Orthodoxy

The day before Holy Week began, I attended a wedding at St. Columba’s United Reformed Church in Oxford, UK. St. Columba’s is down an alley near some of the Oxford colleges. It’s a normal sort of church inside, with a vestibule and facade that make it look like an office building.

Most churches stand out. St. Columba’s is hidden. Attending church there was like going to a house mass—nobody walking past suspects you’re going to a sacred gathering.

(Best wishes to the bride and groom—your lovely wedding is an auspicious start to your lives together.)
Read the rest of this entry »

This past Sunday, I was “installed” as a lector at St. Peter’s Parish. The ceremony consisted of a simple blessing with holy water at mass.

(Pictured: The newly-blessed lectors and eucharistic ministers of St. Peter’s.)

I lectored all through high school without an official blessing, so I’ve been poking around online to learn more about the significance of this ceremony.

Apparently there was a pre-Vatican II “minor order” for lectors, but this is not that. According to The Duties and Ministries in the Mass, I think my role is “a layperson who happens to be reading”:

101. In the absence of an instituted lector, other laypersons may be commissioned to proclaim the readings from Sacred Scripture. They should be truly suited to perform this function and should receive careful preparation, so that the faithful by listening to the readings from the sacred texts may develop in their hearts a warm and living love for Sacred Scripture.

At the same time the lectors were installed, eucharistic ministers were commissioned, which seems to be a more formal blessing from “Book of Blessings, chapter 63.”

Enough of this pre-Christmas and post-Christmas blogging; today is Orthodox Christmas.

Last night I stopped by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in Nairobi a few hours before Christmas mass, which I considered attending but was warned off from by a couple non-Amharic-speakers.

Here’s a photo of the inside I took at the urging of a member of the congregation. The painting of the three bearded men depicts the Trinity. I was told that the TV screen, though not working at present, is intended to give people a view of what’s happening in the inner sanctuary when the curtain is closed.

I love watching people showing up for Ethiopian mass, the women in white packed into cars, emerging like circus clowns turning into butterflies.
Read the rest of this entry »

Father Charlie McCarthy is giving a retreat on Christian nonviolence at Anna Maria College in Paxton next month. I’ve been on this retreat before, and recommend it.

As a preview, you can listen to recordings of his retreat Behold the Lamb and his series Questions & Answers on Gospel Nonviolence.
Read the rest of this entry »

Finally got my acts together to see Avatar (3D) yesterday evening, two months after release. My Green friends Drs Richard Lawson, Derek Wall, and Rupert Read (and those over at Two Doctors blog in Scotland) all liked it, along with many of us studying the Accra Confession at the Saint Columba’s Manse Discussion Group.

L’Osservatore Romano did not like Avatar, some suspected due to alleged pantheism. But the philosophy therein was not really pantheism, but can be more accurately described as panentheism (as my friend Dr George Zachariah of the Mar Thoma Church taught): finding God in everything; finding the image of the divine in everyone. I would have to struggle if I had to deny this as Christian.

[...] Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries [...]

– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The scene was indicative, where the scientist Dr Grace Augustine presented her results about the synaptic nature of the biosphere on the planet Pandora, and the businessman Parker Selfridge dismissed her thus: ‘what have you been smoking!’ Science is only accepted when it conveniently serves the imperial–rationalist exploitation: at all other times it is dismissed. As Dr Lawson pointed out (and echoed by the Reverend Dick Wolff), this has been going on in the climate-change debate: ‘If you are a committed free market fundamentalist, you will never accept the climate change facts, as they are incompatible with your ideology.’

I will be going to the Conference of the Green Party of England and Wales this Saturday; expecting Green hugs.

Homily from mass at the Mustard Seed, Worcester. Memorial of Saint Basil the Great and Saint Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors of the Church.

Download the mp3 or see other formats.

Standard Podcast [ 8:40 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I mentioned in these pages that the “green” Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, His All Holiness Bartholomew I, addressed the European Parliament earlier this year. This was as part of a series during the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. The other speakers were His Eminence Sheikh Ahmad Badr El Din El Hassoun, Grand Mufti of Syria; Sir Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth; and most recently His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Thanks to the intervention by the Liberals and the Greens, Dr Asma Jahangir, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, were also invited to speak. (Sophia in ’t Veld: “I would like to know why the Conference of Presidents has chosen to interpret intercultural dialogue exclusively as an interreligious monologue and whether it feels a part-session is an appropriate platform for religious messages.” and Sarah Ludford: “it seems that you [the President(s)] have made the Grand Mufti comparable to the Pope and the UK Chief Rabbi as a European representative of his particular religion.”)

Here are some highlights from each the speakers, with links to their texts for the gentle readers’ perusal over Christmastime: Read the rest of this entry »

At the risk of obsessively praying about waste and recycling, I have this prayer to offer, which I trust to be sensibly Trinitarian.

(John Calvin was wrong. The Purgatory does exist. I have seen it with my own eyes, at the Redbridge recycling station.)

God our Creator, in your mercy:
Help us to learn how to live in Paradise, where nothing is wasted,
where we walk or cycle with you as you intended.
Bless the workers who sort our recycling,
who, as befit people created in your image, re-create order out of chaos.

Κύριε ἐλέησον.

Christ our Saviour, in your mercy:
Remove us from the flashy sports cars and the 4×4s (SUVs)
which only speed us to the incinerating Armageddon.
Remind us of your crown, when we see the thornbushes growing over the landfill.
Remind us of your Cross, whenever we see smokestacks or wind turbines on the hill.
Remind us of your Passion and your Resurrection.

Χριστὲ ἐλέησον.

Holy Spirit our Advocate and Comforter, in your mercy:
Guard us on our bus route for the recycling centre.
Purge us of our sins of pride and greed.
Blow your wind on us and drive us in your dynamic,
as on the wind turbines, and as on Pentecost.
Bless with your wordless prayer
everything that has a recycling symbol.

Κύριε ἐλέησον.

Amen.

(By the way, Chris Goodall’s second book is out: Ten Technologies to Save the Planet.)

Recent books from Verso:

Slavoj Žižek (2000) The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Is Worth Fighting For? ISBN 978-1-85984-770-1.

Terry Eagleton (2007) Jesus Christ: The Gospels. ISBN 978-1-84467-176-2. This is the New Revised Standard Version of the Gospels introduced by Eagleton and edited by radical cleric Giles Fraser. It is pretty cool that Verso is following the Gideons. On this note, I might mention that recently, I bought the Revised English Bible and the New Revised Standard Version. My copies of both of these are with the Apocrypha (though the collection there is different), and the NRSV is the ‘Anglicized’ text; both are published by the Oxford University Press. I thought each of these represented very wide (as wide as allowed in the current climate) ecumenical English-language translation work in either side of the Atlantic.

A Bible study sheet written in 2000, with some amendments. If you use this in your Bible study group, please leave a note here about your group and any constructive feedback.