I like my religion fancified. No doubt about it – give me some beautiful music in a beautiful building with fancy language and costumes if you have them…and there is a very important part of religion happening in all this. The communal worship, the communal creation of sacred space and time. Sometimes you even have an encounter with God in such situations… a passage of scripture or a particular part of the sermon or hymn sends shivers down your spine and joy leaps up within you and you become aware of that which is always there, the Spirit of God.

But mostly the God I worship is not in the church. Mostly the God I worship lies in the terrible mysterium tremendum, the God that defies such tidy confines as our churches and roars through the world with all of his horror and beauty, present in sunsets, food pantries, and holocausts: the God of Life. He is there in Church, too, of course… but he is as just as often reduced as he is magnified there.

Creeds, statements of faith… these things are more part of that communal, organized experience of God – so they too have their place, but are given to being an excuse to take glory from the God of Life I still find myself uncomfortable with them. So I dreaded ever composing one of my own, dreaded how I would try to pair down the numinous God I know and love into something as banal as a paragraph.

Then Drew went and did it and made me feel humble and elated.

But it’s there. And right now I can hardly imagine how I might change it, it seems to encapsulate as much as the language might in such a short form on what I believe, what I feel, what I know. I’m going to be spending some time with it, work with it a bit. I’m really in awe of it… I worry about inflating Drew’s ego too much but I’m very impressed and happy to see it. Maybe it’s not so impressive as that, being still new to the faith sometimes little things can astonish me. But I think it is worth looking at for just about anyone.

As Jesus revealed God’s mercy among the poor, lonely, outcast, and oppressed peoples of Israel; and as Jesus demanded transformation among the religious authorities while revealing their religious systems as frail compared to the God they alone were to serve, so Jesus asks the community of faith to strive for justice through love knowing that it is God’s grace through acts of faith that sustain the people of God. With faith in a risen Lord who by the power of the Spirit sustains the order of creation, the people of God share the responsibility of establishing a kingdom of mercy, compassion, service, and justice that exists to glorify God alone.

So you might want to take a few minutes and read the rest here.

I knew, intellectually, that a lot of early Christian worship was very similar to Jewish worship as both weaved their way through history the two changed but had some very real connections left. In the Episcopal church, with the revision of the prayerbook in 1979, the older patterns of worship resurfaced a bit more significantly. But this was all intellectual… when I sat through a Christian service there was very little that made me harken back to a temple or synagogue service. The differences were too pressing, just enough so that it was all still quite alien.  While I grew accustomed to my new home, it never quite connected back to my old one.

Meredith Gould, who, like me, converted from Judaism to a liturgical form of Christianity (Roman Catholicism), helped me form these connections with her new book Why Is There a Menorah on the Altar? Jewish Roots of Christian Worship. I devoured the book quickly – it’s written in a relaxed, casual style that often amuses as much as it educates without knocking you over with the enormity that are both Jewish and Christian liturgical traditions.

This is the book that, I think, would have eased my conversion more than anything else I might have read – because as either a Jew or an Episcopalian (or other liturgical tradition, this book is of special significance to Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Orthodox individuals) so much of what our religion is lies in our shared worship. As one of my friends and mentors put it “prayer shapes believing” and the heart of liturgical prayer is the worship we share. Whether it is the objects of the sanctuary or the particular pattern of prayers, Meredith weaves the connections seamlessly and clearly – and this is vital. We find a vital connection to our Jewish roots here, remembering that we are all children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, all praying to the same God of Israel.

This book is put together in such a way that it is an excellent, quick, thoughtful read for an individual or an excellent text for a Sunday school class to work through. I would suggest it as reading material for all Christians, especially from the ‘liturgical traditions,’ who wish to know about the Jewish roots of Christianity.

Read more of Meredith’s work on her blog, twitter, or website.

Disclosure: I was sent a review copy of this text. It goes without saying that I’m far too cynical to heap this praise upon it unless I believed it, and I do.

Lord, I have not lived like a contemplative. The first essential is missing. I only say I trust You. My actions prove that the one I trust is myself-and that I am still afraid of You. Take my life into Your hands, at last, and do whatever You want with it. I give myself to Your love and mean to keep on giving myself to Your love-rejecting neither the hard things nor the pleasant things You have arranged for me. It is enough for me that You have glory.

Everything You have planned is good. It is all love. The way You have laid open before me is an easy way, compared with the hard way of my own will which leads back to Egypt, and to bricks without straw. If You allow people to praise me, I shall worry even less, but he glad. If You send me work I shall embrace it with joy and it will be rest to me, because it is Your will. And if You send me rest, I will rest in You. Only save me from myself. Save me from my own, private, poisonous urge to change everything, to act without reason, to move for movement’s sake, to unsettle everything You have ordained.

Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen, amen.

Kindle iPhone App

So, I’ve been trying to work out something that would work for me – allow me to do it just about anywhere, taking a few minutes from whatever I’m doing.  The trick here, for me, is portability and ease of use.  I’m not good about remembering to carry more than the basics (and don’t want to!)  I like to keep it to the bare essentials (phone, wallet, keys) as much as possible.  I have a number of prayer books, and have manually typed a lot of them out as well.. but I need something more efficient and can’t crack out the BCP all day (not to mention that the BCP really isn’t setup for ease of use in these situations, I don’t want to check the lectionary and then have a bible handy when I do this).  Whatever I do needs to flow, needs to happen without me switching mid-prayer to something else or consulting multiple texts.  So, the trick here is having it all on my iPhone – primarily making use of the Kindle App and then a Bible program (there are plenty of free ones).

This is what I’ve worked out, I’d love to hear your feedback and how you manage daily prayer (for those of you who aren’t particularly liturgical, I realize this is much easier!)

So I’m committing to 4 of the “Hours”, or what we normally consider the traditional daily offices of morning, noon, evening and compline.  During the morning and compline services I’ll be doing additional readings as well, since these are the times I’m not at work, and have more freedom in how I might worship.  My additional readings are: 2 chapters of scripture (New Testament, as I’m still not as familiar with it as I am the Hebrew Bible), and then daily readings from the works of Deitrich Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, and Thomas Merton.  Of those Merton is my easy favorite but Bonhoeffer does challenge me and Lewis sometimes does.

So what will it look like:

Tickle's The Divine Hours

In the morning I will do the Morning Office from either Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours, Thomas Merton’s A Book of Hours (not made by him, and generally of questionable quality but still.. its occasionally profound and a good change of pace), the Northumbria Website, or the Oremus website.

After that I’ll go to the readings from Merton, Lewis and Bonhoeffer.  I might slip in some Rumi from time to time, too (I don’t have the ‘daily’ ebook of his, but I have the print version).  These readings are usually just a paragraph or two.. giving me something to chew on for the day.

After that, around lunch time, I’ll do another short set of prayers from one of the above sources.  The same for evening prayers (around 5-7).

Before I go to bed I’ll do the last round, using the above sources with the addition of the New Zealand Prayerbook.  And I’ll end it all with reading a few chapters of the New Testament.

I’m not an ENORMOUS fan of reading on the iPhone, but the practicality can’t be beat.

How do you maintain a daily spiritual discipline?  Suggestions, thoughts on mine?

In the Hebrew Bible we this over and over again…. God calls to someone and they change their name (Abraham) or they experience something and they change their name (Jacob/Israel).  We walk through certain experiences and we know we are not who we were, and that we cannot pretend that we are.  Sometimes, especially if the individual has a particularly metaphor turn of mind, we need an external signifier to our change – a mark that reminds us that we are not who we were.  It can seem silly to some people, an affectation, self aggrandizement or indulgent… perhaps it is, but having done so I don’t believe these were my purposes.  No, I felt like I was someone else and I needed to commemorate that somehow.

I have many names.  All but my birth name has arisen from my religious life and while this religious life has changed they are still all my own.

My birth name was Travis.  My family still calls me this, and on anything official it is who I am.  I hope to change this some day, but for now it is what it is.

My Jewish name is Baruch ben Avraham v’Sarah.  No one calls me this, and often I forget this name entirely.  Thinking about it tonight (I’m writing this late Friday) prompted this post.

The name I took on soon after becoming religious was Gideon.  There’s a few reasons for this, but mainly it was that call to an externalization of something that had happened to me inside.  It has no special significance, I hate to say – in that it is Gideon, one of the Judges of the Hebrew Bible.  I have no special affinity for Gideon nor was particularly moved by his story.  I simply heard the name when I was young and it always stuck with me.  It’s become who I am and almost everyone calls me this, and even in my own mind it is what I call myself.  I was also baptized and confirmed with this name.  As you might imagine, I also endure quite a few jokes about hotel bibles.

But these are my names.  I am all of them and to me they have power and significance, they map out who I have been and whom I hope to be.

The greatest hypocrites are the religious – all the major religions of the world make our obligations towards one another clear. They deliver us from our egos to see the world we are part of, the world of interrelation that we cannot escape.  Yet those same pious hypocrites cry out the loudest, wearing their crosses so proudly, to hold back help from those who need it.  We are not short of theologies and rationalities  to dress our selfishness in vestments.  No political measure suggested is as wretched as letting these people remain hungry, remain sick, remain in need… none.  Such details can be addressed in time, but the hungry need food now.

It sickens me.  It saddens me.  It drives me to despair.  I reach the point where I can barely bother, where I just can’t seem to see any reason to keep fighting.  My heart breaks and I want to weep and am afraid that should I let that first tear out I’ll never stop.

This isn’t just about health care reform or any particular issue, but rather all issues.  The world we’re in.  The religious disgust me most of all.. the prophets, Jesus, Buddha… they all told us that the world we are in, the world we live in, is false.  It is Fallen.  Broken.  It is a world where we are at each other’s throat and all of them say to us that it is not to climb over our brothers and sisters, treading on them as we make them our ladders, but to lift them up, to help them – and if you must look at it this way, in doing so you help yourself.  We create the world we’re in.

That is the secret, that’s the great truth: we can do better.  Not as some mealy mouthed ideal or bleeding heart platitude.  But as a real practice!  We are conscious!  By whatever accident or design, we have minds and souls that might save us! We must think about what we do.  We must love.  We must forgive.  We must swallow our anger and rage and desire and greed and frustration and surrender it… it is not easy, it is possible.  Perhaps not or everyone, almost certainly not for everyone, but some of us.  Enough of us.  We will fail, we will be broken, we will craft broken things but we can do better, we can do more.

The voice of the world tell us that we must compete, that nothing is gained except what is won from another.  That we must live always bloody.  But the religious have been told, the religious have had it pronounced to them by those they claim to listen to that the Kingdom is at hand!  That we must do justice and love kindness, care for one another, feed the hungry, heal the sick…  You’ve all been told, you all claim it is true, claim it is the Way, you claim to be the children and disciples of prophets but you are only the children of Caesar!

Lord, deliver me from my despair.  Give me strength that I might continue to fight. I am tired, I am lonely and I feel I am alone among the mad.  I know I am not alone but my heart breaks. Help me, save me… I try so hard, yet I know I should try harder, that I do not try hard enough and that there is much I could do but do not… have mercy on me, help me be a better instrument, a better servant and a better healer for those that come before me.  Save me from pride, from arrogance, and help me remember that I am broken among the broken.  Give me wisdom to discern what I can and cannot do, and what I must walk to and away from. Lord, save me.  Amen.

Every outer evil inevitably attracts from our own depths parts of ourselves that resemble it. To engage evil is therefore a spiritual act, because it will require of us the rare courage to face our own most ancient and intractable evils within. It means abandoning one of the greatest and oldest lies: that the world is made up of good people and bad people. There is a double movement of psychic energy. We identify someone else as evil and unconsciously project our own evil onto that person. But the person or system that we call enemy also evokes the evil within, like a piano string set vibrating by a piercing scream. This two-way traffic of projection and introjection, if not halted, eventually becomes a form of mimesis, where each party begins to imitate the other.

What is so very painful in the spiritual discipline required to face this inner darkness is that some of it may not be redeemable. I would like to become non-violent from the heart, but there is a killer, a torturer, a coward, and a dictator in me that would like to keep me in psychic detention forever. Call it Satan, the shadow, the dark side of God, whatever, it is a brute fact documented down through the history of the human race. Something there is in me that does not want to be redeemed, or see others freed as well. I believe this fact is universal. Christian theology calls it the fall or original sin. Judaism knows it as the evil impulse. Even recognizing that this aspect is in me does not free me of its power. I must bring a great deal of consciousness and forgiving love to bear on these parts of me in order to limit their damage. I must continually offer them up to God for whatever healing and transformation is possible. People who engage in non-violent protest without at least some awareness of this cesspool of violence within them can actually jeopardize the lives of their compatriots. In a protest against bombing, they themselves become the bomb, and explode.

It is hard enough getting people to engage in Jesus’ way of resistance to evil. Then we tell them they have to go through an arduous spiritual discipline to neutralize the oppressor within!

To say that I’m feeling conflicted or confused or any other adjective that roughly means “I don’t know what the hell is going on” could really not capture what I’m going through at the moment. It was Yom Kippur last year that I stood up during the services and walked out, my mind in a rare moment of panic with one thought racing through my head “I cannot be Jewish anymore.”

I’m not going to get into all of that. This blog has been a record of that journey and thank you all for your support and guidance. Three people in particular deserve a great deal of thanks for their support, wisdom, and understanding through what has been, while amazing, a very difficult transformation. Tamra, my girlfriend and best friend, who has put up with so much from me as we both have gone through so much this last year, both together and individually. Hal, who was a wonderful ear to listen, source of advice and comfort. Tom, who has been my mentor and friend these past few years who has helped me keep it all in perspective.

I don’t know how I feel about today. Part of me mourns a little. I don’t know how I feel about Christians doing Jewish things, though I have a number of academic arguments for and against at my disposal… but I do not think that I can ever do Jewish things again. I love the awesome power of Yom Kippur, and the fun of Purim, and the lights of Chanukah but… I walked away and it seems wrong, somehow, to have my cake (or hamentaschen) and eat it, too. I know many people who do this wonderfully, respectfully, but.. I don’t think I can.

So this day goes unremarked aside from this. I went to a lovely outdoor service today where Tamra played wonderfully for a small, rural congregation (well, relatively rural) and we read, oddly enough, the end of the Purim story of Hamen, Mordachai and Esther and it was odd hearing it at church. I know it shouldn’t, but it was erev Yom Kippur and that’s just how it is for now.

…she frankly says that religion is one of the greatest impediments to finding God.

And by “religion,” I don’t mean “faith.” I mean rituals, creeds, traditions, and often leaders–all of our means of trying to connect with God.

Lotz somewhat confusingly still thinks Christians should belong to a church.

Yes, creeds, rituals, traditions, leader, etc.. they can and do get in the way. Simply because they do get in the way for some does not mean they must, and it certainly doesn’t mean we cannot rediscover their meaning in our own lives. The problem is that people and institutions tend to take themselves, their creeds, and their rituals too seriously. Ritual and creeds get in the way of our experience of God when we let them become idols. Such things point to God, but they are not, in and of themselves, holy. They are simply the edifice we decorate the experience of God in, scaffolding to protect us from the mysterium tremendum, the awesome mystery of God.

Our creeds and rituals hold no Truth. Our words and prostrations are nothing. They allow us to participate in the Holy but are, ultimately, about us – not God. This is the place in which we must enter ritual, the place where we must whisper our creeds – surrendering to their experience without creating idols.

What do you think?

Inhabitatio Dei: Why Men Shouldn’t Be Ordained

Here’s a funny reversal on the classic sexist and bigoted arguments that Fundamentalists make in opposition to the ordination of women:

Definitely worth a read… “8. Their physical build indicates that men are more suited to tasks such as chopping down trees and wrestling mountain lions. It would be “unnatural” for them to do other forms of work.”

Wrestling mountain lions, indeed!

Posted via web from Gideon’s posterous