An Answer to the Call for the Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything

David Russell Mosley

Eastertide
Octave of the Ascension
The Edge of Elfland
Hudson, New Hampshire

Dear Friends and Family,

A few days ago a new acquaintance (really a kindred spirit and therefore friend, though we’ve not yet met) of mine, Michael Martin, wrote an essay on the Angelico Press blog entitled, “The Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything.” For those unfamiliar with Martin, he is the Assistant Professor of English and Philosophy at Marygrove College and has written several works, the only one of which I have read thus far is The Submerged Reality: Ophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics. Martin is like me, a believer in faërie, a poet (though a far better one as I understand it). I think we both can sign off on this line from an interview with theologian John Milbank, “I mean, I believe in all this fantastic stuff. I’m really bitterly opposed to this kind of disenchantment in the modern churches.” So I was overjoyed when Martin decided to put tires to pavement in a new way (he’s been living this stuff for some time now) when he wrote this essay.

Martin’s essay is a clarion call to those who are like minded in this endeavor which he calls the radical Catholic (and I would add catholic) reimagination of everything, or one might it even call it the C/catholic unveiling of sacramental ontology, for, ultimately, this is what Martin is driving at. At the beginning, Martin, a proponent of sophiology (something on which I hope to write more as I understand more), notes the call to Wisdom (Sophia) that appears at key moments in the Byzantine Liturgy. He then turns to another part of the liturgy, a hymn called  Megalynarion, “The Magnification of Mary.” You can read those for yourself in Martin’s essay. What I want to draw your attention to is this line from Martin:

“My investigation here is not about the liturgy, however, but about the ways in which phenomenology and sophiology discover the same phenomenon: the shining that illuminates the cosmos. This shining speaks in the languages of poetry, languages that take on a myriad of forms and are sometimes mistaken for science, sometimes for theology.”

Martin is calling us to a different way of seeing, but also a different way of doing, of being, simply put of living in reality. Martin understands that certain strains of theology do not allow for this kind of sight. He notes, via Hans Urs von Balthasar, that Neoscholasticism denuded itself of attention to the Glory of the Lord and that this proper attention was passed through certain poets, philosophers, and scientists while it was lost by the theologians. Even were one to disagree with this genealogy, one need only look at trends in theology today to see that this attention the Glory, to Sophia, to sacramental ontology has been ignored by many (though it is making something of return as theologians find themselves once again desiring to return to the sources).

In the end of his essay Martin issues a call to “poets, artists, scientists, adventurers, teachers, communitarians, distributists, scholars, and visionaries who hanker for something more living in Catholic culture.” He does not desire mere theory, men and women sitting in a room talking about how great it would be if. However, it should be obvious that Martin is not against the study of these issues in order to better inhabit these ideas and live this reality. Rather, Martin wants us to act as we talk. Theoretike and Practike must be united. Some may be Marthas and others Marys, but we need both and we need most of all those who are willing to live the hard life being both at once.

And so this is, in my own small way, my answer to Martin’s call. I am a poet, an author, a theologian, a gardener, a distributist, a husband, and a father (and more besides); I am all of those things bound up together and suspended as one made according to the Image. I am ready not simply to think about a sacramental ontology but to live it. This will be hard, already have I been confronting ways in which my habits did not accord with my beliefs and my knowledge, but I will answer this call. I must answer this call, I can feel it in the very blood that flows through me that this is right, that this is how reality really is. Confronting my son’s cancer was the first step for me in coming not simply to believe that these fantastic elements of the faith are true (I already believed), but to experience them. Yet I have let the shadows overcome me and make me believe that those moments are rare and that real life is lived without experience of the Glory. Well I say no more. I say that that way of living is ultimately damned (though we can be saved from it). Root and branch, twig and bough, I am in. Join me, as I join Martin and others and we radically (which remember means to return to one’s roots) and catholicly reimagine everything.

Sincerely,
David

I Need Advent: From Ordinary to Extraordinary

David Russell Mosley

Ordinary Time
28 November 2015
The Edge of Elfland
Hudson, New Hampshire

Dear Friends and Family,

Today is the last day of the year. I don’t blame you if you didn’t realize that New Year’s Eve was actually tonight. After all, it’s never the same one year to the next. For those who didn’t know, tomorrow is the first day of Advent, which is the first season of the Christian Calendar. Tomorrow begins a period of fasting and waiting. This year I feel in particular need for a fresh start, for Advent.

Advent swoops in like a mournful owl searching for its evening sustenance after the longest period of Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar. Ordinary Time, the season in which we are still in for today, is a time for us as Christians to remember that the Holy Trinity is active in every season of life, including the mundane, sometimes especially the mundane as the Nativity itself reminds us (for what is ultimately more commonplace than giving birth and being born). I’ve always struggled with this long period of Ordinary Time. My prayer routines tend to fade; I slip much more easily into those pet sins I carry round with me like an evil dragon perched upon my shoulder whispering the unspeakable to me. Now don’t misunderstand me, many good things have happened during this Ordinary Time: I passed my PhD Viva, got two book contracts, have watched my boys continue to grow, and more. But still, as I wrote to you yesterday, the virtues I have attempted to cultivate have shrivelled and been replaced by vices.

I need Advent. I need this period of fasting to help me gain the mastery over my body that God gives to those who cooperate with his grace. What’s more, I need the Nativity and all the other feasts that will greet us at the beginning of this new year. I need to be reminded of the extraordinary ways God has been present in our world so that I can be better prepared to look for him and work with him in the ordinary times. In truth, there are no ordinary times. Josef Pieper, a twentieth century Catholic theologian and philosopher, writes that, “in fact the liturgy only knows feast-days, even working days being feria.”^⁠1 For Pieper, the Eucharist, which is the heart of all Christian celebrations, so transfigures time that in one sense it turns every day into a feast day, even the days on which we work or fast. I’ve lost sight of this over this most recent Ordinary Time. So this year, I need Advent more than ever. I need the extraordinary to remind me that in one sense there is no ordinary. The whole cosmos is graced, gifted its being by the Almighty. The fact that there is a day at all is extraordinary. The fact that there is a you, a me, that there are rocks and trees and animals is just as extraordinary as the fact that there are angels, for we all, from the highest order of angels to the lowest order of matter come from the same source, the One who is Three, the One who is Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Unity, and Being.

Pray for me, as I will pray for you, that together we may be reminded through these times of intentional fasting and feasting that begins with Advent, that the world is extraordinary precisely because it was an act of pure gratuity on the part of God. Pray that we may have our vision transfigured so was can see the world around us anew, so that we can see past the mist and shadows and catch glimpses of Reality. This is why this year I need Advent.

Sincerely,
David

¹ Josef Pieper, Leisure The Basis of Culture, trans. by Alexander Dru (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 80

The Eucharist Option: A Response to Problems with the Benedict Option for Living in Modernity

David Russell Mosley

Ordinary Time
10 October 2014
The Edge of Elfland
Hudson, New Hampshire

Dear Friends and Family

Recently, there has been an influx of work concerning a way of living in Modernity called The Benedict Option. This notion derives from Alistair MacIntyre’s seminal work After Virtue. The idea is rather simple, in the fall of Rome and Western Civilisation as it was then known, the Benedictines served as pockets of resistance. These communities who had withdrawn from society held on to what was best from civilisation. It is because of the Benedictines, and other monastic communities, that we still have many of great works of classical literature as well as the great works of ancient Christianity. So, following MacIntyre’s work, we now have the Benedict Option, a call for a withdrawal from this new, and rather slow, fall of the new Rome, in order to safeguard our faith and the great things of the past. The question then becomes, is this withdrawal the right response.

Over at Mere Fidelity, a primarily reformed theology podcast associated with the website Mere Orthodoxy, the gentlemen discuss the pros and cons of such an approach. There is first the concern about Modernity. Is it the same as the barbarism that invaded Rome? Is it a unique situation in which the Church has found itself? There are certainly similarities, and like all new times that face the Church, it is, in its own way unique, but does this mean that withdrawal, that the Benedict Option, is the appropriate response? The gentlemen at Mere Fidelity are uncertain. Withdrawal seems somewhat anti-Gospel, or at least anti-Evangelical (in the sense of spreading the Gospel). Yet a kind of withdrawal is necessary, we cannot simply mirror the culture in which we live. So the Benedict Option seems a poor or at least incomplete vision of how we ought to live, but what then is the appropriate response?

Chad Pecknold, associate professor of systematic theology at the Catholic University of America, has suggested an alternate approach, not the Benedict Option, but the Dominican Option. The Benedictines were monks who formed communities and sequestered themselves off from the rest of society, in order to serve that society; the Dominicans, on the other hand, sequester themselves as a community (in the way the live, dress, etc.) that exists within society, not outside it or on its outskirts. They are mendicants and itinerants. That is, they go in amongst society, begging and preaching. They wear their habits, standing out like sore thumbs (if you’ll excuse the cliché), and serve, as Pecknold terms it, as ‘a “contrast society” that is very much engaged with the world—an evangelistic witness which is joyful, intellectually serious, expansive, and charitable.’ If Benedictines serve as a physical, moral, and spiritual withdrawal, Dominicans serve as a moral and spiritual withdrawal, but a physical presence (which includes its own kind of withdrawal). Pecknold sees this as the better option because it involves both separation and engagement, it draws out the truth of the Benedictine but draws out more clearly for us of the non-optional evangelistic witness. We stand apart, but as a presence in the world.

I think, however, what both the gentlemen at Mere Fidelity and Dr Pecknold, leave out, (Pecknold because of the misconceptions of what the Benedictines actually do) to a certain extent, is the need for various forms of being in, but not of the world. The Dominicans did not replace the Benedictines, they simply had a different mission. Pecknold acknowledges that not all Christians should be Dominicans, but doesn’t acknowledge (though I’m sure he would agree with me) that some who ought not to be Dominicans ought to be Benedictines. That is, all Christians are called to different ways of relating to the societies and cultures around us. Some ought to be Benedictines, fully withdrawing in order to guard and protect the faith, to be outposts of Christianity fully separate, but still not disengaged, with the society around them. Some ought to be Dominicans, different in the physical presence within society, but engaging with it directly as a subversive, contrasting society within society. Still others might be called to a Franciscan Option of full poverty, or an Anchorite Option of total, individual withdrawal. And other options which I cannot give a name to. What ought to tie all of this together, what joins the various ways of living in the midst of Modernity and its ills (and goods), is the Liturgy, whose heart is the Eucharist itself. This is what I would call Christians to: a dedication to the Eucharist, which will lead to a dedication to the Liturgy (in its main and varied expressions), which will lead to various ways of dealing with Modern society. The Body and Blood of Christ is the font from which all ways of living the Christian life flow. This is how we first live both differently and within the society around us, by a transformative and participatory meal in which the Divine and the Human meet, in which Time and Eternity are intermingled. Begin here, and many ways of living will follow.

Sincerely yours,
David

The Poetry of Easter: Creation’s Hope

David Russell Mosley

Easter 2014
On the Edge of Elfland
Beeston, Nottinghamshire

Dear Friends and Family,

Advent and Christmas tend to put me in the mood for fairy-stories and fantasies. After all, it is a time of magic, of enchantment, for the God has entered Creation. Easter, however, puts me in mind for poetry. Right now, for instance, I’m attempting to read The Divine Comedy liturgically. The poem begins on the day before Good Friday and ends, apparently, on the Wednesday after Easter. Now, I haven’t reached Paradise yet, but I want to share a passage from there with you.

Dante writes:

“All things, among themselves,
possess an order; and this order is
the form that makes the universe like God.
Here do the higher beings see the imprint
of the Eternal Worth, which is the end
to which the pattern I have mentioned tends.
Within that order, every nature has
its bent, according to a different station,
nearer or less near to its origin” (I.103-110)

All of Creation, made by God, is tending toward him. Every inch of Creation has a trace of God within it. In this sense, we can call Creation sacramental because it points toward its origin. It is even, says Dante, tending toward that origin, just as we are. That is, just as we are intended for union with God in the life to come, intended for deification, so too is Creation intended to unite with God, according to its station, according to its place in the Cosmos. This is why, as I wrote over at Theology Think for Palm Sunday, Easter brings hope to Creation and not simply humanity. Let’s remember that as we celebrate the Resurrection of Our Lord today.

I deal with this subject in a few places in my thesis, key to my understanding of Creation’s role in the life to come is Maximus the Confessor who writes:

With us and through us he encompasses the whole creation through its intermediaries and the extremities through its own parts. He binds about himself each with the other, tightly and indissolubly, paradise and the inhabited world, heaven and earth, things sensible and things intelligible, since he possesses like us sense and soul and mind, by which, as parts, he assimilates himself by each of the extremities to what is universally akin to each in the previously mentioned manner. Thus he divinely recapitulates the universe in himself, showing that the whole creation exists as one, like another human being, completed by the gathering together of its parts one with another in itself, and inclined towards itself by the whole of its existence, in accordance with the one, simple undifferentiated and indifferent idea of production from nothing, in accordance with which the whole of creation admits of one and the same undiscriminated logos, as having not been before it is (Amb. 41 1312A-B).

Maximus is arguing several things here, but the key is twofold. First, it is essential to note that Maximus sees humanity as playing a role in God encompassing all creation into himself. God does this, ‘with us and through us’ (Amb. 41 1312A). Humanity, as I argued in the first chapter, has a priestly role to play for the rest of Creation and this is due, in large part, to humanity’s microcosmic nature, that in humanity is there a convergence of all created beings, ‘things sensible and things intellectual’ (Amb. 41 1312A). God encompasses all this in himself in the Incarnation. In this way, using the microcosmic nature of humanity, God unites all created beings to himself.

The second key is that all of creation is included in this. Maximus does not delineate between mineral, vegetable, and animal, some being included, others not. All beings are related to one another and to God, as Maximus writes:

For in their true logos all beings have at least something in common with one another. Amongst the beings after God, which have their being from God through generation, there are no exceptions, neither the greatly honoured and transcendent beings [angels] which have a universal relationship to the One absolutely beyond any relation, nor is the least honoured among beings destitute and bereft since it has by nature a generic relationship to the most honoured beings (Amb. 41 1312B-C).

Here, Maximus goes further than Aquinas, who only seems to see a role in the eschaton for mineral creation, humanity, and the angels. For Maximus, this cannot be, for all created beings are related to one another, even the lowest is related to the highest, by virtue of being a created being. What it more, all beings are held together by God through Jesus Christ.

What this means is that God in Christ and through us is raising up all Creation to himself. We must remember our brothers and sisters outside the human race in the rest of Creation. Remember Christ’s words, ‘”I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”’

Let me leave you with, compared to Dante’s (and many others) some rather base verses of my own:

The flowers all grow towards an end;
Trees and rivers clap for joy.
The mountains on their knees bend;
The birds make a joyful noise.
For water from the holy side
Spilled out, and red blood
Poured onto Creation’s hide.
At last we understood,
Redemption is not for us alone.
If we were silent,
Every rock, and every stone,
Every bird and beast and violet,
Would with one breath
Proclaim the death
Of Jesus Christ, Our Lord.

Sincerely yours,
David Russell Mosley

Fiat and Doom, Mary and Frodo: Feast of the Annunciation and Destruction of the Ring

David Russell Mosley

Feast of the Annunciation
On the Edge of Elfland
Beeston, Nottinghamshire

Dear Friends and Family,

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation. This is the day we commemorate and make present again that joyous moment when the archangel Gabriel told Mary what was to happen to her. Mary’s obedience in this moment is the beginning of the undoing of the disobedience of Adam and Eve. Mary becomes, in a way, a new Eve and her son will be the New Adam. This on its own is of utmost importance. However, there is another event that is celebrated on this day. It was on this day so very long ago, or so we are told, that the One Ring was bitten off of Frodo Baggins’s hand by Gollum and fell into the volcanic pit of Orodruin.

Of course, I realise that The Lord of the Rings is not real, or at least not real in the same sense that the Annunciation is real, but for a moment I want to explore the implications of Tolkien choosing this day and what relation it may have to the Feast of the Annunciation.

Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic and while there is no explicit reference to the Christian religion in The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, or The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself had always thought of his works as explicitly Catholic. That is, they had a Catholic (or perhaps simply Christian) metaphysics. The world he created was our world in the distant past when men and elves were not estranged, when the Fall had happened but even Israel was a long ways off. So why is the 25^th March the date for the destruction of the Ring?

I think there may be a few possible answers gleaned by looking at what the day signifies in the Christian Calendar and what it signifies in the story. First, in both instances there is an importance behind the events. Mary is told she has been chosen to be the Mother of God (not that God was to have a beginning as God, but that he would have a beginning as a man). Something the whole world is said to have been waiting for is now happening, or will happen, in her, the entrance of God into his Creation. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam and Gollum arrive at the fires of Mt Doom to destroy the One Ring, the very thing all Middle Earth has been, perhaps unknowingly, been longing for since Sauron made it. In both cases an appointed time has come.

Also in both instances, the act is not carried out by the actors. However, this plays out very differently in each case. Mary does not make herself pregnant with the Word of Life. She was not even aware that this might happen to her. She is merely told that this will happen, and presumably happens that very day, perhaps that very moment. Mary is not active in this except in her acceptance, as she says, ‘“Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word”’ (Lk 1.38).

Frodo is the exact opposite, however. He has come to Mt Doom for the very purpose of destroying the Ring. Yet when he arrives he refuses his task, ‘“I have come,” he said. “But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!”’ (LOTR, 945). Frodo falls, he fails where Mary succeeded, and yet the task is accomplished. Gollum, who’s life has been spared on multiple occasions, but importantly by each of the three ringbearers (Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam), and most recently by the third, sees his moment. Somehow finding the invisible Frodo and feeling his way to the ringed finger, Gollum bites it off and takes hold of the Ring. He is, ‘dancing like a mad thing,’ beaming with a corrupted joy until his celebrations take him off the edge of the cliff and into the fires below. The Quest has not failed, though Frodo had, by what the reader at least can call divine providence. Frodo and Sam are rescued and Middle Earth is free for a time, but the divine help needed in this moment foretells a future moment when providence will not be the course of action, but that God will step into his creation to set all things right.

This is, I believe, the connection between the two. Each shows the beginning of a new age, each is the undoing of a previous evil, and each is done in a kind of passive way by the main actor in each story. Frodo is almost a kind of anti-Mary who’s quest is accomplished without his will. In the quest of Frodo the evils of Sauron are undone. In the fiat (Let it be so) of Mary is the beginning of the end of all evils, of death and sin through her offspring, the one who, like the offspring of Eve would crush the serpent’s head.

So let us remember Frodo and Sam and Gollum while we also remember Mary and Christ, for the story of The Lord of the Rings can lead us to the even truer story of Incarnation, Resurrection, and Return. After all, as Tolkien himself wrote in ‘On Fairy-Stories’:

‘I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way that fitting to this respect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels––peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But the story has entered History and the primary world; the desires and aspirations of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy’ (‘On Fairy-Stories, 88-9).

 

Sincerely yours,
David Russell Mosley

Being a (Non-Roman) Catholic Evangelical: Liturgy as a Way of Living Differently

David Russell Mosley

My prayer station at home.

29 January 2014
On the Edge of Elfland
Beeston, Nottinghamshire

Dear Friends and Family,

A few weeks ago now at our church, St Nicholas (an Anglican church in the Church of England), our rector, Steve gave a sermon on Acts 2.42-3.10. The gist of the sermon (you can listen to the whole series here) is about our public impact as we attempt to live life together. At the end of the sermon, Steve enjoined us to start a conversation about how we could live differently. You see, Steve pointed out something I think often all too true. If you asked a Christian what Christians believe, they could give you some kind of answer. If, however, you asked them what do Christians do? They might have a much harder time answering that question.

There are, of course, many answers to this question of what Christians do and how we can live differently within our communities. The most obvious answers are perhaps social justice and evangelism. Feeding and caring for the poor, the oppressed, the widowed is an essential aspect of Christianity. In fact, in the passage Steve preached from, Peter and John, in healing the lame man, were doing an act of social justice that was also an act of evangelism. These two things are essential in any attempt to live in our world, but differently from it. However, there is another that I think often underplayed as an aspect of living differently.

I’ve written more about liturgy on this blog than almost any other topic, which is perhaps ironic since I do not come from a particularly liturgy affirming tradition. That being said, I want to suggest that liturgy is the other main way we can actively live differently within our societies.  Consider how different it would look if on high feast days and high solemnities, like Christmas, Epiphany, Candlemas, Ash Wednesday, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost, etc., we all went to church for a service and then had a feast (on the feast days). And not just go to church, what if we actually had day long events and did our best to get out of work for the day? What if we invited people over for Twelfth-Night? What if on Ash Wednesday we all showed up to work with an ashen cross on our foreheads?

What if we actually treated Sundays as the first day of the week and not simply the precursor to the Monday work week? What if the start of Advent was more important to us (as the start of the Church Calendar) than New Year’s Eve? What if all our churches offered at least Morning and Evening Prayer services so people could come and experience fixed hour prayer? What if we thought of time differently? What if our day was broken up into set times of prayer (whether following a set liturgy or praying on our own)?

I firmly believe that if we treated the Church Calendar, the week, and the day as the Church has understood them in centuries past as what is really real, as opposed to the way modern society has chosen to organise our time, we would stand out. Liturgy is more than a method, but I would suggest it is as important as social justice and evangelism for living differently in the world. You can look over some of my past posts to see why I think this is, but ultimately, it is because I think God upholds every minute of every day and liturgy helps to live within such a rhythmic way as makes this reality known.

Sincerely yours,
David Russell Mosley

Being a (Non-Roman) Catholic Evangelical: Getting High (Church, that is)

David Russell Mosley

 
18 January 2014
On the Edge of Elfland
Beeston, Nottinghamshire

Dear Friends and Family,

A few days ago over at The American Conservative, Gracy Olmstead wrote an article entitled, ‘Why Millennials Long for Liturgy: Is the High Church the Christianity of the future?’ In the article, Olmstead cites several Protestant converts to various kinds of more Tradition (read Liturgical) branches of Christianity. This is a major trend I have seen myself in many of those with whom I attended university and even within myself. Olmstead posits that  Millennials, the generation that spans from roughly 1977~1982-c.2000, are in search of deeper and more mystical faiths, often than those in which they were brought up (the article notes a former Reformed Baptist, and two Presbyterians who switched from a typically Low-Church Evangelicalism to various High-Churches). I myself know of several Presbyterians, some Nazarenes, and many within my own tradition (the Restoration Movement) who have gone high Methodist, Anglican Church of North America or Episcopalian, Eastern Orthodox, or Roman Catholic.

Perhaps it is the hidden hipster within me, but I hate doing things that are trendy, or be seen to be trendy. In fact, in a recent Facebook thread a joke was made (by me, of course) that trendy is the last word most people would use to describe me. That being said, I wonder what it is that drives people like myself to seek more High-Church expressions of faith. I don’t think its possible for me, at least, to say what the general motivations are toward High-Church expressions of the Faith, but I can at least try to describe why I feel this way.

For me, it was the study of Christian history that began to move me down this path. My own tradition has often stressed that the Church should look as much like it did in the book of Acts, particularly chapter 2, as it can.  There are, I believe, many problems with this, but I don’t want to get into that. What learning about the history of Christianity, taught me, however, is that this picture we had of the apostolic church was for one, not as cut and dry as we tended to teach. Also, even if it was, things changed rapidly within a hundred years. You see, Protestantism can tend to focus on either the individual tradition of a given group (Baptist history, Presbyterian, Restoration Movement, etc.) or can focus too much on the brief pictures we’re given in the book of Acts which is meant to teach some bigger things than how to organise our churches. Doing a Master’s degree in Church History taught me that there is an awful lot between Acts chapter 2 and today and not all of it is bad.

In fact, as I learned about the history of Christianity, I realised that we technically share a vast majority of the same history with our Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters. Working with rough dates and generalisations, it could be said that all of Christianity (or the majority anyway) shares all of its history from the Life of Christ until 1053 (the typical date given for the schism between East and West). Western Christianity then continues until, roughly, the sixteenth century and the Reformation. What this means, I realised, is that there are 1600 years where we share ancestry and history with Roman Catholics and about 960 years that we also share with the Eastern Orthodox. This taught me that we need to take the practices and theology of those periods much more seriously than we tend to. We cannot simply write off ancient and medieval theologians because they are Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox and not Protestants. There were no Protestants!

This plus my own work, mostly private, in recent years in the theology behind much that is contained within Liturgy (the Church Calendar, the Divine Hours,) and high sacramentality (Eucharist and Baptism as sacraments and the world as sacramental) has left me desirous of more than I have often received in Low-Church Evangelicalism.  Even now, I attend an Anglican church here in Nottingham, but, particularly the service we attend, it still tends toward a more Low-Church expression, desiring to be more Spirit led, which I believe means allowing for spontaneity (not a bad thing, in my opinion, though rather limiting since that attitude can tend toward saying the Spirit doesn’t move, or move as freely, within structure).

The issue for Low-Churches, however, is not one of simply having a stylistically more liturgical service. That could perhaps help with retention of young people, but it doesn’t get to the root of the desire, at least not for me. This isn’t, for me, merely a preference for a traditional style of worship. It isn’t as though I unequivocally prefer hymns or chants to praise choruses and contemporary Christian worship music (I actually like some of the latter); nor is merely a desire for more communal prayers; lectionary based preaching; or more attention to the Eucharist. It is the theology behind so many of these things. I read the Scriptures and the great theologians of the Ancient and Medieval worlds and I see a worldview that sees the World as constantly upheld by and participating in the God, a world where Angels can appear to young women, where bread and wine can be body and blood, where miracles can happen. In essence, I see a different world than the one the Enlightenment and science divorced from theology and philosophy has taught us to see. I see a world where time can be used to tell the story of the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, everyday, every week, every year. I’m not sure, however, that most standard Protestant theologies can give us this, tied as they often are to Modernism. Nevertheless, I don’t give up hope. I hope, pray, write, and teach about these things in the hopes that change can be affected, not simply in what we do, but in what we believe. If something doesn’t happen, however, I firmly believe we will see more young Christians and young converts, attaching themselves to traditions which already have these elements of liturgy and sacramentology, because let’s face it, that is much easier than changing our traditions themselves.

Sincerely yours,
David Russell Mosley

The Importance of the 12 Days of Christmas

David Russell Mosley

Русский: Рождество Христово (икона в Храме) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

23 December 2013
On the Edge of Elfland
Beeston, Nottinghamshire

Dear Friends and Family,

Christmas is nearly upon us. Tomorrow evening, as we have our supper, however meagre or magnificent, the celebration of the Nativity begins. For most of us, it has probably already begun to some extent. We’ve probably indulged in a few Christmas songs; our churches have put on carol services. Everything is building up to the next day, the 25 of December, perhaps the only day in the Western Calendar (both secular and sacred) that still firmly has a name rather than a date. Wednesday morning will dawn, we’ll open presents, go to church (if it’s safe or if they’re holding services), perhaps we’ll sing carols, give hugs, we’ll laugh, in short, we’ll feast. And then, Christmas is over. Boxing Day, St Stephen’s Day in the Church Calendar, will come and perhaps we can find it in us to extend the festivities to this day, but by the 27, St John’s Day, Christmas is quite firmly over, isn’t it?

Actually, in the Church Calendar, there really are 12 days of Christmas. Depending on how you count it the twelve days run  from the 24 of December to the 5 of January. Either way, Christmas is more than a day or two, it is, in fact, a liturgical season. We are meant to extend both our celebrations and solemnities (particularly during Holy Innocents on the 28 which commemorates the children put to death by Herod). Christmas is meant to be much more than its feast day.

Think of what a change this could make in how you think of Christmas. Christmas parties can continue for twelve days. Christmas carols can be sung with gusto, especially if you’ve generally fasted from them during Advent. The reality of the Incarnation can continue to be at the forefront of our minds. Perhaps, if we in the West, were to take more seriously the twelve days of Christmas we might even begin to think about the larger implications of the Incarnation beyond the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. As I’ve written to you before, I work on the topic of deification. At the heart of this primarily Eastern doctrine is the Incarnation, God becoming human so that humans might become God. Maybe if we took Christmas a little more seriously, people like me wouldn’t need to convince Western Christians of the truth and beauty of deification, or as it is called in the East, theosis.

Christmas has always been my favourite time of year. The music, the movies, the weather (in the Northern hemisphere anyway), the carols, the services, Father Christmas, all come together for me to show forth the magic of Christianity. Beyond all of this, however, is the reality that our God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), the Creator of everything and yet Uncreated, became a creature  in the Son without ceasing to be Creator. He became a creature in order to lift us up, to make us like himself, to make us gods, to make us sons through the Incarnation, the gift of his Spirit, and the sacraments. This is what Christmas means, this is why we celebrate it for 12 days and not just one.

Sincerely yours,
David Russell Mosley

Essay Extract: ‘The Liturgy of the Week’

David Russell Mosley

Simon Ushakov’s icon of the Mystical Supper. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Second Sunday of Advent
8 December 2013
On the Edge of Elfland
Beeston, Nottinghamshire

Dear Friends and Family,

Since today is Sunday, the Lord’s Day, I thought I would post a section from my essay ‘Reclamation of Time’ here that deals with how we ought to view the whole week in light of Sunday. Please read and let me know what you think.

The Liturgy of the Week

From the year, then, with its seasons and major festivals, we move to the week, the unabated cycle followed no matter what the season or what celebrations or solemnities are found within it. The week centres around one specific day, called both the Lord’s Day and the First and Eighth Day. Here I wish to look at those two designations and how they affect the Christian approach to the rest of the week. Of course, central to both concepts is the celebration of the Paschal Feast, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, Communion. Known by many names, and having many different theological interpretations, it is this celebration that is at the core of the liturgy of the week, both with understanding Sunday as the Lord’s Day and as the First and Eighth day.

The Lord’s Day

Sunday is the key to the liturgy of the week. It is the day of the Lord, the day on which Christians celebrate the resurrection of Christ. While this can be celebrated, and often was celebrated––depending on how one reads Acts 2.46-47, ‘And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favour with all the people’––everyday. Nevertheless, a week day could be a feast day or a fasting day, but Sunday can only be a feast day. It is a day of celebration, always. This is why in the West, Sundays are not included in the forty days of Lent. The Eucharist, then, along with the celebration of the resurrection, is what it at the core of Sunday as the Lord’s Day.

In one sense, the Eucharist transcends notions of feast days and fast days. As Schmemann writes, ‘No matter when the Liturgy is celebrated, on Sunday, a Feast Day, or on any day, in the day-time of at night, it is essentially independent of the day or hour; it is not determined by them. From this standpoint the time of its cele- bration is unimportant, since what is being accomplished in the service introduces and incorporates us into a reality which is no way subject to time.’1 Nevertheless, while the Eucharist can, and should, be celebrated on other days of the week and other kinds of days within the liturgy, it belongs to Sunday, or better, Sunday belongs to it. Again, Schmemann writes, ‘The celebration of the Eucharist is placed within the framework of the liturgy of time, so that being neither bound essentially to time nor determined by it, it is ‘correlative’ of time. This is seen even more clearly in the weekly cycle, where the Eucharist has its own day––the Lord’s Day or Sunday.’2 In one sense, it is the celebration of the Eucharist which gives the Day of the Lord its meaning within the week. It is the Lord’s Day for it is the day on which we always celebrate the Eucharist. On the other hand, however, Sunday as the Lord’s Day de- fines it as the appropriate day for the Eucharist since it is the day of the week on which the Lord rose from the dead. It seemingly must be both, for as noted above, the Eucharist is not bound to time, or even to Sundays, it can be celebrated at any time on any day, and yet it is precisely Sundays that are most appropriate because the connection to the resurrection.

The First and Eighth Day

For this reason, Sunday also can be called the First and Eighth Day. It is because of the Lord’s resurrection that we can look forward, to the return of Christ, which signifies that day outside the weekly cycle, that day which is eternal present. Sunday represents the day which Amos looks forward to ‘“when the ploughman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it” (Amos 9.13).’ Ploughing happens before planting, and certainly before harvesting, just treading grapes comes after, not before, the sowing of seed. Amos shows us a picture of eternal planting and harvest. This is a picture of what Sunday is as First and Eighth Day.

Sunday also serves us within time as the first day of week. Within time, it is Sunday that begins the weekly cycle. This means that every week begins with a cele- bration of the Eucharist, the resurrection of the Lord, and the awaiting of his return. It is interesting that as the Liturgy has developed over the years, every Sunday has either a name of its own, or a name in relation to a previous celebration. The Sundays in Advent are all named after Advent; Palm Sunday is its own day; even in the large expanse of Ordinary Time after Pentecost, every Sunday is either called Proper, or related to the previous celebration of Trinity Sunday (again its own day). Sundays do not have numbers within the month, rather, when they have numbers, it is numbers associated with a Season or specific Feast or Festival. To begin each week with a name, rather than a number (even if one only thinks of it only in terms of its more eternal perspective as the Lord’s Day) must affect how the rest of the week is then viewed. Even more, Sunday as the first day of the week, as compared to Monday, could have profound implications when the week begins not with work but with wor- ship. This, according to Josef Pieper, is the foundation for celebrations at all:

And similarly in divine worship a certain definite space is set aside from working hours and days, a limited time, specially marked off––and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitar- ian ends. Every seventh day is a period of time of that kind: that is what a feast is, and such is its only origin and justification.3

For Pieper, celebration, even leisure, have their source in divine worship, ‘The cele- bration of divine worship, then, is the deepest of the springs by which leisure is fed and continues to be vital––though it must be remembered that leisure embraces eve- rything which, without being merely useful, is an essential part of full human existence.’4 This leads him to the conclusion that a purely utilitarian life cannot have celebrations, cannot have feasts, cannot have leisure, for it lacks the foundation for this, worship. This is what Sunday both as the Lord’s Day and the First and Eighth Day, does for us, it grounds the weekly life cycle in worship, providing us with the opportunities for work and leisure.

Sincerely yours,
David Russell Mosley

1 Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology trans by Asheleigh Moorhouse (London: The Faith Press, 1966), 35.

2 Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology trans by Asheleigh Moorhouse (London: The Faith Press, 1966), 36.

3 Josef Pieper, Leisure The Basis of Culture, trans. by Alexander Dru (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 73.

4 Josef Pieper, Leisure The Basis of Culture, trans. by Alexander Dru (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 76.

Essay Extract: The Liturgy of the Year

David Russell Mosley

English: Ash Wednesday, watercolor, 78 x 113 cm (detail) Polski: Popielec, akwarela, karton, 78 x 113 cm (frag.) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First Week of Advent
3 December 2013
On the Edge of Elfland Beeston, Nottinghamshire

Dear Friends and Family,

Here is an excerpt of an essay I am working on provisionally entitle ‘The Reclamation of Time’. I thought it would provide a good accompaniment to my letter from yesterday. Please, let me know what you think in the comments below.

The Liturgy of the Year

I want to begin, then, with the liturgy of the year. This is the macro-level at which Christians can look at time. As each year roles through, beginning with Ad- vent in late November or early December and ending in Ordinary Time in late No- vember, a kind of non-identical repetition emerges. The movable dates, like Advent, Ordinary Time, Ash Wednesday, Easter, etc., are now on different dates and some- times different days of the week. Nevertheless, despite the change, they remain in many ways the same, Ash Wednesday is still Ash Wednesday, Lent is still a time of fasting. However, we are different, the year is different, and the readings are differ- ent. Our experience of any particular date will change from year to to year and yet the structure remains the same. This is the big picture, which tells the story of Christ’s coming to Earth, his life during that time, his death, his resurrection, his as- cension, and his sending of the Holy Spirit. In between the major feasts (besides the lesser festivals and Saints’ Days) are the seasons that accompany them. Seasons of feasting and fasting. It is at this level that Christian explores the notion that all of his- tory is pointed toward the coming and return of Christ, that time, on a grand scale, is here to tell that story. The roots of the Christian year, can be found in the Scriptures, to which I shall now briefly turn.

David Russell Mosley

That there is a religious calendar for the ancient Hebrews is indisputable. When it came into its final form is beyond my purview. The point is that for the He- brew people, the theological and cultic ancestors of Christianity, the year was to be viewed through the lens of the various celebrations and commemorations of God’s actions in the history of Israel. The question then becomes, is this something, on the macro level, that was taken on by early Christianity. This seems equally clear from Luke’s use of Pentecost in Acts as well as Paul’s mention of it in 1 Corinthians 16.8. Still, however, there is little mention of any other major celebrations or commemora- tions in the works of the New Testament. It is, perhaps, a bit inconclusive to what extent the earliest Christians were beginning to think of the year in terms of God’s interactions with humanity throughout history, and especially in the sending of His Son. Nevertheless, with celebrations of the Old Testament in their blood, it at least provides a foundation on which to build a more intentional understanding of the year rather than a simple progression of months and seasons.

As the year developed over the centuries, it worked itself, like the Hebrew calendar before it, around the comings of God into human history. Louis Bouyer writes, ‘God’s intervention in the history of mankind since the Fall, God’s word mak- ing itself more and more perfectly heard and understood by men, all this Divine ac- tion seems from the beginning to be founded on one clearly defined objective:––the formation, out of common and fallen humanity, of a people which should eventually be God’s Own People.’1 These interventions, as he calls them,2 are for one purpose, to create a community known as the People of God. Thus in the yearly celebrations of God’s interactions with humanity, the people who celebrate form that very com- munity. They participate in the divine actions by commemorating them and even re- enacting them by their very celebrations. Bouyer writes concerning the homilies of

men like Gregory of Nazianzus and Leo the Great, ‘On every page, these [homilies] remind us of the fact that in the liturgical year we are not only making a commemo- ration of the past but also actually living again the realities on which we are meditat- ing with the Church.’3 The Church, which is forming itself and being formed into the People of God by participation in the celebrations and solemnities of the Church Year, is also participating in the realities being celebrated. In Advent we await the first and now also the second coming of Christ; in Christmas and Epiphany we live again the reality of his incarnation; in Lent we relive the reality of his death; in Easter his Resurrection and defeat of sin and death; in Pentecost, his sending of the Spirit. Even in Ordinary time we relive with the Church the reality of the times be- tween God’s obvious interactions with history. All of this points us ultimately to the return of Christ. Schmemann, commenting on Pentecost, writes, ‘No matter what the original liturgical expression of Pentecost may have been, its preservation in the Church––as the fifty day period following Easter––points again to the Christian ‘adoption’ of a definite understanding of the year, of time, of the natural cycles, as having a relation to the eschatological reality of the Kingdom.’4 In fact, as Bouyer argues, the Church Year is both an expression of the Word and Mystery entrusted to the Church, but it is also a kind of creation of that Mystery. That is, by participating in the liturgy, the Church calls forth Christ in the mystery. As he writes:

For the liturgical year, seen as a whole, is the great proclamation by the Church of the Word with which she is entrusted. In the celebration of the li- turgical year, therefore, the Mystery is proclaimed, communicated and par- ticipated in. Since the liturgy is, according to the fine phrase of Pius XI, “the principal organ of the ordinary magisterium of the Church,” and as liturgy is all set out within the framework of the liturgical year, the framework contains not only an expression of the Mystery, working by faith through charity and tending toward its final revelation. For the Word of the Mystery cannot be so solemnly proclaimed by the Church without thereby creating what it proclaims.5

The importance of the year cannot be underemphasises. It is preeminent to all the other liturgies of time which follow it. Therefore, I shall now move from the liturgy of the year to the liturgy of the week. It is, perhaps, interesting to note that there is no real liturgy of the month. This could possibly be the case because Christians, in part due to the Julian calendar and a rejection of things that appeared too Jewish, no longer followed a lunar calendar. It is also likely, however, that as the seasons of the Church Year developed, this implicitly became their liturgy of the month, or more appropriately, their liturgy of the season. Thus rather than having twelve months the Christian Year has six seasons (five if Epiphany is only a feast day and not a season).

Sincerely yours,
David Russell Mosley

1 Louis Bouyer, Life and Liturgy (London: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 23.
2 I would prefer a different word here from intervention, perhaps interjection, though even that provides too deist an account of the God who upholds the cosmos at all times.
3 Louis Bouyer, Life and Liturgy (London: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 186-7.
4 Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology trans by Asheleigh Moorhouse (London: The Faith Press, 1966), 69.
5 Louis Bouyer, Life and Liturgy (London: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 189.