A Practical Christianity: Meditations for the Season of Lent - Softcover

Shaw, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819227765 ISBN 13: 9780819227768

Publisher: Morehouse Publishing, 2012

Synopsis

Biblical and poetic reflections on Lenten themes of salvation, forgiveness, sin.

A Practical Christianity: Meditations for the Season of Lent is a devotional book that challenges readers to take up “practical Christianity”―proposing Christian faith as something we do, not something we merely believe in. The starting point for Christianity lies within its practice, says the author, and not in the blind acceptance of a chunk of undigested doctrine.

The book samples fiction, poetry, art and music, combined with the wisdom of scripture and theology, to help pilgrims make sense of faith in the context of everyday life.

Shaw reconsiders the central doctrines of Christian faith through the lens of how we practice them. She explores five themes: dust, forgiveness, time, doubt and love―devoting a chapter to each. This thematic approach is a way of presenting (covertly, since it’s not revealed until the end of the book) the doctrines of Creation and Sin, Forgiveness, the Trinity, Salvation, and finally Love.

About this title

About the Author

Jane Shaw is Principal of Harris Manchester College in the University of Oxford. She was formerly Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and Dean for Religious Life at Stanford University. She has a doctoral degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley, Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University, and honorary doctorates from the Episcopal Divinity School, Colgate University, and the Graduate Theological Foundation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY

MEDITATIONS FOR THE SEASON OF LENTBy JANE SHAW

Morehouse Publishing

Copyright © 2012 Jane Shaw
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2776-8

Contents

Chapter One

Being Dust

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me round among them; and behold, there were very many upon the valley; and lo, they were very dry. And he said to me, 'Son of man, can these bones live?' And I answered, 'O Lord God, thou knowest.' Again he said to me, 'Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.'

So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And as I looked, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, 'Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.' So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host.

Ezekiel 37:1–10 (RSV)

The Problem of Dust

In Philip Pullman's powerfully imaginative novel The Golden Compass, dust drives the narrative and governs everything. Dust, in this novel, consists of particles from another world that cause knowledge—or, in theological language, original sin. The overriding intellectual quest, and the central battles in the book, are about discovering the origin and meaning of dust; and, for some of the characters in the book, about overcoming the power of dust and thus eliminating the existence of original sin, often via cruel means.

While Pullman would stoutly disavow any Christian belief, and the church comes off very badly in the book, the novel is in many ways a working out of a verse in Genesis 3: "From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return." This phrase, repeated in the Christian liturgy on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, reminds us of our mortality. Traditionally, Christianity has used that reminder—when life was "nasty, brutish and short" as the seventeenth- century philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it—to speak of our immortality, to promise something better in a future life. But in the Western world today, where the material quality of life is so high for so many and life expectancy is long, it is not primarily the thought of a heavenly (or hellish) afterlife that determines our actions. Rather, we are guided by love, work, success, money, illness, relationships. Our lives are shaped by our attitudes to these things that preoccupy us here and now. To speak of dust, in this context, is to acknowledge our humble beginnings (literally as humus, or dirt) and discern what it means to lead a moral life, a good life, in a world beset by "dust" understood in a different but related sense, namely sin.

Pullman shares the church's commitment to the quest for the good life. But he would join many intelligent critics in saying that Christianity does not have a monopoly on morality. If anything, for Pullman, true morality must occur outside the limiting and damaging force of the institutional churches.

As a priest who for a long time worked in a university environment, my interest—shaped by my pastoral experience—has long been in this tension between those atheists and agnostics like Pullman who wish to shape a good and moral life, and a Christianity that has a choice to make: either to acknowledge or refute the credibility of such skepticism. And in my present ministry, as dean of a large cathedral on the west coast of the USA, I see that we face that same choice here, where so few people go to church—or indeed any place of worship. My own choice has always been to acknowledge the validity of that criticism, and then to find a place from within Christianity that may address the concerns of those on the margins of the church, outside and peering in, as well as those who are central to the church, but want something more, and thereby to demonstrate Christianity's particular contribution to shaping the "good life."

The questions then become, for Christians and nonChristians alike: what does Christianity offer us in this life? What does faith enable us to do and to be? Are there guiding principles in Christianity that can help us with our relationships, jealousies, and resentments; the knotty problems in our jobs or the desolation of unemployment or underemployment; exhaustion and overwork; and that fear of something—we are not always quite sure what—that keeps us awake at night? In short, how can the practice of a spiritual life help us with all those things which make daily living utterly real and often ugly and painful—our dust? And what particular resources and ideas does Christianity bring to such a life?

The Most Democratic of Substances

Dust is a biblical metaphor, and it helpfully speaks to our beginnings and our endings, to our place in this world, to the life in Christ that Christians share, and to the practical means by which we may live our lives. In the second of the creation stories in which God makes humankind, it is said: "the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground" (Genesis 2:7). Later in Genesis, God reminds human beings of their mortality in the words, "you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). The philosopher Alain de Botton writes memorably, in his book Status Anxiety, that "Dust is that most democratic of substances." It is the stuff from which we are all created.

This raises an existential question: if we all come from the same place, the same substance, and are reduced back to that substance at the end of our lives, what meaning do any of our achievements, our possessions, the things which we believe give us status (our jobs, children, the "right" address, the "right" house, an expensive car, entry into a particular social group) have? In the face of enormous social anxiety, Christianity forces us to realize, finally realize, that for all our achievements and riches, human beings are created equal, from the same substance, and, more than that, in the image and likeness of God.

Jesus himself was the one who reminded his followers that we are all equally and beautifully composed of dust. It was Jesus who washed the dust off his disciples' feet when they came for supper the night before he died (John 13:1–17). This act turned the world upside down. Dust may be that most democratic of substances: it gets in all our toes if we walk on a dusty country road in sandals, as Jesus and his disciples did, day in, day out, so whenever they entered another's house their feet would be washed by servants or slaves. But to wash the dust off your disciples' feet in a deeply hierarchical society was to engage in a radically democratic act. From Jesus' acts—this and others—there resulted a radical egalitarianism, which was a hallmark of the earliest communities of Christians. In a society divided into slave and free, with a carefully delineated, hierarchical social system, and where women had no public role, Christians provided an alternative. Christians of all sorts ate and worshipped together in the same room, and attempted to assign offices within their churches (priest, bishop, deacon, prophet) according to gifts, not rank, gender, or whether a person was a free person or a slave. Paul expressed it like this, in his letter to the Galatians in the first century: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

This sort of radical egalitarianism stood in stark contrast with the wider society where women and men, slave and free, would never have sat in the same room together to eat. Christians were therefore described by the pagans in the following sorts of terms. Here the early Latin Christian apologist, Minucius, constructs a dialogue between a pagan and a Christian, and the pagan says that the Christians "are a gang of discredited and proscribed desperadoes.... They have gathered together from the lowest dregs of the populace ignorant men and credulous women—and women are naturally unstable—and formed a rabble of impious conspirators." For the pagan philosophers, a group that attracted women or the other "dregs" of society had little merit: in a world where rank mattered, it was the number of educated male disciples and followers you had that counted. Christianity shattered that presupposition, and consequently Christians thought of themselves as resident aliens in the Roman Empire. Washing the dust off the feet of those who were, in societal terms, deemed lower than you was part of a startling and liberating movement.

Whatever the churches have made of Jesus, the radical rabbi of the first century, he emerges from the pages of the gospels as a man whose ethical teaching based in love and the basic equality of all human beings in the eyes of God was and is highly attractive. Here was a man who healed on the Sabbath because he wished people to be well and to flourish, rather than adhering needlessly to the law; who spoke to the woman at the well even though she was of "bad" reputation; who sat and ate with the hated tax collectors; who touched dead bodies when it was utterly taboo to do so—and brought them back to life; who honored the woman who poured expensive oil over him and thereby "chrismated" him (named him as the Christ in an act of devotion) when all around him grumbled. Here, too, was the man who washed his disciples' feet with care, embracing their dust and shattering notions of high or low, clean or unclean, worthy or unworthy.

Grappling with Sin

In Pullman's novel The Golden Compass and the following two books in the trilogy of which it is a part, the misguided characters, such as Mrs. Coulter (played so compellingly by Nicole Kidman in the film version), try to destroy dust, believing that to live a good life we have to get rid of our created nature, and especially original sin. In their attempts to get rid of dust, they cause immense pain and suffering.

For some, the notion of a paradise to which we might return, or which we might build on earth, is a way of escaping the dust of our lives; it promises an escape from sin. Utopian communities—both religious and secular—stand as a testament to human beings' capacity for imagining a brighter future and for deluding themselves. The whole idea of modern society's progress was something of a utopian dream, shattered by World War I and the later atrocities of the twentieth century.

In Pullman's work, the central characters Lyra and Will learn that the moral life, the good life, is not lived in a dust-free vacuum but is rather lived out in the quest, in the journey and in the choices that one makes in a complex world filled with pain and suffering as well as joy and hope. If we cannot eradicate dust and sin, there must be an alternative path, some way to grapple with our faults, shake off the effects and continue on the journey.

In the language and practice of the church, this process of letting go is done through the sacrament of reconciliation: namely, confession and repentance. The first stage is always stating things as they are: What do we need to confess? What is the dust of sin in our lives that we need to acknowledge in order that we can shake it off? Unless we make that acknowledgment, we cannot move on, and this is true of both our personal or individual sins, and collective or institutional sins, although of course these are often interrelated.

Patricia Williams, the legal theorist, writes of the ways we as a society need to acknowledge racism—what I as a Christian would call the sin of racism—in order that we can confront it and be reconciled. We might wish for a colorblind society, and many do, but we must first account for who we are and what we do. As Williams puts it, "It is a dangerous if comprehensible temptation to imagine inclusiveness by imagining away any obstacles.... [T]he moral high ground of good intentions [has] its limits. We must be careful not to allow our intention to verge into outright projection by substituting a fantasy of global seamlessness that is blinding rather than just color-blind." In other words, wishing that all is well does not make everything well. There is grappling and reconciling work to do.

Our Lenten discipline begins by kneeling at the altar rail and having the priest mark our foreheads with ash, reminding us that we have come from dust, and we will go back to dust. We share the Lenten litany, in which we state collectively what we have done that was wrong, and what we have left undone. The forty days that follow provide a dedicated opportunity for personal examination, and in our churches and worshipping communities they may allow a space for collective reflection and examination, too. Along with Williams, we have to acknowledge the limits to "the moral high ground of good intentions." God wants us to be more than our human limits, and with God's help we can be, but we have to know what those limits are. That is a spiritual practice.

Jesus once again guides our practice. He sent his disciples out to preach God's love and commanded them to shake the dust off their feet on leaving any village where they were not welcome. (See Mark 6:11; Luke 9:5 and 10:11; Matthew 10:14.) His words stand out as common sense of the highest order. For me, this practical advice encourages disciples to release bitterness and forgive those who have wronged them, a practice we will take up in the next chapter. But it also inspires them—and us—to do the work of self-examination, to discern where we continually fall short and recognize how our dustiness prevents our living freely and fully.

For several years in England there was a BBC reality television program called Life Laundry; in the U.S., there was a similar series called Clean Sweep on The Learning Channel. In this program, people with very cluttered and messy houses who cannot stop collecting old comic books or garden statues or hoarding broken washing machines that they might mend one day, or something else utterly useless, or who simply cannot throw anything out, submit themselves—on television, which never ceases to amaze me—to a very bossy woman and her slightly timid male sidekick who go through their houses, telling them what to keep and what to throw out. There is a bit of pop psychology thrown in along the way about why the homeowners accumulated so much rubbish.

My hope is that we might all gain the spiritual tools for ourselves—without a bossy television presenter coming into our houses—to do a bit of "life laundry," not just about material objects but all the difficult situations and relationships which accumulate in our lives and cause us embarrassment or upset or grief or resentment. One session of Life Laundry from someone else does not do it: my guess is that those houses get cluttered all over again once the television cameras have left. We need to learn the spiritual tools for ourselves to keep on discerning throughout our lives what to wrestle with, what to let go of, and how with God's grace to re-engage to effect a transformation. We all have dustiness, limits, sin, and eventually the only course is to deal with it.

Life after Dust

The point of reckoning with the reality of dust—coming to accept our created nature, including the flaws—is to move towards and embrace life in all its fullness. God longs to bring us to new life despite our limitations, for there are no limitations with God. Out of our dust, through the clouds of dust that we shake off, comes new life. This is marvelously depicted in our biblical passage: Ezekiel 37:1-10.

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me round among them; and behold, there were very many upon the valley; and lo, they were very dry. And he said to me, "Son of man, can these bones live?" And I answered, "O Lord God, thou knowest." Again he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord."

So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And as I looked, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host.

Ezekiel is brought to a valley of dusty, dry bones and God commands him to prophesy to the bones so that they might live. It seems an impossible task. But Ezekiel follows God's instructions, prophesying that God's breath might enter the dry bones. The dry bones begin to rattle and shake as they miraculously take on first flesh and then life, so that a vast multitude of people comes to stand before Ezekiel in the valley, where before there had simply been bones. This vast multitude is a sign to the people of Israel—in exile at this point—that life can come out of their spiritual aridity, their despair and despondency.

Here our verse from Genesis 3 is turned upside down. What the Ezekiel story suggests is this: you shall go back to dust, but by the mighty power of an all- loving God, from dust you shall be given new life. We may all be formed from dust and return to dust, but there is hope: the belief that God is a God of life and flourishing, not of death and decay. God always wants us to come to fullness of life, to be wholly who we are called to be, dust and all.

What, then, does Christianity bring to the quest for a moral life, the struggle to live with our dustiness? The promise that we are created of dust and in the image of God, and that we will be accompanied in our journey by the love of God, a love greater than our sin, greater than our limits.

For Reflection

1. Consider the phrase: "From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return." In what ways do these words comfort you? In what ways do they challenge you?

2. In many church services, there is very little silence for reflection following the invitation to confession. What is so difficult about confession or saying "I'm sorry," especially in public?

3. If you did a "life laundry" exercise, what would you need to confess or release about your life, your habits, your choices?

4. Where do you see glimmers of new life, dry bones taking on flesh? Where do you wish to see new life?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITYby JANE SHAW Copyright © 2012 by Jane Shaw. Excerpted by permission of Morehouse Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819227765
• ISBN 13: 9780819227768
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 103