Seven whole days

From ASBO Jesus, another gem.

The daily office lectionary for today includes Psalm 67. Thanks to The Topmost Apple, I was introduced to a spectacular offering of this psalm by the Westminster Abbey choir. I pray that we do not completely lose Anglican Chant as an art form. Sadly, it’s very, very rare to hear Anglican Chant sung well on this side of the Atlantic.

One would enjoy hearing beautifully sung Anglican Chant with a more modern psalter, however.

My colleague here in Rhode Island, the Rev’d Jennifer Phillips, has an extraordinary gift for writing prayers. We heard many of her prayers at General Convention in the House of Deputies. I was forwarded a couple of her prayers for today, and so I’m posting them here. Thanks, Jennifer!

Collect for Hiroshima Day

God our Light, Cloud, and Flame:
speak your word of love through the haze of our confusion
and deliver us from the terrifying fire of our own hatred,
that we may recognize and greet you
in the shining faces of our neighbors
as Christ our true Peace.

Collect for Transfiguration/Hiroshima Day

Incendiary God:
In the scalding light of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
we have seen our power to destroy;
now show us ourselves in the fullness
of your radiant image and will,
in the shining face of your child, Jesus,
transfigured on the holy mountain,
through whom we pray.

In 2006, Sherilyn and I visited Hiroshima. It’s hard to express what it’s like to visit the site of such unimaginable destruction. If you look one direction, you see a vibrant city, not much different from other cities in Japan. Look the other destruction and you see the ruins of the first wartime use of an atomic bomb. There’s a museum which chronicles life in Hiroshima before and after the bomb. One particularly heart-wrenching display has a wall (yes, a wall!) of letters from the city’s leaders to various world governments. In vain, they’ve written at the time of each nuclear test since 1945, asking that the bomb never be used again, for any purpose. The number of letters — and the lack of responses — is poignant. If you ever have a chance to visit Hiroshima, you should go. It’s a sobering and inspiring shrine to peace.

Here are some photos from that trip:

That’s the sole surviving building from the bomb blast. Most of the rest of the city center was leveled. The few buildings that remained standing were cleared to make way for new construction. This one was left as a memorial. It anchors one end of a peace park.

Cranes are everywhere. There are some permanent displays in a couple of locations. In one spot, you can see thousands upon thousands of cranes sent to Hiroshima by people around the world. The day I visited, there are vast piles of cranes sent by school children from several continents. Each set of cranes had a tag saying who had made the cranes. While I am saddened by the violence in our world, it is also heartening to see such tangible evidence of prayers and good wishes for peace.

This is a peace bell. Anyone can ring it. There was something profoundly hopeful and achingly sad about this scene: two parents brought their tiny child to ring the bell, as a prayer for peace. Will this child grow up in a world that is more peaceful than our time? That is up to us, dear reader.

From what I can see we Christians need to look into the face of evil that is manifest in what happened at Hiroshima, and then we need to repent. We need to repent of our violence and turn toward God’s hope of a peaceable kingdom. Kyrie eleison.

There are more photos from that trip to Japan on flickr. While you’re looking for photos, go visit the Big Picture blog, which has a collection of photos of Hiroshima before and after the bomb.

Bosco Peters has a profound meditation for this day on which the church celebrates the Feast of the Transfiguration and the whole world remembers the first use of the atomic bomb.

On this day in 1945, someone climbed not a holy mountain, but into the cockpit of a plane – a machine of war. There had been a lull of a week in the fighting between America and Japan. The Americans had a new secret weapon and they wanted to use it with the maximum psychological effect. On August 6 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Here we have a new voice booming from heaven. Here too was brightness, brilliant as burning magnesium. Here too is a cloud that has come and has covered us all with shadow. Truly, under the shadow of this new cloud, we are right to feel afraid.

Indeed, are we transformed by the experience of this evil — the destruction of an entire city in one brief flash? Are we as Christians troubled by the juxtaposition of two dazzling experiences on one day? Let us pray that as Peter, James, and John were never the same after seeing the Christ, so may we never be the same as we contemplate the cost of peace and war.

Here’s an icon for today, the Feast of the Transfiguration.

The Transfiguration of Christ: Part of an iconostasis in Constantinople style. Middle of the 12th century. 41.5 x 159 cm. Available on Wikipedia.

Dancing and weddings go together like peanut butter & jelly, right? Sure. But weddings belong in churches and dancing belongs at receptions, unless you’re getting married at St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. It might seem that the recent YouTube sensation (“Kevin and Jill’s wedding dance procession“) would overturn my view, with its unrestrained joy and sheer exuberance, right? Wrong.

To the contrary, it reinforces a problem that exists in our culture: weddings become the apotheosis of American consumerism and individualism run amok, just when we should be turning to God for God’s sacramental blessing. I ran across a blog posting that gets it just right:

For my own wedding, I no more want to write my own vows than I would want the president to write his own oath of office. To do so saps the words of meaning, of that sublime feeling you get saying something you never thought you’d say to that person you most want to say it to. Vows are meant not to be a reflection of a couple’s individual love, but an intonation of a promise made countless times before. That is their power.

And so, though I am a writer and half-Jewish, I will be saying traditional vows in an Episcopal church, the very same in which my fiancée’s parents were married. We don’t buy into the idea of the wedding day as the truest expression of our love. It’s more of a rite of passage, and we don’t think rites work when you whip them up on your own, or buy them off the YouTube rack.

Read more »

A group of thirteen groups working within the Church of England has released a statement responding to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s reflection on General Convention. OK, so a statement about a response to a Convention sounds confusing, but it’s not, if you think about it.

Anyway, here’s a snippet:

Together, we reaffirm our commitment to working for the full inclusion of all people at all levels of ministry. We will continue to work towards liturgical and sacramental recognition of the God-given love which enables many LGBT couples to thrive. We will seek to strengthen the bonds of affection which exist between those in all the Churches of the Anglican Communion who share our commitment to the full inclusion of all of God’s faithful. We will also continue to work closely with our brother and sister churches, especially those with whom we have mutual recognition of orders such as the Nordic churches.

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Last Saturday, the Telegraph carried an interview with Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster. In the interview, the archbishop said that he worried that Facebook and MySpace are causing young people to lose social skills, which in turn makes them more vulnerable to problems that can lead to suicide. The next day, Bishop Alan Wilson responded on his blog with a couple of helpful points. First, he reminds us that reporters and headline writers don’t always reflect the real nature of comments made in interviews, so we should pay very careful attention to what the archbishop actually said.

Then Wilson goes on to look at the substance of the argument: do social media stunt our skills at making enduring human relationships?

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Sure, some people might be concerned that Facebook is causing suicide and the destruction of the church. If those were true, I’d be concerned too! At the moment, I’ve been more concerned about the pernicious trend toward thousand of inane Facebook quizzes. If you are a Facebooker, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. It might be fun to take these quizzes, but it’s no fun the read the results of “What breed of dog am I?” or “What kind of lightbulb am I?” or “Which vestment am I?”

As Facebookers will know, you can block the appearance of a particular quiz. The problem is that the number of quizzes is nearly infinite. For each “Which American Idol contestant are you?” you block, a “Which SUV are you?” pops up. My only choice had been to hide my quiz-happy friends. At last count, I had hidden about 40 people, meaning everything from them is consigned to the bit bucket.

Finally, I found a solution, courtesy of m@q.

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After church on Sunday, I was chatting with a parishioner at Christ Church. She’s in high school, and I asked what she is up to this summer. Reading, she said. Among other things, she’s reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. That reminded me of something which I’d been saving in my blogpile for an opportune moment.

Most observers would agree that, despite the Bush regime’s efforts to expand Big Goverment/Brother, we live in a world that’s more like Huxley’s vision than Orwell’s. I thought this series of comparisons, based on Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, was a good summary. Have a look at the whole series.

When you’re done, go read Postman. That book made an enormous difference in my life. While there is irony in this complaint from a person who blogs/tweets/facebooks, I do feel obligated to point out that we all have choices to make; we could reject the commercial ubiquity of our world, if we wanted.

I saw this video on Facebook from The Episcopal Church. Seems like a pretty fantastic introduction to the worship life of the Episcopal Church. Enjoy.

The title seems odd — “Kickoff of General Convention”? I’d call it “Episcopalians at work in worship and service.”