5:00 a.m.

Good words on tradition from two brothers in the faith—one gone to Glory, the other still soldiering on: 

“Being faithful to tradition most definitely does not consist…[in] literal repetition and transmission of the philosophical and theological theses that one imagines lie hidden in time and in the contingencies of history. Rather, being faithful to tradition consists much more in imitating our Fathers in the faith with respect to their attitude of intimate reflection and their effort of audacious creation, which are the necessary preludes to true spiritual fidelity.”

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence and Thought: an Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa (Ignatius, 1988), p. 12.   

“In his essay, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ (in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, Cambridge UP, 1986), the 20^th-century German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer states that tradition is not so much a matter of conservation as transmission, and that every act of transmission necessarily involves a corresponding act of translation. The conservative mood is therefore not necessarily the best mode for continuance of any given tradition and in fact may undercut or truncate that tradition by its very refusal to ‘translate’ it into meaningful terms for a current generation of participants. In other words, hanging on too tightly to a particular iteration of a tradition will cause it to arrive stillborn in the next generation.”

—Bruce Herman, Lothlorien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts, Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. From “Teaching in Tongues: Christians, Art Pedagogy, and Postmodernity,” a paper presented at the conference, “Art Education, Religion and the Spiritual,” at the School for the Visual Arts, New York, October 2007.     

The Episcopal Church (of which I am a member) will likely split in the next few years from the larger Anglican Communion over the contentious issue of homosexuality. This, a brief excerpt from somewhere in the middle of the “St. Andrew’s Day Statement” issued by the Church of England in 1995, is the most liberating word I’ve come across on the subject:

“At the deepest ontological level, therefore, there is no such thing as ‘a’ homosexual or ‘a’ heterosexual; there are human beings, male and female, called to redeemed humanity in Christ, endowed with a complex variety of emotional potentialities and threatened by a complex variety of forms of alienation.”

The entire text appears here and is well worth reading: http://www.episcopalian.org/cclec/paper-st-andrews-day.htm

This weekend we had a party for a friend turning 50 and a few (16; she has many more) of her friends. Somehow it all worked, though if you’re hosting, you’re in a kind of parallel state of consciousness—assessing things like when to shepherd people from table back into the living room for coffee and birthday cake—too soon and you risk cutting short some great conversations, too late and people get restless.  It’s a little like theater, another post for another time.  

In attendance were two young R.C. priests, one of whom reported having officiated at 15 funerals in 10 days—more than normal, he said, but not much more. This is what the priest shortage looks like “on the ground.” Their parishes are north of Boston and they seem remarkably cheerful, all things considered. A portion from an email the next day from the other one:   

“Regarding something you mentioned in your last email, one of the most memorable lessons learned in Church history class (Anglican and Roman) was that before the rise of a professional theologians’ “guild” in the late Middle Ages (abetted, no doubt, by a drop in literacy rates and a move away from the vernacular), all theology was done in an ecclesial context, in response to challenges, controversies, and difficulties, as the Church endeavored to carry out the Great Commission.  Most of the patristic classics were written by bishops, priests, or monks responding to the pastoral challenges of the day in their local churches.  Therefore, in a very real sense, all theological endeavors — and all theologians — were amateur.  This is not to say it was not learned — quite the contrary — but pre-medieval Christian theology stuck pretty close to the questions posed by the life and work of the Church, rather than by philosophical speculation on the part of the theologian.  So, hooray for amateur theologians, who have many illustrious forebears numbered among their ranks!”

The latest fun theology quiz: http://quizfarm.com/quiz_repository/new/8081/. Are you Zwingli, Luther or Calvin; Orthodox, Catholic or Unitarian? I am Orthodox (not officially). An interesting journey for one born mainline Presbyterian (think: high school church summer camps with themes like “Awareness”). Must have been all that Schmemann, whose For the Life of the World and other celebrations of Eucharistic theology have been seminal for many.    

“It is not dry manuals (full as these may be of unquestionable truths) that plausibly express to the world the truth of Christ’s Gospel, but the existence of the saints, who have been grasped by Christ’s Holy Spirit. And Christ himself saw no other kind of apologetics.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, p. 494

“Hans Urs von Balthasar is a theologian whom one never reads indifferently. He himself decried the ‘sleek and passionless’ theological treatise as the sole form of theological presentation; and while never suggesting any abandonment of theological rigor, he urged upon theology ‘movement, sharp debate (quaestio disputata) [and] the virile language of deep and powerful emotion’ [ET1, 204]. Thus, if readers of Balthasar’s oeuvre are often left to marvel at the sheer range and erudition of his presentation, just as much they are left puzzling over the undeniable risk of his ‘creative invention,’ it is when they come to his treatment of the saints—those men and women of prayer who have taken their sanctification by the triune God most seriously—that they become most profoundly aware of the passion and intensity of his theological itinerary.”

David Moss, “The Saints,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes, SJ, and David Moss (Cambridge University Press, 2004)