Category Archives: Thoughts

In seminary, our church history professor sent the class on a scavenger hunt to New York’s art museums, in order to ponder the theological shifts occurring during the Middle Ages.  “Find me Our Lady of the S-Curve!” he warbled, contorting himself into a serpentine pose.  “Look for an increase in emotional piety!” his hands held aloft like a pious Nosveratu.

We joked about it, but to this day, I cannot prevent a small, Fr. Wright-sounding voice in my head from chanting “SEATED WISDOM!” or “LADY OF THE S-CURVE!” whenever I behold any depiction of Madonna and Child.  As the theological understanding of the masses shifted, those changes could be seen in Western art.

Of course, there has always been a gap between what the religious institution teaches and what the religious faithful believe within the spectrum of Christianity—this is what the art tracked.  No religion exists in a vacuum-sealed pouch¹; it is carried out in the real world, affected by real people and real circumstances, and that shifting dynamic is what makes the study of religious traditions so fascinating, enraging, and beautiful.  

In the Middle Ages, the Pope didn’t wake up one morning and decide that right-angle Jesus on a right-angle cross looking sober and stoic no longer made sense; a confluence of events pushed that image out of popularity. 

Namely, there was a big plague.

Prior to the Black Plague across Europe, images of the stoic Jesus and stoic Mary were everywhere.  Not unrelated: popular belief in a corporeal, general, physical resurrection was also widespread.  It was understood that Jesus’s resurrection brought to all of humanity the chance to physically follow where he led, and be raised on the last day.  Burial practices concentrated on preserving all of the remains, in anticipation of that glorious event.  

Then, the plague.  (Carol Walker Bynum talks about this in much greater detail.) Because the plague brought intense physical pain, as well as some deformity, popular theology began to shift, and it was here that we see the Western European church begin to talk about eternal life as not physical resurrection, but a spiritual unification with God in heaven—absent a physical body.  Gazing upon the physical destruction of the plague, European Christians couldn’t imagine bodies—which had caused such harm—being redeemed.  Bodies brought suffering, bodies brought agony.  Christ, bearer of eternal life and light, didn’t fit with that reality.  So they start to spiritualize the whole deal.

Cut to: our own plague.

What has been lingering in my mind since this has started is what theological shifts we will make during this time.  The discussion/argument/epic Internet Throwdown over “virtual communion”² worries me for precisely this reason.  I am not concerned with Anglican eucharistic theology per se—others are handling those arguments quite well (see: the Presiding Bishop for one.)  For once, it turns out that Episcopalians actually do have somewhat of a consensus on what we believe and where the boundaries are.³  (No, priests can’t say mass by ourselves; we’re not Roman Catholic. No, saying mass doesn’t create the church; God creates the church.  Yes, everyone probably needs to spend more time playing Animal Crossing and less time fighting on Twitter.)

I am concerned, though, with a larger issue here.  Many of us are becoming increasingly aware of our physical bodies as the site of marked vulnerability and frailty.  We watch the news, we see the cooler trucks lining the streets in New York City, we see medical experts warning us that the common physical things we do every day now put us in mortal danger.  For many, it is a frightening revelation that these mortal bodies God gives us are not impervious; they fail, they suffer and they die.⁴

The immediate response to the crisis was to close the churches, and move everything online, which was (and remains) the correct, responsible, and loving response.  God does not will the death of anyone, and indeed, God wills even less the death of anyone to be caused by our worship.  Christ came that we might have life, and life abundant—a truth we undermine when we put people at risk by our actions. So, separating is the right thing to do.

At the same time, when the day comes when we can gather again, what will our attitude be towards the sacraments from which we have fasted?

The liturgy takes its power not only from the words we say, but also from the space and context in which we say them. That is, ritual means a different thing, communicates a different thing when I am standing in a room with you saying the words of institution than when I am in a Zoom meeting with you.  And that ritual will mean something differently entirely when we can come together again, and you and I are both conscious in a new way of the germs on my hands, on yours, and floating in the air around us.  

The danger we are talking around, I think, in many of these debates about “virtual communion”², is our fear of precisely that scene.  I can’t be the only one who finds herself watching TV shows, and flinching each time the characters leave their house.  We know more now, and there’s no going back.  We can’t return to the blissful ignorance of a world before the corona virus pandemic.  When we show up again in a room together, it won’t just be wonderful—it will be scary.

The best of our tradition holds an opportunity for us here. The temptation is to take the medieval approach, and further spiritualize our faith: further sever the spiritual from the physical, and declare that the fullness of a person can be communicated via their floating head on a screen. This way seems the safest, the most practical—and yet it also leaves recent events unaddressed.  If we treat people only as spirits, we cannot heal their physical wounds.  If we pretend everyone is disembodied, we cannot address the ways in which our physical nature causes us pain—a fact which is causing the whole world a lot of trauma right now.

 Yet, we hold a tradition that also promises that God came to us in this mortal flesh—as vulnerable, as frail, and as mortal as it is.  

Our sacraments involve physical objects, involve touch, because God enters our world precisely in the site of our vulnerability.  God enters our experience exactly where we find the most pain, the most suffering.  It is in our physical embodiment where we most need to experience the presence and love of God—especially in a moment when we are so aware of our physical limitations. 

We have the chance, post-pandemic, to embrace fully the physical, material nature of our sacraments.  We can brave the nervousness and fear in order to experience God made real for us in the place of our greatest weakness.  How meaningful will it be, after all this turmoil, to be able to place a wafer of bread in another human hand?  To know that in this action, God comes near to us, even as we are newly conscious of just how risky such an action can be, and how fragile our lives really are?  How powerful to rub oil into the shape of the cross on a forehead, remembering all the times we weren’t able to?  

The danger of “virtual Communion”² isn’t just a weird understanding of eucharistic theology; it’s that it creates a gnostic split between spiritual and material that ultimately leaves the pressing concerns of our time unaddressed. To lean into the physical aspects of our sacraments (when and how it is safe to do so) communicates the reality of God’s presence into all parts of our struggling existence—and most especially the parts where we are the most broken.  

Ultimately, I think the times in which we live are far too dangerous for anything other than the fullness of the incarnate God.  Right now, we desperately need a God who comes to us in the frailty of a human body.  We need a God who saw loved ones die, feared sickness, worried over coughs.  We need a God whose power is made perfect in weakness.  We cannot offer our people anything less.

1. A Glad bag descending from heaven, if you will. (Shout out to my GTS alums!)
2. Not a thing; don’t @me.
3. Pandemic miracle! Others include: a Parks and Recreation reunion episode, Ithaca getting our own Trader Joe’s.
4.  I say “most of us”, because the disabled and chronically ill community has always been acutely aware of this.  Indeed, much of my thinking here owes a great debt to the work of disabled theologians on the critical importance of embodiment in Christian thought.

(cross-posted to Facebook)

So here’s what I’ve been thinking about this week.
When I was in Haiti, visiting Ravine a l’Anse with a team from St. Paul’s, we were in the marketplace of Les Cayes. (Whenever you’re in a foreign country, go to a grocery store or the marketplace–it’s the best.)

As we were strolling along, a woman approached me, and announced to me, in a loud voice, “Tu es blanche!” (trans. You are white.) Drawing on my six years of French, I responded, “Oui” for indeed, this was so. She repeated herself, pronouncing the words like the ruling of a monarch setting forth a new law: “TU ES BLANCHE!” Again, I agreed, “Ouais.” I am never more casper-like than in Haiti.
She drew herself up to her fullest height, fluttered her hand in a sweeping motion down in front of her, as if encompassing her entire being, her essence, the soul of her humanity in all its glory, and pronounced her final verdict to me, in a voice smooth with dignity: “Moi, je suis noire!” And turned and sauntered away, as if she had established, once and for all, her infinite claim to truth in the world. 

I think about her this week, this ordinary Haitian woman who literally proclaimed her pride in existence to me in the public square. I think of the faces of the children who pestered me, in ever more creative ways, to give them a ball. I think of the man who tied a rope around his waist, and lowered himself into a hole in the ground to dig a well for the village–by hand. So they would have water. And I think of the faces of the vestry of the church we work with, who patiently sat with us for hours, as they explained how they wanted to improve the lives of their people.

Haiti (and South Sudan, and Kenya, and Togo, and the other places the president slandered) aren’t notable because occasionally a great person emerged from there. They are notable because ordinary people live there, with the miraculous yet commonplace human capacity to live and thrive and be human. That nameless Haitian woman in the marketplace wears her pride with ease for she is the living image of God, and she knows it.

May we all know it too.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, I confess to you, my neglected blog that I have gotten into more internet fights than is usual for me.  

I don’t know that this is intentional; at least on my part, I find that I have markedly less tolerance for people continuing to excuse actions I find inexcusable.  These past few months have seemed to take a heavier toll than usual, and I daresay this is true for people on the other side of the spectrum as well–who knows?

But one refrain I have heard several times has stuck with me: “both sides.”  “We have to hear both sides.”  “There are two sides to this.”  “What about the other side?”  “Aren’t we called to love the other side?”

 

It has haunted me, this idea of “both sides”, and in the terms of the President on Saturday afternoon “many sides”.  Is that what we’re called to do as Christians?  

It is certainly a modern expectation of polite society.  The common understanding is that every situation is a Rashomon: a complicated situation that we may never fully understand, because everyone’s story is necessarily different.  So, in order to gain a more full picture, we have hear all sides.  We are blind people grappling with an elephant.  We are tiny insects on a beach ball.  And for most nuanced situations, these analogies work very well.  They encourage us to question our own assumptions, and stay humble in the moment.  They remind us that what we see is not all there is to see.  

Fine.

And yet, in situations like what happened in Charlottesville on Saturday, can we, as Christians, take the same feeling-out-the-elephant approach?  For the most part, that approach is predicated on the idea that truth, while it does exist, is ultimately unknowable.  It’s a mystery!  So that’s great for situations where the full truth is overly complex or impossible to fully grasp.  And there are many of those.  

 

But on Saturday?  Saturday, we had all the information.  There was a long-planned rally of several white supremacist groups organized by a far-right blogger.  They came to Charlottesville, ostensibly to protest the removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee.**  They came well-armed, and bearing tiki torches, chanting slurs and Nazi slogans.  They attacked counter-protesters with bottles, metal bars, and finally and most tragically, with a speeding car.  19 people were injured: 1 person died.  2 police also died when their helicopter crashed.  

 

The dogmas of white supremacy are familiar to us; they have been the virus embedded in the soil of this country since its founding. It snakes out in various forms at various times: chattel slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, the war on drugs, mass incarceration–and sometimes it recedes, but it’s always there.  Lurking.

 

This is not a mystery to us.  We know what fascism is.  We know what white supremacy is.  We have seen both before. And we have lost many human souls to both.

 

That, to me, is the crux of the issue, so I don’t think that “what about the other side?” is the right question to ask.  We aren’t missing any information.  I don’t think it’s the proper metric for this situation.  When I read the gospel, I do not find Jesus urging his followers to examine many sides of an issue.  Instead, he urges them to alleviate human suffering wherever they find it. Period.  Love God, and love your neighbor, he says: and from these two commandments come all the law and the prophets.  

 

Those commands don’t urge us to a concept of ‘fairness’.  Instead, they push us to focus on our fellow humans, and their needs.  Jesus tells us that the meek are blessed, the grieving will find cheer.  He tells us that he has been anointed to bring good news to the poor, and release to the captives.  He reminds us that he has come to seek and save the lost, as he eats with tax collectors, sex workers, and Samaritans.  In Christ’s world, it isn’t about ‘sides’, it’s about love.  What does love require?

 

In fact, Jesus is not fair at all.  As Fr. Jim Martin pointed out, the Beatitudes are one-sided:  the meek inherit the earth; those who aren’t?  They’re on their own.  The sorrowful will be comforted.  Those who are already happy?  Presumably they don’t need comforting.  

Consider also Mary’s Magnificat, where she describes how God acts in the world.  “He casts down the mighty from their seats, and has lifted up the humble and meek.  He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”  This is not fair!  God isn’t portioning out equally to both sides–but the inference is that God sets right that which human order has made unjust.  God is interested, not in standards of fairness, but in what makes for human flourishing.  God is interested in love.  And that’s it.

 

Which brings us back to Charlottesville.  As a Christian, my job is to love my neighbor, and love God.  My job is to incarnate God’s mercy and justice into the world.  So I cannot stand by in situations of human suffering and oppression and equivocate.   More important than all sides on a situation is the suffering inherent in a situation.  Did people suffer this weekend?  Yes. Because of the slogans, because of the doctrines espoused, because of the actions taken, children of God were hurt and killed, and made to feel like less than God made them to be.  That is evil, however you slice it.  

 

To stay silent on that evil is unloving, both to the victims of this racist violence, and to the perpetrators.  We cannot love the victims if we allow them to suffer, and we cannot love the perpetrators if we allow them to do the hurting.  Inflicting violence, be it physical, emotional, or participating in systemic violence, deadens the soul of the violent person.  It does something to you.  To love someone and want their flourishing must mean not wanting them to suffer that loss of humanity.  So we have to confront and name their violent actions as wrong, rather than minimize them as just ‘another side’.  

 

The gospel doesn’t have sides–it has a position.  It doesn’t ask what the facts might be, or what can be proven–oddly enough, the gospel doesn’t seem to care as much about that.  The gospel only asks us where the suffering is, and how we have helped.  That is the call of the gospel: to heal the suffering: to love God and love others.  

 

There are no other sides.

 

**Which was erected in the 1960s–meaning my parents are both more historic than that statue.  But #history, #heritage, etc.