Author Archives: blgriffith

Why it’s cool to go to church

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An interesting little piece in the Huffington Post – Why It’s Cook to Go to Church.  In addition, it is interesting that he went to Union and seems to have such an attitude toward the ancient and enduring Traditions – Catholic and Apostolic.  These are generally not the norm for Union students.  I wonder why he attended a seminary for his degree?  What initially brought him even that far?

“Then, in seminary, taking classes on monasticism and ancient
Christianity, I began to strongly feel the presence of God. I got
inspired to visit monasteries and very ancient churches, first in the
U.S., then researching and filming hermits in Egypt, then in Greece and
Eastern Europe, and finally in Russia. I met hermits and monks, and
they let me film their descriptions of the inner Christian life. They
took me to their monastery churches. My studies in Christian mysticism
and ancient texts grew deeper and deeper. I discovered a prayer, the
Jesus Prayer, or Kyrie Eleison — “Lord have mercy,” or “Lord Jesus
Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.” (Some add “a sinner” at the
end.) I loved ancient church so much that I’m making a movie and
writing a book about them, coming early next year (Mysteries
of the Jesus Prayer is a not-for-profit feature film, the result of
my studies and renewed love-affair with Jesus Christ and church).”

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‘Till Tuesday

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I loved ‘Till Tuesday – the name, the music, the look, the album covers.  I’ve followed Aimee Mann long after the band broke up – have all her albums.  She has been referred to as the “last of the tortured artists” and an “artist’s artist”.  I remember in the mid-1980’s sitting in the studio working on my graphic design projects listening to this album.  “Coming Up Close” is easily the best song!  New Wave, female vocalists with low voices… I had a platonic crush on Aimee Mann.

 

Well, she really needs to have a guitar in her hands in this video – not so good at free dancing.  This was when MTV had “VJ’s” and actually played videos – all day!  Then, of course, there was the keyboardist.

In the “Inventive Age”

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Here is the quote:

“I think there is something much bigger going on than finding a niche market and asking how should we position this product of the gospel so that those people will appreciate it, and will like it, and will accept it. We’re really asking a deeper question about who we are in a changing cultural environment when it comes to the way think, the values we hold, the tools that we use, and the aesthetics that are meaningful to us.” –Doug Pragitt (describing the concepts behind his new book, “Church in the Inventive Age“)  
Pagitt is the pastor of Salomon’s Porch Church.

This is the melee in which I desire to be and where the Imago Dei Society has a real place within the greater arena of Anglicanism. Well, actually, this whole way of considering and thinking has had a place within Anglicanism, but to understand how we continue to do this thing called Anglicanism (this Christianity) in emerging cultures and with emerging generations are the questions we need to continually ask!

I came across one of the ministries that has as its purpose (or its obsession) the condemning of the “Emergent” side of the Church as being heretical. I don’t know whether it is simply their inability to understand enculturation and that we are all raised within a cultural system that forms us in the ways we collectively think, the way we understand the world around us and our place it in, what we consider to be aesthetically pleasing or appropriate, and even what we consider to be moral and ethical.  I don’t know whether they are simply ignorant of disciplines like anthropology, sociology, etc., or what is really going on within them.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ and the divine Logos do not change, but we certainly do, our cultures certainly do, and what we consider to be self-evident truth certainly does.  So, groups like this, I suppose, either honestly not to understand, are being willfully ignorant (and as a former teacher, this is an astounding tragedy), or are intransigent in their beliefs – fundamentalists, in other words. 

What is this particular ministry, you might ask?  Apprising Ministries.  I don’t know anything about this, really, and perhaps much of what they do is really good, but with regard to Emergent stuff, they have a thorn in their craw!  So, make up your own mind. 

Our Times

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Thomas Chatterton Williams in his book, Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,00 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture, wrote: “Nietzsche believed the greatest deeds are thoughts. ‘The world revolves around the inventors of new values,’ he wrote.  For more than thirty years the black world has revolved around the inventors of hip-hop values, and this has been a decisive step backward.” (p. 218)

In his book, Williams describes his experiences growing up with increasing allegiance to those inventors and the hip-hop culture, until discovering a much broader world when he went off to college – and more importantly due to his father’s constant influence and love.  Certainly, not all of hip-hop is negative, but much of it is.  For many, many black people, according to their own testimony, the more gangsta forms have had a devastating effect on black culture and those forms are the “new values” taken up decisively by a generation.

Williams goes on to write that his generation, in order to pay the debt they owe their ancestors for all they suffered through in order to make possible in his generation a black President, who is a counter example as a “nuanced thinker” of hip-hop culture, his generation must take up the challenge to do things differently and make things right for the sake of the new generations coming.

I see in Williams’ description of his experience and the “new values” of the hip-hop phenomina a similiar experience of another generation and another racial group – the overwhelmingly white Baby Boomer generation.  The “1960’s” generation proclaimed a new morality with a whole set of “new values.”  In their belief that their generation’s purpose was to usher in a Brave New World, the age of Aquarius, they have been relentless in overturning anything they perceive as getting in their way.   As Nietzsche said, the world has revolved around this new morality and their new values.

Like hip-hop, not all that this generation has done is wrong or bad.  Many aspects of white, 1950’s culture needed to be upended – racism, the “Stepford Wives” expectation of women are examples.  The proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater, however, because of an unnuanced rejection of all that came before them.  We are beginning to reap the whirlwind. 

One predominate characteristic of this generation is their rejection of the notion that their ancestors, or even their parents’ generation, have anything worthwhile to say to them or to teach them, and as a result their generation is known as the first one to cast off history and lessons from the past as informants of how things should be. This may be a bit of overstatement, but not by much.  What is even more sad is that the generation in the aggregate does not acknowledge or perhaps even realize the tremendous sacrifice and denial of self past generations have endured for their generation’s existence.

I am hopeful when I read the demographic trends of younger generations.  They will have their own problems, of course, but there seems to be a reclaiming of history and past experience as informants for figuring out how to live life.  As Williams claims it is up to his generation to overturn the very negative influences of hip-hop on African-American culture, so is it up to his generation, including all races, to overturn the negative aspects of the Baby Boomer zeitgeist for all Americans.

What type of service

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Fr. Dan Martins in his blog, Confessions of a Caricoa, posted an entry entitled, Missional Notes.  He is writing about the services of the Church and their connection with people of varying degrees of knowledge about or commitment to Christ.  He is wondering about the growing population of people who are very much in American post-Christendom and what can be understood in these days to draw people into relationship with God through Jesus Christ and the Church.

One thing mentioned is that a service like High Solemn Mass (which we do at St. Paul’s during the regular season) might be over-kill to someone without a church background – the uninitiated or unconverted.  Fr. Dan writes, “Solemn High Mass is solid food, and is likely to induce spiritual
indigestion in those who haven’t been carefully and gradually prepared
for it. Where’s our version of breast milk, strained carrots, and
Cheerios?”

How do we configure and do “Church” in Post-Christendom and in a culture that is becoming far more pre-Constantinian than post? 

We can no longer assume that new people coming in the door of whatever service or activity the Church engages in know anything about the Christian Gospel, Jesus, or the worship of the Church beyond often trite sound-bytes.  Something like a High Solemn Mass can be very intimidating, and if we actually obey our vows to uphold the Canons of this Church we cannot assume they are baptized Christians, so they may not be able to participate in the central act of such a service.  (They can, of course, come up for a blessing, which is exactly what every unbaptized person to whom I have explained the requirement for communion and why has done once they know they can come forward for a blessing.)  Perhaps this kind of service is for the initiated, while something else may be better suited for these post-Christian seekers.  A fine, well done choral Morning Prayer or Evansong may well fit the bill.

And, how do we configure and do “Church” differently in ways that resonate with younger people and still remain faithful to who and what we are as Anglican Christians in the Episcopal Church?  After all, they are looking for that kind of faithfulness.  An interesting thing about the demographic research – the majority of GenY’ers would rather us say up front who and what we are and clearly delineate what we believe.  They are looking for people and groups who are clear and unafraid to stand for what they believe, as long as we can deal with their honest questions, opinions, and doubts forthrightly and graciously.  With many in the younger generations, it comes down to a matter of rebuilding trust before we can earn the right to speak into their lives.

These are the very questions that I envision the Imago Dei Society dealing with – a charism to research and analyze emerging generations and the emerging cultures so we can meet them in authentic ways that resonate with them without jettisoning the Tradition, both in liturgy and in belief.  Then, taking the knowledge and engaging in “experimental” worshiping communities to see what sticks and what doesn’t.

To be given confidence

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I am about finished with a very good book by the new author, Thomas Chatterton Williams, entitled, “Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture.”  For the past several years, I have bought an autobiography as one of my summer books.  This is that kind of book for this summer… Williams writing about his life, and I’m finishing it too quickly. 

In his acknowledgments, Williams quotes Truman Capote, “Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.”  A good statement, a good sentiment, a good thing to remember.

I hated when in school we were told to write about a favorite hero, and everyone seemed to jump right to it.  I couldn’t.  I never really had any heroes, and wondered whether something was wrong with me.

But what about those who gave me confidence?  If I am honest, and I have to ask myself if I am truly remembering correctly, I have encountered more that broke down my confidence than raised it up.  I really have had to be my own motivator for much of my life. 

The person that came to mind most quickly is Dr. Terry Kuhn.  He is retired now, but while at Kent State he was the Vice-Provost and Dean of the new academic unit in which I worked.  He was my boss.  There is much to admire in Dr. Kuhn.  He had enough confidence in me to allow me to branch into areas of interest and person development that never would have been possible, otherwise.  He allowed me to develop the whole technology department for our unit, when I was a student development specialist and hardly a technology guy.

This may be strange way of conveying such a thing, but one of the greatest compliments I remember receiving came from Dr. Kuhn.  I asked him to write a letter of recommendation for me as a perspective student to The General Theological Seminary.  He wrote in the letter that he thought this turn in my life would result in a tremendous waste of talent, but he highly recommended me nevertheless.  There you go. 

Then, of course, there is my mother!

New Troubles

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I know I shouldn’t get into this, even before I start.  I have decidedly not been visiting all the Anglican/Episcopalian blogs very often, because, basically, they were truly causing me a lot of angst and distracting me from other important ministry stuff.  I have two brain cells, and when one and half of them is dealing with how this person doesn’t like what that bishop said or whatever that other Primate declared, well, that only leaves 1/2 a brain cell to deal with the rest of my life – just too much to do.  In the end, all this stuff in the Church will come to nothing more than distraction within our culture and defamation of the cause of Christ.

Yet, when I hear this new line of reasoning and affront coming out of the leadership of this Church – whether lay or clergy – I just can’t help myself.  When I hear people attempt to use a line of argument around the Episcopal Church’s sense of “colonial victimhood” when the Church of England’s & the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury makes decisions that spank or put into “time-out” this Church for its self-centered actions, well, that is just beyond the pale.  It really is.  When I hear the leaders of the provinces in Africa making the “colonial victimhood” accusation against the “Western” provinces, I can understand their justifications for such accusation (even while I think they use that accusation for convenience and to attempt to justify their own actions of rebellion within the Communion).  (Before God, we will all give an account for what we do and say according to the attitudes of our hearts, and if any of us do things and then justify those doings with fine sounding arguments that are not the attitudinal reality within our heart – lying, in other words – then we will give an account to our final Judge and jury.)

This Church in the U.S. has absolutely no right to claim colonial victimhood!  

We as a Church act in the world with respect to the wider Anglican Communion just like the Bush administration acted politically and militarily in the world.  We expect that we have the right to do whatever we want unilaterally because we are so developed and so enlightened and so absolutely correct and our “prophetic” doings are so righteous. We can do anything just so it is justified in our own minds no matter what hardship it may cause for anyone else. In our hubris and the resulting blindness, we actually believe that it is “good for them.” 

Then, when we get pushback, or spanked for our childishness (which ++Rowan is doing, now) by those foreigners, then we start to act with petulance.  It is laughable that we attempt to rebuke the English Church because we were once a colony of England – nearly 300 years ago!   We, at this point in our ecclesiastical decline as a Church, can no longer really act this way, but we still do so because this generation of leadership doesn’t know how to act in any other way. We are blind to our own “colonizing” attitudes and “imperialistic” actions with respect to the rest of the Communion, and particularly those “poor, backward” Anglicans in most of Africa (except Southern Africa, because they agree with us). 

The time is coming sooner than later when the rest of the world will stand up to the United States politically, economically, and militarily and say, “No more!”  Just wait until that happens and see the epileptic fits this country will go into.  We will become truly dangerous during the transition from world dominance to a far lesser status.  We will assert our dominance, in the mean time, by brute force if need be because we have lost our moral authority as a great nation and beacon of freedom.  This is what is happening to the Episcopal Church, our Church, within the Communion and with many of our former ecumenical partners.  We may not lob physical bombs (or money, in our case); we will simply not listen to anyone else, hands over our ears. We will simply not face up to reality and our place in the world Communion.   Oh, we want diversity and multiculturalism all right, just so long as they believe just like we do or pretend to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

We have to come up with fine arguments or attacks against those English colonizers in order to attempt to save face, but we continue to act in ways that do nothing much more that prove that we are not trustworthy and unwilling to listen to the plight of those less fortunate than our own American selves.

It isn’t that I disagree with women being clergy or LBGT people being members, priests, or bishops of our Anglican Churches. It isn’t that I don’t think we can or should be advocates of such things around the Communion or the greater Church. What I absolutely disagree with is the way this generation of leadership in our Church has been conducting itself with respect to institutional change and the “controversial” issues.  We treat those issues as civil rights causes and make decisions in like manner.  This is not the way the Church should handle things. 

Now, because our leadership makes decisions in such a political or social manner (they know no other way), we are losing the knowledge of how to made decisions as a the Body of Christ, internationally.  And herein lies the problem of trust and “faith and order” as the other provinces attempt to order their lives when they cannot ignore what the Americans’ are doing without much regard for their plight.

Never Stopped Listening

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“My parents told me a story that encapsulates Pappy’s paternal psychology completely.  As a baby, I was with my mother in our old home in Newark, crawling freely while she was trying to clean and watch after my very active five-year-old brother. We were upstairs, on the second floor of the house. At one end of the room, there was a door that led out into the hallway and down a long flight of carpeted stairs onto the parlor level, where my father had his study and received visitors.  I was a quiet baby, and it wouldn’t have been odd for me to not be making much noise as I crawled.  Somehow, my mother had gotten distracted with my brother, and I made my way over to the door, which wasn’t properly closed.  I got out into the hallway and soon began tumbling down the staircase in a bright blue bundle of diapers and pajamas, rushing toward the hardwood floor below.  As my mother gaped from the landing above, the door to my father’s study flew open and out dove Pappy to catch me like a fly ball before I reached the ground.  He had been in the middle of a meeting when suddenly he hopped up, told his guests to wait, and bolted to the door.  He almost certainly saved my life that morning.

“‘How in the world did you even hear that?’ one of the stunned guests asked him afterward.

“‘I’ve been listening for that sound from the moment we brought the baby home from the hospital,’ Pappy said.

“I grew up knowing that no matter where I was or what I was doing, Pappy never stopped listening for the sound of me falling.”

Williams, Thomas Chatterton, “Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture”;  New York (2010): The Penguin Press, pp 33-34.