The Spirit of Martyrdom

        Is this a slender proof of the impotence of death, do you think? Or is it a slight indication 

        of the Savior's victory over it, when boys and young girls who are in Christ look beyond            

        this present life and train themselves to die? Every one is by nature afraid of death and 

        of bodily dissolution; the marvel of marvels is that he who is enfolded in the faith of the cross                 

        despises this natural fear and for the sake of the cross is no longer cowardly in face of it.

              ---Athanasius, On the Incarnation, ch. 5 "The Resurrection"

This post is written as something of a reflection on the killing of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida this past November.  After learning that the shooter was pleading self-defense, claiming that the teenagers were armed and that his life was in danger, although there is at the moment no evidence that this is the case, I began the principle parts of this reflection.  A few other elements of the killing also got my attention.  (1) The killer Michael Dunn was 46, well-employed, apparently a collector of guns, while the victim was a 17 year old.  (2) Michael Dunn was also white and the victim (and possibly his friends?) were black.  (3) Dunn fired 8 rounds total--there is no evidence of return fire from the alleged-armed victims.  (4)  Dunn was under the influence of some amount of alcohol, though whether enough to impair his reasoning is unclear. (5)  The shooting happened at night, in the dark.

I claim no particular insight or knowledge "about what really happened that night", but as an outsider, it is easy to imagine what could have happened, and what I suspect did happen, though I freely admit that my personal suspicions are not very valuable and do not really matter in this particular case.  But for the sake of my reflection, let us for the moment assume that my imaginative suspicions about "what really happened" is correct.  

I imagine the following:  I imagine that Dunn was slightly intoxicated--enough to make him suggestible, perhaps a bit sleepy, perhaps careless, perhaps more prone to anger because of whatever amount of alcohol he consumed.  I imagine that he was in a strange place (in Jacksonville, not his home town), and going to a liquor store and came across a car full of black teenagers listening to loud (rap) music and that he became unduly apprehensive and perhaps even paranoid because of all these factors.  I imagine he thought he had a right and a duty to defend himself and use lethal force if necessary (because who carries a handgun who doesn't believe that's true?).  I imagine he had a nasty altercation that involved lots of yelling and anger and curses from both parties, and that in his anger and partly racially motivated fear, and in the dark in a strange place . . . I imagine that Dunn heard Jordan Davis and his friends threatening him, and took them literally, and that Dunn imagined that Davis had a gun and was going to try to kill him.  So Dunn does what is necessary of course, shoots and kills Davis, and pops off eight rounds total just to make sure he had vanquished his foe, whose status as a deadly enemy was almost entirely fabricated by emotion and imagination.  That is what I imagine.

But regardless as to what I imagine, what I see is fear: fear of death.  Fear of losing one's life to someone else.  Fear of being robbed of what one deserves, fear of dying in a worthless altercation (better make sure--I'll get him before he gets me!  I won't let them take me that way!)  I also see a judgment made--better to kill than to be killed.  Better to protect one's own.  Better to exercise one's power where one can and fight for one's rights.  Better to be a killer than a coward or a fool.  I see the world's perspective on life and death.

What I suspect in Dunn, I've heard right out in other people in other ways: a self-protectiveness and devotion to self-love (incurvatus in se, perhaps) that chills me.  What chills me more is when I hear it in Christians, for it is the warning bell of a love of God and neighbor that has grown cold.  I hear it in the obnoxious birth-certificate "controversy" with Obama.  People absurdly hate him both for his liberal policies and accuse him of being a Muslim at the same time--don't they know that if he were a Muslim fundamentalist, he would not be a liberal in any sense?  But they are so ignorant that all they can do is fuse ignorant fear with ignorant fear--they have the now socially incorrect fear of black people and the socially ambiguous fear of fundamentalist Islam--and the masses to which this fear appeals know next to nothing about these things and no one who is either black or Muslim.  Thus, they join them both together into one great fear.

I hear it in the fearful bigoted speech of people who are "afraid" of black people or more often now, "afraid" of people from the Middle East.  I imagine if I lived in a different part of the United States, I would also hear about "immigrants", but thankfully I don't hear about that.  But the fact of the matter is, if I am afraid of someone else and have not conquered that fear with love and courage, I am going to treat someone or a class of people very badly.  History bears that out, though I am not presently going to prove my case by history.

What most of these small, fearful bigoted people (and heavens, perhaps I am one of them at times?!) have in common is that they want security in life: they want to secure what is theirs, secure what they have.  They want to secure their rights, their protection, their prosperity, their well-being before "those people" take it away.  What a miser or a miserably selfish person seeks to pursue for herself alone, a bigot pursues for "us" and "ours".  A selfish person only loves himself enough to act, a bigot has got far enough in love of neighbor to love their nearest kin alone.  A selfish person will sacrifice for no one but herself, but a bigot will sacrifice for his kind and not for what is not perceived to be his kind.  Thus, a very imperfect love has the capacity for terrible vice and sometimes terrible evil.  

My family particularly is prone to "tribalism"--they love their own and extend to their own every grace, courtesy, kindness, generosity--but little of this can be seen outside the family unit.  In fact, given the charity shown to insiders, it is really shocking to see how "outsiders" are treated.  It is rarely natural for us to extend this self-giving, other-preferring  love to the full extent to which Christ meant for it to be extended.  And by chance we learn to love all our neighbors, all the kindreds of the earth very well for Christ's sake, noticing and taking note and regard for his likeness in them all . . . Jesus has still asked from us a step further: we also must love our enemies.  It is this love that Christ exemplifies most fully in the Gospel--he loves those who betray him and those who put him to death.  Having loved his own, he loves them to the end, even if still they walk away from him or stab him in the back for 30 pieces of silver, or personally see to it that he dies in shame on a tree in agony as a criminal.

   

But back to bigotry.  It is this preference for the things that belong to "us" and "ours", and especially the security that we feel we are owed or entitled to by life or by the government or by the moral law or by whatever justification we seek and find that helps us justify some of our least Christ-like behaviors.  Because security under the perception of threat from a group that is "other" will make people do all sorts of crazy things that they ought not do.  It is the combination of "threat" and "other" ("not-me") that lets either a lone person or a nation think about preemptive strikes and "getting him before he gets me".  And the conviction that I (or we) deserve my own life and security is what makes self-defense necessary.  The one who deserves his life and his rights naturally feels that he must cling to it, and that it is only right to defend it.  If one is so thoughtlessly devoted to oneself and one's own good and one's own deserts and consumed with oneself, how is one to put one's own self aside to love one's neighbor, or more importantly, one's enemy? 

The Christian has been made free from self-defense.  We are not required to defend ourselves.  My life was once given to me in Creation by a gift.  Robbed from me by an enemy, and restored to me by a Friend.  But in restoring my life to me, my Friend did it in such a way that I need never cling to it again.  Jesus gives us Life Eternal that cannot be taken from us by anything or anyone, and thus we are freed to hold on to our own lives very lightly.  I don't have to cling to my life and protect my rights, because my true life is hidden with Christ on high and will one day be revealed in splendor.  What we see now isn't everything that is to be seen.

Tertullian once said that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.  It is my prayer that the spirit of the martyrs would fill the Church, so that it would be very obvious that we don't need to cling to our lives and our security like the world and our flesh tell us we must.  Athanasius was once able to use the lives of the martyrs as proof that Christ's Resurrection had truly taken place, and that the power of death had truly been beaten.  The saints, the people in the Church, were martyred so often and showed such disdain for dying (which normal people are afraid of) the only logical explanation, says Athanasius, is that something has truly changed.  That with Christ there is something truly different, and that difference is freedom from fear of death and being set free to truly live.  Athanasius (contra mundum!) writes,

        Even so, if anyone still doubts the conquest of death, after so many proofs and so many martyrdoms in      

        Christ and such daily scorn of death by His truest servants, he certainly does well to marvel at so great 

        a thing, but he must not be obstinate in unbelief and disregard of plain facts. No, he must be like the 

        man who wants to prove the property of the asbestos, and like him who enters the conqueror's 

        dominions to see the tyrant bound. He must embrace the faith of Christ, this disbeliever in the conquest

        of death, and come to His teaching. Then he will see how impotent death is and how completely 

        conquered. Indeed, there have been many former unbelievers and deriders who, after they became 

        believers, so scorned death as even themselves to become martyrs for Christ's sake.

        

        (29) If, then, it is by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ that death is trampled underfoot, it is 

        clear that it is Christ Himself and none other Who is the Archvictor over death and has robbed it of its 

        power. Death used to be strong and terrible, but now, since the sojourn of the Savior and the death and 

        resurrection of His body, it is despised; and obviously it is by the very Christ Who mounted on the 

        cross that it has been destroyed and vanquished finally. When the sun rises after the night and the whole 

        world is lit up by it, nobody doubts that it is the sun which has thus shed its light everywhere and driven 

        away the dark. Equally clear is it, since this utter scorning and trampling down of death has ensued

        upon the Savior's manifestation in the body and His death on the cross, that it is He Himself

        Who brought death to nought and daily raises monuments to His victory in His own disciples . . . .

        If you see with your own eyes men and women and children, even, thus welcoming death for the sake 
        of Christ's religion, how can you be so utterly silly and incredulous and maimed in your mind as not to 

        realize that Christ, to Whom these all bear witness, Himself gives the victory to each, making death

        completely powerless for those who hold His faith and bear the sign of the cross? No one in his senses 

        doubts that a snake is dead when he sees it trampled underfoot, especially when he knows how savage      
        it used to be; nor, if he sees boys making fun of a lion, does he doubt that the brute is either dead or 

        completely bereft of strength. These things can be seen with our own eyes, and it is the same with the 

        conquest of death. Doubt no longer, then, when you see death mocked and scorned by those who 

        believe in Christ, that by Christ death was destroyed, and the corruption that goes with it resolved and 

        brought to end.

I pray, not for the martyrdom of blood (though this happens today so much in our Church, albeit not so much in the United States), but for the "white martyrdom", the bloodless martyrdom, that the monastics went out in the desert to seek.  That the people of God would be joined to Christ in a death like his, so that they also may join in his Resurrection and shine the light of God's glory and freedom and power over the world and over death.  May our freedom and our life in Christ be so powerful that death and the world and the flesh are seen to be scorned and mocked by our people.  May the light of the glory of God shine in our faces as we are changed into the likeness of Christ's own face and image.

"The Mystery of Iniquity" a Reflection on the Events on December 14th, 2012

After reading a little bit about the Connecticut shooting today and trying to find a way to pray about it, I ran across this article in The Onion: "Fuck Everything, Nation Reports". As long as profanity isn't something that gets you terribly upset, I think it is worth the read. One of the most interesting parts of the article to me is the following excerpt:

"“Seriously, what the hell is this? What’s even going on anymore? Why do things like this keep happening?”
Continued McEllis, before covering her face with her hands, “Why?”
Despairing sources confirmed that the gunman, armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle—a fucking combat rifle, Jesus—walked into a classroom full of goddamned children where his mother was a teacher and, good God, if this is what the world is becoming, then how about we just pack it in and fucking give up, because this is no way to live.
I mean, honestly, all 315 million Americans confirmed."

I can't really blame anyone for feeling this way. When I was driving to work today, I heard about the shooting in Connecticut about the same time as I heard about another shooting in Florida (which, as one might expect, ended up being interracial again) . . . but I didn't hear any of the details of the former case. It wasn't until I talked with my mom after dinner this evening that she told me 20 children had died. 20 children. And this after the gunman killed his own mother at her house, and then went off to her workplace to kill her coworkers and students.

I don't know why any of this happened. Frankly, even if we ever are to learn exactly why Adam Lanza did any of those things, it won't really matter. God knows, I am sure, but I don't think knowledge will really mitigate any of the horror of what happened. Either he was insane, or he was demon-possessed, or he was evil of his own choosing. Does it really matter which one? When the facts of the matter are that the world really is this broken by evil and malice and madness, and things like this keep happening in relatively prosperous America as they have always happened in other times and places . . . does it matter why so and so did thus and such? I don't think so. And I doubt it is a real comfort to the families of the victims for them to know why. They don't care why right now--they just want their children back.

This is why Paul described the prevalent forces of evil in the world as the "mystery of iniquity" and this is why God included the book of Job in the Canon of Scripture. We rarely know why, the "reasons why" are themselves irrational and full of hate, malice, envy, rage that make no sense. The "why" does not help us. Wisdom has its limits. Sometimes you just need miracle.

Discovering the roots of evil is no real comfort to us. Even if we, as readers of Job and readers of the story of Scripture and readers of the story of the history of the world that unfolds before us, even if we readers know as God knows that there is a supernatural Enemy behind all of these things that eggs on evil in the world, that pursues us with malice, that is ever and always out to destroy us . . . well, that's not a comfort, is it? It might help us a little with perspective, but if anything, that knowledge that tempt us to despair--as Theoden King said in The Two Towers, "So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?"

The answer for Theoden was "get rescued out of it". He and all his men would have died if it weren't for Gandalf and the aide that he brought with it. And the real lesson of the book of Job is that people absolutely need divine intervention. Although it did not appear so to Job, God had actually put a limit on the activities of the accuser. In this case, he would not let the enemy destroy Job's life--and apparently God would not let the enemy touch Job's wife either. Finally, in the end, God personally appears to Job, speaks to him, and overturns all the evil that Job had suffered with blessing: "And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job . . . and after this Job lived 140 years, and Job died, an old man, full of days."

I guess it would have taken at least 50 years to get over the tragic loss of his first family. Perhaps 140 years of blessing would have healed the devastation of Job's heart. 140 years of the Lord's love and favor and comfort lavished upon him.

I imagine the griefs I have suffered in my own life have been very small. I have never lost anyone close to me through death, much less a tragic death. I have loved a lot of different people and it seems like I am forever having to let go of someone or grieving the grief of a friend or loved one lost to this or that thing, though physical death has yet to be the cause. Love hurts and loving people who are bent on destroying themselves hurts, but I imagine death hurts more. I have however, got to watch and listen a little bit to people who have suffered. I have listened to some of my African brothers talk about the horrible losses endured in war-torn homelands. I have listened to the stories of women in prison who have lost everything and possess nothing except little shreds of hope in God. I have probably seen God more clearly present in jail and among the addicted than anywhere except the community gathered by and united in the Eucharistic meal and worship. God is with those who suffer and those who have nothing except hope in him.

The Onion said, "fuck everything" because, it isn't "as if the same fucking bullshit isn't going to keep happening again and again and fucking again before people finally decide it's time to change the way we live, so what's the point? What the hell is the goddamned point?" The authors concluded the article by saying that they had nothing to say. The latter is certainly appropriate: Job's comforters could have improved some by remaining silent, as difficult as that is to do. But I say, though not to those whose own loss it was, but to all the rest of us who look on their grief and try a little bit to grieve with them. Instead of "fuck everything", how about, "Love one another, as Christ has loved you." We can't stop all the madness right now. We don't have the power. But God does, and he has promised that he will bring an end to this madness. He will bring an end to this madness and then there will be such joy undiminished by sorrow for endless ages upon endless ages that we won't remember such horrible things as this.

I always used to cringe a little at the end of Job because I thought it was a fairy-tale ending stuck on the end of a tragic story. It only made sense to me as a picture of what the Gospel story is all about. It only made sense if Job was a little story that foreshadowed the real story about Jesus defeating death, ushering in the Resurrected life, and promising his children that he would be coming back for them, and coming back to do away with evil once and for all. And then telling those same children to tell this message to all the world, and to prove that this message is true by how they loved. We do need to change the way we live . . . but not because we have power in ourselves to overturn all the evil in the world--but rather that our witness is powerful to the One who does have the power to overturn all the evil in the world. (If we had the power to tackle evil by ourselves, we would have beaten it by now.) Our Gospel is pretty useless without Jesus coming back to set things right once and for all. He is often about the business of setting right smaller things, but one day he will come and set to right all things.

And what do we say to the people who are intimately suffering such horrible things as the shooting in Connecticut right now? Probably, you say nothing. Probably, you remain silent and love them in your presence and not by your speech. Probably you do everything in your power to love them by your service and by your presence and by your devotion to them and you let God speak to them. Probably you just suffer alongside them and maybe a day will come down the road where they will want to hear something, where they will want hope and encouragement, and want to hear a story about Somebody who loved them enough to taste and suffer death so that it might be sanctified for us, and one day banished altogether, and who is coming back as a Conquering King to set things right forever.  But that day, the day to speak, is not always today.

Star Trek: "A Piece of the Action"

I love Star Trek for all sorts of reasons.  One day I'll write a post about what is probably my most favorite episode of the entire Trek franchise, and why it's my favorite, but "A Piece of the Action" makes the cut as certainly being one of the most fun episodes ever.  Who doesn't want to see Kirk and Spock running about an extraterrestrial version of 1920s gangsta Chicago with tommy guns and fedoras?  And really rockin' the fedoras, too?  Who doesn't want to contemplate the deliciously absurd notion that descendants of a human colony might appropriate a 1990s history of 1920s Chicago mob life as a sort of biblical code of conduct? 

It doesn't really get much better than this.  Normally, I love Star Trek because it does such a good job communicating things like adventure and wonder and delight in what is beautiful and noble and good.  Most of the time, it also depicts characters who are adults with fairly advanced personal integrity, lots of self-respect, and a lot of love both for what they do and for other people.  It is a depiction of humanity's "golden-age" so to speak in which people are wise, intelligent, noble, and generous--the sort of people with whom you'd want to have adventures.  But other times, Star Trek is just fun.  And "A Piece of the Action" is one of those times.

Quasars and Super-symmetry: Proof that Science Works

When I was a kid, none of the science textbooks could tell you what a quasar was.  I don't even think they had good guesses.  I heard something about "quasi-stellar radio sources" and from thenceforth always got quasars and pulsars confused.  The best explanation at the time was that quasars were "proto-galaxies" that were so far away they were still in some mysterious stage of development.  (Pulsars are neutron stars that rotate so quickly they give off bursts of energy, some in the form of radio waves--it was the radio connection that got me confused).  I don't know what made me decide to check out quasars in my latest Wikipedia science binge, but I did.

I found out something new!  We now have a pretty good guess that quasars are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies that have such amazing amounts of energy pouring into them that it causes incredible friction around the accretion disk.  The "accretion disk" is the whirlpool of energy being collected and draining into the black hole.  For whatever reason (still unknown) all that energy in the accretion disk explodes outward along the north and south poles of these huge black holes--so, ironically, these black holes are some of the brightest (absolute magnitude) objects in the universe!  I read somewhere else--if I recall correctly, that if the Milky Way had a quasar as the supermassive black hole at its center, then that quasar would shine in the heavens as brightly as the Sun now does, even though its 26,000 light years, not 96 million miles away (light year=6 trillion miles, and it takes 8 minutes, not 26,000 years for light to get from the Sun to the Earth).  I love learning something new about the glorious cosmos--science for the win and for the glory of God!  (On the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, check out the article on Sagittarius A on Wikipedia.)

I also learned last week that super-symmetry has all but failed the test of scientific rigor.  I don't know about you, but I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe back in the day--I read all the exciting things about how some form of super-symmetry (linked to string theory somewhere) was bound to emerge as the poetic completion of the current Standard Model of Particle Physics.  But, thanks to the new Hadron Collider, the scientific community is starting to throw in the towel.  (Read about it more here at Scientific American.)  It will be another couple of years before they have really finished the tests in order to be more certain, but hopes are dim that super-symmetry will be able to make a come-back, and whether they'll find the "super-partner-particles" of the already known particles that would have validated their theories.  (And so much for a quick solution to dark matter, I imagine, though that may be conflating things.)  Now everyone is back to the drawing board, and scratching their heads as to whether they can reasonable expect to find anything beyond the Standard Model.  Personally, right now I'm excited about relativistic chemistry--which no one told me about in school--and want to know when we're going to solve that quantum theory of gravity!

When I read about the tests for super-symmetry failing, I (oddly) felt an immense degree of satisfaction--about the same feeling of satisfaction when they found (we think) the Higgs-boson particle.  In both cases, I was immensely pleased because the hard work and years of labor had paid off--in the first case, it finally paid off with a discovery--scientists found more or less exactly what they wanted to find: how wonderful.  In the second case, scientists are about to prove that they are never going to find what they wanted to find: equally wonderful.  That is the point of science, after all--to devise methods and conditions of discovery and then to put those methods and conditions to the test with ever-increasing rigor until some little bit of the universe has been exegeted properly.   Lovely.  I love science.  It reminds me that life (in general) is really worth all the effort and uncertainty, disappointment and ambiguity for long road of the progress of knowledge and the contemplation of beautiful and wonderful things.

When it comes to the history of civilizations, I am not a big believer in "progressivism":  I don't really think the nations of the world are necessarily better or worse now than they were 500 years ago.  I think we are better in some ways and worse in other ways to which we are mostly blind.  But I do think every human being has the option before them of being better today than they were yesterday.  I think we have the option, with God's help, of contributing to goodness each and every day, though that work is sometimes painstaking and difficult and tedious and it seems that not much comes of it except profound moral failure.  But even accepting that failure and learning to live with it and with God and to move forward in the strength and grace of God and leave failure behind . . . that's what life is about in nearly every dimension.  Science reminds me that some types of failure are just as important as success and sometimes just as helpful and meaningful and instructive.  And living life well means being a good student of it as one learns to be a good student of the physical universe in science.

Some day, after years of striving, you discover the Higgs boson particle.  On another, after years of striving, you discover that super-symmetry has failed.  Both days can be worth the having.  I want to pray more for the grace to move forward in a spirit of discovery and wonder.

**(You can take a quiz about your knowledge of black holes here at http://www.space.com/15906-black-hole-quiz-facts.html.  I got 7/9 correct, and I gave you one of the answers that I originally got wrong in this post.  I think they said Einstein and Eddington would be proud, or something like that.)

Ecclesiology Begins in the Heart of Love

Aristotle thought that young people (under the age of 30) shouldn't study philosophy because they could not be wise or practiced in the virtues.  When I first learned that as an undergraduate studying philosophy, I at first thought that terribly unfair, and I generally countered his thought with this verse from Psalm 119: "I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.  I understand more than the elders, for I keep your precepts."  And of course Paul told Timothy, "Let no one despise you because of your youth."  It never occurred to me that the Psalmist's words and St. Paul's words were rarely applicable.  For a long time I believed everyone surely must love wisdom . . . they just aren't very good at it, that's all!

Also in college I learned that some students of theology were irritating and perhaps Aristotle had met young people like them, and that was why he thought the young should not study grave subjects.  These young people were irritating to me for very particular reasons: they were more interested in the way in which advanced-sounding subjects like "systematic theology" made them appear intelligent than they were in actual learning.  They were more in love with their egos than they were in love with the study of God.  I found this very difficult to understand--for although I was no stranger to love of ego, it seemed stupid to study theology to show-off.  Why not study something less important?  The love and study of God seemed too important to trifle with.

It occurs to me even now that we can all study theology or write theology or advocate for theology for all the wrong reasons.  We can do it with something other than love in mind.  We can study our books and write our papers and have nothing of real value in mind--we can completely miss the service of the Church and of God in favor of something else.  What a waste that would be.

I was praying the other day and decided to do something I hadn't done in a little while: use some Ignatian methods of prayer with imagination.  As I often do, I "imagined" Jesus with me and waited for him to say or do something.  To my surprise, he didn't do any of the things I normally expect from him, instead he just sat there, slumped over, and clearly sad.  I waited for a moment, and I think I said something like, "So . . . what's up?"  His response was, "I'm sad about my church.  I am sad about the brokenness of my church."

I couldn't really think of anything to say in response.  Of course Jesus is sad about the brokenness of his church.  One would have to be a fool not to be sad, at least on some level, about the brokenness of the church.  But on that particular day, I wasn't feeling terribly sad about the denominational aspect of the church's brokenness, so I was a bit surprised that He said something about it.

It took me the course of the day to realize that Jesus wasn't really talking about the divisions between denominations--as heartbreaking as that is.  He was actually talking about the kind of brokenness that means people shut out the love of God.  While I hadn't been doing very much reflecting lately about ecumenical issues in the church, I had been consumed with thought--and some grief--about the ways in which people don't want to be loved.  How much some people (Christians) don't want to be loved.  How much they ignore or turn away from God's provision of love, or his own outstretched arms of love.  How much they would rather have things other than love.  How much they are consumed by idolatrous desires for approval, for acceptance, for importance in the eyes of their brothers and sisters in Christ or of the world, and how much they simply are not able to believe and receive the gifts God wants to give them.  How often are our hearts cold and hard because we don't want the good things God has for us?  We'd rather play around with our addictions and diseases and our own death than be healed and forgiven and accepted and loved.  We play in death all the time.  And that makes Jesus sad, yet we do this all the time and the adherence to saying the Nicene rather than the Apostle's Creed will not compel you otherwise.

So . . . it occurred to me that in all my thoughts about ecumenism, I had really forgotten about something the same way my college irritants had forgotten that they were studying theology because God is beautiful and worthy to be loved and adored.  They had forgotten that worship is at the heart of all theology, and I had forgotten or never quite knew that love is at the heart of ecclesiology and ecumenism.  Theologians occasionally differ (peaceably I think) as to whether they say that the Church was born out of the blood and water which came when Christ's heart was pierced by the spear or whether she was born when the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost.  Either way, the Church is born when the love of God is poured out for us, the Holy Spirit is Love, and the blood poured out for us at Calvary is love.  The Church is born of Love, of the Bridegroom for the future Bride, and our meditations both on the nature of the church and on the ecumenical call to peace and reconciliation must begin with the identity of the Church as She who is Loved, the Beloved of God, the loved one in the Song of Songs.

I was thinking about ways in which I wish the ACNA would structure its conversations on the controversial matter of the ordination of women.  What I would really like to see is our Church come together about our identity first.  And I would like to see us come together in a way that is real and tangible, not just paying lip service to things we are supposed to believe.  I would like to have us have theological conversations in a matter befitting to Christians.  I would like to see them begin and end in love--knowing that the Church exists as living witness and proof of God's love, born out of his love, and born to the great purpose of one day being united to him in perfect wholeness, perfect peace, and perfect joy.  I would like to see a celebration of the nature of the Church as one loved by God, in which we are all striving to do what we can to show that love to one another.  And I would like to see us commit to love one another deeply from the heart, and to stop having theological conversations until we have done the first duty of loving our neighbors.  How can we reason about the things of God if we will not obey him?  And if we hate and resent our brothers and sisters about such small things, and intend to quarrel about power and doctrine, what good is it to pretend to talk to one another?  I want us to love one another first, and settle questions of theology later.  Maybe that means a lot of healing and reconciliation first, I imagine it means growth in trusting God to settle things rather than giving into our own fears and anxieties about what will happen if someone else does something or believes something we think is wrong or unjust.  I would like to see Jesus Heal in our Church, and offer that healing to our world.  I would like to see us awake to our identity in Christ and offer the world an escape from worshiping dead idols.

Love, real love, is heartbreaking.  It is hard and difficult and looks like the Cross and not like the Hallmark channel.  I think really learning how to love our neighbors as ourselves--or perhaps just beginning to love our neighbors as ourselves means the destruction of a whole lot of the "person" I think I am--the false identity, the false refuge of self I have created for myself in which I can hide.  Love will break you down and break you apart and overturn everything that seems right to you (Jesus died and the apostles didn't understand it at all), but Love turns the kingdoms of the world upside down and puts the right Man on the throne.  I really hope that the ACNA takes up the mantle of calling Anglican Christians and especially Anglican Christian leaders to the humble, patient, inglorious calling of love rather than to whatever thing the Episcopal church was seeking after for the last fifty years.  Was she searching for acceptance for the world, for recognition, for power, for relevance?  I don't really know, but I think her face was turned to the world and away from God.  If she had sought those things in God, she might have been weak and despised in the ways of the world, but strong and mighty to the casting down of strongholds in the name and power and will of God.  I hope we have the courage to embrace the latter destiny rather than the former.  I hope we have the courage to embrace shame and distress and irrelevance and smallness because we are so sure of ourselves in God, and so sure we are loved by Him, and chosen, and called according to his purposes.  We certainly can't do it without his love.  And if we don't know we are possessed by the God who is Love, we don't really have anything, and we don't really know anything, and we have forfeited our identity and mission as the Church.

Why not enact an ecclesiology and a call to unity and a call to theological conversation based on 1 Corinthians 13:4-7: "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."  The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live out these things in fullness and in perfection and impart their bounty to us: we need to be about the business of receiving all that God is, so we may give him away to every one we meet.