When heretics are excommunicated from the fold of the holy catholic and apostolic Church, when are things right again? The answer of ‘when they hold the correct beliefs again’ is probably very common (if people believe in excommunication at all), but this is distinctly unchurchly: the Church isn’t optional, and the only way normally for healing to take place is through reconciliation and restoration to the Church. This idea also inevitably leaves people hanging with an unclear reattachment, whereas the break was manifest.

But this is probably why we think it’s enough to be right without being legitimately connected to the Body of the Church except by the futility of our own thoughts. Whose solipsistic idea was it that one’s thought, unconnected to the world, could connect people? Is this all that matters to salvation? For if it is, no wonder there’s the crypto-Pelagian idea floating around that intentions alone matter. But if so, then why would we excommunicate people for heresy in the first place?

Perhaps one may suggest that visible Church actions do make things happen and that we don’t have to be all hush-hush, mysterious and Gnostic about it.

We have a lot of nice-sounding church music. Perhaps we even have too much of it. This depends on meaning, of course: what’s the right and proportionate way to portray God in all the subject matter of worship?

At least some of our church music, for the right functions in each service (okay, every song should have a particular function already, really), ought to be compatible with the sound of thunder. In the world of my fantasizing, and also in older church chant practice, this will include an ison (a drone of the base note). Since in primary school creative writing they say ‘Show, don’t tell,’ today’s your lucky day for examples.

Very musically appropriate, I think, for the subject matter (translation by Francis Marchal):

Statuit ei Dominus
testamentum pacis,
et principem fecit eum;
ut sit illi
sacerdotii dignitas
in aeternum.
Alleluja, alleluja.

The Lord made to him
a covenant of peace,
and made him a prince;
that the dignity
of priesthood
should be to him for ever.
Alleluia, alleluia.

Solemn, otherworldly and compatible with the sound of thunder outside.

And another, perhaps more emotional example, for Good Friday (translation mine):

Σήμερον κρεμάται ἐπί ξύλου,
 ὁ ἐν ὕδασι τὴν γῆν κρεμάσας.
Στέφανον ἐξ ἀκανθῶν περιτίθεται,
 ὁ τῶν ἀγγέλων βασιλεύς.
Ψευδῆ πορφύραν περιβάλλεται,
 ὁ περιβάλλων τὸν οὐρανὸν ἐν νεφέλαις.
Ράπισμα κατεδέξατο,
 ὁ ἐν Ιορδάνῃ ἐλευθερώσας τὸν Ἀδάμ.
Ἤλοις προσηλώθη,
 ὁ νυμφίος τῆς Ἐκκλησίας.
Λόγχῃ ἐκεντήθη,
 ὁ υἱὸς τῆς Παρθένου.
Προσκυνοῦμεν σού τὰ Πάθη, Χριστέ.
Δεῖξον ἡμῖν καὶ τὴν ἔνδοξόν σου Ἀνάστασιν.

Today he is hung on a piece of wood,
 he that hung the earth upon the waters;
With a circlet of thorns he is encircled,
 he the king of the angels;
With false purple he is encompassed,
 he that encompasses the sky with clouds.
Slaps in the face he took,
 he that in the Jordan set Adam free;
With nail-heads he was abused,
 he the Bridegroom of the Church;
With a lance he was stabbed,
 he the Son of the Virgin.
We prostrate ourselves to thy Passion, O Christ;
Show us also the glory of thy Resurrection.

For those suspecting I’m just musically bigoted, I note that I’m partial to Renaissance polyphony and to Valaam chant as well, but I’m totally open to the possibility of a church musical tradition developing out of Chinese and Japanese music theory. It’s usually the CCM scene that demands a narrowing with its myopic focus on chasing the tastes of the day. And as they say, diversify (thoughtfully and coherently).

As Marc expresses, the existence of the Church is not an excuse for something else to happen (he’s written what I’ve been wanting to write, on a different register). There can be no chill about the raison d’être, and any other purposes people dream up are mere interpolations.

Remember, O Israel, the call of thy covenants.

And now, with neither Jew nor Greek, all that binds thee – nothing else: not thoughts, not wishes, not commonalities – is the blood of one Lamb, which you drink together at his Table. I myself am bothered by the idea of niche churches that cater to a sector of the population. In The Screwtape Letters, one devil writes to another (HT: Scott Schultz):

You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realize that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.

The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organisation should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires. The congregational principle, on the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all goes well, into a coterie or faction.

Nothing should disguise the purpose of gathering, nor should anything detract from the glory of the One in whom they gather. If the consumer society swallows this too, we shall all die.

Hosanna in excelsis Deo.

There was a time when faith was real,
When it was not itself,
And God did search us, know us then,
When I knew not myself.

And then came introspection’s thoughts,
A mirror to my soul.
Who needs a Chillingworth t’accuse
With scarlet letters’ toll?

בָּרוּך הַבָּא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָֹה

My self-manipulated heat
Was « mene, mene » call’d:
I call’d for water to my soul,
For righteous gardens wall’d.

I know no more what I did seek,
So, Adam, ask me not.
But wait, I do now: Shepherd’s hands,
Which had my marrow bought.

בָּרוּך הַבָּא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָֹה

His wine is in my unclean mouth,
A coal to sinful lips,
For « common » is, he says, no more –
No more, these fictive scripts.

And clean’s as holy as he speaks:
« Forget your labour plan:
I have a fatted calf, my son.
So feast, and heed the banns. »

בָּרוּך הַבָּא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָֹה

© 2009 Lue-Yee Tsang

‘Such are his words, and sick at heart with immense grief he feigns hope in his expression, but hides his pain deep in his heart’ (talia voce refert curisque ingentibus aeger / spem vultu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem. Aeneid 1.208–9, translation given by David O. Ross in Vergil’s Aeneid: A Reader’s Guide [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007], 9).

I’m nothing like these epic heroes psychologically: I cannot so feign something without thinking it’s true, even if I must do violence to myself to get there. If I’m torn asunder in grief – oh, it will be known, and you need not speculate.

I note also, you are what you do, not what you intend to do, not even what you think you’re doing – your good intentions cannot save you from your monstrous deeds. The subjective deliberations in your mind between reason and counter-reason, between one emotion and another, and even what you think is your choice, are the construction of your self, not the more authentic ‘you’. In the end, no decision is final until action has actually been taken, for no one can know whether he will change his mind and be made other than he originally intended to be.

If you’re a hypocrite, your actions, and not your thoughts alone, belie your words; if you’re engaged and intend to be married, you may yet break off the engagement; if you’ve given yourself to be catechized in the Way (‘made a personal decision’), you may yet decide at the last that you cannot be baptized into the faith. Our reaction against this, our attempted revolt, is a plea for the illusion of autonomy. ‘Peace, peace,’ they cry, but there is no peace; ‘freedom, freedom,’ but they are everywhere in chains, in the hands of the Accuser.

These also are the issues of authenticity that surround apostasy, which is not predicated on your earnestness or lack thereof.

I once thought God in his beauty could be compared to a crocus or a cherry blossom in the morning, reflecting on the delicate beauty that he had dispersed into the world and seeking to apply the attribute ‘delicate’ to him. Blasphemy. The flower is his Bride, ever dependent and glorious, but he is the Sun. (Don’t worry, I’m not at all denying the kenosis of Christ.)

Dynamis. Agios o Theos, Agios Ischyros, Agios Athanatos, eleison ymas.

The weakness of ‘balance’: it’s always a superficial analysis.* It reliably gets us nowhere, and it assumes too much.

They offered scant evidence of forethought when they taught the children to ‘strike a balance’ without a way to tell what exactly to balance in the first place. Then, thinking turned into sludge. If you must teach nuance and subtlety and precision, teach that. Just don’t tell people there are no rules, or the balancing acts they attempt will be without rule, without measure, without canon, without any hope of success by any more than mere chance (though ‘chance’, too, is a simplifying abstraction).

‘Balance’ is for the non-thinkers to persist their lazy ignorance and subject all things to their worst judgement under that rubric.

* Except in such cases as Newton’s Third Law of Motion and other things that make reference to literal, physical balance.

One of the most beautiful Kyries I’ve ever heard, by Tomás Luis de Victoria, from Officium Defunctorum (although the beginning’s been cut, so the first two plainchantings of ‘Kyrie eleison’ are missing). For God to have allowed for sin to mar the world, this must be an adornment to the glory of his redemption.

Now, the day after Reformation Day, I wonder why God purposed for this piece to come out of the Counter-Reformation: perhaps it’s exactly so that greater glory will shine forth when the Church is reformed according to God’s word and once more united. What is fractured will be brought together. God loves his Church: let no man forsake the vision of her glory.

We remember all our brethren who have tasted death and wait for Christ to return in glory to raise us in the Resurrection of the Body. The collect for today from the Book of Common Prayer reads,

O almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord; Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

We wait, and we long to see what we now know by faith. Come, Lord Jesus!

First, I want to say that it would be a great reminder for me to have בעזרת השם (beʿezrat ha-shem: ‘in the help of the Name [of YHWH]’) emblazoned across my door, although I think sometimes it would be cool instead to have lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate (‘all hope abandon, ye who enter in’).

With this in mind: a certain Philologos, writing in an article entitled ‘Public Displays of Piety Are in Fashion, Thank God’, claims that routine reference to God in daily life (‘if God wills’, ‘with God’s help’, ‘blessed be the Name’) has become common among Mohammadans and some Jews but makes a passing remark that such isn’t the case for Christians. I’m wondering why this is so, if it is indeed.

Is it good for a Christian society to be filled with such acknowledgements of God in the hum-drum of daily life? On the one hand, it’s ‘very meet, right and our bounden duty, that we should at all times and in all places give thanks’ to God, who blesses us every day with the benefits he imparts to us weekly in the celebration of his Resurrection; on the other hand, we’re as much as told to keep our piety to ourselves, and people interpret this way the passages where Jesus says to do good works unseen by men.

To this I’m inclined to say that our praise to God should be objective as well as subjective, therefore extending from the Lord’s Day worship to what we call the normal course of human life. If the sacred is to ultimately sanctify even the ‘secular’, it should be a good thing that God be upon our heads, our lips and our hearts throughout the day. This is simply desire for God’s Kingdom, not hypocrisy.

But in this day and age I suppose I also have to deal with the fear prevalent among Christians that doing something all the time will render it stale. You do eat dinner all the time, don’t you? I hope you do. And I hope that the taste of food is new to you each time, even when the dish is familiar, even when it’s the same cook and the same recipe. How can this be? Well, the only thing I can say is, the Lord’s mercies are new every morning.

What spirit is it in us that we should take pleasure in seeing a man hanged or broken on the rack (or, indeed, given lethal injection)? What are these vicious beasts that we are, that our aesthetic sense is drawn to things of no real beauty? 吾不欲觀之矣。 Harsher is this content than even the harshest, bitterest winter of discontent that we can muster, and the most biting winds of the sharp steppe, for its edge is a cruel grin at once familiar and repulsive.

At the heart of morality and truth lies what is beautiful. Ships are launched from Aulis by the face of Helen; the fields buzz with iron-bearing myriads of locusts while Xi Shi’s beauty has doomed the King of Wu; green envy rises dank in the human soul by the quest for beauty, and knowledge of beauty, and obedience to beauty. And still, if we dismiss the question with de gustibus non est disputandum, we shall have no vision, no light, no God.

We are beggars. This is true. We beg for beauty to burn the bonds that shackle us to our hideous corruption, which has become us both within and without. We look to the east on the third day, on the eighth day. We cannot make our own way to the Tree that rises taller than anything on the earth, which gives juice red and dark like a pomegranate’s, yet only the Tree can make us alive again.

Only its leaves can shade the field named Haqel-dema, in which we sprang out of the earth as warriors spring from sown dragon’s teeth, in which we killed ourselves as we emerged. And then there once was a valley of old, dry bones.