vigilant

A sermon of St Gregory the Great on his feast day:

For the love of Christ I do not spare myself in preaching him ‘Son of man, I have appointed you as watchman to the house of Israel.’ Note that Ezekiel, whom the Lord sent to preach his word, is described as a watchman. Now a watchman always takes up his position on the heights so that he can see from a distance whatever approaches. Likewise whoever is appointed watchman to a people should live a life on the heights so that he can help them by taking a wide survey.

These words are hard to utter, for when I speak it is myself that I am reproaching. I do not preach as I should nor does my life follow the principles I preach so inadequately.

I do not deny that I am guilty, for I see my torpor and my negligence. Perhaps my very recognition of failure will win me pardon from a sympathetic judge. When I lived in a monastic community I was able to keep my tongue from idle topics and to devote my mind almost continually to the discipline of prayer. Since taking on my shoulders the burden of pastoral care, I have been unable to keep steadily recollected because my mind is distracted by many responsibilities.

I am forced to consider questions affecting churches and monasteries and often I must judge the lives and actions of individuals; at one moment I am forced to take part in certain civil affairs, next I must worry over the incursions of barbarians and fear the wolves who menace the flock entrusted to my care; now I must accept political responsibility in order to give support to those who preserve the rule of law; now I must bear patiently the villainies of brigands, and then I must confront them, yet in all charity.

My mind is sundered and torn to pieces by the many and serious things I have to think about. When I try to concentrate and gather all my intellectual resources for preaching, how can I do justice to the sacred ministry of the word? I am often compelled by the nature of my position to associate with men of the world and sometimes I relax the discipline of my speech. If I preserved the rigorously inflexible mode of utterance that my conscience dictates, I know that the weaker sort of men would recoil from me and that I could never attract them to the goal I desire for them. So I must frequently listen patiently to their aimless chatter. Because I am weak myself I am drawn gradually into idle talk and I find myself saying the kind of thing that I didn’t even care to listen to before. I enjoy lying back where I once was loath to stumble.

Who am I — what kind of watchman am I? I do not stand on the pinnacle of achievement, I languish rather in the depths of my weakness. And yet the creator and redeemer of mankind can give me, unworthy though I be, the grace to see life whole and power to speak effectively of it. It is for love of him that I do not spare myself in preaching him.

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Salva nos, Domine, vigilantes, custodi nos dormientes, ut vigilemus cum Christo et requiescamus in pace.

Keep us safe, Lord, while we are awake, and guard us as we sleep, so that we can keep watch with Christ and rest in peace.

Brothers of Holy Cross Abbey before Vigils (website).

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vig·i·lant

adj., on the alert; watchful.

[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin vigilāre, to be watchful]

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See also:

Through the night

The Feast of the Nativity

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Reading Paul

In Paul’s day, Jewish zealous nationalism that focused on Israel’s internal purity was not the only temptation to violence. That nationalistic zeal was also directed outwardly toward an oppressive, violent regime–the imperial power of Rome. Paul would become a critic (at least an implicit one) of that form of violence, too–violence in the name of justice, peace, and security. Based on a misinterpretation of Rom 13:1-7, Paul is often portrayed as a political conservative who supported Rome, and perhaps all forms of political authority, even tyranny. However, like Jesus, he was a critic of imperial values such as domination and of imperial claims like divine status for emperors and divine blessing on the empire’s ambition. Paul mocked the Roman claim of providing pax et securitas (I Thes 5:3), offered an alternative form of divine justice, and proclaimed as Lord a criminal crucified by Roman power–rather than Roman power incarnate (the emperor). A politics of subversion, not intentional but as an inevitable consequence of the gospel, is central to Paul and to those who read his letters as Scripture. In that sense, Paul was a good, prophetic Jew. (19)

Michael J. Gorman, Reading Paul

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El Greco, St. Paul (1606)

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Sister Nature

If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden. For the obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature. The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in the proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not out Mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. (115-116)

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

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Giotto di Bondone, Preaching to the Birds (1295-1300)

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terrible as an army with banners

Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within… That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worships cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold the astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. (75-76)

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

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identity

“Converting to the God of the Christians was not merely an adjustment of this or that aspect of an otherwise unaltered basic cultural pattern; rather, worshiping the God of the Christians simultaneously involved an extraction or removal from constitutive aspects of pagan culture (e.g., sacrifice to the gods) and a concomitant cultural profile that rendered Christians identifiable as a “group” by outsiders. Yet the practices that created this cultural profile were themselves dependent upon the identity of God. Christian ecclesial life, in other words, was the cultural explication of God’s identity.” (246)

C. Kavin Rowe, “The Book of Acts and the Cultural Explication of the Identity of God,” from The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in honor of Richard B. Hays

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i·den·ti·ty
n., the set of behavioral or personal characteristics by which an individual is recognizable as a member of a group.

[French identité, from Old French identite, from Late Latin identitās, from Latin idem, the same from id, it (cf., essentitās, being)]

con·com·i·tant
adj., existing or occurring together; associative

[Late Latin concomitāns, accompanying; (cf., comes, companion)]

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liberalism

A recent write-in to the News & Observer Opinion section reads:

Commenting on the response to Burgetta Eplin Wheeler’s column about grandparents having to raise grandchildren with no support and to one of his own columns, Barry Saunders quotes a critic as asking, “Isn’t there a saying from the Bible, ‘God helps those who help themselves’?”

The question deserves a prompt answer, and the answer is no. It does not come from the Bible.

The quote is far more an expression of a false sense of individualism that fails to see how living with others means depending on one another. On this the Bible scores really high. Here is just a sample: “Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” “Bear one another’s burdens.” “The Spirit helps us in our infirmities.”

Robert L. Brawley
McGaw Professor of New Testament Emeritus, McCormick Theological Seminary
Durham

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The primary location of Christianity is not so much deep within the self of the believer, but in the worship and practice of a believing community. This community’s view of the world is formed by the scriptural narrative. (54)
Sam Wells, Transforming Fate into Destiny: The Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (1998)

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The Last Supper, Jaume Hugue (ca. 1470)

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lib·er·al·ism
a) A political theory founded on the natural goodness of humans and the autonomy of the individual and favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.
b) a movement in modern Protestantism that emphasizes freedom from tradition and authority, the adjustment of religious beliefs to scientific conceptions, and the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity.

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catacombs

In Rome, towards the end of the second century, the Church was already acquiring rights to excavate tunnels for burial in the soft tufa stone of the region, the first Christian catacombs – not refuges from persecution, as the pious Counter-Reformation Catholics assumed in the sixteenth century, just places for decent and eternal rest.  The whole system of catacombs in Rome (named after one particular complex of tunnels beside the Appian Way in a sunken valley, In Catacumbas, knowledge of which has survived when all the others were forgotten) 875,000 burials made between the second and ninth centuries.  What is interesting about the earliest of these burials is the relative lack of social or status differentiation in them:  bishops had no more distinguished graves than others, apart from a simple marble plaque to record basic details such as a name.  This was a sign of a sense of commonality, there poor and powerful might be all one in the sight of the Saviour. (160)

Christianity : The First Three Thousand Years, Diarmaid MacCullouch

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maelstrom

It is not even accurate to say that Christianity eventually broke away from Judaism.  It is more accurate to say that, out of that matrix of biblical Judaism and that maelstrom of late Second-Temple Judaism two great traditions emerged: early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.  Each claimed exclusive continuity with the past, but in truth each was as great a leap and as valid a development from that common ancestry as was the other.  They are not child and parent; they are two children of the same mother.  So, of course, were Cain and Abel. (xxxiii)

The Birth of Christianity, John Dominic Crossan

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mael´strom (māl-)

a noun,

A powerful whirlpool, originally (usu. Maelstrom) one in the Arctic Ocean off the west coast of Norway, which was formerly supposed to suck in and destroy all vessels within a wide radius.

[ from early modern Dutch maelstrom (now maalstroom), a whirlpool, from malen to grind, to whirl round (compare meal) + stroom, a stream n.

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