Remembering 9-11

Posted on September 8, 2011 by djgrieser

The media are full of 9-11 commemorations. Linda Holmes mentions many of them, and watches part of one, 9-11: The Days After. Her response:

What I personally felt was a rolling back of a ten-year process in which my memories became less raw and my sadness became more manageable than it was when I stood on the lawn of the state capitol watching a co-worker pal of mine eulogize his brother at my state’s official memorial service. Mind you, my experience of this was strictly from far away, living as I did in the Midwest at the time. I was marked so much less than almost anyone else, and yet feeling that healing effectively un-happening was profoundly unnerving, and I found myself wondering why I was doing it.

Susan Jacoby attacks the “sacralized myth of 9-11” with power:

This Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011, will undoubtedly mark the apotheosis of the long sacralization of the terrorist attacks that brought down the towers of the World Trade Center and killed more than 3000 in New York, Washington and Shanksville, PA. By sacralization, I do not mean the phantasms of those who see a crucifix in a surviving piece of metal among the ruins but an ongoing attempt, usually in religious but also in secular rhetoric, to elevate this event from one more chapter in the history of human evil to “the day that changed everything.”

This mass murder did not change everything; it changed only some things. And what it did change, it generally changed for the worse.

Some religious reflections:

from Paul Harvey
Brian McLaren on “spiritually-transmitted diseases”
Greg Garrett, “After Anger, Fear, and 9/11”
Michael Jinkins on remembering; not just the act of remembering but how and what we remember

Structure, Anti-Structure, Communitas: The Future of the Episcopal Church

Posted on September 8, 2011 by djgrieser

No, this is not a post on Victor Turner. Rather, it is a brief reflection on the need for change in institutional churches, particularly my own, the Episcopal Church.

Mark Harris has been asking hard questions about re-structuring the Episcopal Church in response to budget shortfalls and other issues. In one post, he asks whether it is time for a special General Convention. Earlier, he offered some imaginative possibilities for the future of the Episcopal Church here and here. Insofar as his questions arise out of budgetary considerations, it seems to me, he is reacting rather than imagining new possibilities. . The question should be, what sort of church do we need to be at this moment in history? Our institutions were designed and built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and do not seem nimble enough to change for the twenty-first.

Scott Gunn has also posted on this issue here and here. The latter post is an attempt to think about the current response to the need for change in terms of grief, which might be helpful on one level, but seems also to obscure things in some ways.

It seems to me that Gregory Jones’ comments about “sustainable institutions” might be helpful here

Less noticed, perhaps, is our longing for God, and for elegance, in the design of our institutions. The question is not whether we will organize ourselves; it is whether we will do so well or badly. We yearn for institutions — including those in the social sector — that will function with what Matthew E. May, in his book “In Pursuit of Elegance,” calls “effortless effectiveness”: an ability to achieve maximum effect with minimal effort.

We marvel at corporations, such as Apple, that offer such effectiveness. Apple combines identity and innovation, efficiency and creativity, functionality and beauty. Such organizations attend to the design of the physical spaces they occupy, to be sure, but elegant design is more than that. It involves attending to the design of people’s time and development, the design of ideas, the design of services, the design of networks and the design of budgets.

In fact, what Jones is describing is precisely the same sort of thing that Harris is imagining in his posts about the future Episcopal Church.

The Myth of Closure

Posted on September 7, 2011 by djgrieser

An interview with Nancy Berns, author of Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us. Berns argues that closure “simply doesn’t exist. While grief can diminish over time, there is no clear process that brings it to an end – and no reason that achieving this finality should be our goal.”

People are told they need closure whether we’re talking about bad relationships or terrorist attacks, so it’s a wide variety of issues. We also see closure become an essential part of sales talks, whether it’s in funeral, grief, or relationship advice industries, as well as a political argument for issues ranging from the death penalty to memorials … .Closure really has saturated our popular culture … because it’s an effective way to sell ideas and to sell politics and products. As a result, people have come to believe that they do need closure.

Remember “Blessed are the cheesemakers”?

Posted on September 7, 2011 by djgrieser

A column on Monty Python’s Life of Brian and the blasphemy law in England.

Here, Life of Brian remains as subversive as ever. If not an overt attack on Christianity, the film is devastating in its satire of religious behaviour. Blasphemy is parodied in the famous stoning scene. Just as pointed, in its own way, is the depiction of a would-be disciple who thinks that Brian will heal his wife’s headache because “her brother-in-law is the ex-mayor of Gath”. The scene in which Brian flees from a crowd of would-be worshippers manages to encapsulate the whole history of religion in around three minutes.

My heart is swimming in blood

Posted on September 5, 2011 by djgrieser

Corrie and I made our first visit to the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival yesterday afternoon. What a delight! It’s a lovely setting; we were surprised to find the festival barn air-conditioned and we enjoyed the free wine and nibbles at intermission. But the music was the reason we went and we were wowed.

The Harbisons, along with some local musicians joined members of Emmanuel Bach Musicians from Boston for an all Bach concert. The main piece was the cantata “Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut” BWV #199. The text and translation is here.

The key passages are these:

6. Chorale S Ich, dein betrübtes Kind, Werf alle meine Sünd, So viel ihr in mir stecken Und mich so heftig schrecken, In deine tiefen Wunden, Da ich stets Heil gefunden. (“Wo soll ich fliehen hin,” verse 3)	6. Chorale S I, Your troubled child, cast all my sins, as many as hide within me and frighten me so greatly, into Your deep wounds, where I have always found salvation.
7. Rezitativ S Ich lege mich in diese Wunden Als in den rechten Felsenstein; Die sollen meine Ruhstatt sein. In diese will ich mich im Glauben schwingen Und drauf vergnügt und fröhlich singen:	7. Recitative S I lay myself on these wounds as though upon a true rock; they shall be my resting place. Upon them will I soar in faith and therefore contented and happily sing:
8. Arie S Wie freudig ist mein Herz, Da Gott versöhnet ist Und mir auf Reu und Leid Nicht mehr die Seligkeit Noch auch sein Herz verschließt.	8. Aria S How joyful is my heart, for God is appeased and for my regret and sorrow no longer from bliss nor from His heart excludes me.

The chorale is the 3rd verse of a hymn by Johannes Hermann and it clearly provides the anchor point for the whole cantata.

The language of “throwing all of one’s sins in the deep wounds” of Jesus Christ seems stranger coming in a seventeenth-century Lutheran hymn than it would from an eighteenth-century cantata influenced by Pietism. But the imagery harkens back much further to late-Medieval piety that had as a devotional focus the wounds of Jesus Christ, especially the side wound. The translation copied above seems incorrect in the recitative, which translates the German preposition “in” as “on.” John Harbison’s notes on the piece are here. Here, as so often, Bach is able to transform a text that is rather over the top religiously into something sublime.

In any case, it was a lovely performance by soprano Kendra Colton.

I’m looking forward to next year’s series.

The macho Jesus

Posted on September 5, 2011 by djgrieser

According to artist Stephen Sawyer:

“I scarcely think Jesus could have overturned the tables of the money-lenders and driven them from the temple if he was a wimp. The model I use for my paintings is a surfer guy who’s built like a brick shithouse.”

A couple of his masterpieces:

Love is the fulfilling of the law: A Sermon for Proper 18, Year A

Posted on September 4, 2011 by djgrieser

September 4, 2011

I’ve been thinking a lot these past few weeks about 9-11. With the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center coming up, there are stories and retrospectives all over the web about those events, and about how our world has changed over the last ten years. There’s another commemoration that comes before next Sunday, and that is our observance tomorrow of Labor Day. I’ve not noticed, except among progressives here in Madison, much reflection on that holiday in light of the protests here and elsewhere over the challenges to workers’ rights. Continue reading →

A profile of Joan Didion

Posted on September 3, 2011 by djgrieser

From the Shambhala Sun so there is a lot in it about her attraction to Buddhism, but it begins in the columbarium of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where her husband’s and daughter’s ashes are inurned. She also talks about her (rather unorthodox) Episcopalianism.

Spiritual, not religious–another view

Posted on September 2, 2011 by djgrieser

Amy Thompson Sevimli‘s perspective on the piece by Lillian Daniel:

What I have found, however, is that the phrase is almost always a gateway into a deeper conversation about their spirituality (even if it is about sunsets). It is an opportunity for them to talk about their faith and their experience of the church — which, by the way, has usually been negative.

And this:

Instead of fully engaging those outside our churches, we sit back and wonder why the mass of spiritual but not religious people don’t walk through our doors. But honestly, why would someone who can read our condescending views of their sense of spirituality want to come to church at all?

My earlier take, here.

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Preaching Grace on the Square

Scripture, Tradition, Theology, Random Thoughts from Capitol Square in Madison, WI

Monthly Archives: September 2011