Author Archives: djgrieser

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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.

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I just finished reading the profile of Roger Ebert in Esquire. It is incredibly moving. I have no idea when Siskel and Ebert first aired or when I first began watching it, but for many years, it was part of my week. Later on, I continued to follow Ebert’s reviews online. For a few years, I wrote movie reviews myself and I relied on Ebert to give me guidance (that’s another story for another day).

Siskel and Ebert taught me that movies were more than entertainment. They taught me how to watch movies, what to look for, how to interpret them. Their friendship and their disagreements also showed a way to be human, humane, and yet be able to differ deeply about important and trivial matters.

It’s a wonderful story about a man who lives with passion, full humanity, and deep love in the midst of great obstacles. Ebert’s response to the article is here.

First Sunday of Lent, 2010

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Lent 1, Year C

February 21, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

I sometimes wonder what visitors or newcomers think when they come to our services on a day like today. I mean, there was the Great Litany which I love. But its language is archaic and the chant itself sounds more like something out of the Middle Ages than the twenty-first century. Then there are the lessons we heard today, which themselves come from a far distant past and don’t seem to speak to us. As I read the gospel for today, images from Hollywood movies came to mind—especially “Devil’s Advocate, that Al Pacino movie in which he plays a devil figure and takes Keanu Reeves to the top of his tower and tempts him with wealth and power. How do these stories, how does our liturgy connect with the lives we lead here in the twenty-first century?

It takes a curious sort of person who would look forward to the self-examination and self-discipline that the season of Lent encourages. Most of us want our religious lives to focus on celebration and joy, not the repentance, the gloom and doom, of Lent.

In fact, that is only part of what Lent is about, and perhaps not the most important part. The “Invitation to a Holy Lent” that is read during Ash Wednesday services, refers not only to repentance and confession of sin, but also to the fact that Lent began as a period of preparation before baptism. So it was a time of instruction in the Christian faith. But whether or not we celebrate baptisms on Easter, Lent should serve as a season in which we deepen our understanding of our faith.

But that’s a hard thing, because the small corner of our lives which is dedicated to our relationship with God has to compete with everything else that demands our attention—our families, work or school, our leisure time. We may find it difficult even to get to church many Sundays—the roads might be bad, it might be too cold, or we might not be able to find a parking space when the square is blocked off for something like Winter Festival. For many of us, perhaps for most of us, no matter how much we want to nurture and deepen our relationship with God, there is simply to much to do from day to day, too many other demands on us. In the end, it may be that all we have time for is an hour or an hour and a half on Sunday morning.

The rigors of a Lenten discipline that deepens our understanding of our dependence on God, that deepens our faith, and that makes us more deeply aware of our of our relationship with Christ, that sort of discipline seems infinitely remote from the daily existence we lead, the routines of work, family, and whatever else that occupies our time and energy.

So we come to church this first Sunday of Lent, and hear the alien language of the Great Litany, and encounter the penitential tones of the litany and of our liturgy today. And then we hear the words of scripture; the story of God and the people of God two thousand years ago, and we wonder how our stories, the stories that brought us here relate to that story.

For there is an enormous chasm between our lives and our world, and the world of the texts we’ve heard.  The texts we heard had their origins in very different worlds from each other too.

With the gospel, we are actually picking up the narrative we left off back in January when we heard the story of Jesus’ baptism. Today’s gospel recounts the very next episode in Jesus’ life. It may be a familiar story, but like so many familiar stories from the gospels, we often overlook those details that are most important for helping us make sense of them. In this case, the story begins with the observation that “Jesus, full of the holy spirit … was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” Luke is reshaping Mark’s version of the vent significantly, for Mark says that the Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness. For Mark, at least on this occasion, the spirit seems to be a less than benign force, while Luke emphasizes its comforting presence for Jesus.

The temptations, too, are significantly in the two gospels. Mark says only that Jesus was tempted in the desert. Luke and Matthew agree that there were three temptations although they change the order slightly. They are temptations about who Jesus is, about his relationship to God, and about the nature of his ministry: Satan tests Jesus, perhaps even taunts, by asking him to make bread from the stones. Satan tests Jesus, by offering him earthly power. And finally, Satan urges Jesus to test God, by urging him to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, so that the angels might save him.

Each time, Jesus responds to Satan by quoting scripture; more precisely by quoting the book of Deuteronomy. In Luke’s sequence, in the last temptation, Satan quotes scripture of his own to Jesus. In a way, theirs is a battle over scripture, but in a sense, too, Jesus is battling with other Jewish interpreters over the meaning of scripture. It is a battle over the story of scripture, of what it means and to whom it belongs. It is a battle he would continue to wage throughout his public ministry.

The story of the Israelites in the wilderness is a story of a people testing God, complaining when there was no food or water, when the way looked long and arduous. The Jews of Jesus’ day were looking for a political Messiah who would deliver them from their Roman occupation much as the Maccabees had freed them nearly two centuries earlier.

But Jesus rejected that way and as he did, he interpreted scripture in a way that was new and challenging to the religious elites of his day. He was telling a new story. The temptations he faced are a clear rejection of the path of political and military power, and the full implications of the path Jesus chose would only come clear on his last journey to Jerusalem.

Paul, for that matter, is battling in a somewhat similar way in the letter to the Romans as he tries to find a way for including Jew and Gentile in this new community that is being birthed. But Paul gives us reassurance, again quoting from Deuteronomy, that scripture is not beyond our ability to understand or grasp—indeed, scripture lies within us: “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.” The passage from Deuteronomy that Paul quotes makes clear that the “word” refers to the commandments, the law. But for Paul, the story of scripture was not an exclusive one, it extended to Gentile as well as to Jew, to all of us.

The Invitation to a Holy Lent that is read on Ash Wednesday also encourages us to “read and meditate upon God’s holy Word.” It is an invitation to enter into and make scripture’s story our own, and to interpret our stories in light of scripture. I suppose that if I could encourage you to do anything this Lent, it would be that, to take the time, even if it’s only a few minutes, to read the weekly lessons, but to do it early in the week before they are read on Sunday. That’s what I try to do each week. Ideally, on Sunday afternoon, after I’ve recovered from Sunday morning services, I will read through the next Sunday’s lessons and allow them to float around in the back of my mind for a few days.

To read and meditate upon scripture is to enter into and reflect on the story of God and the people of God, to let that story begin to shape our own stories. We see in today’s reading from Deuteronomy what seems to have been some sort of ritual enactment. As part of that ritual of giving thanks for having received the promised land, the story of God’s mighty acts on behalf of God’s people was recited. It is a story that defines the people of Israel in a particular way, “My father was a wandering Aramean” and goes on to recite all that God did on their behalf.

We tell such stories repeatedly, our liturgy is itself such a story—We give thanks to you to God, for the goodness and love you have shown to us in creation, in the calling of Israel. … in the word made Flesh. Stories like this tell us who we are, where we belong, and for what purpose we live.

Yes, it may seem sometimes as if all of that—the story of the liturgy, the story of scripture—seem infinitely remote from the stories we live out each day but Lent invites us to reflect anew on those deeper connections and as we do, to deepen our connection to God.

More on that “other” controversy

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It seems the controversy I mentioned in an earlier post has begun to garner Goshen College national attention. Here’s the yahoo article (from AP). There’s little of substance to add although I didn’t know the background that the debate began in 2008.

The relationship between nationalism and Christian faith is complex. For most American Christians to equate the nation with Christianity seems obvious. Yet there is always the danger of idolatry and of elevating one’s country above one’s God. It is a tendency most often seen in the religious right, but few American Christians are immune from that temptation. It’s most obvious when patriotic feeling is at fever pitch and the nation is involved in or building up toward military conflict. Love of one’s country should never blind us to the fact that we are citizens of another country and that the body of Christ knows no national boundaries.

Take this Bread

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Last week, I read Sara Miles‘ Take this Bread. It is a memoir of her life leading up to her encounter with Christ in the Eucharist at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, her conversion and efforts to create a food pantry at that church. It’s a remarkable story, well-written and full of passion. I’m especially interested in how she created the food pantry and made it a place that did more than distribute food. In fact, the distribution of food takes place around the church’s altar and over time, she created eucharistic community among the volunteers (many of whom began as pantry guests) and among the larger group of guests as well.

Her work and life is not without controversy, however. She came to the church via open communion–the practice of extending the hospitality of the Eucharist to anyone, not just the baptized, and St. Gregory of Nyssa does not clearly distinguish lay and clerical roles in the Eucharist. Many Christians are uncomfortable with the former, and many ordained clergy are outraged by the latter practice.

I’m intrigued by much of what she writes about the hospitality we offer as churches and as Christians, and about the role food places in nurturing community and the sense of the sacred.

Harvard’s Crisis of Faith

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In an article in Newsweek, Lisa Miller attempts to discuss the place of Religion as an academic discipline at Harvard University. Apparently the article is in response to the new general education curriculum that was introduced and the firestorm during its development over the proposed requirement in “Faith and Reason.” Religion’s place in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is complicated. As she points out, there is no Department of Religion; rather undergraduate courses in Religious Studies and the graduate programs are administered by the Committee on the Study of Religion. She observes that students can also take courses at the Divinity School.

When I was a student at the Divinity School, and as a ThD candidate, my graduate program was administered by the Committee on the Study of Religion. Most Divinity School faculty preferred the Harvard structure over that at other universities with Divinity Schools. It allowed them to teach ministerial students, graduate students, and undergraduates, and it allowed rather different academic foci on the doctoral level. Her article suggests that there is relative institutional separation between the Divinity School and the Committee on the Study of Religion. In fact, one of her sources, Diana Eck, holds a joint appointment on the Faculty of Divinity and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and William Graham, Dean of the Divinity School, was chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion when I was a student.

But creating a department of Religion does not clarify Religion’s place as an academic discipline. I taught for fourteen years at two liberal arts colleges, where debates between Religion Departments and other academic disciplines, and within the departments themselves were quite lively, and often heated.

Too, students often assume that Religion courses will lack rigor. It was quite clear to me that Freshmen taking the required Intro to Biblical Literature course at Furman were expecting it to be a breeze. They were often disappointed.

Homily for Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2010

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Ash Wednesday

February 17, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

I love beer. I love its crisp, cold taste. I love the carbonation and the hoppy-ness. I love the finish, the way my mouth feels and tastes after I’ve taken a good swig of a good brew. I especially love IPA’s—India Pale Ales for those of you who are not beer aficionados. Now, I don’t drink beer every day, but I’ve long enjoyed them as a way of relaxing after an intense day’s work. It’s something of a ritual to have beer with lunch on Sunday or after a vestry meeting. One of the great things about Madison is that you’re never far from a bar or restaurant where you can get a really good beer.

I’ve made quite a public display of my fasting this year. I’ve given up beer for Lent. I drank my last one, last night among friends, across the street at Barrique’s. Yes, it was an IPA, Bell’s two-hearted.  And for forty days, more actually, because I won’t abandon my fast on Sundays, as many people do, my lips will not savor the froth, hops, malt, and carbonation that I love so dearly.

For Episcopalians, Lent has long been a time when people give something up—often something like chocolate or beer that we love dearly. There are people who make jokes about what they give up—rutabagas was one I remember, or someone I know well who often claims to give up church for Lent. I’ve been rather amused today a Facebook friend who announced he was giving up Facebook for Lent early this morning but had posted again by 10:00. Well, he’s Baptist, or at least used to do. If you plan on giving something up, I hope you are more successful than he was this year. And if you are planning on it, you better decide quickly, if you haven’t yet, because here we are, it’s Ash Wednesday.

Of course, none of this is serious fasting. It’s not like devout Muslims for example, who fast from sunup to sundown during Ramadan, or those Christian monks and nuns who fast for long periods of time, or Jesus, who the gospels say fasted for forty days and nights.

So why do it at all? It’s a good question and deserves a serious answer. One way to think about it is see it as a matter of discipline and becoming more aware and conscious of our relationship with God, a consciousness increased by the reality that a common activity is abandoned for a time; that alternative choices have to be made. Another way to think about is that Lent is a time of reflection and repentance, not a time for celebration and joy. We have seasons of both in our liturgical year and it is not a bad thing to move back and forth between repentance and celebration, because each helps provide perspective on the other.

Given the public nature of my fasting; given the way many of us make ostentatious shows of our piety by having ashes put on our forehead, there is rich irony in the choice of lessons for today. We hear these words of Jesus each year on Ash Wednesday: when you pray, do not do as the hypocrites do; when you give alms, do not do as the hypocrites do; when you fast….

These lessons—the reading from Isaiah and the gospel challenge us at the very heart of our religiosity. They call into question not just the ashes that will be on our forehead, but our attendance at church, our pious kneeling, and bowing of our heads, and genuflection. They force us to ask ourselves why we do these things.

But an even greater challenge are the words I will use when I cross your forehead with my ashy thumb: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” They remind us of who we are and who God is. They remind us that God created us from dust and that one day our bodies will again be dust, in the language of the burial service: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The ashes on our forehead should not be understood as a display of piety but as a statement of our finitude and brokenness.

Perhaps more important still, they remind us that nothing we do can change who we are before God. As our creator, God knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows what lies behind our every act of piety or devotion, indeed God knows what lies in our heart. We may be able to deceive others or ourselves, but we cannot deceive God.

As I’ve thought about Ash Wednesday this year, and about Lent, the concluding prayer of the Good Friday liturgy keeps running through my head. It reads in part, “we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death.”

In the end, the ashes on our forehead remind us of our humanity and of God’s judgment of us, but that’s not the whole story. As we walk this pilgrim way of Lent, let us remember our finitude and brokenness, certainly, but let us also remember the love of God that became incarnate in Jesus Christ to show us what true and full humanity means, and restores us to fellowship with God. Thanks be to God.

It’s nice to be a by-stander to controversy occasionally

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I grew up Mennonite and graduated from Goshen College, a Mennonite school. While Mennonites are most familiar to larger American culture as people who have some strange habits and practices, especially with regard to dress and the like, in fact the branch of the tradition from which I come had abandoned most of those peculiarities by the time I came along. What it hadn’t abandoned was the central conviction that at the heart of the Gospel and Jesus’ ministry was a commitment to his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, especially the commitment to peace. What that meant was that young Mennonite men who were drafted in WWI and refused to bear arms were court-martialed and sentenced to hard labor at Ft. Leavenworth. By WWII, there were alternatives for conscientious objectors and many Mennonites did alternative service in mental hospitals, national parks, and the like. Mennonites have often been vilified by other Americans for their refusal to participate in America’s wars. This was especially true when the enemy was Germany, and many Mennonites still spoke German.

Goshen College recently made public its decision to play the National Anthem at athletic events for the first time in its 114-year history. To outsiders, it may seem like a tempest in a teapot, but in fact Goshen is one of the Mennonite Church’s key institutions and something of a bellwether. You can read about the decision here. There is an online petition here. It is a controversy that goes to the heart of Mennonite self-identity and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I left the Mennonite Church twenty years ago but retain deep affection for the tradition and have friendships with many Mennonites. My theology is shaped profoundly by the Anabaptist and Mennonite tradition and my teachers at Goshen College. When I return to the church of my childhood and encounter contemporary evangelical style worship, I long for the four-part a capella hymns we used to sing and the simpler ways of forty years ago. In spite of the long journey I’ve traveled, I seem to want the church and college of my past to remain where they were, fixed in time and fixed theologically.

Such feelings are common. People who grew up Episcopalian and may only attend services on Christmas and Easter often tell me that they miss the language and liturgy of the 1928 prayer book. They expect and want the church of their childhood to remain what it was, in the midst of a rapidly changing world.

Sermon for the Last Sunday after Epiphany

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Transfiguration

Grace Church

Last Epiphany, 2010

February 14, 2010

I’m sure that by now most of you have seen or heard about the article from this week’s Isthmus about the homeless shelter. If not, it’s posted in the back and is available online. I urge all of you to read it. I knew it was coming out; I wasn’t quite sure when it would appear, and I certainly had no idea of the content. But Thursday morning I got up around early and was working on a couple of projects. I kept checking their website to see if anything was on line. Then I saw the cover and the headline: “Bleak House: Grace Episcopal’s homeless shelter is a dispiriting place.” And my heart sank. I still had no idea what was in the article, so when I came to the church, I stopped by Barrique’s to see if they had copies of this week’s issue yet. I went to the office and read the article.

I’ve preached about the shelter a good bit already in the months I’ve been here and if you visit my blog, you’ll read more of my ruminations. Seven months is not a long time to develop a perspective on one’s ministry in a new place, but it has become clear to me that right now, a good bit of my job is going to be involved in the issue of homelessness. I didn’t expect that, and I’ve had more than one parishioner say to me that they wished I hadn’t already gotten so involved in it.

I wished I hadn’t as well. I certainly didn’t expect it. Coming in, I suppose I thought that having a homeless shelter, run by an outside organization, would give me a little cache, my ministry a little edginess, without actually having to be very involved.

But I quickly learned that wouldn’t be enough. As winter came on, and as I walked past the line-up night after night, I began to be more and more troubled by what I saw, more concerned about what I heard, more passionate about what was going on. And I learned that there were others who were also becoming more involved and more passionate. Perhaps we are close to achieving critical mass. I don’t know.

The headline on the article was troubling. I immediately shot an email off to the author to complain about it, and he assured me that there would be a clarification in the next issue. For better or worse, it’s not “our” shelter. We rent space to Porchlight, but of course we bear responsibility as Christians for the treatment of the guests and for the kind of hospitality that is shared there.

The shelter is a reflection on us as a church. The conditions in it, the treatment of the guests by Porchlight, all say something about how we understand and live out our call to be Christ’s body here. That’s why that headline should bother us. My first reaction was quite natural, to get defensive, to attack the messenger. Perhaps yours was as well. Unfortunately, there’s a great deal of truth in that headline: the shelter is a dispiriting place. I hear it almost every day from the men who stay there and we at Grace share in the responsibility for what it has become over the years.

Again, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not placing blame or criticizing the past clerical or lay leadership of Grace, nor Grace’s membership. I’m not interested in exploring or analyzing the history of the relationship between Grace and Porchlight. I learned quickly that Grace is a complex institution that requires a great deal of energy, time, and commitment to keep going. We can’t do everything that needs to be done. We don’t have the resources: financial, human, spiritual, to do everything. So people have to make difficult choices about where to spend money, where to invest time and talent. You might have called a rector whose passion for the gospel and ministry lay elsewhere and would have focused her energies and your attention on different projects. Instead, you called me.

The story broke as I was thinking about my sermon for today and beginning to look ahead to Lent. As I pondered Luke’s gospel for today and thought about the situation of the shelter guests I remembered the quotation from Matthew’s gospel that I was quoted as referring to in the article: The church’s job, I said, is to clothe the naked and feed the hungry. I was alluding to Matthew 25 to the parable of the sheep and goats, and Jesus words’ “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” I’m perfectly comfortable thinking about encountering the face of Christ in the homeless, the hungry, in victims of violence and oppression, even in the faces of those suffering in Haiti. Yet I wonder whether my comfort is too comfortable, whether I fully understand what it means to encounter Christ in those faces.

I’ve said repeatedly these past weeks that Epiphany is a season during which we celebrate God’s glory and presence in the world, and above all the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who makes God’s glory and presence manifest in himself. The season of Epiphany always ends with a reading of the gospel story of the transfiguration, that eerie, otherworldly encounter of Jesus with Elijah and Moses on top of a mountain.

I’ve never found this story particularly compelling, probably because I’m not generally fond of those stories that emphasize Jesus’ divine nature or his miraculous powers and this one has nothing to redeem itself like the healing of someone who is blind or deaf or possessed. Instead, it seems to be all about the divine and kind of gratuitous at that, with the appearance of Elijah and Moses.

That might seem to contradict much of what I said last week about experiencing God, as Isaiah did in his vision, as Paul did on the road to Damascus, and as Peter did in the miraculous catch of fish. Each of them was transformed by the experience, each was humbled, each was called. They were other-wordly experiences. The difference, it seems to me, is that in the transfiguration we have two odd and unbelievable events—the first is the transformation of Jesus. Luke doesn’t call it transfiguration, saying only that the appearance of his face changed and his clothes became dazzling white. The second event was the sudden appearance of Moses and Elijah.

The Transfiguration confronts us directly with the problem and the mystery of Jesus Christ’s divinity. But it does so in a curious way. On other occasions, with the miracles, for example, the demonstration of Jesus’ power is on behalf of someone else, to heal them, to restore them. In this case, the demonstration of Jesus’ divinity is for no reason, or perhaps only to show forth Jesus’ divinity.

But to focus only on what happens to Jesus is to miss some of the significance of the story. Luke’s version is unique in several respects. First, only Luke mentions what the three talked about—“Jesus’ departure.” Literally, the Greek reads “exodus.” So not only are we put in mind of the children of Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness by the presence of Moses and the mountaintop setting; there is a connection here as well. And of course it is important that even in the context of a transcendent event like this, we are reminded of what is to come, of the cross and Jesus’ suffering. Another important point made by Luke is in the description of the disciples. It’s not at all clear what is meant here. The NRSV reads “they were weighed down with sleep, but since they were awake they saw his glory. Again, one is put in mind of Gethsemane, and of the same three disciples in Luke, sleeping, because of grief. In the midst of this glory, we have a foreshadowing of the cross.

Indeed, just a few verses along in the gospel, Luke will write: “And Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem.”  It’s a journey we will be walking with him in the coming weeks—the journey to Jerusalem. Lent is a time of reflection, penitence, and preparation for Easter. The glory of Christ that we experience in the resurrection, the glory of Christ of which we have a foretaste today in the story of the Transfiguration, is also the glory of the cross.

Lent has been most often seen as a time for individual focus and reflection, an opportunity for each of us to deepen our relationship with Jesus Christ. It is appropriate, however, that we thank of it as a communal experience as well, that our journey is not one we make alone, but with our brothers and sisters in Christ. It is fitting, then, that as part of our Lenten devotion in the coming weeks, we reflect together on our shared responsibility for Madison’s homeless. I would like to begin that process of reflection by inviting you to join me next Sunday at 8:45 in the library for an initial conversation. I don’t know where that conversation will lead us but I pray that together we will discern where God is leading us.

Peter wanted to build booths on the mountain so that he and the other disciples could continue to bask in the glory of the presence of Moses, Elijah, and the transfigured Christ. He wanted to linger there, as we want to linger in the joy and glory of Epiphany. But the memory of this event will have to suffice for a time, as we make our way through Lent toward Easter and the greater glory of the sorrow and suffering of the Cross transformed into Easter.

Bleak House: Grace Episcopal’s Homeless Shelter a dispiriting place

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That’s the headline I woke up to this morning. Here’s a link to the front page. Rather dispiriting, don’t you think? I shot an email off to the author of the article before reading it; it wasn’t yet on the website. By the time I got to the office, copies of The Isthmus were available. The article by Joe Tarr was well-researched, well-written, and balanced. He spent a night in the shelter to get some first-hand experience of what goes on there.

In a return email, Joe assured me they would make a clarification in next week’s issue, but anyone reading the article would quickly realize that the shelte is run by Porchlight, not us; and that it is ours only because we rent the space.

Still, part of the headline is true. The shelter is a dispiriting place, and we need to shoulder some of the responsibility for that.

There is a great deal of energy bubbling up in the downtown area around the issue of homelessness and the shelter and I am very hopeful that there will be some substantive changes. Several innovative ministries and outreach programs have developed recently and the growing concern over conditions in the drop-in shelter may lead to some change there too.

veils, mirrors, and faces

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I’m working on my sermon for this Sunday, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany. The gospel is always the story of the Transfiguration. This year we hear Luke’s version, which is notable because it does not use the word transfiguration. Luke says only that “the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Lk. 9:29). While Luke refers to Jesus’ face, both Exodus and Paul talk about a veil. Moses needs a veil to protect himself when he approached and talked with God. Paul uses that image to draw a contrast between the direct experience of the believer with God.

It puts me in mind of another image from Paul. In I Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face.”

I’ve been reading Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. Traherne was a seventeenth-century Anglican priest who wrote extensively. Little of what he wrote was published in his lifetime and manuscripts have been found within the last decade. The Centuries of Meditation were discovered in a used bookshop in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

I came across this in the Centuries yesterday:

O let me so long eye Thee, till I be turned into Thee, and look upon me till Thou art formed in me, that I may be a mirror of Thy brightness, an habitation of thy Love, and a temple of Thy glory. That all Thy Saints might live in me, and I in them: enjoying all their felicities, joys and treasures.” 63

I hope to write more extensively and seriously on Traherne at some point, but I’m intrigued by that statement “O let me so long eye thee till I be turned into thee.”