The non-profit, A Faith that does Justice, has published another contribution of mine about one of my favorite short prayers from the (Anglican) book, A St. Francis Prayer Book. It is entitled, “For gentleness in my dealings.”
REPOST: “THE LORD LIKES BLUE CHEESE”
The non-profit, A Faith that Does Justice,” has republished another widely read blogpost of mine from this site, “In These Times.” Here is the link to the repost:
HEALING, WHOLENESS, AND JUSTICE
This site features my writings on everyday life, but occasionally writing from my work as an Episcopal Priest. I am retired now from that work, but am still active as a blogger and an academic writer.
The non-profit, A Faith that does Justice, has published my third contribution to their column, “The Weekly Word.” This post is the third of four columns that they have chosen to appear on their website. It focuses on the relationship between healing and justice in the teaching and actions of Jesus and on how you, the reader, might enact that justice in the world today.
THE LEGACY OF MEMORY
As I have gotten older, I am realizing more and more that my own grandparents did not live much past my current age. I find myself wondering what their life was like at this same stage in my life. I also find myself wishing that I had asked them more questions about their lives.
My father died at the age of 58 as did his father. My maternal grandmother died in her early 80’s, but my other two grandparents died in their early seventies, an age I am rapidly approaching.
My grandparents all lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. As I was still a teenager when two of them died and a young married person when my maternal grandmother died, I did not think to ask them much about their lives. Now, I wish I had been more inquisitive and willing to listen to them.
As a teenager, I was an avid fan of military history from the Napoleonic Wars through WWII. I assembled and painted numerous plastic models of airplanes, warships, and tanks of WWI and WWII. I even painted some 2000 miniature plastic figures from the Napoleonic Wars, each one with an authentic uniform. I perhaps was one of the few youth who ordered books in French, with pictures of Napoleonic Uniforms and I had accounts with English booksellers for the same purposes. I had quite a collection of military figures, but when I returned home from college one year, I found that my parents had cleared out my bedroom to make it a more generic guest room and they threw them all out along with my models.
Bob, my mother’s brother, a private in the 29th Infantry Division of the United States Army, landed on Omaha Beach as part of the D Day Landings. He was separated for weeks from his unit, but eventually regrouped. Shortly after reuniting with his unit, he was wounded in the Battle of Saint-Lô, sometime between July 7 and 19, 1944. He was hit in the back of his right arm, most likely by shrapnel from explosives mistakenly dropped by American planes from behind the front lines. As an enthusiast of books and movies on WWII, I begged my uncle to tell me more about what he experienced overseas in combat, but my family always steered me away from that discussion with him. If I asked him alone, I got little out of him. The only story I ever heard from him was that as they approached the shore the landing craft that held him and his fellow combatants hit a German mine. Most of the soldiers drowned with 50 pound packs still on their backs, but my uncle, an excellent swimmer, was able to drop his pack and swim to shore, In the confusion, it took him three weeks to be reunited with his unit. He never really recovered from his ordeal, living most of the remainder of his life with his parents before dying at the age of 67 at the Soldier’s Home in Chelsea, Massachusetts. I remember that he had an abiding dislike of the nasal sound of the French language. That is what he remembered hearing, but not understanding, after he was wounded and transferred from hospital to hospital in the vain attempt to restore his damaged arm. Apart from that I know little else about his wartime experience.
Over the years, my uncle became more and more of a recluse, although to the family, he talked endlessly about cars and every new model that appeared. When he returned from the war, he felt that, because of his disability, he no longer was good enough for his girlfriend, and that he would only be holding her back from a happy life. Without telling her anything directly, his apparent disinterest in her drove her away gradually. That’s all I know. I realize now that he was most likely suffering from depression and some sort of PTSD, which was not understood well at the time. The term “shell shocked,” which emerged from the experience of troops from WWI, came the closest to describing his experience. His parents were endlessly frustrated by what they thought was my uncle’s lack of motivation and chalked it up to laziness. As a result, relations between my uncle and my grandfather were fraught. I was aware of this at the time, in the way a child knows that something is not quite right, but I loved to be with my uncle and looked up to him in a way that even now I can’t say exactly why.
After the war, Bob found it difficult to find a job. Before the war he had studied business, but the fact that, with his wounded right arm he was not able to shake hands, meant that few wanted to hire him. He ended up packing and shipping boxes in a factory that produced box toes for the shoe industry in Haverhill, Massachusetts.
Uncle Bob was my only uncle. My father was an only child and my mother only had one brother. o because Bob never married and had children, I never had an aunt or any first cousins. He was it. I wrote what I did here, so that my uncle’s story, however incomplete, is not entirely lost forever.
What remains of a person after they have died? I have none of my uncle’s personal effects. For a time we had his bed frame, but that is no longer with us. My mother framed his purple heart and other medals from the war and hung them on her wall. So what remains, other than the memories of those who, like me, knew him and still remember him? There are fewer and fewer people alive who knew Bob and knew some of his story. After all, he, like my father, was born about 100 years ago. What will happen when we too die and those memories are lost forever?
I began thinking about some of the events in my own life that I think were important and how I would like my children and grandchildren to know about them when I am no longer alive. I think it is time to start writing some of that down, because they, like me at their age, will not think to ask what later in their lives they might wish to know. My hope is that my memories will mix with their memories of me and perhaps that bundle will enrich their lives as well.
What would you want subsequent generations to remember most about you?
TO SOJOURN AND NOT TO DWELL
In Mt. 25: 1-13, we find Jesus’ parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids which concerns their preparedness at the parousia, the return of the Jesus the bridegroom at his second coming: five were ready when the bridegroom returned at an unannounced time, but five were not. The five who were prepared with oil in their lamps could not share what they had because, readiness is not something you can share. It is something you have to cultivate within..
This story of the bridesmaids allows me to do something I rarely do in the pulpit and that is to connect what I have been writing on as an academic with what I preach. In the past ten years I have published numerous articles and chapters on the work of Giorgio Agamben. (You can find the bibliographic information on the page of this blog listing my academic publications.)
Giorgio Agamben is one of the most prominent continental philosophers alive today. He is a former student of Martin Heidegger, and even though he could be described as an atheist and somewhat of a philosophical anarchist, his work is based primarily on religious and theological texts, including a commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and a book on St. Francis and monastic rules. I became interested in him because he was the Italian editor of the writings of Walter Benjamin on whom I wrote one half of my doctoral dissertation and because of his use of theological texts in his non-religious philosophy. Agamben, I might add, is not easy to read or to understand.
In March 2009, Agamben was invited to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to give a lecture on his critique from his own philosophical perspective on the Roman Catholic Church. This address was subsequently published as The Church and the Kingdom. [1]
The earliest Christians, as is evident in the parable of the wise and the foolish bridesmaids in the Gospel of Matthew and in St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians expected that the crucified and resurrected Jesus might return at any moment. St. Paul told Christians in his early writings that they should make no drastic changes to their life because Jesus was going to return any moment. If they were not married, for example, they should hold off marrying because the Lord might return at any moment. The present form of the world, he said more or less, is passing away, so don’t get too attached to it. (1 Cor. 7:31).
In his address in Paris, Agamben observed that “the Christian church has ceased…to sojourn as a foreigner,” and begun to dwell in the world and “live as a citizen in the world and thus function like any other worldly institution.” As the years went on and Christ did not return, the church began to settle in the world and put down roots. It ceased to sojourn and began to dwell. This for Agamben is the root of his critique of the church. [2]
The difference between sojourning and dwelling is something like the difference between being nomadic and settling down and building permanent dwellings. When you begin to dwell you get tied down to your own possessions and lose the ability to move quickly when needed, or adapt to changes.
St. Paul proclaimed freedom from the law. He urged Christians to live in the Holy Spirit in joyous freedom from the law. When the church began to dwell in the world, it became like other worldly institutions and set up legal structures that effectively replaced the law from which they, in Christ, had been freed. Agamben investigates St. Francis and other monastic rules, which in Latin are called regula (from which we derive our English word regular) to see if he could provide an alternative today for law (Latin, lex), investigating how one might free oneself from servitude to law in all of its contemporary manifestations.
To address this, Agamben does something quite interesting. He turns to St. Francis of Assisi and the first Franciscans. Francis wanted to live his life according to one rule only, namely that he live as Jesus Christ lived. He, therefore, renounced all his possessions so that he would be free from them and thus able to respond to Jesus in every area of his life. Francis became a kind of nomad. He gave up the idolatry of his possessions and found freedom. In his poverty he found exhilaration and joy. In subsequent centuries after Francis, Franciscans tried to figure out how, if they were going to live a life of perfect poverty, they could “use” things without owning them. Agamben turns to these texts and discussions to glean what he can for his own philosophical and political work.[3]
Returning to the story of the bridesmaids, five of them were ready but five were not. Why were the other five not ready? The story doesn’t tell us. Without reading too much into the parable we could surmise that they had been busy. They put off getting oil because they had other things to do, which at the time seemed more important.
Could it be that they had ceased to sojourn, and begun to dwell? They had become so attached to the things of this world and to the care of them, that they were not ready and prepared when the bridegroom (who in this story is clearly the person of Jesus Christ) returned. They had been claimed by what they owned and not by the person who owned them, Jesus Christ. This idolatry of things and possessions prevented them from the freedom to follow Jesus wherever he led.
The parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids ends with these words, “Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” We know neither the day nor the hour of the Lord’s return. So, prepare yourselves. Begin by examining the things that hold you back—that tie you down—that enslave you— that keep you from responding to Jesus and his call to you. Can you begin to use things without owning them? Can you begin let go of the things that hold you back that keep you tied down? You can only be prepared for yourself. You cannot be prepared for someone else. “Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour when the bridegroom will return.” The question for you is, “when he does return, will you be ready?”
[1]Agamben, Giorgio, Leland De la Durantaye, and Alice Attie. The Church and the Kingdom. (London ; New York: Seagull Books, 2012).
[2] “…The Christian church has ceased to paroikein, to sojourn as a foreigner, so as to begin to katoiken, to live as a citizen and thus function like any other worldly institution. See Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, p. 4.
[3] Agamben, The Highest Poverty. Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2013.
3D PRINTING: ANOTHER WAY TO SEE THE WORLD
3D MODEL BY PHC DESIGN
I’ve found a new hobby—3D printing. It’s a fun way to make something from nothing. It starts with a 3D computer model that has been designed in a CAD program. Thousands of free models are available on the internet on sites such as Thingverse and Printables. Once the file you want to print is downloaded, you have to convert it in a program that tells the printer how to slice the model so that it can be printed. The 3D printer lays down one thin layer at a time on a heated platform until it builds up the entire model. I am printing with PLA filament. PLA (Polylactic Acid) is made from renewable, organic sources such as corn starch and sugar cane.
A few years ago, 3D printing was out of reach for me. The cost of entry was just too high. Now, with new 3D printers on sale for less than $200, the hobby is much more accessible for persons like me who just wanted to try it out for fun.
So far I have made a number of really useful parts and gizmos for things around the house. I make a tamping stand to hold the portafilter of my expresso machine and a funnel that fits to it for dosing ground coffee into the portafilter, a bracket to hold a drafting lamp (I lost the original part who knows where.) I have made cases for the Arduino motherboards for my small-scale electronic projects, a model of the Radcliffe Camera, the domed library at the center of the campus of Oxford University where I have done some academic research, a small model of the Library of Congress, a Lord of the Rings bookmark, a small Tardis from the Dr. Who television series, and any number of other gizmos and chotskies.
Along the way I have also had to become somewhat of an expert in modifying, repairing, and upgrading my machine, including connecting and disconnecting various wires to the motherboard. Instructions on how to do these things are difficult to find. One a recent repair, I reordered a new “hotend” with cables attached. I had damaged the original hotend when I made a mistake replacing the brass printer nozzle. The new part arrived with no instructions whatsoever on how to install it—just the part attached to numerous wires. While installing it, I foolishly disconnected more wires than I had intended. Fortunately I had the foresight to take a picture of the motherboard so that I could correct my mistake. On repairs and upgrades like this, YouTube videos and other Internet chat groups can help, but often you just have to figure out how to correct the mistakes you have made on your own.
How to manually level the printer bed and how to get the print to stick to the printer bed are also things you have to learn on an entry level printer. While there are numerous upgrades one can get to make these things easier, it is good first to learn how to do these things manually, as that helps troubleshoot printing issues you might have later on even with upgraded printers. In spite of all the issues I have named above, I find that I get a great deal of satisfaction from using my printer and seeing what it can produce.
Learning the ins and outs of 3D printing has expanded my horizons. It has allowed me to look at the world in a different way. When I look at objects in the world I realize that the whole I see in these objects is layered of many parts. I can imagine how a flower petal or a the leaf of a plant is layer upon layer of cells of different shapes and sizes. When I get ready to 3D print an object, whatever it is, after carefully setting everything up, I feel that I am able to make something that did not exist before. It is like making something out of thin air. It’s magic.
SNOW
Snow now blankets the ground in New Hampshire. The maple and birch trees are bare of leaves but full of snow. The air is crisp and cold. When it’s snowing, the air has a kind of sound that is difficult to describe. It’s got a texture to it as if someone were brushing the air with a stiff brush. Other sounds seem to recede into the background, and I’m left to listen to the snowflakes as they fall. It’s amazing how peaceful and tranquil it can be.
It has snowed twice this past week, accumulating in total around ten inches of snow. Snow banks along the road are now two to three feet high. I have been busy with my self-pushing electric snowblower, clearing our driveway, which runs up hill from the street towards our house.
More snow is expected today, so I’ll be busy. I don’t mind the work. In fact, I enjoy it. Some people curse the snow and can’t wait to be rid of it. Not me, I love it.
Now that I’m retired, I don’t have to worry about getting to work on time. Even so, people in New Hampshire are used to dealing with snow and for the most part are nonchalant about it. What I like most about snow on the ground and in the trees, apart from its beauty, is its contrast with the heat of the summer months. The change of the seasons, each with its own characteristics, adds variation in the passage of the year such that each day does not pass with relentless uniformity. Each day has its special treasures for us to discover. Weather comes and goes, and if we can move with the flow, we can enjoy the riches that each day has to offer.
I’m getting ready for a walk outside later today and I’m looking forward to hearing the bristling sound of snow falling, the sound of peace and calm. Then I’ll be back going up and down the driveway with my snowblower.
GETTING THE HANG OF RETIREMENT
I now have been retired for a little over nine months and I am still trying to get the hang of it. More than one of my retired friends has told me that it took them the better part of three years to get used to it. So I am just a beginner.
All kinds of resources exist for retirement planning but most of them, apart from an occasional nod to the familiar advice to follow your dreams, focus on its financial dimensions. That is due for the most part to the fact that no two people are alike and retirement means different things to different people. Some will quit work altogether and others will continue to work full or part-time in retirement, but perhaps in a different area from the work from which they retired. No matter the circumstances, retirement means change and change always comes with some loss in the hope of gain.
The best advice I got on the first day or two of my retirement was from a woman who told me not to try to do all my errands on the same day. Save something, she said, to do tomorrow. I have taken that into account and no longer try to cram ten errands into the same day. I save something to do tomorrow.
The other problem — and it really is a problem, although not an earth-shattering one — is that every day seems like a Saturday. I lived a life for forty plus years that focused on Sundays. Saturday for me was always a day for errands and by the evening, a time to brace myself and prepare for the busyness of Sunday morning. So, I suppose it was more like most people’s Sundays before work resumed on Mondays. Now there are times when I can’t remember what day it is. While it’s a wonderful feeling, it can also be a bit disorienting.
When we retired, we moved far from where we had been living. More than one person has asked me why we moved north to cold New Hampshire instead of chasing the warmer southern climes. As with many people our age, we moved to be nearer to family. We wanted to move to a place that was new and familiar at the same time. Growing up, I spent my family vacations in New Hampshire. We also lived there and commuted into Cambridge when I was a Divinity Student. And when my father died in 1983, my mother moved to New Hampshire where she lived for many years. And so we retired in a part of the state unfamiliar to us but in many ways familiar to us as well.
When we moved into a new town, we knew no one here. After a couple of months, I knew that I needed to make connections in the community and I wanted to be of service to it. So, I sought out and joined the local Rotary Club that meets every Wednesday for lunch. They have already put me to work on their many service and charity fund-raising projects. In a few months I have gotten to know people from towns all around and I feel more connected to the community.
At home, we are busy every day trying to repair and update a house that had suffered some neglect. We hired professionals to do some of the big jobs, but we are chipping away slowly at the smaller tasks. In February, we set up a portable heated greenhouse in our backyard, That allowed us to get a head start on our gardens this year. Now that spring is here, we have been busy every day working to reclaim and improve the plantings on our property which is over an acre in size. It’s a mix of lawns and garden beds, with ground vegetation and woodlands on its edges. We have planted fruit trees, fruit bushes, roses, shrubs, Japanese maples, fifteen garden beds, with dozens and dozens of plants and seedlings still needing a home.
In retirement we are not really doing anything that is completely new to us, but what we are doing we are doing in a different way and sometimes for different purposes. So, it’s an adventure yet to be continued. In three years, I’ll let you know if I’ve finally gotten the hang of it.
THE LOAF-KEEPER OF ALL CREATION
I have always been fascinated by the etymology of words. Perhaps this interest explains why I studied so many languages in school or perhaps this interest arose from my studies of these languages.
English is one of the many languages that comprise the Germanic language family within the larger Indo-European family of languages. The Germanic family includes modern German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.
For a time, Britain was part of the Roman Empire and Latin was spoken there. In 122 A.D., the Emperor Hadrian began building a wall to mark the northernmost boundary of the Roman Britain and to serve to keep the “barbarians” out. Later, because of numerous raids by the Norse and other barbarian tribes across the Northern boundaries of the empire, the Celtic languages native to the place were changed or influenced by a variety of Germanic linguistic influences. After the Norman invasion in 1066 A.D., French was spoken by the nobility in England and English remained the “vulgar” tongue, the language of the common people.
Words contain in themselves not only a history of meaning but also a cultural history. Some words meant one thing in an earlier time and place and mean something entirely different today.
Several years ago I was asked to give a talk at a church gathering on the Lord’s Prayer. As I prepared my talk—and especially as I reflected on the meaning of the phrase “give us this day our daily bread”— I discovered the etymology of the English word “lord.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “lord” is derived from the Old English word hláford, once hláfweard, which means “loaf-ward,” that is the “keeper of the loaf.” A lord, then, is the bread-keeper for the family. He was the head of the household in relation to all who ate his bread.
The making of a loaf of bread does not happen overnight. First the wheat has to be grown, tended, harvested, and ground into flour. Then the flour has to be mixed with other ingredients and baked. Because most of us today buy our bread from a store, we forget how time consuming the making of bread from start to finish really is. In the ancient world bread was a valuable commodity. It needed, therefore, someone to protect it from anything that might harm, unlawfully take, or destroy it.
As everyone on a low carbohydrate diet today knows, bread is a source of sustained energy for the human body. Where there is enough bread, there is life.
In the Lord’s Prayer we ask God, who is “Lord” —the “loaf-keeper”—of all creation, to give us the “bread” we need each day to live. We do not ask the Lord for more than we need, but only for what we need to survive and flourish.
In God’s economy there is always enough bread for all. In human economies, there often is not abundance, but scarcity. There is scarcity because the resources of the planet are limited and God calls on us to shepherd them wisely, but we fail in that duty when some have more than they need for human flourishing while others have nothing. The stories of the feeding of the four thousand and five thousand in the gospels remind us of the abundance of God’s creation— a creation in which there is always enough bread to sustain life for all.
The Eucharist we celebrate and share together is a sign of the abundance of God’s creation and an invitation to all to eat and share in the abundance that God has given us. It is a sign of the economy of God by which the hungry and thirsty are invited into the Lord’s table. We see this in the gospel of John when Jesus tells the disciples that, “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. They said to him, Lord give us this bread always” (John 6:33-4).
When we ask God to give us our daily bread, we recognize that God is the “Lord,” the “keeper of the loaf.” In the Old English sense of the word, God truly is the “Lord” of all creation.
THREE RECENT PUBLICATIONS OF MINE
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Images copyright of Palgrave MacMillan / Springer Nature
Three chapters of mine have recently been published in separate volumes of the Palgrave Macmillan series, “Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue.” The books in this series derive to a great extent from expanded conference presentations at meetings of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network. Two of the three chapters published recently arose from conference presentations, and one was written especially in memory of a departed colleague, Gerard Mannion of Georgetown University. To date, I have published chapters in five separate books in this series, with one still forthcoming. (The details of the publications can be found on the “Academic Publications” page of this blog and in the links at the end of paragraphs below.)
I don’t often write about my academic publications in this blogspace, but because these publications allow me to address both the academy and the church at the same time, they may be of interest to some of my readers.
All three of these chapters employ the work of the Italian philosopher and political theorist, Giorgio Agamben, to engage specific theological topics and issues. While Agamben writes from outside the church, his writings often illuminate ideas and themes from the Christian archive, that might otherwise go unnoticed by those working from within a Christian perspective. In using resources from Agamben for my own purposes, and not necessarily in the way that he deploys them, I aim to craft new perspectives on Christian theological themes and issues.
The title of the chapter in Changing the Church, “To Live according to the Form of the Holy Gospel: St. Francis of Assisi’s Embodied Challenge to the Institutional Church,” is taken from the words St. Francis of Assisi used to describe his manner and form of life, that is, he sought solely to live according to the form of life described in the Holy Gospels (forma sancti Evangelii). The chapter explores what the contemporary church can learn from Francis of Assisi and the monastic traditions of the church so that by focusing less on itself as an institution, the church might offer concrete resources to help contemporary Christians find continuity between who they are and what they do. The second half of the chapter examines “The Way of Love,” promulgated by the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, understood as practical ways of living out the gospel in the modern world. This contribution was part of a volume in memory of Georgetown Professor Gerard Mannion, a founder of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network, who died unexpectedly, in 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53425-7_29
My chapter in The Church and Migration: Global (In)Difference entitled, “The Refugee as Limit-Concept of the Modern Nation State,” contrasts the work of two of the most influential contemporary international voices on behalf of refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers, Giorgio Agamben and Pope Francis. After an explanation of the the way that Agamben understands the refugee to be the “limit concept of the modern nation state,” I examine a few of Pope Francis’ statements and comments on the status of migrants and refugees in light of Agamben’s analysis of the refugee crisis and its integral connection to the nation-state. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54226-9_11
Finally, my chapter in Stolen Churches, or Bridges to Orthodoxy, Volume 2 was first presented at a 2019 conference in Stuttgart as part of an ongoing dialogue between Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians. The chapter entitled, “Giorgio Agamben’s Stasis (Civil War): An Illuminating Paradigm for Ecumenical Dialogue?” examines how Agamben’s paradigm of stasis (civil war) might shed light on contemporary conflicts and engagements between Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55458-3_3
I will make a similar announcement, when another chapter of mine is published in Ecumenical Perspectives Five Centuries after Luther’s Reformation later this year.
IN THESE TIMES 