A Sound of Sheer Silence

In the past, I have written about the project that I was a part of called the Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer .  As of last Thursday, I am no longer part of CMMR.  It still exists, just without me (and other core members).  I would love to be able to say that I have all the confidence in the world that CMMR will grow and flourish, but that would be a lie.  I think the far more likely outcome is that CMMR is heading for a fiery crash of one of a couple different sorts.  And part of me thinks that flourishing, at least of the public sort, would be the worst possible outcome for all concerned. In any event, my participation in CMMR is over, and thus one could say it was a failure.  In fact, I would definitely say it was a failure.  There are some people who want to relativize failure, to say something along the lines of "well, it wasn't a failure because I learned from the experience."  It is good to learn from experiences, to be sure, but ...

When I was in the process of becoming an Episcopalian, a close friend of mine--someone who was a serious Christian, a priest actually, but not a Roman Catholic--expressed very serious concerns about the project.  One of his concerns was over my perceived (correctly perceived, as it turned out) lack of institutional loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church.  In his mind, once you are on a particular team, you need to stay on that time--a somewhat ironic position for him since he himself was once a convert, but nonetheless his position.  But his other, more interesting, objection is that he viewed the Episcopal Church as the "off ramp" to Christianity.  In other words his position was not that the Episcopal Church was not a "real" expression of Christianity, but that it tended to be a way station for people who eventually stopped practicing Christianity altogether. Implicit in that formulation is the notion that what is truly important is to be a practicing Christian no m...

"So, what do you think about the bishops wanting to deny Biden Communion?" I've gotten that question a lot. There are a number of ways to approach this issue that I think are interesting on their own merits, but not ultimately the heart of the conversation.  For example, the lawyer in me is fascinated by the applicability of Canon 1405 p.1 , which states that "[i]n the cases mentioned in Canon 1401 [which includes ecclesiastical penalties such as denying Communion], the Roman Pontiff alone has the right to judge . . . Heads of State."  That seems pretty black and white to me--the U.S. Bishops' Conference has no jurisdiction over Biden so long as he is the President.  And, if you think through the "legislative history" of this Canon, it was surely written to prevent local bishops from mucking around with the Pope's broader diplomatic and spiritual initiatives.  In other words, exactly the kind of scenario we have right now.   Along those lines, ...

A while back in this space, I told a story about my first really significant encounter with a personal faith .  It was an experience that came about via the medium of stories, more specifically the stories of this particular person named Jesus who lived a long time ago in a far off place.  I wouldn't have had that vocabulary at the time, but it was a "poetic" experience and encounter.  It wasn't like I read what was said in the Gospel passages and concluded that the "arguments" it was making or the facts that were laid out seemed correct.  Instead, my reaction happened in a different key, on a more emotional and symbolic and abstract level.  Indeed, the reaction occurred at a moment when I was very consciously and very explicitly struggling with the "prose" dimensions of the faith I was being taught.  And nothing in that experience really changed that struggle, except in the sense that it pointed to some other dimension to this whole faith thing, s...

A while back in this space , I wrote about a book entitled Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor.  The core idea, concept of "lunar faith" as contrasted with "solar faith," was a home run for me.  Many people, maybe even most people, either have or want a faith that is solar--it provides clarity and definition and warmth pretty much all the time.  A faith that has shadows and soft edges, one that masks almost as much as it reveals, would be counter to what they are seeking out of this whole faith project.  I get it, and I can't say I haven't looked to bathe in that solar light.  But I find myself drawn to that softer moonlight, and more to the point I get itchy when there is too much sunlight.  I need things to be a little fuzzy, whether that's because I need the mental space to imagine what is there, or because I'm not quite ready to fully confront what is there, or just because there is a beauty to that fuzziness. But what does luna...

In The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Karl Marx said, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."  In the early 17th Century, the Roman Catholic Church committed an enormous, wholly unnecessary own goal when it condemned Galileo's astronomical findings that demonstrated that the solar system revolves around the sun rather than the Earth.  It's important to understand that Galileo was not breaking any new ground with what he was saying, as pretty much every scientifically literate person at the time had a heliocentric view of the universe.  Indeed, that's why it was so damaging--no one  at the time  who knew anything about the topic could take what the Church was saying seriously.  From that, the intellectual world concluded that there was no reason to take anything the Church had to say about the natural world...

This Sunday, the Washington National Cathedral, which is technically the cathedral of the Diocese of Washington of the Episcopal Church, invited Max Lucado to preach.  Lucado is an evangelical author and speaker, known (at least in my sense of things) as one of those guys who writes those novels that fill up the massive shelf space in the "Christian Living" section of Barnes & Noble.  But, he's written other stuff, too.  And you will not, I suspect, be particularly surprised to learned that he is against gay marriage and gay relationships.  In reading through the quotes attributed to him, they seem to be pretty standard anti-gay conservative talking points--the Bible says no, if we let gays get married bestiality is next, etc., etc., etc.  So, it's bad, but it is bad in the usual way.  He's One of Those. I want to talk about this, and why I think the decision of the Washington National Cathedral to invite him to preach is incomprehensibly stupid.  ...

For the first time in almost 20 years, I preached in a church yesterday.  And, through the magic of the Internet, it is archived for all time.  If you are curious, here it is.