GalliBlog

I’ve just sent another book off to the publisher–A Great and Terrible Love: The Unexpected Embrace of a Holy God. It’s about the traditional attributes of God (omniscience, omnipresence, etc.) and how they are the ground of our intimacy with God. Like I did with Beyond Bells & Smells, I will feature excerpts to wet the appetite.  Here is a passage from the chapter on God’s immutability–his changelessness–and how that might relate to prayer:

Aligning our wills with that of God’s is not a matter of meek abdication, of mindless submission to power and wisdom of an almighty divinity. It begins by boldly accepting the invitation to make our desires known to God: “Ask and it will be given to you.” It is not until after Jesus pleads that the cup of suffering be removed that he finally discerns that it is not God’s will that it be removed. Only after wrestling with God does he relent of his desires.

God’s unchanging purposes, then, are discovered in the argument of prayer. To reduce prayer to begging God to fulfill our desires is childish. To abdicate to God without first acknowledging our desires is to deny our humanity, the person created and shaped by God. Pure acquiescence is often portrayed as the most saintly posture of prayer, but in reality God invites us to argue with him. And it is through the argument that knowledge of God’s will emerges.

This is the dynamic of all relationships. It is only in the back and forth of honest, passionate conversation that deeper understanding emerges. Only by expressing our desires and views, and hearing a challenge, do we begin to see that our desires and views have richer features than we had first imagined. Only in argument do we see where our desire has become selfishness, and where our opinion is but ignorance.

Even more so when we argue with God.  Through the argument of prayer we better understand ourselves as well as the unchanging nature and purpose of God.

Our church (Anglican) is in the middle of a land and building campaign, and our parish has been reflecting on what that means for us.  The following are some reflections  I shared in a recent  adult education class.  This will make more sense if you have read the Beyond Bells & Smells chapter on how liturgy shapes our sense of space. But I’m wondering if people from other-than-Anglican traditions identify with this reasoning or not. 

There have been many reasons marshaled to justify our purchase of land, upon which we hope to raise a building. We have heard about “coincidences” that suggest this might be the leading of God.  We have thought about the evangelistic opportunities of  "building something beautiful for God," a sanctuary of transformation that will send people back into the world to build something beautiful into lives whose walls are collapsing from despair and hopelessness. I have often said that a church is an institution and can have no long term viability if it doesn’t buy land and build a building.

But as Anglicans steeped in the liturgical tradition, can we not perceive an even deeper reason?  God has been good to our church, and he has met us over the years, in a number of auditoriums. As I’ve noted, these auditoriums have been blessed, and they have become holy places, pieces of real estate where God meets and changes people.

An Anglican church, however, cannot be a sojourner church—that is the unique calling of some, but not us, and it is a unique and important witness to the world for some churches to be on the move on the move, so to speak, to treat buildings as mere shelters, to remember indeed that this earth is not our home, that this building is not the kingdom of heaven, that we are but sojourners, strangers in a strange land.

As Anglicans, we have a different vocation, some other essential truth of the gospel to which we are to be a witness: The reality that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” We remind all that God meets people not just in their hearts and minds, but on certain pieces of real estate, and that these pieces of real estate shape and change our relationship with God, and that our relationship with God changes these pieces of real estate.

Indeed, in this day of ecological awareness, we of all people should know why we should not only care for the earth but why we care about and for the places we worship. We of all people should know that we have a mysterious relationship with land and with the stuff that ultimately comes from land–concrete, wood, glass and stone.

We Anglicans, along with the Orthodox and Roman Catholics, are the gospel witness that land matters to God, so much so he called a wandering Nomad from Ur and told him to stop wandering and to settle down in the land he would give him; the One who rescued a people enslaved in a foreign country and guided them to a land of their own; One who returned them from exile to the place from which he had driven the; One who became flesh and dwelt in that land and in no other, a land today we call Holy.

Every Anglican parish is an icon of Israel, a people with a unique call from God to not wander but to settle down, not to live in exile in strange places, but to gather together on a certain piece of land where Jesus will take on flesh and dwell among them, a place that will become holy.

It will be a place where perhaps our generation will first get to dwell, and then our children, and then our children’s children. And by dwelling in that place for generations upon generations, the people called Church of the Resurrection will know things about God that cannot be known except by dwelling in a place for a very long time. For only after living and worshipping in a certain place for generations can we begin to fathom the liturgical mystery of time and space, where here becomes there, and there becomes here, when past becomes present, and present becomes future. For in the years to come, when during the liturgy we join angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we will recognize personally some of that company of heaven, because we and our parents and our parents parents will have worshipped with them on earth, on a certain piece of real estate that had shaped them and had shaped us because it had become holy ground.

This question unnerves us because it presumes a great chasm exists in the universe, a Grand Canyon of despair. On the far side of the canyon stands God. On our side of the canyon stands our hurt. The canyon is so wide, God appears as a speck on the horizon. Our pain looms so large before us, we sometimes cannot even make out that distant divine speck. The canyon is so deep, we fear to approach the edge lest we trip and fall into the abyss. Where is God when it hurts? presumes this great Canyon, this unbridgeable gulf, this chasm as deep and wide as the gap between eternity and time, between between holiness and sin.

So begins the sermon I preached on Sunday. The audio file has not been uploaded, but if you want to read the sermon, since I preached from a manuscript, you can download it.

Okay, time for some shameless self-promotion…

My book on liturgy has been released:

The book is not an explanation of the liturgy as much as an exploration of how the liturgy shapes us into the image of Christ, and integrates us into the community called the church.

Participants in this blog helped shape a number of the chapters. In one instance, my editor wanted me to delete a section, but because of the vigorous responses I received here, I insisted we keep it.

So, thank you for your input. It has made it a better book.

For more info about the book–and an easy link to order it!–go to the Beyond Bells and Smells page.

If you find it helpful, I’d appreciate an evaluation on Amazon.com–with lots of stars! I was grateful for a mention in Publisher’s Weekly, but it’s clear that the reviewer did not read the book carefully. While he/she criticizes the book for trying to cover everything "from Orthodoxy to Presbyterianism," he/she apparently failed to see in the introduction that I deliberately excluded Orthodoxy from my discussion precisely because it is so different than the other mainstream liturgical traditions.

He/she seems to have wanted a book that explains the different parts of the liturgy (which I specifically said the book wasn’t) and failed to see what in fact I was trying to do. This, of course, is frustrating.  But I’m still confident that the book delivers on its promises and will be a great help to newbie and veteran alike. But it will take a few reader reviews to reinforce that point.

Then again, if you agree with the Publisher’s Weekly review, uh, just keep your opinions to yourself 

Well, it’s time to stir things up, which means (drumroll), time to think about gender issues. The occasion is an Atlantic Monthly essay, "Marry Him!" in the March issue.  The theme is summed up in this paragraph:

My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)

And then there’s this paragraph:

What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.

The entire essay struck as grounded in reality and full of wisdom. My wife and I did have a short period of romance, but frankly, most of marriage has been like running a "very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business." And I too mean that in a good way. I can imagine all sorts of women who might make me happier, and my wife can surely think of men who could make her happier. But we realize that those men and women don’t really exist. And if they do, they would have serious flaws in other areas that would just make us pine for each other! And, if it isn’t clear, my love for her is rooted ever more deeply, and in a place that seems to transcend mere feelings. I don’t know how else to describe it. This is not to say we don’t drive each other crazy some days.

So that’s my reaction as a man married to the same woman for 33 years. Yet I recognize that the essay may strike people differently, and I’d love to hear how it does strike you. I just don’t know what it’s like to be a 20-or 30-something at the turn of the 21st century, so I’d love to hear, either here or in a personal email.

I  wonder how the findings in this article–"Conservatives Just Aren’t Into Academe, Study Finds:Divergent life choices may explain the dearth of right-wing scholars," (Chronicle of Higher Education)–apply to Christian higher education.

It has been my experience that Christian college professors are more liberal than their students and than Christians in general, and that politically conservative professors are an increasing minority. But my experience is limited to a handful of colleges, and I’m willing to be challenged on this. 

The article shows its own subtle liberal bias, especially in the way it frames liberal and conservative motives, but the larger issue remains, and I suspect even for Christian colleges. If true, this has all manner of consequences when it comes to offering students a balanced and intellectually rigorous education.

(Cross-posted on the Christianity Today Live Blog.)