Category: Art and culture

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One month on

It’s no secret that I’m politically liberal and like many of you have been stunned and disheartened by the first month of the current administration in the United States. But my role on this site is more pastoral than political, and besides there are others who can speak more eloquently and with greater detail than I can about what might come and how it may be responded to. What then is a faithful Christian response to the current situation?

First, I’ve made peace knowing that I cannot come up with a comprehensive solution and don’t expect you to have one either. Good ideas can quickly become fossils, and the moment requires nimbleness and discernment or else each of us will come overwhelmed, and then defeated. (We also have to be comfortable with language of conflict, or else we will delude ourselves about what is happening.)

That’s why — above all else — I remind myself of my core convictions. I need to know what I’m defending: not only the standards of American democracy, but social compact based on decency and mutual respect, characteristics the incumbent president sorely lacks. This is congruent with my faith, and beneficial to decent people of any faith or none. So I don’t have to hold myself to some pious and self-defeating false standard about what Christians should or should not do; I just need to know what I want at the end of this process. The common good, I suppose, above all else. That’s a work in progress, but it will be neither what we have now or what we have had recently.

Discernment like this is one tool on the path towards wisdom, and I’ve been thinking a lot about Jesus is saying in Matthew: “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” (10:16) I’ve seen enough debilitating and catastrophizing rhetoric on the Left — sometimes with unproductive rage towards political opponents — to know that harmlessness or gentleness is necessary for an eventual solution to this crisis. Why? Because there are a lot of people with whom I might agree politically who have a spiritual knife in the hand, pointed towards their own hearts. This is misplaced energy: fear or rage taking the place of constructive action, even so simple as listening to those in Federal service or dependent upon Federal funding for their livelihoods, or preparing for the destruction of programs which may or may not be legitimately in the president’s purview. The performance of outrage benefits no one, including the performer.

The tone is this post is not accidental. If the president wishes his enemies destroyed, there is no easier path for him than they destroy themselves: emotionally, morally or spiritually. With Christians in all times, we bear the strain with humility and grace, relying on the prayers and example of those whose suffering is and was immeasurably greater. We will not increase our suffering by debasing ourselves, but rather uplifting one another. Christian vocation prepares us for stressful and painful moments, and it is a blessing and opportunity we might share with others who struggle deeply and without relief. If we should find ourselves better persons at the end of the current crisis, let us count it as specks of gold mixed with the ashes.

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Deacons in The Universalist

The Universalist, one of the two national Universalist newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s, is available online and with searchable (if imperfect) text. It also gives a view from “the west” namely Chicago and Cincinnati. What does it say about deacons?

In one case, it speaks of a deacon who participated in the 1887 Universalist General Convention, but in the main, deacons appear in one of two ways:

  1. Elderly Universalist men, noted in an obituary.
  2. As a stock character in an entertaining, but hard-boiled tale. (One time, we get a deacon’s wife with a switch ending.) The deacon — an older, established and respected or feared man — has rigid or misplaced morals that place him or the ones he loves in harm’s way. I get a sense that these deacons aren’t Universalist, but they are so broadly drawn that who knows?

I like a soap opera as much as the next person, but it’s not the ecclesiology I was looking for, so I’ll leave further reading to interested parties.

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Anti-sectarian, pro-beauty

A recent dip into familiar sources about spirituality led me back to A. Elliott Peaston’s The Prayer Book Tradition in the Free Churches (1964; one-hour loan available from Internet Archive) and particularly to its chapter on the Free Catholics. Less than a tradition, but more than a whim, for about a decade after the Great War, the Society of Free Catholics stood against sectarianism, attempted to integrate the heritage of the Church with the contemporary world and in doing so elevated beauty. I’m all ears.

This is a counter-narrative that the war infected the liberal churches with a terminal malaise. Sure, it’s a shame it was a minority interest, but their books — especially the liturgies — remain. When I read about them, I want to know more, and so for a while most of my articles will be linked to this theme, at least tangentially.

There’s a temptation to put the Free Catholics in the Unitarian orbit, but this would be a mistake. While the leading voices had a Unitarian background, they rejected its sectarianism and in their own lives stayed outside (British) Unitarian institutions. Also, the Society of Free Catholics were a diverse bunch, even embracing some Roman Catholics, though admittedly on the Modernist end. All the same, even if liturgies the created Free Catholics — and those that inspired them — found their way into the Unitarian-Universalist Hymns of the Spirit and into the minority consciousness of what deep liberal Christian worship looks like. 

Related articles:

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Lovely examples of order of service?

Another request. I’m looking for lovely samples of orders of service. Necessarily available in a downloadable format online, and preferably from a small church (of whatever stripe) or one that works with a tight budget. Feel free to chime in, even years from now.

There’s something dispiriting to visit a church and find something that was clearly made with love (I’m trying to be nice here) but is ugly, disorganized, jam-packed with add-ins or otherwise unpleasant to use.

I’d ask the same for newsletters, but those are harder to find in print. Alas.

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Reading “Search”

I’ve started reading Michelle Huneven’s church memoir Search, about her experience with a ministerial search in a California Unitarian Universalist congregation. The details are altered to create a cloak of anonymity, though it doesn’t take much effort to pull back the veil. (I don’t know how much is fiction; the author and the protagonist have a little dance of identity.)

I’m about a fifth the way through. I’m not sure how a general audience will read it, but I feel like another veil — the practices of and about the ministry — are also being pulled back, and that’s not a bad thing. Several times already, I’ve been slingshot back twenty or twenty-five years to my own formation and the search that brought me to Washington. But I also see the clouds gathering in the book; conflict is coming. I’ll comment more as I go along, or when I finish.

While I don’t recommend prospective ministers develop their vocation in a Unitarian Universalist context (more about that later) if you feel yourself drawn that way, go ahead and get a copy: it’ll surely become part of the folklore of the calling. Anyone else reading it?

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79 years ago, today

I’ve been enjoying “WW2 in Real Time“, a YouTube-based week-by-week documentary wrap up events in the war 79 years ago. (Go, and subscribe if that’s your kind of thing.) That means we’re in 1940, during the Battle of Britain.

I’ve thought about reading the Radio Times in tandem since they’re available, to get a better sense of the nature of the religious broadcasting. So, “today” Sunday, September 1, 1940 I see on the Forces radio schedule a variety of short religious programs, lasting from about five to thirty minutes, and ranging from talks, to hymn sings, to services. Smart: serving people who might not be able to break for a local, organized service or to listen to a fifty minute “full” service on the Home service. Serving people as they are is good ministry. I look forward to other insights.

Also, I note on that day an early show for the Forces featuring that epitome of World War Two home-fires entertainment, Vera Lynn. She is still living, aged 102. This is the past, but not ancient history.

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A word about the situation we’re in

I usually write on a narrow set of subjects — worship, theology and church administration — so leave subjects of national or international importance to those who have a greater depth of experience or better vantage point. Say, the merciless change in policy that means migrant parents in custody are separated from their children. I can’t imagine their horror, or the life-long damage this causes them all.  The UUA made this statement; my heart is closer to this Greek Orthodox statement. There’s lots of religious objection from many quarters to this policy, and the Attorney General’s presumption of quoting Romans to defend his actions.

Of course I detest it. I want it to end. I want decency, democratic norms and accountability to guide national and international governance. But the list of the unbelievable and the unimaginable keeps getting longer. Defend against this, and the White House lobs that grenade into the crowd.

Overcoming these assaults will mean a lot of hard, wearing work, and success is not given. Things I used to care about deeply — employment rights for gay people, or the end of the death penalty — are (to me) now less important than the calculated and empowered de-humanization of target groups by the current Administration. God willing, we may step out of crisis in a few years, but I’m not banking on it.

I paused to make this statement because I was going to write a little post about automating and improving prayerbook typography, and that seems so small by contrast. Even a bit callous. But here’s part of my thinking: we will be called to fight and sacrifice for a very long time. There won’t be as much money or time to enjoy pleasantries, also because the economy is rigged against all but the very rich. We should make as much of what we can, that we might enjoy it the more. If the organ is broken or the plaster crumbles or can’t put a down payment of a church building of our own, we can at least have well-ordered services and (in this case) attractive printed material. We can have that much, and try not to be jealous for more. We must be careful not to be anesthetized to evil by heaping up things or meeting or processes. More than a policy change, the situation we’re in calls for a change in how we live.

So if the flower fund becomes someone else’s legal defense fund, we might better see the beauty of the Lord, and worship in spirit and in truth.

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Twelve books for 2018

Like a lot of people, I want to read more. Unlike a lot of people I’m a very slow reader. So I’m making a resolution to read 12 books in 2018; I’ll start with this list but reserve the right to substitute those that don’t keep my attention. (This also shows how theological my bookshelf is, and it’s not like I’m going to put cookbooks on this list.)

Follow me on Goodreads, where I’ll record my progress.

  • Carl Scovel. Never Far from Home: Stories from the Radio Pulpit.
  • Richard Baxter. The Reformed Pastor.
  • A.A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh.
  • Von Ogden Vogt. Art and Religion.
  • Massey Hamilton Shepherd. The Liturgical Renewal of the Church.
  • Radcliff Hall. The Well of Loneliness. (The foundational lesbian novel.)
  • James A. Herrick. The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction.
  • Nathan O. Hatch. The Democratization of American Christianity.
  • Hilarion Alfeyev. The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian. (A Christmas gift.)
  • Peter Singer. The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty.
  • Gregory McDonald, editor. “All shall be well”: Explorations in Universal Salvation and Christian Theology from Origen to Moltmann.
  • Rene Girard. The Scapegoat.


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Salvator Mundi is for everyone

This week, a previously-thought lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci, “Salvator Mundi” sold for $450 million, and making news because of it. It shows a serene Christ, holding a crystal sphere — the cosmos — and an upheld right hand in a posture of blessing.

The work is stunning, and the price is eye-watering. But the subject of the painting, Christ, Savior of the World is greatest treasure. We are not lost in this world, or to it. We have a sure and powerful savior, and we do not need the riches of the world to meet him. We carry the image within.

See the painting here; the image is probably in the public domain but was released by Getty, and they’re awfully jealous of their licences, whether or not they have the right to be.

Christ with clear orb and hasd-gesture of blessing
Andrea Previtali’s Salvator Mundi, with the same theme

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Painting of the Universalist Church in Gloucester

Over the years, troves of images have been released into the public domain or under liberal licences. The most recent release is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Search page)

Here is “The Church at Gloucester“by Childe Hassam (1918) and now in the public domain. The church is, of course, the Universalist church — the first in the Americas.  John Murray was its pastor; Judith Murray, a founder, was an author and leading figure in Gloucester.