Our Segregated Sundays

When people with disabilities don't feel welcome at church.

It Took Two Steves To Make An Apple

"Lone geniuses are out," Susan Cain writes. "Collaboration is in." Companies, schools, and even churches are relentlessly trying to get people to work together even when they'd rather work, play, and pray alone. Many of us, and especially introverts, do our most creative thinking by ourselves, and with the warrant of Picasso himself, who said, "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible." Cain, who has a book coming out called Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking, suggests we acknowledge and harness both aspects of our social temperament:

[M]ost humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

What If It's The Preacher's Phone?

Hat tip to Mark Shier

"The Most Available Democratic Experience"

St. John's Church at Easter; flowers by Kathe Hayden

A Sunday or two ago on the Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor read out a John Updike passage about churchgoing. Several listeners, including your correspondent, wrote in for the citation, and someone from the show thoughtfully provided it. It's from a "New Yorker" essay by Episcopalian Updike entitled "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car," published on December 16, 1961.

I'd always wondered why I'd extravagantly bought the complete "New Yorker" on DVDs a couple of years ago. It turns out that this (maybe the third time I've consulted it) was why: Vocational encouragement at a pivotal time in my ministry:

There was a time when I wondered why more people did not go to church. Taken purely as a human recreation, what could be more delightful, more unexpected than to enter a venerable and lavishly scaled building kept warm and clean for use one or two hours a week and to sit and stand in unison and sing and recite creeds and petitions that are like paths worn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts? To listen, or not listen, as a poorly paid but resplendently robed man strives to console us with scraps of ancient epistles and halting accounts, hopelessly compromised by words, of those intimations of divine joy that are like pain in that, their instant gone, the mind cannot remember or believe them; to witness the windows donated by departed patrons and the altar flowers arranged by withdrawn hands and the whole considered spectacle lustrous beneath its patina of inheritance; to pay, for all this, no more than we are moved to give -- surely in all democracy there is nothing like it. Indeed, it is the most available democratic experience. We vote less than once a year. Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our supposed value, the soul-unit of one, with its noumenal arithmetic of equality: one equals one equals one.

Come, Light Of Christ

A half-hour ago, a friend sent me this photograph of the brand new Roman Catholic Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, California, a good image to behold this morning of the Feast of the Epiphany. Christmas ended last night. Today the church celebrates the enlightenment of the world as signified by the visit paid to the Holy Family by the Magi (the gospels actually don't say there were three of them).

In an hour or two, I'll have the blessing of preaching at St. John's School about three epiphanies -- the one in the Bible, the ones we experience when we least expect them (those aha! moments of revelation, belonging, and peace), and the ones we can actually engineer by counting our blessings instead of our grumps. I also just finished writing the "Prayers of the People" for our Epiphany season liturgy at St. John's Church, which will take us right up to Lent (which is closer than you think!). We'll be asking for Epiphany light to suffuse all the shadowed corners of our lives and world:

As our world is darkened by ambition, aggression, and injustice, may those in authority be continually strengthened to do what is best for all your people. We pray especially for the President and President-elect; for those serving in the Armed Forces of the United States; and for the safety of the innocent amid war and strife.

Light of Christ, shine in every heart.

Hat tip to Kris Elftmann

"Doubt" About The Church's Future

You may have to love the church really to enjoy "Doubt," starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep as a priest and nun who clash over whether love or authority will prevail in Christ's earthly home. The story is set the year after JFK's assassination, as the world begins to go mad. You can't quite hear the guns in Vietnam, but the winds of change are gusting all around the parish school in the Bronx where she is principal and Fr. Flynn, played by Hoffman, is priest. (That's Hoffman above with Amy Adams, who plays Sister James, a young teacher who is tortured by her own uncertainty about him.)

Sister Aloysius Beauvier, Streep's character, is shown closing her office windows to keep the wind out. As far as Fr. Flynn is concerned, as he tells his congregation, the wind is propelling him toward new challenges. Whether those doing the huffing and puffing are church leaders covering up sexual abuse, the viewer never quite knows, which is what helps give the movie its power. The rest comes from John Patrick Shanley's story and script, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, as well as the work of two of the greatest actors in the world.

The post-Vatican II priest stands for "progressive education and a welcoming church" as well as the transcendent power of love. Complicating the picture is ambiguity over whether his enlightenment extends to man-boy affairs. Sister Aloysius is ambiguous as well -- slapping the boys upside their heads at mass while showing exceptional kindness to an aging nun as well as prophetic passion about protecting Donald Miller, an African-American 8th grader, from Fr. Flynn. She's convinced he's abusing the boy or planning to, and it's not just that Flynn's reform-minded and she's not. She really believes it; and yet you're never sure she's right. All you know for sure is that he's hiding something from his past. Then again, as it turns out, so is she.

The movie just won't let you take sides, even when it comes to civil rights vs. feminism. There's a powerful scene between Streep and Viola Davis, playing Donald's mother, who's desperate to get him into a decent high school and college and away from his abusive father. Her shy, isolated, sometimes bullied son is the first black child in the school, and he's come to depend on the priest's support. For complex reasons, even after Streep tells her that Fr. Flynn may be abusing Donald, Mrs. Miller can't bring herself to despise him. I was aching for the nun and mother to bond. Both were second-class citizens and victims of unjust systems. And yet Davis finally tells Streep, "I don't know if you and I are on the same side. I'll be standing with my son and those who are good to my son."

It's not just whether Fr. Flynn's love for the boy is appropriate. The movie also tangles with the question of whether God is just love, as some progressive Christians will tell you. Streep's character stands for the sometimes under-emphasized godly values of righteousness and discipline. As for deciding which values are supreme in the church, now, as 2,000 years ago, it's all about the sources of authority. Who decides what the rules are? Do we look to the Bible, the pope, or the General Convention of the Episcopal Church? Who's right, the progressive priest or the stern nun? It no doubt bespeaks Shanley's deep church roots that the movie won't say.

The story is set in the moment in American history when national authority also began to be up for grabs, as an accidental President is decisively elected in his own right and is preparing to escalate the war whose consequences are with us still. For most in the audience, the movie was a fascinating if frustratingly inconclusive struggle between two stubborn characters as they lived through the tensions between tradition and modernity. It's also about the continuing struggle over the governance of Christ's church. We don't quite believe in authority anymore ourselves; and yet we can't survive without it.

More Thinking, Less Understanding

Garrison Keillor on the blessing of worshiping in an unfamiliar church:

[S]lipping into St. Patrick's for Mass in Spanish is pretty wonderful. It's like a big family reunion at which I know nobody and so nobody is mad at me. Nothing said in Spanish offends me doctrinally or any other way. I squeeze into the crowd, under the placid stone faces of saints, the sweet smell of burning wax and a hundred varieties of cologne, and feel the religious fervor, and tears come to my eyes, and I light a candle, say a wordless prayer, and out into the cold I go.

It brought back memories of Christmas Eve in Copenhagen 20 years ago and how beautiful the sermons were before I started learning Danish.

A man gets a keener sense of the divine in a church that is not your own. Maybe Luther and Calvin and Jan Hus and all them were dead wrong and literacy is not the key nor an understanding of Scripture, and maybe the essence of Christmas is dumb childlike wonder and the more you think about it, the less you understand.

Which Denomination Will Obama Rescue?

Washington's churches are elbowing each other to have the Obamas as parishioners. The unchurched may assume this is because they are to be the President, First Lady, and their children. Pastors, especially those in the struggling mainline denominations, will tell you it's because they're breathing.

Historian Gary Scott Smith on the Presidency and the pews:

Roosevelt served as the senior warden of St. James Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, New York the entire time he was president and devoted a significant amount of time and energy to this position. Nevertheless, he only worshipped about once a month, usually at St. John's Episcopal Church, known as the "church of the presidents," because many of the early chief executives beginning with James Madison worshipped there. Roosevelt claimed it was difficult to worship God with so many people staring at him. "I can do almost everything in the 'Goldfish Bowl' of the president's life," he declared, "but I'll be hanged if I can say my prayers in it."

They Probably Didn't Call It "Doubt" For Nothing

Is this a perfect movie combo or what? Written by the great John Patrick Shanley ("Moonstruck"). The great Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a priest under a cloud, and the great Meryl Streep as the nun who accuses him. Plus the whole church thing. Watch the trailer and ask yourself, "Did he do it?" Then find a friend to bet.