Living Liturgy: Part II

You may have already read how I started Part I of this two-part series called, "Living Liturgy":

This week, some of my favorite bloggers [and I now] are using the word, liturgy, as they get on with their lives.  [I'm getting on now with living too.]  In Part II of this short series, I'll link to them.

Without further ado:


I do not usually admit this right off the bat – it is definitely a conversation stopper – but here it is: I am a liturgist. “Liturgy” is a common enough word among Christians, but it does not flow trippingly off Jewish tongues, and I am not only Jewish but a rabbi to boot. The word comes from the Greek, leitourgia, “public service,” which is how Greek civilization thought of service to the gods. The Jewish equivalent is the Temple cult of antiquity – in Hebrew, avodah, which meant the same thing, the work of serving God. That eventually morphed into what people do in church and synagogue. Christians call it liturgy; Jews call it “services.”

--Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D.,

"What’s this blog all about anyway?"

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D.:
Life and a Little Liturgy

Will you grow up in love with liturgy, as I did? I have no idea. You will become whoever you become. I do hope that you will come to cherish this holiday, this season when we retell the story of how our people came to be a people, how we were lifted out of slavery and constriction by God's mighty hand and outstretched arm. How it is possible that even though this is a once-upon-a-time story, it happened to each of us -- it happens to each of us even now. I hope you'll thrill to the songs and the flavors as each year's new spring unfolds. I hope you'll ponder the question of what it means to be free. 

--Rachel Barenblat,

"A Passover letter to my son"

Velveteen Rabbi: 

Now running and playing with the real rabbis!

The author of three dozen books, Rabbi Hoffman — “Dad,” to me — is a preeminent Jewish liturgist (it’s a niche market, I know, but he’s got it cornered) and leading modern Jewish philosopher.

--Joel M. Hoffman, Ph.D.,

"Life and a Little Liturgy:

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD, 

has a blog!"

God Didn’t Say That:
Bible Translation and Mistranslations

I’ve listened politely to preachers who decry the “humanist position” and heard historians complaining about the effects of the Enlightenment. But, I have to admit I’ve secretly taken these comments with a grain of salt as, I am, after all, human and think there must be various advantages to taking this key fact into account. I’m also a Christian (just stating that upfront before I continue), and I believe humans have common needs – I’m happy to call these “rights”. I even believe that human behaviour should be governed by conventions lest another Holocaust is to occur.  Interestingly, the most negative reactions from other Christians against humanism (that I’ve seen) have been in response in response to psychology....  [T]he discipline well entrenched now, my mother is a well qualified one, so there’s little use protesting!!!  I figured I should learn some more…. Humanism seems as I thought, very pro-human, but also seems to be the cool cousins of Atheism… (http://www.iheu.org/about). Some comments I thought I could resoundingly yell “Amen!” after;

Our vision is … a world in which human rights are respected and everyone is able to live a life of dignity....

God wasn’t here auto-writing through people, but something far beyond the scope of understanding of the authors took place at the time – Paul has an incredibly high view of Scripture both old and new, e.g. Romans 15:4 “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope“. I believe that unique, divine inspiration is contained in these books and I esteem them as texts around which the Church has gathered in liturgy, in practical application, and in seeking the meaning of human life.

--Tonya Riches,

"'The Mission of God' 

– and humanism…"  

tanyariches:

musings, teaching and music

Charlie Peer sums up with accompanying critique (rather kindly really) a great many people’s view of the prayer released by “the Church of England” for the royal wedding. (Then again, this is probably in part the result of a new part-time appointment of someone also relatively new to the Church of England to replace a full-time experienced Church of England priest to resource liturgy and worship.)

--Clayboy

(Clayboy is really called Doug Chaplin.)

"Sunday best:
from trans clergy
to that royal wedding prayer"

clayboy:

an everyday tale of starburst, spit and spirit

Meanwhile we had some surprise visitors on Saturday afternoon who brought us flowers from the mountain top. It was an act of spontaneous pleasure and joy at having found such a perfect meadow on their part and we were the first people they knew on their way home. It was a lovely moment to see them standing there at the door, holding out the pretty posy pictured here, and to know with a smile on my face and a slightly sinking heart, that I had 10 minutes earlier decided to put off tidying the house for a little while longer ... aie! However, many who have experienced the untidy houses I have lived in may think that my levels of embarassment have perhaps not quite reached the required level for ensuring a tidy place!

The flowers from the mountain top will have faded and wilted by the end of the week but their meaning for me, the memory of their fragility and the smiles with which they were offered will remain. "Say it with flowers" the adverts used to say ... yet there was much that was unspoken in this small bunch of colour we received and which I placed in our favourite jug. So the yellow daffodils and the purple vetch speak for all that cannot be, for those things which cannot be said, for the deisre for joy even when this seems far off, for the promise that fear will truly be overcome.
For such small fragile yet powerful signs I give profound thanks.

--Jane Stranz,

"Of tears, laughter and flowers ..."  

Of life, laughter and liturgy . . .

In reading the the Gospel of John, I find that several interactions between Christ and the other people in the story can easily be seen as liturgical – a sort of call and response.... [F]or now, consider this example:....

--Joel Watts,

"Liturgy in John's Gospel"

Unsettled Christianity

Dan took one look at the wilting potted palm I brought home from BiLo and said, “I think they needed to be at least 21 inches long.”....

I guess in the back of my mind I’d hoped that all the liturgy and symbolism and tradition would magically restore my hope in Christianity and miraculously cure me of my doubts about God.  Isn’t that why young evangelicals have rushed out and purchased The Book of Common Prayer? Isn’t that why troubled, poetic folks like Anne Lamott and Sara Miles are Anglican? 

--Rachel Held Evans,

"Embracing The Not-So-Holy Holy Week"

Rachel Held Evans - Blog

For example, if I say I don’t take Genesis 1 literally, just what do I mean? For me, Genesis is not narrative history. Having said that, there are many things it could be, and it happens that I take Genesis 1:1-2:4a to be liturgy. There are figurative elements in liturgy, but it is a more specific label....  [I]n the Orthodox Study Bible [is a note] regarding the Greek word leitourgia ... : “Service is literally ‘liturgy.’ …” ....  But “service” is not literally “liturgy” nor is leitougia literally “liturgy.”

--Henry Neufeld,

"A Misuse of the Word LITERAL" 

Participatory Bible Study Blog

Everything hangs on that even though. I have to find a way to feel grateful for the innumerable blessings in my life even though other things are tough. I have to find a way to understand (again) that I'm always already liberated, that the freedom we celebrate at Pesach is always real. That's what redemption means. We speak in our liturgy about God Who redeems us from slavery -- that's always ongoing.

--Rachel Barenblat,

"Worth Revisiting Before Pesach" 

Velveteen Rabbi: 

Now running and playing with the real rabbis!

In the six quotations below, can you [and I] see how the word [liturgy] has had origins that are fairly restrictive? 

--J. K. Gayle,

"Living Liturgy: Part I"

Aristotle's Feminist Subject

Speakeristas and Abortion

At another blog, some of my blogger (Christian) friends are having a conversation about (A) religious egalitarianism as opposed to (B) activist feminism.  Abortion seems to be one of the divides that separates these groups of people in two.  Who listens compassionately?

Let me just review some history to show the muddle men have made of this.  I'm not talking about mankind but males.

First, the man Aristotle does write in his Politics something that looks like an anti-abortion statement: "an abortion must be induced before the onset of sensation and life."  Aristotle seems to side with Hippocrates and his oath; and with anti-abortionists today.  However, in fact, Aristotle argues for infanticide when the baby is defective; Right-to-Life, anti-abortionists don't argue this.  And he writes also that females born are defective males; Right-to-Lifers don't address whether females are equal to males.  And he does not allow females to voice their opinions about their abortions or anything else; Right-to-Lifers say the pregnant woman's voice must be silenced only in favor of the fetus.  And Aristotle says that life or the soul is already in the sperm; Right-to-Lifers say that life begins at conception or very soon afterwards.  Aristotle also claims that sperm, of course, is male; that adultery is always wrong for the wife but is mainly wrong for the husband if he can't keep it a secret or if he's cheating when his sperm is most potent; and that premarital sex is fine but homosexual intercourse is not.  My suspicion is that Aristotle is motivated by fear of females and wants to keep them logically and politically separate from males.  Of course, these concerns of Aristotle do not seem to square very well with either Right-to-Lifers or Right-to-Choicers today.

Second, the man Solomon does seem, by conventional wisdom, to care about both a woman's rights and the right of a child to life.  Here the King does listen to two speakeristas, pleading their case.  Listening to women seems wise enough.  You know the famous story in the Jewish scriptures (I Kings 3:16-27).  However, in fact, this man is not completely unbiased, having 1000 virgins all to himself (700 wives, and 300 concubines).  Is perhaps this baby he's trying to save his?  

Third, the men on the U.S. Supreme Court listened to a speakerista named Jane Roe.  Again, this seems wise.  She tells them her name is really Norma Leah McCorvey and that she's been raped and wants to abort the fetus legally.  They are Christian men (three Presbyterians, two Methodists, an Episcopal, and a Lutheran) and two men who do not publicly claim that faith, but their majority decision to say Yes to the choice of this woman, and to women, is not based on Christianity but on the past practices of the male-only democracies of Greece and Rome.  (And the two dissenters--the Lutheran and one of the nonChristians--do not appeal to religion either but rather to the desire to keep the choice in the hands of "the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs."  Of course, "the people" were mostly male gynecologists, husbands, boyfriends, and men who were local jurymen, lawyers, lawmakers, and judges).

Fourth, the men who are Christians today who call themselves heads of their wives want to listen now to that speakerista named Norma McCorvey because she has become one of them. You know her story of repenting of being

a ninth-grade dropout, [with] a tough life, [having] suffered physical and emotional abuse as a child, [having] spent some time in reform school in Gainesville, Texas, and [being] raped as a teen-ager. [Then having a] husband whom she married at age 16 [who] later beat her. [And of having struggled herself with] alcohol and drug abuse, and [who had] experiences with lovers of both sexes

She tells how she regrets leaving "[h]er first child, Melissa, [to be] raised by her mother; her second child [to be] raised by the father, and [having] agreed that [she] would never contact [this daughter]." She remembers how "[s]he drifted through a series of dead-end jobs, including work as a bartender and a carnival barker [and how once] she went public with her story, she worked in several clinics where abortions were performed and did some public speaking, garnering publicity and a little bit of celebrity."  The men now forgive all because she has made a different legal choice, but the choice that supports theirs not to have to listen to speakeristas all the time.

What if men listened more to women?  What if "Christian egalitarians" listened more to "the politics of feminism"? Could there be more culture peace and less culture war?

Cyber-Psalm 40

My wife and I ate lunch today with friends who are very close friends of David Ker's. They told us that his mom, Janet Porter, passed away and that he's in transit to the States. You blogger friends of Dave's will know that too. Our condolences to him and his family. (He, my favorite blogger, and some of my other blogger friends advised me well a few days ago to give blogging a rest so as to get after my dissertation. Stupid dissertation.)

Anyway, here's David's post, Cyber-Psalm 40, from yesterday (and other things he's said about his mom recently).

Gone.
Mom is gone.
Such silence now.
After so much laughter.

Left.
Still here.
Wondering and wishing.
Now only to remember.

Joy.
Heavenly laughter.
Not to linger in pain.
So why am I crying?

Life.
Without you.
Living like you loved life.
Loving the Savior who saved you.

in a Compromised Light

My Sense of Having
Been Required to
Present Myself in a
Compromised Light

That sense is back. I don’t like having to get what I’m writing in my dissertation, of having to conform myself, into dissertation form. Not two years ago, after the three days of all-day writing for my qualifying exams, the committee met with me for the orals. And each professor told me it was my best writing. By my standards it was my worst. What they meant was I had been clear, less playful with the words as when I had written for them in their courses, now more conscious of them for the exams’ sake. One bright spot, for me, was that Dr. Hogg had given a question in which she asked me to critique Nancy Mairs’ assertion that males tend to write and to live in a binary dimorphic way, while the world in which women speak and live and write is in many respects rather polymorphic. So I told a story for that last, final exam, hoping not to undo what my professors later told me I had done in those first five exams. I wrote a biography that was an ethnography that was a Ph.D. exam. And Nancy Mairs, in my memory of one of her best lines by my standards, the one below which ends a story with a beginning, appeared in the epigraph. She writes as most academics don’t or won’t and therefore can’t,

___ I remember walking out of my oral prelims to find my husband waiting, a bottle of Drambuie hidden in a paper bag for a toast.

___ “How did it go?” he asked.

___ “I passed!” I told him, and burst into tears. As a younger woman, I’d believed that opening oneself up to experience—all experience—offered the greatest opportunity for intellectual and spiritual growth. Now, suddenly, I saw that there are some experiences one simply ought never to have, and prelims constituted such an experience for me. Over time, my humiliation—my sense of having been required to present myself in a compromised light I would never have chosen, any more than I’d have chosen to strip my misshapen body to its skin, even less—faded, of course. But a sliver of grief remains lodged near my heart.

___ I was surprised, then, rereading years later the essays written for the exam, that their tone hardly sounds bleak or distressed. On the contrary, the voice is breathless with excitement, with exertion, with laughter, but not with anxiety. This woman sounds like she’s having as good a time as I always do when the world drops away and I am left alone with language. Listening to her, I am carried back to a little room with one high window where I hunch intently at a grey metal desk under fluorescent flicker, sucking at cigarettes and red cans of Coke, pushing my fountain pen across sheet after sheet of yellow legal-size paper . . . and sure enough, I’m having a wonderful time.

___ “Self. Life. Writing. Self-life-writing. Selflifewriting,” the first essay of my prelims began.

"Sweetbitter"

Sweetbitter things today:

Our youngest daughter graduates from elementary school.
Our eldest daughter didn't make a high school team she tried out for and she's been talking through it with friends and family.
Our son is home from college but looking for work as he hears that one of his good friends may need a heart transplant.
We've had to say goodbye in a memorial, a true celebratory tribute, to a friend and colleague who passed away from injuries from an auto accident just last month.

reminding me that, in his Symposium, Plato has one of his characters, the man, the physician, saying:

ἔστι δὲ ἔχθιστα τὰ ἐναντιώτατα, ψυχρὸν θερμῷ, πικρὸν γλυκεῖ, ξηρὸν ὑγρῷ, πάντα τ τοιαὰῦτα·

Now the most contrary qualities are most hostile to each other--cold and hot, bitter and sweet, dry and moist, and the rest of them.

It's almost as if we cannot change. As if we're in denial about something that Sappho sings. Here's how she and Anne Carson put that:

It was Sappho who first called eros "bittersweet." No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?
____Eros seemed to Sappho at once an experience of pleasure and pain. Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox. To perceive this eros can split the mind in two. Why? The components of the contradiction may seem, at first glance, obvious. We take for granted, as did Sappho, the sweetness of erotic desire; its pleasurability smiles out at us. But the bitterness is less obvious. There might be several reasons why what is sweet should also be bitter. There may be various relations between the two savors. Poets have sorted the matter out in different ways. Sappho's own formulation is a good place to begin tracing the possibilities. The relevant fragment runs:

Ἕρος δαὖτέ μ᾽ ὀ λυσιμέλες δόνει,
γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον

Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up
_____________________________(LP, fr. 130)

It is hard to translate. "Sweetbitter" sounds wrong, and yet our standard English rendering "bittersweet" inverts the actual terms of Sappho's compound glukupikron. Should that concern us? If her ordering has a descriptive intention, eros is here being said to bring sweetness, then bitterness in sequence: she is sorting the possibilities chronologically. . . But it is unlikely that this is what Sappho means. . . Love and hate bifurcate Eros. . . . Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative image from which positive pictures can be created. Whether apprehended as a dilemma of sensation, action or value, eros prints as the same contradictory fact: love and hate converge within erotic desire.
____Why?