About djgrieser

I have been Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, WI since 2009. I'm passionate about Jesus Christ and about connecting our faith and tradition with 21st century culture. I'm also very active in advocating for our homeless neighbors.

Elaine Pagels on the cultural impact of the book of Revelation

Posted on April 22, 2010 by djgrieser

A somewhat disappointing talk by Pagels tonight. I was interested to hear her stress the importance of Judaism as a context for John and Revelation, specifically the Jewish Wars. It’s obvious on one level, of course, with the stress in the book on Jerusalem’s destruction but she seemed to suggest that the author’s Judaism was in some way more important for making sense of the visions than his belief that Jesus Christ was the Messiah.

I think you can do that only if you separate out the letters to the seven churches from the visions. For if the same audience is implied then the most important context is the relationship between Christianity and the empire, not Judaism and the empire. I’m still convinced that the book’s overall message is not only to stand firm in the face of persecution, but to force readers to come to see Rome in the same light as the author does, as the great enemy of God.

That’s one of the points of apocalyptic literature like Revelation–to help the reader see the world in a new way, where there is no gray area, just black and white and as the angel said to the church of Laodicea:

“I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. ¹⁶So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:15-16

April 21: St. Anselm of Canterbury

Posted on April 21, 2010 by djgrieser

Today is the commemoration of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 1109. Anselm was a native of Italy who traveled throughout Europe as a young man in search of learning. He lived before the rise of universities, just when Europeans were beginning to discover logic and the philosophy of Aristotle. In Anselm’s day, most learning took place in cathedral schools or in monasteries, and was very much dependent on the gifts and scholarship of particular teachers. He found his way to Normandy and the monastery of Bec, where Lanfranc was the leading teacher. Lanfranc was called into service by his secular lords who had recently conquered England, and became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm would succeed him both in Bec and Canterbury.

Anselm is primarily remembered for two major works and ideas. The first is what has come to be known as the ontological argument for the existence of God (the phrase God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”) and for the Satisfaction Theory of Atonement, articulated in Cur Deus Homo.

Centuries of theology and philosophy have extracted from Anselm’s writing and spirituality the elements of both of these arguments, and in so doing have robbed it of its spiritual depth and power. What you experience when you actually read the Proslogion is not an argument for the existence of God–that’s dealt with in a few sentences–but rather an extended meditation, prayer really, on Anselm’s relationship with and experience of God. He begins with a famous paragraph:

Come now, insignificant man, fly for a moment from your affairs, escape for a little while from the tumult of your thoughts. Put aside now your weighty cares and leave your wearisome toils. Abandon yourself for a little to God and rest for a little in him. Enter into the inner chamber of your soul, shut out everything save God and what can be of help in your quest for Him and having locked the door seek Him out.”

Anselm moves quickly from logical argument to direct address of God, language that explores his own experience of God, and seeks to deepen that experience.

I’ve been in lengthy conversation with someone about the doctrine of atonement recently, a conversation that has focused on the mechanics of the doctrine. When extracted from Anselm’s spiritual life, the doctrine he expresses is cold and bloodthirsty. Yet it’s important to remember that he articulated that idea as an attempt to make sense of his experience, a religious life that was expressed in deep prayer and devotion. Anselm’s prayers are especially beautiful, and he marks an important change in his devotion to the Virgin Mary.

I’m also struck as I read him by his dependence on Augustine. There are times in the Proslogion, for example where it seems he is doing nothing more than paraphrasing Augustine.

Stirring reads from two Catholics

Posted on April 18, 2010 by djgrieser

The first is the open letter written by Hans Kung, published in the Irish Times. Kung is the German theologian who was a colleague of Ratzinger’s (Pope Benedict XVI) at Tubingen University in the ’60s. They were the two youngest theologians at the Vatican II council. He writes with passion, intellect, and pleads with the bishops to take action. The full letter is here.

The other is an essay written anonymously, published in Commonweal in response to the controversy after a Catholic School in Boulder, Colorado refused admission to the children of a gay couple. The author tells us a great deal about herself, her spiritual journey, and the open and affirming Catholicism she has experienced throughout her life, and continues to experience, as her sons attend a Catholic School and were welcomed by the priest.

It’s difficult to watch what’s going in the Catholic Church today. As a historian, I’m constantly mindful of the need to take the long view, but as a pastor, it’s heart-breaking to watch the pain and suffering that so many Catholics are undergoing.

Let’s go fishing: A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter

Posted on April 18, 2010 by djgrieser

Let’s Go Fishing

Easter 3, Year C

Grace Church

April 18, 2010

Easter season is such a joyous time. Everything around us proclaims the reality of new life, new life in Christ and new life in the world. It’s not just Easter. Yesterday Madison was a whirl of activity—everything from the opening of the Summer Farmer’s Market on the Square, to the Wisconsin Film Festival, to yes, the Spring Football game at UW. Flowers and trees are in bloom, and we’ve had some temperatures that are more summer-like than typical April.

Continue reading →

Lourdes

Posted on April 14, 2010 by djgrieser

I saw the 2009 film Lourdes this evening as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival. Written and directed by the Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner, it takes the viewer inside the pilgrimage to Lourdes, where more than a million people seek healing each year. The film is shot with empathy toward the pilgrims and sensitivity to the theological questions that arise for people seeking healing. Hausner is interested in these questions, and has a variety of characters asking them overtly, and with her camera asks them implicitly. Surprisingly, the church and the clergy come off fairly well. The priest who has to answer everyone’s questions, seems uncomfortable with facile answers, yet tries to find ways of helping the pilgrims understand their plight.

The lead character is Christine, played by Sylvie Testud. She suffers from multiple sclerosis and has come to Lourdes because such pilgrimages are the only way for her to get out of her house. She admits to preferring the cultural offerings of Rome to what Lourdes can provide. Testud is marvelous as the suffering woman who wants to have a “normal” life as she confesses to the priest.

One rarely sees in film images of people taking care of others in such intimate ways. Christine is tended by a volunteer, a young woman who says she’s doing this because she wants to find meaning. She dresses Christine, spoon feeds her, and pushes her wheelchair, but she also goes off and has fun with the young male attendants.One of the lingering, unspoken questions concerns the motives of all of those who take care of the pilgrims.

As I watched, I was reminded of Robert Orsi’s discussion of the Catholic cult of suffering that emerged in the mid-twentieth century (in Between Heaven and Earth) and indeed one of the characters mouths platitudes to the invalids about their role as model sufferers. There are also almost continuous shots of religious gift shops, but they serve as a backdrop to the action; there’s no attempt, explicit or implicit, to comment on the commercialism.

Suffering and the quest for miracles can bring out the worst in religion, and in movies. It’s easy either to give an easy answer to the difficult questions of why suffering happens, and why one person receives a “miracle” while others don’t. The quest for healing also attracts all matter of charlatans.

The movie asks great questions and ends in ambiguity. If you’re in Madison, there’s another showing tomorrow night; otherwise, add it to your Netflix queue.

The holy fire

Posted on April 12, 2010 by djgrieser

Thomas Lynch has a fascinating article on cremation in a recent Christian Century. He’s a funeral director who has written eloquently on death, burial, and his occupation. He begins this article with observations about changing American attitudes toward cremation, and the impact of those attitudes on our funerary rituals. He uses Thomas G. Long’s Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral. Both lament the relative absence of concrete experiences of the mourners with cremation. We have all attended burial services, but few of us have witnessed a cremation. He writes about contemporary “memorial services:”

If not made to disappear entirely, the presence of the dead at such services is minimized, inurned, denatured, virtualized, made manageable and unrecognizable by cremation.

He continues:

The issue is not cremation or burial but rather the gospel, the sacred text of death and resurrection, suffering and salvation, redemption and grace–the mystery that a Chrisitan funeral ought to call us to behold, the mystery of life’s difficult journey and the faithful pilgrim’s triumphant homegoing. The memorial service, by avoiding the embodied dead, the shovel and shoulder work, the divisions of labor and difficult journey to the grave or pyre, too often replaces theology with therapy, conviction with convenience, the full-throated assurances of faith with a sort of memorial karaoke where ‘everyone gets to share a memory.’

Now, I’ve never witnessed a cremation, but then what Lynch says about burials is not quite accurate, either. In my experience, burials are hardly visible to the mourners. In fact, it seems that most cemeteries are reluctant to let us see the open grace, instead covering it with astroturf.

The liturgy instructs priests to cast dirt on the coffin. In the antiseptic funeral, an experienced funeral director will supply me with a tiny vial of what looks to be mason’s sand. There is no connection with the body, or with what Lynch calls “the spade and shoulder work.”

Contrast that with the cremations in which I’ve participated. At St. James, we dug a hole, we carried the ashes and poured them; often they sifted through our fingers. I’ve found those ashes much more real, more embodied, than the artificially made-up faces of loved ones in open caskets.

I will agree with Lynch that more work needs to be done. There are problems with the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer as it moves from the burial service to the graveside, and especially in dealing with the reality that a burial may take place at a very different time and in a very different place than the memorial service. Families struggle mightily to make those services meaningful and to find meaningful ways to say goodbye to the mortal remains of their loved ones.

Lynch seems to think that we ought to develop some rituals related to cremation and fire. Perhaps. He doesn’t realize the ritual power and sacred meaning in the ashes themselves. He seems to assume the memorial service takes place without either body or ashes present and that the norm is for it to occur before cremation. In my experience, the ashes are almost always present. And I’ve been struck repeatedly by the ways in which loved ones deal with the presence of those ashes, the care and awe that they show.

The full text of Lynch’s article is here.

Glory Days

Posted on April 10, 2010 by djgrieser

I returned to my hometown this week for the first time in over a year and only the second time since 2003. As I was making the final hundred miles on the Indiana Tollroad and the Ohio Turnpike, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA was playing on my ipod. It struck me as I listened that that album came out the last summer I spent any substantial time in Archbold–1984.

As I drove, and then on my return journey when I took a more “scenic” route, the landscape seemed full of decrepit barns and houses. Small town streets were lined with houses that had for-sale signs in front of them. There were empty factories everywhere. It was ironic listening to Springsteen sing in the ’80s about an industrial America that had seen better “glory” days, home towns that had fallen on hard times, futures that looked bleak. He wasn’t prophesying by any means, but it seems that the economic development that took place in the twenty-five years since that album was nothing more than pretty facades and empty bubbles.

I’m neither an economist nor a political scientist, but I do fancy myself something of an amateur sociologist. During my stay in Ohio, I spent time with aging relatives, aunts and uncles, most of whom are concerned first and foremost with their health. But occasionally conversation shifts to other topics, to the economy and to the fact that jobs that are gone will never be back.

I’m struck by the parallels with the South where I lived for sixteen years. In both Tennessee and South Carolina, the textile industry hemorrhaged jobs in the ’90s and after 2000. Those jobs will never come back and the economy of the upstate of South Carolina seemed dependent on coaxing new industry to relocate by bribing with tax breaks and infrastructure improvements, and attracting retirees with promises of low taxes. It seemed like a race to the bottom.

In some ways, the towns of the Midwest are looking more and more like the small towns of the south, full of empty storefronts, dollar stores, and despair. I remember remarking once that the lovely County Courthouse Square in Winchester, TN seemed to be lined with bail bondsmen and pool halls.

When politicians and the media talk about “Main Street” is that what they have in mind?

Fingerprints of God

Posted on April 9, 2010 by djgrieser

I just completed Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s The Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality (Riverhead Books, 2009). Hagerty is NPR’s Religion Correspondent and offers a chatty introduction to current scientific research into religious experience—everything from peyote to near-death experiences. I learned some things about new directions in neurological research, but in the end, I found the book rather slight.

There are several problems with it. For one, she says that she is writing about the existence of God, but that’s not accurate. She is writing about religious (or spiritual) experience, and whether there is a physical basis for that. Both are interesting questions, but you can’t answer the first one by means of the second. When she does attempt to link the two, she raises some interesting speculations about the universal nature of religious experience, but then seems immediately to jump to the question whether all religions are true. If the brains of Tibetan Buddhist monks and Roman Catholic nuns do the same thing when meditating, that must lead to the question of the truth claims of religions. But it needn’t. It only shows that human brains are similar and certain types of religious experiences share certain physical characteristics.

The thing that bothered me the most was that while she interviewed all of the leading researchers in the field, the scientific data and analysis were sophisticated, but the religious scholarship was almost non-existent. For example, she referred more than once to St. Teresa of Avila’s “spiritual orgasms.” That’s a prurient and sophomoric description of Teresa’s experiences. More problematically, she begins with a discussion of “brokenness” as an important precondition for many people’s experiences and says more about stages, but her analysis would have been much more effective had she drawn on the research of scholars of mysticism.

The question of the relationship between religious experience and the body/brain is a fascinating one. I find it not at all surprising that people experience similar things and that the brain does similar things in certain circumstances. What I do find interesting is that people process these experiences in different ways, and indeed religions process and interpret them differently, too. Of course, those things are interesting to scientists. They should fascinate scholars of Religious Studies.

One comment of hers stands out:

Every person I interviewed who had traveled to the brink of death returned with a new definition of God. I had first noticed this when I talked with people who had enjoyed spontaneous mystical experiences, and I saw the pattern repeat with those who experienced other transcendent moments as well. I realized that after encountering the ‘Other,’ people no longer clung to religious distinctions.

She continues

Now I am not saying I agree with the view that all of the world’s great religious traditions hold, at their root, the same view of the nature of reality I am simply reporting what spiritual adepts told me.

Here’s one of those places that a little depth in the study of mysticism would be illuminating.

On the bodily resurrection (and Bishop Spong)

Posted on April 5, 2010 by djgrieser

John Shelby Spong will be speaking at First United Methodist in Madison this weekend. The retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, Spong has made a name for himself as a fearless of advocate of what he calls “progressive Christianity” and the need to reinterpret scripture and tradition in light of what he understands to be contemporary modern world-view, dominated by science. He also rails against fundamentalists.

I’ve heard him speak over the years,, had a conversation or two, and read at least one of his books. I don’t find his approach or his conclusions particularly helpful or insightful, although I’ve been told by more than a few people that reading Spong has saved Christianity for them.

As an example of what I find problematic, here’s an essay of his from 2003 on the resurrection. He goes through the New Testament evidence for the resurrection, mentioning Paul’s discussion in the opening verses of I Corinthians 15, and the fact that Mark records no resurrection appearance. He concludes:

When these biblical data are assembled and examined closely, two things become clear. First something of enormous power gripped the disciples following the crucifixion that transformed their lives. Second, it was some fifty years before that transforming experience was interpreted as the resuscitation of a three days dead Jesus to the life of the world.

In order to make that case, he has to claim that Paul never asserts Jesus was raised on the third day. But that’s nonsense. He does it right there in I Corinthians 15, the text Spong cites in favor of some sort of spiritual vision. True, Paul equates his own experience of the Risen Christ with that of the other disciples; that’s his claim to apostleship, but in order to do that he has to assert that his experience of Christ was the same qualitatively as that of the other disciples as well.

Moreover, Paul is using the fact of Jesus’ Christ bodily resurrection from the dead to defend the belief in the bodily resurrection of all believers. To claim that Paul did not believe Jesus Christ was bodily raised from the dead is utterly wrong. We may not like that he did, we may have a hard time believing it, but it is crucial to Paul’s theology, crucial to the faith of the writers of the New Testament, to Christians down through the ages to our own day.

The resurrection, whether we like it or not, believe it or not, accept it or not, is crucial to Christianity, because it says something about human being (that we aren’t just disembodied souls, but enfleshed). It is linked to the Incarnation because we believe God became flesh and dwelt among us. If you want to reject the resurrection, you might as well toss the Incarnation out as well. The resurrection is also ultimately linked to Christian notions of the nature of God and of creation itself, that the material world was created good by God and is capable of and included in, redemption.

More about Spong’s visit to Madison here. I won’t be going, but then I won’t be going to hear N.T. Wright either (Anglican Bishop of Durham, England and a prominent conservative New Testament Scholar). Info on his talk is here.

I will probably go to hear Elaine Pagels, however. Not that I’m in any closer agreement with her than the other two. Her lecture is both local and free. Info here.

Surprised by Easter

Posted on April 4, 2010 by djgrieser

Surprised by Easter!

Easter Day

April 4, 2010