Teaching, a few books, and “Lies”

Today I finally started the online TESOL course which I’d been thinking about for a while. Shortly after I graduated from high school I applied to a similar program at a local university but was rejected. I guess this is my second shot about 12 years later.

A few months after I got back I taught World Religions and Philosophy at a small local college here, and since the educational style was based on the American system I enjoyed it very much. I only lasted one semester, though: they weren’t offering enough courses to keep me there full-time so they gave me a part-time offer and I told them I’d rather not. Part-time doesn’t quite pay the bills around here, you know. That was almost four months ago.

As much as I enjoyed teaching religion and philosophy last semester and Scripture while I lived in the United States, I’ve become more and more uncomfortable with handling these things in a classroom. More and more I feel that I know about less and less, and becoming Orthodox certainly didn’t help since I’ve been thrown into a religious vertigo of sorts. For now, and perhaps for some time after this, I’d rather not be teaching “deep things”. English seems pretty harmless by comparison, doesn’t it? For one, you can’t play spiritual guru when teaching English, at least not without trying very, very hard.

From the brief stint at the local college last semester I acquired a few books for class preparation which I think might interest some of you:

• The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Islamic Book Trust, 2007). This is of course a classic translation—or rather, “interpretation”, as the Muslims would prefer to call it. Mine is a handy pocket-sized edition.
• The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Bantam, 2004). I chose this translation because it was the least technical of the ones I found and also because it simply keeps the word “Krishna” when the original text actually refers to him by his various lordly titles.
• Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, translation with introductions and notes by Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1996). I’m going to read this as soon as I finish with the collection of the letters of Flannery O’Connor (which might take a while more since it’s a sizeable book).
• Sheng Yen, Attaining the Way: A Guide to the Practice of Chan Buddhism (Boston: Shambala, 2006). Both my curiosity about and respect for the Mahayana School of Buddhism were stirred as I learned more about it. You see, what little training I had, I had as a Theravadin, which is hardly the way to learn about their “opponents”, so to speak.
• Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). This hardly needs introduction. His narrative of the Enlightenment project for ethics is quite captivating, I think.

Unfortunately, starting a TESOL course—and hopefully finding a job later—won’t leave me with more time to read, but I hope to get to these eventually.

Since it’s Friday, I’ll leave with something I’ve been thinking about—my favorite song from one of my favorite movies, Once. I think it speaks to the effect of lies on our relationships—you know, the ones we tell God, others and ourselves. Repentance, it seems to me, has something to do with acknowledging them and leaving them behind in order to begin again. Give it a listen and let me know if you think it’s as Lenten as I think it is. Here is Glen Hansard’s “Lies”:

A dissertation; Confucius and pots; and Jorie Graham

I learned yesterday that Tim Gray’s doctoral dissertation has finally seen the light of publication! I’m not sure exactly when Mohr-Siebeck published it but it appears to have been sometime in 2008. When I left Denver last May Tim was finishing up some last-minute edits to the manuscript. Here it is: The Temple in the Gospel of Mark: A Study in its Narrative Role. (Google Books features selections from this book.) I’ve read the whole thing twice in its dissertation form and can happily vouch for its excellence.

I can honestly say that few people have had more influence on me than Tim. He’s been a teacher, a mentor and above all a friend along the Way who’s lent me his ear, his money, his pick-up truck and countless books on Scripture and theology. Everywhere in my Bible there are notes and markings from my classes with him, whether on the Pentateuch or the Prophets, on Paul or Markan eschatology. I’ve jokingly told him a few times that I can always hear his voice inside my head whenever I open up my Bible. (I still do.) I don’t think many people have the privilege of being formed and mentored by a great teacher and I’m thankful that I’m one of the few. The playground of biblical studies is more like a mine field most of the time, and my faith not only survived but was strengthened because of Tim. Congratulations, Dr. Gray!

While I’m on the subject of teachers, here is one of my favorite sayings from that old Chinese sage:

The Master said: “A gentleman is not a pot.” (Analects 2.12 [Leys])

Quite cryptic, yes? Leys explains in his note on this:

a pot: one might also translate “a utensil” or “a tool”—the idea is the same: the capacity of a gentleman is not limited as is that of a container; his abilities are not circumscribed to one narrow and specific function, like a tool which is designed for only one particular purpose. The universal aim of Confucian humanism should have particular relevance for us today, as our modern universities seem increasingly concerned with the mere training of “specialized brutes”.

The civil service which was to run China with great efficiency for two thousand years embodied the Confucian ideal: officials were selected through an examination system that essentially tested their knowledge of the Classics and their literary talent. With such an intellectual equipment, a local prefect was expected to dispatch single-handedly all the affairs of a large territory with a vast population, performing simultaneously the functions of administrator, judge, engineer, economist, police officer, agronomist, architect, military commander, etc. (not to mention that, in his leisure time, he was also supposed to be a competent calligrapher, poet, writer, painter, musician, and aesthete).

I grew up thinking that the Confucian ideal was the nerd. Not so, not so.

To close off with a little literary refinement for today, a poem featuring minnows by one of my favorite poets, the Pullitzer-crowned Jorie Graham.

For the Annunciation: Hymns from the Night Vigil

Lord, our Lord, when Your Godhead was moved
to descend and to be clothed with our [humanity],
Gabriel flew with the peace of His Lord and sowed it
in the ear of Mary, saying to her, “Peace be with you, Mary.
Blessed are you among women. The Lord is with you.
From you shall come forth the Saviour of the Creation.

Mary said to Gabriel, “How can this be for I know not a man?
When, where and how was a virgin known to have given birth?”
The Watcher replied, “The Holy Spirit will come on you
and the power from on high will rest in your womb.
From you shall come forth the Ancient of Days
who will restore to life Adam worn out by corruption.”

The ark which Moses built on Sinai,
in which he placed the tablets of the Law,
represented you, Mary, as a figure.
Your virginity was preserved when the Giver of the Law
dwelt in your womb—God-made-man who came forth from you
and made His peace reign to the ends of the earth.

The closed cell sealed with the seal of the king
in which dwelt Daniel the Just
was a sign of you, Mary, who preserved your virginity
when the Saviour of the Creation came forth from you.
Blessed is He who has come and is to come,
halleluia, halleluia, Son of God, Offspring of the Virgin!

Qolo of the First Watch

*****

God called Gabriel from the secret place of the Watchers
and from on high He spoke these words to the Fiery One:
“My Son wills to descend on earth, so prepare a palace for Him with Mary,
the Daughter of David, and remember this on your journey.
Greet her with peace, that seeing you she may not be afraid.
Let peace be on your lips that she may be comforted by you.”

“Tell her that the Son of God is to come forth from her womb.
Wear a white veil on your head that she may have no fear.
Do not strike her with dumbness like Zechariah.
Speak to her tenderly and make your announcement gently.
When she asks how this will be, answer with sweetness:
‘The Holy Spirit will come and God’s power will rest on you.’”

The Fiery One received the message and flew swiftly to Mary.
“Peace be with you, Daughter of David,” he said,
“The Lord is with you, blessed among women.
You shall receive a wonderful conception
and bring forth the Saviour of the Creation.”
As she received this announcement from the Fiery One,
the great power from on high descended and rested in her womb.

Glory to the Exalted One who humbled Himself
for the sake of the race of the earthly ones, to raise us from our fall,
from the dunghill of our affliction. To Him be glory,
and to His Father our adorations and to the Holy Spirit our shouts of joy;
and on us graciousness and compassion, at all times. Amen. Amen.

Bo’ootho of the Fourth Watch

—————

The above translations are taken with slight amendations from Francis Acharya, Prayer with the Harp of the Spirit, Volume III: The Crown of the Year Part II: The Seven Weeks of the Fast of our Lord and of His Life-giving Passion and the Night of His Resurrection (Vangamon: Kurisumala Ashram, 1985).

Annunciation to the Theotokos, vows and +Seraphim’s blog

The Feast of the Annunciation. I tried to get myself out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to make for Qurbana at 6:30 a.m. but since I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back asleep for almost 2 hours, I felt extremely tired and unfit to make the half-hour drive to church.

Seven years ago on this feast, in 2002, I professed for the first time vows of obedience, chastity and poverty under my spiritual director in the Catholic Church, and renewed them on an annual basis until last year when I professed them perpetually (“all the days of my life”). As a Catholic, these vows always put me in an awkward position because I was never been able to properly explain them to another Catholic apart from my spiritual director and canon lawyers without incurring suspicion about my “canonical status” (I’m not even sure I know what that means) in the Catholic Church.  Once, when I was visiting some friends in the East Coast of the United States, someone I’d just met spent most of our long walk in the streets of Alexandria trying to get me to define my canonical relationship to my bishop. Incidents like that were rare, thankfully, but like I said I’ve never been able to explain myself very well.

I haven’t been Orthodox long enough to have similar awkward experiences, but now that I belong to a Church which follows the Syriac tradition I can at least appeal with greater confidence to the tradition of the ihidaya (“single one”) in ancient Syriac Christianity. It’s not quite the same thing (mostly because I’m not as ascetical as these guys were) but close enough to give one the picture, I think. If you’re so inclined there is a helpful essay about the ihidaya published in Hugoye here.

If you’d asked me what the vows meant 7 years ago I could’ve given you a far more eloquent exposition than I could today. If anything, my experience (more “struggle”) of trying to live by them have only smudged the neater understanding of them I had in the beginning. Since moving back to Malaysia I’ve also been asking what these promises are supposed to look like given my family situation, socio-cultural contexts as well as demands of a worklife in this country. Never a dull moment though there have been quite a few confusing and difficult ones. I’ve returned time and again to the advice a nun once gave me: “You will make mistakes in following Christ, and these will be numerous, but as long as you realize that these vows are supposed to lead you to deeper and deeper love, you’ll be all right.”

Enough about that. Looking at the account of the Annunciation to the Theotokos in Luke 1.26-38 today I was struck by the strong emphasis given to Jesus’ status as king. Luke first of all notes that Joseph is “of the house of David” (v. 27), a genealogical fact which underscores Jesus’ royal lineage. Then the Archangel Gabriel informs the Theotokos that Jesus will be called “the Son of the Most High” (v. 32) and “the Son of God” (v. 35) which, in addition to being designations of his divinity, were also prerogatives of the Israelite king (by way of 2 Samuel 7) as well as the Roman Emperor (probably not a coincidence given the subversive nature of Luke’s narrative). This is followed by three more kingly references in vv. 32-33. God will give to her son “the throne of his father David”; he will “reign over the house of Jacob for ever”; and “of his kingdom there will be no end”. The theme of Jesus’ kingship in Luke is strong, and I think it was intended as a challenge to both Caesar’s and Rome’s rapidly inflating claims at that time. I wonder how this passage speaks to the empire-building endeavors of the superpower nations of our time.

Recently I’ve been enjoying very much the blog of Bishop Seraphim Sigrist which I discovered through Dr. Peter Gilbert’s blogroll. I like Bishop Seraphim’s casual and unpretentious style as well as the gorgeous photos and other interesting attachments he posts. Overall, his blog provides good counterbalance to my own theological geekiness and I hope to take this blog a bit more in that direction. Do stop by there and see what you think.

Lastly, I covet your prayers on this special day. Happy feast day to all!

“The love which frees men from their loneliness”: Some thoughts

In his autobiography, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977, then-Cardinal Ratzinger identified Henri de Lubac’s Catholicism (the original French title of which is Catholicisme: les aspects sociaux du dogme) as one of books that has influenced him the most. In Principles of Catholic Theology, he sums up de Lubac’s thesis in Catholicism like this:

The concept of a Christianity concerned only with my soul, in which I seek only my justification before God, my saving grace, my entrance into heaven, is for de Lubac that caricature of Christianity that, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made possible the rise of atheism. The concept of sacraments as the means of a grace that I receive like a supernatural medicine in order, as it were, to ensure only my own private eternal health is the supreme misunderstanding of what a sacrament truly is. De Lubac, for his part, is convinced that Christianity is, by its very nature, a mystery of union. The essence of original sin is the split into individuality, which knows only itself. The essence of redemption is the mending of the shattered image of God, the union of the human race through and in the One who stands for all and in whom, as Paul says (Gal 3:28), all are one: Jesus Christ. One this premise, the word Catholic became for de Lubac the main theme of all his theological speculation: to be a Christian means to be Catholic, means to be on one’s way to an all-embracing unity. Union is redemption, for it is the realization of our likeness to God, the Three-in-One. But union with him is, accordingly, inseparable from and a consequence of our own unity. (pp. 49-50; italics in original)

If Ratzinger is here reading de Lubac (with whom he no doubt agrees) correctly, then the privatization of the sacraments must be one of the most diabolical afflictions on church life because it spiritualizes and sanctions the very “split into individuality” which is a curse of original sin.

As I thought about these words I was reminded of an incident that made a deep impression on me several years ago, when I was serving as a Catholic campus missionary at the University of Illinois. In one of our team meetings, my colleague Mary Claire asked me in a gentle but direct tone: “Why do you and the other people here sit by yourselves when you go to a weekday Mass?” It had never occurred to me to be critical of my own preference to sit alone during the liturgy and I didn’t have an answer for Mary Claire that day (and brushed her question aside without much consideration) but the frank answer to the question would’ve been something like this: “Because for me, the Eucharist is where I, as an individual believer, encounter and receive Jesus Christ in the privacy of my own heart.”

At that point, the Eucharist held little communal significance in my mind, the “community” nonsense having become one of the signatures by which “the libs” were identified, along with their tell-tale omission of the definite article whenever they spoke of “Eucharist” (as in, “He gave me Eucharist”) and “Church” (as in, “We are Church”). Holy Communion was little more than the vehicle of grace by which I attained to my own sanctification and only indirectly allowed me to “bring Christ to others” by its fruits in my life. The liturgy was no “sacrament of the assembly” (again, that would’ve been classic “lib-talk” if you asked me then), and my own devotional practices made that clear. I went to Mass as an individual, received Communion as an individual, made my own thanksgiving prayer as an individual, and walked out of church as an individual. (I also recited the breviary as an individual, though it was good every and then to have company.)

This, it seems to me, is precisely “a Christianity concerned only with my soul, in which I seek only my justification before God, my saving grace, my entrance into heaven”. I might not have contributed to the rise of atheism but I was sure as heck propping it up.

The inherently communal—let’s say “ecclesial”—nature of the Eucharist is something I still struggle to appreciate and practice. Really, it was only when I started worshipping with the folks at Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Denver that I began to see that the Eucharist has something to do with “making” the Church.

What I think allowed that to happen was, first of all, the size of the congregation itself—basically made up of 25 people and often a few visitors. There was precious little anonymity or hiddenness at Ss. Cyril and Methodius (since one couldn’t really get away with sitting in the backmost pew without being publicly “invited” by Fr. Chrysostom to stand in front of the iconostasis). Everyone knew everyone.

Then there were the potluck lunches after each Sunday liturgy which, in many ways, was the highlight of my dining experience week after week. Not only was the food terrific—and it was pretty good even during the various fasts—, but the fellowship that took place during these meals was something that I’d never consistently experienced before in a parish context. (Going out to dinner with whoever of my friends happened to stick around after church on Sunday evenings paled in comparison.) The fellowship, like the meal, was an intentional commitment. We shared not only the food (which took some families all Sunday morning to make) but ideas, worries, funny stories and other “mundane” events from our week—you know, the stuff that “ordinary workaday life” is made of. Even more, we shared life during the week with phone calls, e-mails, and even a face-to-face meal or two sometimes. There were the bi-weekly lunches with Joel during which we talked about Chinese chess and Cyrillic Christology. One day, Fr. Chrysostom came by with some soy protein supplement because he thought I was unhealthily underweight.  One of my favorite memories of summers in Denver is going to Vespers with the Ruckhauses followed by a cold beer (or two) on their front porch before dinner.

These were the small things that instilled in me, little by little, an understanding of the sacramental life as a life of reconciliation and communion for the divided children of Adam. I didn’t learn that from reading de Lubac or Ratzinger or The Didache but by experience—by being welcomed into a real, living, breathing community of real, living, breathing people. Only then did it seem strange—even repulsive—to me that I had so often practiced the “commune and scatter” approach to the Eucharist.

I wondered this morning if I would’ve ever understood what Ratzinger meant by these words had I never met the people at Ss. Cyril and Methodius.

…[T]he Church is is not merely an external society of believers; by her nature, she is a liturgical community; she is most truly Church when she celebrates the Eucharist and makes present the redemptive love of Jesus Christ, which, as love, frees men from their loneliness and leads them to one another by leading them to God. (Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 50)

I don’t see how I could have.