Scripture, Church, Service: Personal Disciplines III

I have done next to no reading of scripture on its own over the past few years. I read a lot of theological books that quote scripture or reflect on stories or themes from it. There are of course scripture readings and sermons every Sunday. There are scripture readings in my prayer book. My church small group has done studies of a book or two of scripture. But on my own, with Bible in hand, I have done very very little. I have spent more time reading books about books about books of the Bible than I have reading the Bible. I don’t know why this is.

Part of me feels that I need to know a certain amount more background, context or theory to be adequate to the task. But those are all just so many excuses. Maybe I just think it would be less enjoyable reading, that it would be just harder. But that’s not necessarily true either. There is no doubt this is something I need to change.

Church: I began attending my wife's church, Church of the Servant, from time to time as a matter of familial obligation before, and then during, our first years of marriage. We were also married in her church more or less because she wanted to and I didn't have any other ideas. The Sunday-morning ritual had its pleasures though. The preaching in the church (now ours) was (and is) incredible. I enjoyed the beauty and intellectual stimulation of the sermons even when faith wasn't anywhere in my sights.

When things started shifting in my head and heart (who can say which was first?), I began to want to go more often and soon every week just for the reminder of what was so exciting about the faith and for seeing it come together in a worshipful setting. I was, and still am, torn at times about denominational and congegational affiliation. Fretting about theological subtleties and various mixed motivations for staying or going alternately. This conversation, like so many others, plays endlessly in my head lists of all the various bad reasons I could have for doing the right thing and good reasons I could have for doing the wrong thing.

What eventually convinced me that I should join this church as an adult member, and what convinces me to stay committed, was that it felt like home for me. To the extent that home is where family is, and family are those whom you do not get to choose, I would say that I felt this congregation's claim on me before I felt I could claim it. It seemed to both speak to me where I was, being part of the denomination I was raised in, but also to challenge me the way I was ready to be challenged since it is a unique congregation within the denomination. So i feel like it is a place to both put down and discover old roots.

I have made church-attendance fairly important. We don't miss too many Sundays unless we're out of town. Most Sunday mornings church is just where I want to be. I think it really does re-focus me, at least for a little while and I of course have a growing number of connections to people that I don't want to go another week without seeing. While we don't attend the night service like I did as a kid (few do these days) it could be that I'm just falling into the behavior of church-attendance I was raised for. I don't know, maybe that's not necessarily anything to be ashamed of anyhow. The view of Sunday worship I've tried to live up to is as a weekly training in seeing the world rightly, in getting priorities right, and of course as a time of learning through proximity from those further along in the way. Again the tension arises: do I force my will to do the action even when it is disagreeable, trying to keep the real goals in mind, or do I avoid the pitfalls of pride and Phariseeism by doing whatever I feel like at the time?

Service: I do not really do anything in the way of disciplined service. As I mentioned, I try to be more serving in my daily work and family tasks, or at least see them more as service. (Maybe the two are reciprical: seeing something more as service increases one's ability to serve through it, and serving more increases the ease with which the service in something is recognized.) But I'm not someone you'll see serving in a soup-kitchen line or other obvious do-gooder role these days. I idealize those stereotypical heroic front-line roles as the epitome of Christ-like service but have never really participated in them. I resented the near coercive ways these activities were encouraged in school for example, finding it easier to stay home with pure, though self-serving motives than to serve others with mixed ones. I suppose though that the recipients of aid don't much care about the motives of those bringing aid.

I have tried, especially over the last year, to start serving in and through the church itself, the place I think should be the focus of a Christian's service anyhow. So I started volunteering for whatever for whatever responsibilities advertised a need for help within earshot. I currently help out running the sound board one Sunday a month, I've taught a few Sunday-school classes and I just started a three-year term as Deacon. I don't know if any of these things are specially suited to any gift of mine, but they are all things that the Church needs done and I feel good in general about contributing to the daily running of or the institution that has and continues to do so much to serve me.

There are dangers, I think, to being active in the institutional life of an organization like a church. It is easy to either lose sight of the goals of the organization and focus too much on control and management or to become jaded by seeing the nuts and bolts operations and the flawed human beings who are trying to come together in the service of something beautiful; trying to be something beautiful. I think seeing the behind-the-scenes operations of my childhood Church contributed to my disenchantment with that Church and maybe religion in general. Though probably even the most sincere and humble Church in the world wouldn't have allayed my omnivorous doubts at the time.

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Work: Personal Disciplines II

I’ve been torn for some time, all along really, about work, both inside and outside the home. With all of the disciplines, drawn to theorizing as I am, I am not able to separate how I think the discipline should be thought of from how I actually experience it. My struggle is with how to get them to be one and the same.

With work this tension is the most obvious. On the one hand I believe one should perform gratefully, as God’s calling even, whatever work one finds oneself given to do. (I've found the clearest theological exposition of this view in the Benedictine and my own Reformed tradition.) So if I find myself working at an insurance company talking on the phone all day and chasing a toddler, rocking a screaming baby and washing dishes all night, then that’s what I should be happy doing. On the other hand maybe I have a real calling or gift in some other area that I should explore by going back to graduate school or seminary or at least by continually and intentionally developing whatever that gift might be in my 'free time'.

This might just be a tension I have to deal with but how I actually experience this does not feel healthy. I experience it by feeling resentful of the daily things I am given to do, the job that I should be more grateful for, the family that I should be more appreciative of and present to. This is obviously not a good situation, but how does one go beyond one's comfort zone and pursue a calling if it is not somehow away from one's normal, daily life. (Indeed, the very word calling seems to have the connotation of calling out of one life and to another life while the word gift seems to have the connotation of nearness and presence.)

Any possible way that I can imagine creating a life where my daily life and work involved my passion for education and the world of ideas, would necessarily involve years of sacrifice that I would ask of my family. How could I possibly do this just to satisfy my own selfish urges. Aren't I just ungrateful for all the comfort and ease I've been given and looking for even more by way of self-fulfillment? But then the other voice says: "Staying on the track you're on is just your allowing yourself to follow the path of the upwardly mobile, middle class. You're just justifying your trying to grasp the good life with the theology of everydayness." To which the other voice replies: "But really your describing your desire to pursue a career that involves your hobbies of thinking and reading and writing and calling it a vocation is just the theological justification of your own self-centeredness." Then the third voice comes in and says something to the effect of calling the whole interior monologue a sign of hyper-narcissism. The statement that "we should never have scruples about whether the state in life we have chosen is the most perfect or what sort of progress we are making. These are merely signs of excessive self-regard." [1] hits me like a punch in the gut.

It sounds trite but it really is anguishing to think about. I find it nearly impossible to compromise with myself. I feel like I either need to give up all desire for any change in my situation right now or I need to start changing it right now. The idea that I should be contented with my work for now with the possibility that another door will open down the road when the family situation allows it, doesn't satisfy any of the voices. It seems to validate the negative interpretations of all three.

How does one say that one way of life is right and another wrong when either judgement can be seen as self-serving? What does one do when one can't even discern one's own true motivations? How can the mind know the secret desires and motivations of the heart?

1. Prior Aelred, Singing God's Praises p. 304

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Prayer & Fasting: Personal Disciplines I

The first spiritual discipline I have worked at is prayer. I began with the assumption or conviction that prayer should be regular and as fixed in time as possible. I’m not sure what gave me this idea at the time, but I was sure that if Christian devotion meant anything it involved somehow submitting oneself to God, and submission can not happen in prayer if I only pray when and how I feel like it.

I came to understand it later in Benedictine terms as what Anthony Damron, O.S.B. calls “the sanctification of time.” He goes on to write that formal prayers are necessary because relying on spontaneous prayer would be too irregular and thus not useful for growth while also recognizing formal prayers have dangers too, that of becoming incantation. (Singing God’s Praises p. 43)

My attempts at actually going about praying, like I said, have been very mixed. I wanted a prayer regimen that was based in a book that was fairly easy to follow, that heavily incorporated the psalms, and that involved at least a few readings or offices a day. I leafed through the Book of Common Prayer a few times, but didn’t really get how it worked and didn’t know how to figure it out. (Outside the Abbey, I’ve only been to an Episcopal service a handful of times and don’t really know very many Episcopalians.) I came across a new prayer compilation, I think just about three years ago, still in the first year of my conversion, called The Divine Hours edited by Phyllis Tickle. It included four Offices a day, each with one complete psalm, a Psalm fragment repeated a few times throughout, some Collects from the BCP, a paragraph reading of scripture, the Gloria which I then recognized (this was also probably right about the time that I was brought to the Abbey for the first time), and also some other religious poetry or hymns.

When I started, I was very committed and read all four offices, one in the morning, one at lunch, then next right after work was through for the day and last, right before bed. I’m not sure how long I kept that up, but I think it was for a few months. Then I stopped for a few months after becoming disillusioned. One problem was that the book was rather large and thus a pain to haul back and forth to work. I then started back up for a little while doing all four, but soon left that off for an idea of my own devising. I continued using the prayer book for morning and evening prayers. During the day, I selected and memorized five Collects from the BCP to recite in place of a longer Office. The goal was to have a total of seven periods of the day, and I ordered them as made best sense for the rhythm of a workday. I couldn’t do them at fixed times, since my schedule varied, and I didn’t have five events to base them on, like meals and so forth. My solution was to recite them at fixed intervals, an amount of time that spread them roughly evenly between waking and sleeping (I think it was about every two and a quarter or two and a half hours.) I procured a watch that had an automatically resetting timer that also had a vibrate function, whenever it went off, the push of one button turned it off and started the countdown again. Wherever I was during the day, I would get a vibration every two and a half or so hours that no one else could usually notice, then at the next available moment recite the prayer mentally or verbally, depending on the setting.

I was pretty proud of my solution because I felt it suited my goals and matched the needs of my schedule and abilities. I liked the idea of having the simple memorized prayers and their carrying me through the day, so that even if I worked late, or ate lunch early, the cycle kept me aware of my relative position in the day. I liked the idea of a call to prayer; my little watch mirroring a monastary’s bell. Of course, I chose the number seven also to duplicate a monastic day’s cycle even if my ‘Little Hours’ were very little, about thirty seconds.

Most of all, I wanted something on a fixed schedule (intervals being an adequate substitute for fixed times in my mind) because I was drawn to the idea of making prayer a kind of seasoning spread throughout the day, acting as a reminder that everything I was doing during the day should be done with an awareness of God and as an offering to God. Since the interval model could and did catch me literally doing anything and everything in my day it held the opportunity of drawing me out of my indifference and redirecting me to my present task with greater mindfulness. Well that was the goal.

My actual performance of the discipline of prayer seems to swing from extreme to extreme. Either I am praying a lot and wondering why, or praying very little and wishing I was. (I try to get insight into this wishing but it's slippery. I don't think it's just guilt, which would obviously not be a good motivation. But just as I'm not always sure that my prayers are genuine, I'm not even sure that my desire for genuine prayer is genuine.)

These days have been very crazy: a new baby, an illness, just all around unpredictable schedules. But probably none of that is really to blame. I've just been going through a period of low motivation the last few months. These things seem to go in cycles for me. A good day for me lately has meant just a brief prayer before bed, read from my prayer book, or not, depending on how late I stay up and when my daughter wakes up.

There are a few other practices I've experimented with around the general topic of prayer, the first was the rosary I bought sometime in the first year of my conversion. Now I wasn’t very serious about intending to use it, I was even a little wary of buying it, seeming as it did to fit into that old tendency of mine to focus on accessorizing hobbies over the hobbies themselves. I was at the store with my wife who wanted to buy a rosary because she had been studying it a bit and I just got one for the heck of it too. In an interesting foreshadowing, the rosary I bought, selected based on purely aesthetic bases – it looked fairly solid and simple – turned out to be a Benedictine one, having Benedict’s cross embedded in the crucifix and a Benedictine medal at the joining. I never really did much with it, but I had never really intended to. For a time I used it to do repetitions of the Jesus prayer punctuated by the Gloria and then an Our Father at the end. I never found this avenue very fruitful – I think I was too self-conscious about it – but I haven’t ruled out trying to use it again.

I’ve many times read or heard someone talking up the benefits of scripture memorization and whenever I do, it strikes me as just the perfect thing to do. The first place to start was obviously the Psalms which over a few months I memorized eight of, but I also memorized, as prayers, a few religious poems: one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, A Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the first of the Eleven Verses to the Lord by John Berryman, then also some non-religious poetry. I did the majority of this about two years ago. I worked on them, and then employed them, going for long walks around the neighborhood with my then infant daughter on my shoulder. I have no good reason for having stopped this exercise. I found it very helpful to be able to call up these words, and the work of memorizing I didn’t find that difficult. I still retain what I had though, or if one Psalm fades if I haven’t recited it in a while, I can usually recall it with a quick reading or two. I know this is a practice I need to return to.

To aid in the use of Psalms in prayer, either memorized or as encountered in prayer books, I wanted to study them. Over the past few years I’ve read a handful of small studies: Bonhoeffer’s Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Church, Breuggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms, C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, and I’m currently reading James W. Sire’s Learning to Pray Through the Psalms. In general I’ve found this study useful and definitely need to do more of it.

I’ve experimented with fasting for the last three Lenten periods. The first year I did a kind of sunup to sundown fast, eating a small breakfast, a regular dinner and nothing in between for most of Lent other than Sundays. The past two years I started with 24-hour fasts, having just a small lunch each day, then building toward longer fasts – 36, then 48, then 72 hours - at the end of the week and eating normally, perhaps more than normally - feasting, on Sundays.

I tried to talk about it as little as possible (Jesus' explicit instructions right?) but there were immediate and some extended family that had to know, the latter because we were living with them. Mostly it just felt kind of embarrassing to own up to. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was raised with. There were certain insights I was looking for or expecting based on what I had read about the discipline. I was hoping at the very least for a kind of increased awareness of my own weakness and an openness to God. I may have gotten that but it was mixed with the self-certainty that I could do this, could make it through x number of hours or days without food. C.S. Lewis writes that while self-mastery is the goal, one of the inherent dangers of will-focused disciplines like fasting is pride. What you could really call the pride at risk here is an idolatry of the will.

Then again there were days that were utterly humiliating, where I didn’t do what I had told myself to, where I came home at the end of the day depressed and tired and just sat and snacked. Emotional eating I’ve heard this called. Maybe seeing that this was obviously what I was doing on a ‘failed’ fast day was itself instructive in that it pointed to what I was probably doing during normal eating periods. Be that as it may, it still often felt like my ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ were counted for the wrong reasons.

I believe strongly that fasting is something that Christians are called to but at the same time I sometimes feel it is something that I have absolutely no business dabbling with. Maybe it's just the lack of guidance. But maybe it's my doubting my own faith that causes me to feel conflicted about my experience with such disciplines.

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Cool Calvinism & Fixed Hour Prayer

Here is an interesting article by a (former?) Calvinist on why he (used to) think Calvinism is cool. It focuses on the Reformed tradition as antidote for the mushiness of American Evangelicalism.

I also recently stumbled on this great essay about fixed hour prayer with a few personal stories.

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I Will Not Survive or, None of Us Gets Out of Here Alive

So I recently found out that I am relatively in-the-clear in terms of my cancer. The doctors have decided that I don't need any treatment following the surgery and will only keep me under close observation for the coming years. I am trying to be as grateful for this news as I ought.

This officially makes me a cancer survivor. In fact, I've been told that I'm a survivor from day one. Whatever that means.

I've been saying all along that I never really felt like a cancer-anything: victim or survivor. The diagnosis didn't feel that real when I had it and so the cure doesn't feel that real now that I apparently don't have it. So maybe my ambivalence about the designation 'cancer survivor' has to do with this lack of the news really sinking in but it has also made me reflect on the idea of survival as it is experienced in our present culture.

It has often struck me that our culture is positively obsessed with the idea of survival. Perhaps this emphasis on being a survivor of an illness is but one manifestation of a more general feeling in the air.

We really have a schizophrenic attitude toward life and death. We are at the same time more obsessed than ever with avoiding death and more willing than ever to tempt death out of plain boredom with the shallowness of our lives.

On the one hand, perhaps because death has been pushed back and life expectancies have gone up so dramatically in the West, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that death might just be optional. Believing the goal might be attainable, we become obsessed with avoiding death, even reminders of it. On the other hand, living in a world where day-to-day survival is no longer a pressing issue, members of affluent cultures invent artificial ways to make their survival a matter for their concern again. We see this latter manifested in, for example, the survivalist movement or just your now-everyday extreme sports where the whole point is to flirt with the brink of death just in order to feel the rush that accompanies it. The survivalist or skydiver is then merely inventing a way of replicating the feeling an ancient forbear might have gotten just in the course of trying to bring home food from the hunt.

In the following I will be exploring the former phenomenon of the hyper-avoidance of death and the elevation of the value of survival.

It is now apparent that we will not stop our war against death until we have banished its very countenance from our collective sight. We fight every sign of aging, every wrinkle and gray hair, with the utmost ferocity. Those who can no longer hide their age are themselves hidden away with the rest of their kind in retirement or nursing homes, well cared for, as long as we youth-filled ones don't have to be reminded of their, and our future, existence. When someone inconveniently insists on still kicking the bucket, we keep their body so chemically preserved and make-up caked that they probably look better in the casket than they have for years. By all means, don't let them look like what they really are: dead!

I believe that behind this disturbing emphasis of our culture on survival is the general loss of meaning in our lives. In the not-so-distant past a person had hope for an afterlife. In the new world we comfort ourselves with dreams of a really long life. (I'm ignoring here the theological difference between eternal life and the merely everlasting life-after-death which, though taken to be the default conception of heaven, is not really a Christian notion at all. Christians believe in resurrection not resuscitation. In fact, it may be that the weakness of our religious imaginations in respect to the afterlife is in part a result of the larger cultural shift of pinning all hopes on this life and attempts to lengthen it.) We tell ourselves that this is an improvement. "One life at a time" we call it. We pretend to celebrate living for the moment, or valuing life for life's sake but the truth of our feeling is expressed in the tenacity and anxiety with which we cling to our lives.

Lacking something beyond life to provide the context or substance for valuing life - a spiritual or religious dimension - we have come to grasp after mere survival with all our strength and at any cost. Paradoxically, the more we make life itself the focus, the less weight it seems to carry. Life used to be deemed nearly priceless, but it shrinks under the burden of our attempt to make it into the ultimate value. Our collective existential crisis is but our intellect's realization that without spirit, we really are no different than the other animals. The tragedy of our situation is that we are too smart to ever think that mere smarts can make us any more than a clever beast.

I came across one extreme instance of this attitude in an interview with Ray Kurzweil on NPR's Fresh Air a couple years ago. Kurzweil is the author of, among other books, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. In the interview, Kurzweil came across with an enthusiasm that was truly infectious but it was almost pitiful how much he seemed to have convinced himself that it was a reasonable goal to live forever through careful health maintenance until the day that technology can swoop to the rescue.

Setting aside the perhaps more profound difference between a person who believes in some kind of afterlife or resurrection and one who doesn't, imagine for a minute the difference between two individuals, one who knows she will die - eventually, and another who thinks there might be a possibility of not dying. I'm picturing these two individuals on their deathbeds each with a mortal gunshot wound, minutes from certain death. Either one might be experiencing any range of emotion: sadness, regret, devastation, fear. But the average person knows they will have had to die eventually. It was just a matter of time. Now contrast that with someone like Mr. Kurzweil and imagine the devastation someone in his position would feel if he were unlucky enough to have had a fatal accident before the fortuitous advent of nano-bots able to repair any possible wound or computers ready to upload our brains to be re-booted into a new body, or whatever the solution to death is that's supposedly right around the corner. The picture of this deathbed scene, much less the life lived trying to avoid it, is actually quite heartbreaking.

Secularists like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens argue quite frequently that believers are more dangerous precisely to the extent that they hold a belief in an afterlife. The argument goes that since a believer feels personally immortal, they are more willing to use this life carelessly and thus more likely to take others with them. The obvious example is the modern suicide bomber, who - we can't help thinking - is more likely to blow himself up because of the reward he thinks he's headed for. This argument has a certain logic to it though I was never convinced that since it seemed befitting of the suicide bomber, it was thus appropriate for all believers. One need pay attention to what is being believed.

There is also an argument that cuts the other way which the picture of these two hypothetical deathbed scenes brings to mind. It makes a certain amount of intuitive sense that one who feels this life is the end all and be all would do more, right or wrong, to protect it or prolong it. The Psalmist understood this well when he prayed to be protected "from men of this world whose reward is in this life." [1] The more potentially fearsome is the one with nothing left to lose. Who truly has nothing to lose, the one who is entirely committed to this life or the one who loves life more than everything except the values from which it derives its meaning and value?

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes that "what people want today is not salvation, but health. ... The medical establishment is the counter-salvation-promising group in our society today." [2] I agree that what people are seeking through the new emphasis on health and longevity is a kind of salvation. What is sad is that what so many pursue as their only comfort in life: more life, is in regards to the full-blooded Christian story of death and resurrection a rather pathetic parody or at best a pastiche.

Again, it is not a matter of being against survival, but mere survival. Life is supremely valuable but it is not of ultimate value. Life is like joy, the more it is pursued as an end in itself the more it slips from one's grasp and the more the very goods it contains are corrupted by its receiving misplaced emphasis.

It could be argued at this point that pursuing survival is a matter of believing in the sanctity of life which people, including Christian people, often think of as an obvious conclusion of Christian convictions. To find out why this might not be so I turn again to Hauerwas who proclaims:

"I want to know where Christians got the notion that life is sacred. That notion seems to have no reference to God. Any good secularist can think life is sacred. Of course, what the secularist means by the word sacred is interesting, but the idea that Christians are about the maintenance of some principle separate from our understanding of God is just crazy. As a matter of fact, Christians do not believe life is sacred. I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe that there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in and of itself." [3]

Hauerwas makes clearer than I ever could the difference between life as ultimate value and life as a very important though derivative value.

I don't mean to be overly hard-nosed in any of this. It is nothing if not understandable for human beings to cling to life. We obviously should love life. The difference is between the hopeful affirmation of a beautiful gift and the fearful clinging to what we take to be our only lot. Like so many other differences, like for example between lust and love, it could be said that holding out for mere survival is the worst coming from the corruption of the best.

In conclusion, I leave you with this final thought from Stanley:

"We Christians are people who must learn to live, as we have learned that life is a gift. We thus live not as if survival is an end in itself, but rather because we know that life allows us the time and space to live in the service of God. We should not view time as something to be lived through, nor life as an end in itself, but rather see life as the gift of time enough for love." [4]

To this I can only add an Amen, in the hope that I will myself continually learn this lesson.




1. Psalm 17:14 NIV

2. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 611 "Abortion Theologically Understood"

3. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 614 "Abortion Theologically Understood"

4. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 585 "Reflections: Suicide and Euthanasia"

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