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The Church is founded on Peter who denied Christ three times and couldn’t walk on the water by himself. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others. To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs, whereas it is our dignity that we are allowed more or less to get on with those graces that come through faith and the sacraments and which work through our human nature…Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does. The Church does well to hold her own; you are asking that she show a profit. When she shows a profit you have a saint, not necessarily a canonized one.
Flannery O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins 12/8/58.
Habit of Being, Letters
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Now playing: Jan Garbarek & The Hilliard En – Parce mihi domine
via FoxyTunes
The group that whips the weekly worship into shape in church got asked this question recently: ‘How far are our psalms, hymns and spiritual songs expressing a sufficiently wide spectrum of spiritual experience and aspirations or are we too narrow and self-absorbed?’
Narrow? Self-absorbed? Moi?
This would have saved the agonies of doctrine lectures, been funnier and more memorable.
The reader course stabbed around a bit last night at the subject of Communion. It felt like the joke about the drunk looking for their lost keys under the lampost, because ‘that’s where the light is’. One colleague rightly suggested that in the last 30 seconds of the session we look at lay presidency – which sounded sort of Clintonesque and would have sounded Bushesque if it had been lame presidency.
Inevitably – because it was getting interesting – we ran out of time. Not before the tutor had attempted a final throw of the Anglican control frisbee, along the lines of ‘Eucharist being special’ ‘nature of ordination and authority’ ‘the Bishop says’ and structural issues like the three way tie of ‘bishops, priests and deacons’. However, when I returned home, tds offered insights from discussions in God’s own diocese. The confident pronouncement was: ‘The laity should become more priestly; the priests become more episcopal and the bishops become more apostolic.’
Although there’s snow forecast this week, could the Other Place be in danger of freezing over as well? Nope, thought not.
On the ipod:
Red, Red Wine – Jimmy James and the Vagabonds
Son of a preacher man – Dusty Springfield
What a waste – Ian Dury
Jesus was an only son – Bruce Springsteen
When the man comes around – Johnny Cash
Baby it’s cold outside – Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow – Dean Martin
This came to my attention:
Strangely enough Snoopy’s theology of ‘Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?’ didn’t appear to be among the spinal inches on show at Gladstone’s library at St Deiniol’s visited in the line of duty today. It’s a miniature Trinity College, Dublin or Bodleian with a pinch of Hogwarts thrown in.
Gladstone had a vision of creating a reading, thinking and writing space for ’scholars committed to serious and solid work for the benefit of mankind in inexpensive lodgings together with congenial society’. To this end he bequeathed his library of around 32,000 books and wheeled them himself in a barrow from Harwarden Castle to his new library. He read over 20,000 of the titles, and as an anal-retentive type must have kept a list of what he’d read so those who came after him would know how literary minded he’d been. Assuming he didn’t leave his mother’s womb reading Homer or Dante and we start him as a reader at say four years of age, he read around 238 books each year to get to his overall total.
Is this possible? He kept a diary allocating his use of time very carefully and worked 16 hour days, but is it possible to really read 238+ books in a year? Did he have lean years where he only managed 100 or so volumes and had to make up the deficit the following year with a reading list of 300 or 400+? Were some very, very slim like his own 29 page book On Books and the Housing of Them?
There are now around a quarter of a million books at the library – too many even for Gladstone’s speed-reading – still leaving room for a Peanuts, Schulz or Charlie Brown who aren’t in the catalogue yet.
There are two utterly different forms of religion: one that believes that God will love me if I can change; the other believes that God loves me so I can change.
Fr Richard Rohr speaking at Greenbelt this year
Which reminds me of something I read long ago which runs: ‘While nothing is worse than bad religion, nothing is more necessary than true religion.’
And a final move beyond religion, which even has good news as a selling point.
