Comments on Can you believe?: "Support our troops" and other incomplete sentimen...

Johan, my thanks for your commentary on scripture ...

2008-07-22T19:56:00.000+04:00

Johan, my thanks for your commentary on scripture from the starting place of an adult convert from an atheist family... my experience also. "...urgent, ecstatic, despairing, instructing, inspiring..." Thank you. A menu of excellence in this weeks blog.

Our Lord told us we needed to worship Him in Spiri...

2008-07-07T21:56:00.000+04:00

Our Lord told us we needed to worship Him in Spirit and in Truth. He never specified the style or form of worship, despite the attempts by some (including some Quakers) to make it into that. Worship of just about any style can either be true worship or false worship.

All this helps me understand why different communi...

2008-07-07T18:17:00.000+04:00

All this helps me understand why different communities have different worship cultures.

Another testimony to my own inconsistencies.... I love Taize singing. Also: When I'm thinking about worship, I can have strong preferences against ceremony or anything that seems to be setting a mood or sculpting holiness or awe. But when I am IN worship, I'm in a zone where such critical thoughts don't seem to intrude.

There does seem to be an audience for studies and statistics that "prove" how ignorant we Americans are. But some of those studies need to be taken seriously. In my work with a couple of state bars, I've seen studies that demonstrate our lack of knowledge of (and support for) the U.S. Constitution, jury service, etc. It's possible to exaggerate the knowledge gap, but it is not possible to exaggerate how important it is for Americans to do better in advocating Constitutional due process and good civics education.

Maybe I'll get to this in another blog post.

Thanks for your reflections. A couple of thoughts...

2008-07-06T20:31:00.000+04:00

Thanks for your reflections. A couple of thoughts:

Bible in worship: Many churches not only have public readings from the scriptures in the Protestant sense, but also recite a daily office whose text is made up largely from scripture. I participated in such a daily office when I worked for the Iona Community, an ecumenical community that derives from a Scottish Presbyterian tradition that doesn't normally use one and was historically very suspicious of such 'popery'.

More than one of my co-workers commented that they resisted the daily office idea for fear of mouthing the words mechanically and devaluing them, but that they ended up finding it valuable. It helped them to pray when they were spiritually dry and disinclined to pray at all, and encountering scripture in such a state sowed seeds which flourished later on, and even helped them to revive from their dryness, e.g. reciting texts exhorting us to forgive and to accept forgiveness, when we feel in no mood for this.

I personally find most daily offices - including the Iona Community's - very wordy, but short songs or chants using key passages of scripture, especially those from the Taizé Community, have been a Godsend to me in difficult times.

Another feature of daily offices and scripture readings is that they are rather selective. This can be helpful for those of us who are daunted by the size of the Bible and the sheer difficulty of understanding some passages, or of extracting anything remotely wholesome from them. Offices and lectionaries direct us to the passages which the tradition has found most valuable in forming us a Christian people.

The disadvantage, of course, is that the tradition censors, both by exclusion and by establishing contexts and interpretations which discourage other, potentially fruitful, ones. I've noticed, when attending mass with my wife, that Mt 6:25-34 is coupled in the missal with other texts telling us to trust in God and not worry, rather than texts criticising wealth-accumulation. (Though to be fair such critiques do appear elsewhere in the missal, e.g. Jas:5, and in Catholic teaching generally.)

Simpsons vs. US Constitution: The Language Log, a group blog by linguists at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ , has two posts on this story in its archives (1st and 3rd of March 2006). In brief, they think the US Constitution holds its own quite well against the Simpsons, and that media stories that suggest otherwise do so by carefully spinning the statistics.

Thanks, Bill. I think that if many people are help...

2008-07-05T07:16:00.000+04:00

Thanks, Bill. I think that if many people are helped by reading the Bible in public, it is perfectly OK to tell others, like me, to defer to the experience-tested benefits that others receive, while still remembering to avoid routinizing a precious resource that should be sharpening us rather than dulling us.

On reading the Bible in public worship:1. I think...

2008-07-04T18:24:00.000+04:00

On reading the Bible in public worship:

1. I think it can have a certain value standing alone. A good Catholic church reads each portion of the lectionary at a different point in the mass, and allows a period of silence after each one so people can reflect on it. Such a practice can help immerse us in scripture, though it by no means obviates the need to read it daily in private devotions.

2. Conservative Friends have a practice of public Bible Reading. It is like a normal worship service in that it is grounded in holy silence and people speak as led. But the speaking is all directly from scripture (Friends do bring their Bibles to these services), without commentary. It can be very powerful.