Avdat

Blood v. milk

Although it's Eastertide, I'm kinda stuck on Good Friday. The faculty staged a preview of this year's Sprunt Lectures by convening a panel discussion on Margaret Miles' recent article in The Christian Century.

Miles argues that in the early and medieval Church, the symbol par excellence of God's love was the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus. But in the early modern period the breast became secularized and eroticized, and the cross replaced the lactating Virgin as the paradigmatic icon of God's love. Miles laments this shift, for the result is a modern culture which objectifies women's bodies and glorifies violence.

The historian on the panel, as I saw it, politely demolished the notion that the cross is an inherently problematic symbol and the nursing Virgin an inherently benign symbol. True, early Christians were loathe to incorporate crosses into their art, but that's because the Emperor Constantine viewed the cross as a symbol of pacifistic insubordination to the Empire. Moreover, when an 11th century Byzantine Emperor launched a campaign to pacify the countryside, his army marched under the banners of the Virgin and Christ child. Our historian reminded us of a chapel service last month led by our Korean students in which a symbol of the hope for Korean unification was displayed, two pieces of wood, one from each side of the border, fastened together to form a cross (i.e., crosses aren't always a tool the Man uses to keep down The Other).

What he didn't do was dispute Miles's argument about how and why a lactating Virgin Mary disappeared from Christian iconography. I'd like to hear more about that. 

Our theologian acknowledged the fact that the cross is a multivalent symbol, but noted that what's important is how the cross is preached and depicted and expressed gratitude for Miles's concerns about a brutally eroticized culture.

Saint Pelagius

Lee heard J. Philip Newell talk on Celtic Christianity the other night and was less than impressed.

Since I'm not above quoting myself, I blogged about the current marketing of Celtic Christianity a couple of months ago.

I find the idea that Pelagius is some sort of standard bearer for the goodness of human nature laughable in the extreme. All you have to do is read his "On the Christian Life" in Oliver Davies Celtic Spirituality to see how hard he is on sin and sinners.

The difference between Augustine and Pelagius is that the former's understanding of sin was more comprehensive. For Augustine, more so than Pelagius, sin is not just an act of wrongdoing; it is a sickness of the human will. Which, ironically, leads Augustine to be much easier on sinners than Pelagius. He thought it was cruel to exhort people to do right when their wills were broken.

Augustine's doctrines of original sin and predestination were formed on the ground, as a result of dealing with seemingly unreformable sinners. He concluded that we ought to let in as many people as possible in the Church, and let grace work on as many as it could. Who knows? Maybe the worst sinner is in fact elected to salvation. This is what historian Robert Markus calls "a theology of mediocrity." Whether it was the cause or the effect of the Church's turn from persecuted sect to imperial religion is a matter of great debate, but the two did go hand in hand.

Pelagius, on the other hand, was a purist. "Every Christian a monk," as Peter Brown puts it. It's ironic that peace and justice types who want a more inclusive Church, flock to Pelagius when, on grounds of their adjusted gross income alone, he wouldn't want to be in the same room with any of them.

The problem with Augustine, of course, is that, since we inherit a defective will, and since the medicine of grace that heals the defective will is available only in the Church, and since Baptism makes one a member of the Church, then unbaptized babies are going to hell, and all that Augustine could say about this unhappy logical conclusion is that he hoped that their hell would be not as bad as the hell for adults.

And I suppose that, if all you know about Augustine is that he thought babies were burning, and that he didn't like Pelagianism, then that's enough for J. Philip Newell and more than a few others to go to the phone book looking for the First Church of Pelagius.

The new hagiographers

The title of the Ian Bradley book I referenced yesterday is Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams. It's a clever debunking of the Celtic Christianity fad, which among mainline Christians is a close second to the Emergent fad, and is something of an overlapping phenomenon.

In short, Yes the Irish celebrated Easter on a different date than they did on the continent. And yes, Irish ecclesiology, which developed outside the Empire, vested authority in the abbot, whereas on the Continent, a diocesan structure modeled on Roman administration lodged authority with the bishop. And yes, the continental (Roman) ways prevailed. And yes, Brigit was probably a Celtic goddess whose powers got attributed to the founder of a convent at Kildaire. And yet, Pelagius was a Briton (perhaps), and Augustine was a Mediterranean Catholic.

But to then conclude that an egalitarian, pluralistic, free-spirited, "green" Christianity not hung up on sin thrived in the northwest corner of the known world until Rome crushed it does not necessarily fly. Such a romanticized view of Christianity in the British Isles has to ignore a lot of data.  Like how their monastic rules prescribed severe corporal punishment for any whiff of insubordination.  Like how Saint Columba forbade cattle on Iona because  "Where there's cows there's women, and where there's women there's trouble." And how Columbanus' sermons describe our nature as depraved. And much else that won't fit into a blog post--primary sources that our professors are having us read because they want the MDivs especially to use this stuff responsibly once they're in a parish.

What's interesting about Bradley's book is that he shows how Celtic Christianity has always been romanticized. He compares Saint Patrick's Letter and Confession, the only extant writings we have of the saint, to the Life of Saint Patrick composed a couple of hundred years later. In his own voice, Patrick is a defensive and admittedly poorly educated man, who frankly doesn't like the Irish all that much. But the Patrick of his biographer goes from strength to strength, sitting at the feet of the great Germanus, and then sailing to Ireland to smack down druids and dull-witted kings with signs and wonders. The transformation of Patrick is certainly due to the author's wish to play up Patrick's town of Armagh over against Kildaire (home of Saint Brigit) as an ecclesiastical and pilgrimage center.

And so it goes. Scottish Presbyterians lauded the Celtic saints as proto-Protestants, those who'd fought the good fight against Rome in days gone by. Patrick became a symbol of Irish nationalism, despite the aforementioned fact that he was only in Ireland under duress--a divine imperative to evangelize those who'd once enslaved him.

Bradley admits to letting himself get swept up in some of the current romanticizing of the Celtic past, and even contributing to it a bit in earlier writings. But he wryly concludes that, If you're going to write hagiography, and that's what much of the pulp Celtic devotional stuff is, better to write it for the sake of cleaning up the environment than because you're engaged in some kind of locker room conversation about the relics at your cathedral versus the cathedral down the road.

Put differently, it's time once again for me to link to Elliot's cautionary tale about lapsarian myths.

You too can be a Celtic saint!

Alexander Carmichael was a 19th century Scottish revenuer. While traipsing through the highlands, shutting down illicit stills,he collected Gaelic songs and poems for posterity. Alexander's anthology of the Gaelic oral tradition, the Carmina Gadelica, is, in the words of Ian Bradley, at least partly responsible for the notion that Celtic Christianity is "a gentle, 'green,' poetic and pagan-friendly inculturation of the gospel with a particular emphasis on notions of presence, immanence and closeness to the next world."

Now whether there is or was such a thing as Celtic Christianity, and whether it fits the above description, and whether 19th century Scottish poems can tell us something about the Celtic Christianity of the 5th-7th centuries, are topics that will have to wait for later. For now I just want to talk about the poems and songs. We are using Esther de Waal's reduced and simplified version of the Carmina Gadelica in our Celtic Christianity class, The Celtic Vision.

There are prayers for building a fire, for churning butter, for herding cattle, and for setting a loom. There are blessings of mothers for their sons who are departing on a journey. There are prayers for newborns and prayers for the dying. There are, to be frank, charms and incantations to ward off disease and evil spirits.

I like this one:

Bless O God, my little cow,
    Bless, O God, my desire;
Bless thou my partnership
    And the milking of my hands, O God.

Bless, O God, each teat,
    Bless, O God each finger,
Bless thou each drop
    That goes into my pitcher, Lord!

I wonder if these mostly Catholic Scottish highlanders didn't have a leg up on both their Protestant neighbors and on their cloistered co-religionists. These folks didn't have to drop everything to say the Divine Office. For them, ora and labora were a single movement, thanks to these prayers, poems and songs. And praying while working may have made "the sanctity of the common life" a lived reality and not a rote theological affirmation.

A classmate who is a minister said that this is what people these days want, a sense of God's presence in the minutiae of life, and not just on Sunday morning. The problem is, we Protestants haven't had anything to give them. We have sermons and free prayers. But where's the poetry? The catechism has fallen out of favor because we don't want to raise kids who have a parrot's faith, but without memorizing catechisms, psalms, hymns or poems, then the secular world's commercial jingles become the soundtrack of one's life. A deficit in my spiritual life right now is that I'm not singing in a choir. Thus I go to bed and wake up with the crappy pop music they play at That Casual Dining Chain You've Eaten In Before where I wait tables in my head instead of the anthem for Sunday.

And not nearly as many people milk cows by hand these days. So there's a danger in consigning a lived spirituality to the misty, dewy recesses of nostalgic by-gone days. But our professor, with the help of Norman Shanks, showed us how easy it is to re-enchant your disenchanted life.

Here's the format; it's easier than Haiku!

Bless, O Lord,           
    May                    
    That                   

And this is what I came up with:

Bless, Lord God, this silverware I roll.
    May I set it out and clear it away with a gracious spirit.
    May it be wielded by those who tip generously,
        who feast with thankful, not gluttonous hearts,
That both server and served may serve and be served by the Son of Man,
    who gave his life a ransom for many.

And,

Bless, O Lord, my carrel, #337,
    May it be a home to a labor of love, and not mere idle curiosity,
That I may glorify you with my mind,
    and build up your people, the Church.

I think that in this washed out age, we need to teach people how to pray along with what to believe and how to live. We need to teach them to sing and to compose. We need to teach beauty, not just truth and goodness.

What I did last summer

I wrote up this little article about my Iona experience for the church newsletter.  No mention of vomit-filled shoes naturally, but you can't say everything in one little article!

            On June 6 I traveled to Scotland for ten days as part of a continuing education project sponsored by Columbia Theological Seminary.  I attended a conference on Celtic Christianity at the restored Abbey on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland.

            Iona is an important site in the history of Scottish Christianity.  The Irish monk Columba came to Iona in 563 AD to establish a monastery.  Monks fanned out from there all over Scotland, converting its inhabitants to Christianity.  The monastery had its share of ups and downs.  It was plundered by the Vikings in the 9^th century, and rendered obsolete when Scotland became Protestant in the 16^th century.  But it has endured as a religious and historical pilgrimage site.

            In the 20^th century, George MacLeod, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, began a unique project.  He brought together seminary students and skilled tradesmen to restore the ruined abbey.  He wanted to bring the gospel and the church into closer contact with the problems of ordinary working class people.  He was also experimenting with new forms of Christian community.  Out of MacLeod’s experiment came the Iona Community, whose members live all over the world, devoting themselves to peace, social justice, and worship renewal.  Members are accountable to each other for the use of their time and money.  While the government now owns the abbey, the Iona Community is responsible for the worship services and seminars that are conducted there.

            In the week that I was there, I worshipped twice a day, attended seminars in which we read Irish and Scottish prayers and poems from the Middle Ages, went on a hike across Iona, visited the spooky and awesome island of Staffa, where Mendelssohn was inspired to write his Hebridean Overture, and hung out with people from all over the English-speaking world.  It was a great experience. 

            People in the Middle Ages lived a lot closer to nature than we do, for good and for ill.  More so for them than for us, the Creation was a realm which revealed God’s plan for redemption, but could also be a menacing place in which divine protection was needed.  We who labor on keyboards and not in fields can find a more holistic spirituality in the writings of the saints who’ve gone before us.  And, in an age in which nature may be bucking human attempts to keep it on a leash, we need the wisdom of our ancestors in faith whose use of the Creation was bridled by a reverent awe.

            Our stereotype of monasteries is that they are places where people go to flee from the problems of the everyday world.  But the monasteries that Irish monks established on Iona and elsewhere were on the front lines of mission. 

            In a book the Session recently read about healthy mainline congregations titled Christianity for the Rest of Us, one of the more curious details was that congregations that are growing in numbers and vitality tend to require a lot of potential members in terms of time spent in worship, Bible Study, prayer and volunteering, before they can join the church.

            What both examples teach us is that high-commitment Christian communities can have a higher impact on transforming society than low-commitment communities can.  In some sense, we do need to be a people set apart from the world, but only in order that we can better serve the world. 

            In the 21^st century we are still seeking new models of Christian community that can faithfully advance the cause of the gospel in the world.  Fortunately we have history to learn from, and the Holy Spirit to lead us into the future.