When the Wise Men are called to seek the Christ Child, they are drawn forth in a strange way: by an unusually bright star, shining in the heavens. In Matthew 2 we are told, “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him.’” We rarely pause to acknowledge how odd this story is.
Read MoreThe terms of this satisfaction emerge in dire tones as Anselm’s treatise turns, in its second part, to his revelation of God’s salvation offered through Christ the God-man.
Read MoreMartin Thornton said of St. Anselm of Canterbury that he “occupies a place in English spirituality not unlike that of Chaucer in English letters. He is the father-founder who first brought all the essential elements together, who gave the school its clear character and stamp. In Anselm, English spiritual theology is embodied and potentially formed; formed as a young man who still needs to mature but who is no longer a child” (English Spirituality, 156). Anselm was a Benedictine monk who occupied the Archbishopric of Canterbury during the tumultuous period following the Norman Conquest at the end of the 11th Century. Like many in the English school of Catholic theology, his writings were imaginative if not always precise.
Read MoreIt was the first funeral that I remember attending. It was for a boy my age, and I was a young boy. I can recall the commemorative photo of him on display and thinking, ‘I look like him.’ Unlike many funerals I’ve since attended, the body of the departed was present with us, and the casket was open so that everyone present could process forward and say goodbye. It all seemed like it could barely be real.
Read MoreWhen people ask what my favorite movie is, I always answer that I have two favorites, one of which is Home Alone. Some people think it’s kind of weird to have a Christmas movie as one of my absolute favorites, but I think it’s the best; I will watch it several times during this season. And the more I watch it, the more I see how this movie thoughtfully compares an Advent that is defined by overindulgence and materialism with an Advent characterized by penitence and reconciliation.
Read MoreAll week, I have been haunted by a “Monday in Holy Week” journal entry from The Duty of Delight, a collection of Dorothy Day’s journals. Day’s sundry list of “unnecessary things” calls to mind, for me, exactly what I am so resistant to giving up each time Advent and Lent return: cigarettes, candy, liquor, movies, radio, newspapers. For each of us, the list is different—mine might be something like chocolate, social media, music, podcasts, coffee—but all of us have a list of unnecessary things to which we are unduly attached. And all of these lists signal the same impulse to find hope (or rest, peace, joy, forgetfulness, pleasure, healing, etc.) in something that is not God.
Read MoreAnglican Catholics are defined by a prayerful encounter with the Scriptures in conscious dialogue with the Church and her saints. To read the Scriptures as an Anglican Catholic means to be fully and robustly Anglican—to grow into the maturity of the Church’s threefold Rule of Mass, Office, and Personal Devotion—and to be fully and robustly Catholic—anchored to the Faith once delivered to the saints and confessed everywhere, always, by all, in the undivided Church through the ages.
Read MoreIn Part 1 of this mini-series, we discussed how our reading of Scripture always takes place within a reading tradition. We may be conscious or unconscious of that tradition, but it will influence us in either case. Anglican Catholics read the Scriptures in interaction with the tradition of the ancient Church and what became the Christian West. In the last post, we explored how the New Testament itself bears witness to a tradition of reading the Scriptures as fulfilled in the Person of Jesus Christ, through whom the Scriptures are read as either anticipation or remembrance. As we turn now to the Middle Ages and beyond, we will look at how a unique spirituality emerged in the English Catholic Church, which became, in its time, the patrimony of the Anglican Catholic expression of the Christian life and its approach to the Scriptures.
Read MoreEveryone reads Scripture after a tradition. Sometimes, that tradition is frightfully novel and idiosyncratic, even egotistical. Most of the time, however, when a person reads Scripture, they are reading it after the manner of someone who came before them, who initiated them into that tradition. The person who teaches us to read traditions us in a way of reading. The parents, pastors, teachers, mentors, and friends among whom we have read the Scriptures are all influences that have contributed to our reading tradition.
Read MoreThe ambient Christianity of Southern California tends to be evangelical and non-denominational. In these churches, Bible exposition comprises the entirety of Sunday service, and individual reading forms the main activity of Christian daily life. Reading the Bible is seen as the primary occasion for encountering God, and this encounter with God has a transformative effect. There tends to be, as well, a focus on the power of extemporaneous reading. I have often seen a numinous application of that Augustinian exhortation to “take up and read!” Within these communities, there is often a dichotomy in practice between expositional preaching, which scrupulously follows the literal sense of the Scriptures, and private devotions that attempt to derive God’s will simply by opening and reading in any given place. This Biblicist emphasis can incline one to believe that anything less than this predominant presence and authority of Bible study in a church’s practice presents a dangerous diversion from the solely reliable stream of divine truth.
Read MoreTrinity is about to end and I find my prayer practices are limping feebly toward its conclusion, just as they have limped feebly through most of Trinity. When I reflect on the expanse of the last twenty-something weeks I see, in my mind’s eye, a desert landscape. It is a dry, rocky expanse. It reminds me of the Coachella Valley: bordered by low-lying hills, roughly textured by boulders, sand, scrubby sagebrush, sheer sandstone cliffs, and little green-trunked trees that bloom with bright yellow flowers.
Read More“Now is not the time for this.” I can think of few phrases that so capture the spirit of our age and its perspective as this. We are obsessed with schedule and itinerary and the control we believe they give us. Life must be arranged and it must be optimized. But as we all know, reality does not yield in this way, and few things reveal the objectivity and intractability of reality as death. We do everything we can to defer and distract from our reckoning with death; it’s never quite the right time to consider it, after all. And so we must see it as a severe mercy that we are halted this day and called to remember again.
Read MoreGetting back into a rhythm is a difficult thing. When I wrote frequently for our blog last year, the process of sitting down to put thoughts to paper was routine, familiar, and often easy. I developed a liturgy that suited me well and allowed writing to be a prayerful exercise. Yet, after a five-month hiatus for the birth of my daughter, I find myself struggling to make my fingers type. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, but rather that the time away has dulled the familiarity of the liturgy. What was once a discipline of stillness to center my thoughts and prayers well enough to write has become once more a laborious struggle to remember how to be still. It’s much easier to let other things take away my time, and I find myself making excuses that other things are more important than this more cumbersome task at hand. It feels like I’m starting over.
Read MoreThe Church fathers taught that the Spirit’s primary ministry is to re-produce Christ within the Christian. This is not to say that there is more than one Christ, but rather Christ means to become fully and truly present in the life of every Christian as He is, while making them that which they are called to be. As this work unfolds, the fellowship of the Church matures in the godlike character of agape, or the love that is uniquely God’s to bestow and enjoy. But before we are united in love as members of one another, before we are made perfect as the living members of the Body of Christ, we will experience the work of personal perfection and the manifestation of Church unity through what the Scriptures call the ministry of reconciliation.
Read MorePentecost is a feast of joy in the Lord’s renewal of His people’s spirits and His whole creation through the giving of the Torah. As the 16th Century Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel notes, “Man’s connection to Torah represents the fruit of the soul God placed within, and its ability to produce spiritual bounty … Without Torah, he remains in that state; but once he receives Torah, he realizes his potential as adama to bring forth bountiful produce.”
Read MoreThe Holy Spirit is the Lord and Giver of life, eternally breathed forth by the Father through the Son. Yet that life always has a shape, and the shape of God’s life is relational. Father, Son, and Spirit share an eternal communion with each other, without beginning or end. Out of the abundance of their eternal communion they created the heavens and the earth in the beginning. The Father spoke the Word, His Son, in the Breath of the Spirit and the world was made. Again, out of the abundance of their triune love, they provided salvation to our shipwrecked race. The Father sent His only-begotten Son to redeem the death-afflicted creation by pouring out the Holy Spirit to usher it into the fullness of life again. Our life as Christians is a life shaped by our relationship to the Father in the Son by the Spirit. We are what we are because of the life we have been made to share with them.
Read MoreThe Orthodox priest Fr. Alexander Schmemann calls the Sacrament of Confirmation “the personal Pentecost of every man,” the effect of which is to consecrate him as a temple of the Holy Spirit to inaugurate his new life as a kind of living liturgy. In the next few posts, I would like to explore what is this new liturgical life we have received through Baptism and Confirmation, and what it means for us, each and all together, to be the living Temple of God.
Read MoreConfirmation is one of the seven sacraments of the ancient faith. Sometimes called ‘chrismation,’ owing to the long-standing practice of using blessed oil (or chrism) as part of the rite, Confirmation bestows a unique grace to the baptized Christian, by which the nascent gifts of the Holy Spirit are stirred up in them and by which the Christian is sealed as belonging to Christ. The stirring up from within and sealing from without bestow strength upon the Christian, so that they may carry out their vocation as a member of the congregation of the faithful.
Read MoreWith this week featuring both the Autumnal Ember Days and the Feast of St. Matthew (September 21st), our recaps of 1 Kings as featured in our Old Testament lessons from Morning Prayer will cover only Chapters 6–9, as our lectionary skips over Chapter 7 entirely. As a reminder, the Ember Days are days of prayer and penance which occur at the four seasons (“Ember Days at the Four Seasons” sounds like the name of a fancy restaurant), where we also pray for development of vocations for clergy. At St. Matthew’s, we’ve also taken to praying for the development of all vocations in the Church, including those of the laity.
Read MoreWe continue our recaps of the Old Testament readings for Morning Prayer with the start of 1 Kings.
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