from a perspective not our own. Second, anything to increase human understanding across religious lines is a good thing in our crowded and sectarian world. 

And, let us not forget that Jesus was Jewish, his followers were Jewish, their piety was Jewish, and we are heirs to a religion with deep roots in Judaism. We read from the same Scriptures, we worship the same God, and our liturgy owes its architecture to Judaism. The artwork on this page is a depiction of the Jewish Shema, the command to "Love God with all your heart" as the highest commandment. We say that every Sunday in Rite I, quoting Jesus, but it is Jesus who is quoting what every Jew would know from Deuteronomy 6: 4-9.

As I have now learned, even the question "What do Jews believe about this?" is not a very good question. Lately I have come across an organization, NewJewishThought, and its website provides a window into the dialogue amongst Jews about Judaism from which the wider-world can benefit. Keith Kahn-Harris, the convenor of this organization, wrote a fascinating article about the question "What do Jews believe." The article is adapted from a lecture on this topic:

Jews rarely use the term ‘faith’ amongst themselves. Judaism is a practice-based religion in which action is foregrounded rather than belief. While of course Judaism has a core of beliefs and faith in God is part of Jewish theology, faiths and belief tend not to be emphasised when Jews talk about Judaism – even amongst orthodox Jews.

To read the rest, click HERE.