The Way We Practice

This Lent, I’m offering a weekly exploration of the Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. Along the way, I’ll be posting interviews with a variety of New Testament scholars who will help us understand Paul’s major themes and the context of his letter. To get us started, here is a conversation with Beverly Roberts Gaventa, whose book When in Romans: An Invitation to Linger with the Gospel according to Paul is one of my favorite explorations of the letter. Below you will find some other suggested books that came up in my conversation with Dr. Gaventa.

If you want to join my study of Romans, begin by reading through the whole of Paul’s letter in as few sittings as you can. There is a lot to work out, and we’ll be going through chapter by chapter, but its always helpful to get a sense of the whole of a biblical book before working back through slowly. You may opt to listen to the book the first time through. It will take about an hour. If you use an app like Dwellapp.io, you may want to choose a female reader, since Paul’s letter was carried and likely read by the Deacon Phoebe. Next week, in addition to another interview, I’ll be posting notes on chapters 1-4 of the book.

Books on Romans and Paul recommended by Beverly Roberts Gaventa:

* Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ by L. Ann Jervis

* Galatians by J. Louis Martyn

* Commentaries on Romans and 1-2 Corinthians by Ambrosiaster

* The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth

* Paul and the Power of Grace by John M. G. Barclay

* Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology by Susan Grove Eastman

* The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul by Jonathan Linebaugh

* The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God’s Righteousness by A. Katherine Grieb

Sometimes I read a writer whose words burn with energy and light; setting blaze to my thoughts in a way that keeps burning for weeks after the initial spark. That was my experience when I began reading Graham Pardun’s Sabbath Empire newsletter. I immediately reached out to Graham and he agreed to have a conversation. It was as good to talk with Graham as to read him and I’ve continued to reflect on the insights he shared in our conversation. I hope this recording proves as fruitful for you as talking to Graham was for me.

Below are a few of the books and writers mentioned in the conversation:

* The Sunlillies is Graham’s book on “Eastern Orthodoxy as radical counterculture.”

* Robert Alter’s translation of The Hebrew Bible

* The Ancient Hebrew Lexicon of the Bible by Jeff A. Benner

* “The Mossy Face of Christ” Mark Vernon conversation with Martin Shaw

* Martin Shaw’s Substack “The House of Beasts & Vines”

* Paul Kingsnorth’s Substack “The Abbey of Misrule”

* Looking East in Winter by Rowan Williams

* Orthodox Christian Prayers St. Tikhon’s Monastery Press

* The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel

This week, on the eve of the Feast of Christ the King, I’m back with another conversation with my friend Joshua Daniel. The spark for this conversation was a speech given by Raphael Warnock in which he makes some theological claims about the nature of democracy. From there we followed the conversation to a wide range of questions about the church and politics. I hope you find our conversation helpful in your own discernment of these important topics!

Some resources mentioned:

* David Fitch interview with Stanley Hauerwas: “The Present Moment with Stanley Hauerwas.”

* Andrew Root The Church After Innovation

* Church of the Sojourners

* Tim Otto

* Ivan Illich The Rivers North of the Future

* James K.A. Smith The Nicene Option

* Hannah Arendt The Human Condition

In what we plan to be a series of conversations, I’m joined in this episode by Joshua Daniel. Joshua is an Episcopal priest serving at St. Columba’s in Washington, D.C. He also holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, specializing in the work of Wittgenstein. Joshua is one of the smartest and wisest people I know and everytime we talk I leave the conversation enlivened and enlightened. I hope you will be as well. To provide fodder for our time, we decided to engage with a recent piece by L.M. Sacasas that asks us to take stock of our technological liturgies. I hope you enjoy the conversation and stay tuned for more dialogues with Joshua in the coming months.

A reflection on the varied patterns of eating that reflect the rhythms of creation.

A reflection on Halo Top, Isaiah 55, and how fasting can help us feast.

I’ve recently been thinking about the practices that have been most helpful to me in my journey on the Christian way. Fasting is among them and I’ve been working to renew my own regular practice of it. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be offering a short essay on fasting, its practice, and why its a helpful discipline for the Christian life. Today is part 1, but each essay should be fairly independent of the others, so read in whatever order you come upon them.

It is a rainy morning, each drop sounding with a chaotic rhythm on the tin roof. The incense is lit, nothing fancy—just a simple stick bought on the side aisle of the grocery store. It smells of cedar and myrrh. Before me there are a few scattered icons—St. Luke, patron of writers, the Holy Family, Mary and the Christ child. Before them a candle flickers, a spent “office” candle from church with plenty of life left for my purposes. It sits in a jar that once held spaghetti sauce, now filled with sand.

I’m preparing for work, and as has become my habit on the best days, I start with a time in prayer—not the active, busy kind (my mind will begin its rush soon enough)—but the quiet sort that brings me to a center from which I can begin to move through the day.

For many years I used a timer set up on an app for this purpose. 20 minutes with a basu bell sounding halfway through. I like the app and continue to use it. The best feature is that after my time of prayer I’m told of all the other people who were praying or meditating at the same time. Some of them I know, some are members of my church or friends from the wider circles of my religious life. Others are unknown to me, but still I feel a connection—all of us seeking the more beneath the surface of our frenetic lives.

Lately, however, I’ve been using this clock less often. Earlier in the year I purchased a chotki from an Eastern Orthodox monastery. I’d been reading a book on the Jesus Prayer, a prayer that has been central to my practice for a long while now. I had always simply prayed with the rhythm of my breath: inhale “Lord Jesus Christ Son of God,” exhale “Have mercy on me a sinner.” But I was reminded in my reading that many Eastern Christians use a rope tied with knots to count their repetitions. The most common sort has a hundred knots, though I also often wear a bracelet of 33, a knot for each of the years of Christ’s earthly life.

In the morning, it is the rope with a hundred knots that I use. It is black with a cross at the beginning and a tassel at the end of the loop. There is a wooden bead made of olive wood that marks the completion of each decade. To pray the cycle slowly and deliberately, resting on each of the hundred knots, takes about 20 minutes—roughly the same time I set on the clock. And yet, there is something different about the rope. It has a more natural rhythm to it than the external constraint of a timer.

I’ve spent a good deal of my life struggling against my finitude, the basic creaturely limits of my existence in time. I always struggle to keep my “currently” reading books under seven and I am tempted to always take on more projects that I can possibly complete. I’ve become better over time, largely with the help of my wife who early in our relationship employed an annoying “bee, beep” sound whenever I started dreaming aloud of a new project while I was still in the middle of several others. She made me a collaged box with index cards where I could keep my ideas until I had time for a new project. It helped, but still I’ve worked to maximize time, blocking it off in clear segments, working against a clock in 25 minute intervals with 5 minutes of rest in-between or 90 to 120 minute sessions of “deep work.”

These methods have been good in many ways, and I do not plan to abandon them altogether, but more recently I’ve begun to think in terms of rhythm rather than clocks. Life works according to cadences rather than the set increments of time. And one of the most dehumanizing features of modern life has been the ignoring of this fact by the systems of production. We make children go to class far too early in the day, ignoring their natural sleep cycles—all to fulfill the economic end of child care. Workers themselves are often tied to tasks in unnatural patterns that do not allow their bodies and minds to work to their fullest potential. Instead of embracing the normal sleepy hours around 2 p.m., when our circadian rhythms turn us toward an afternoon nap, we head for a bit more caffeine or sugar.

Rhythm, as opposed to clocks, works within the context of a wider set of contingent realities—which is to say within the world of finite creatures. So it is that I have found myself moving more deeply toward ways of continuing the work, the disciplines, the essential patterns of my life, but tying them more to the native cadence and pace of their unfolding. For instance, I no longer tend to set an alarm to wake me, unless there is an unusual circumstance that demands it. I find that I naturally wake around dawn most mornings, and never so late as to be a problem with getting where I need to be. With the exception of dinner I also try to eat, as best I can, when I’m hungry—not according to some set schedule. Some days I have breakfast, some others I’m not really hungry until 1 p.m.

This work of living from creaturely cadences rather than clocks requires a certain attention and awareness. It takes listening to the body and also attending to what is the important work now before me. When the energy is strong for a session of focused work, I do it, and when it would be better to go for a walk, I do my best to take the cue.

With the chotki in hand, I’m free to move at the pace of my heart and soul. There are days when the motion of the rope slows me and others when it keeps me on pace from wandering too far in my thoughts. Either way, it is a pace set by my own fingers working in concert with the heart-mind deep within me.

And though I don’t see the faces of friends who have shared the time of prayer with me, I feel connected in a different way. I do not need an app to tell me that when I pray, whenever I pray, I am joining in a great polyphony of hearts moving upward to the divine. I sense that in every knot of the rope I am sharing in a wider prayer. Each knot of this rope was tied as the monk who made it prayed over each twist of the fiber. And in praying with these words in this way, I know I’m entering a common prayer that stretches across centuries and continents.

Clocks will continue to be a part of my life and I will still have mornings when I must wake with an alarm. I have not deleted my meditation app from my phone and I plan to keep using it, here and there, though I long ago let go of achieving any “streak.” But I am working more and more orient my life toward the cadence of the creaturely life, the pattern of light and seasons, the tilting and rotating earth. It is a rhythm I enter each morning with my fingers running along knots on a rope.

When I was a child, few movies captured my imagination like the Indiana Jones series. Indy was everything I wanted to be—an adventuring scholar, at home equally in a library or a jungle; a good guy with a gruff edge. I saved my money, bought myself a felt fedora and a whip, and set off into the woods in search of adventure. I didn’t discover the Ark of the Covenant or escape ancient booby traps, but I did find a few old bottles and a cobbled leather shoe—exciting enough fare for a nine-year-old.

Perhaps it was a sense of nostalgia for that excitement that led me, on a night when my family was away, to sit down to dinner and watch my favorite film in the series: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

For those who don’t remember or have had the misfortune of never seeing it, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade traces Dr. Jones’s adventures in search of the Holy Grail, all the while battling Nazis and encountering the supernatural despite his skepticism.

In one of the early scenes of the film, Jones is discussing the Grail with his colleague Marcus Brody. Jones is skeptical about the Grail legend which he takes to be little more than a Medieval fairytale. Brody responds that, "The search for the cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all of us. But if you want facts, I have none to give you.  At my age I'm willing to take a few things on faith.”

Brody’s response is a wise one, one that names, perhaps, the reason for the long and flourishing tradition of Holy Grail stories, from L’morte de Arthur to Monty Python. We all want to understand our relationship to the divine and so the grail legend has been a vehicle for us to explore this mystery in the best way human beings know how: through stories. With the grail on my mind, I began to work through a problem I’ve been pondering, the problem of the Ascension.

Creation, incarnation, resurrection—these are essentials for our understanding of God in Christ and each has a great resonance for me. Part of the reason Christianity has remained my faith and practice is because of our profound belief that God created the world and redeemed it by becoming a part of creation, suffering inside of it, and opening the way for new life within it through resurrection. But the Ascension has always been a hard reality for me because it seems to be moving in the opposite direction. The Ascension appears to say that Christ was simply a visitor to earth, like some alien from a spaceship, who doesn’t belong here and so has left us for a better place, like a big shot who gets stuck in coach on an airplane and is quickly ushered to first class by an apologetic flight attendant.

To put it more theologically, how do we make sense of Christ’s promise in the Gospel of Matthew to be with us always, even until the end of the age, when it seems that in the Ascension Christ has clearly abandoned us, albeit under the divine care of the Holy Spirit? How is it, as Ephesians puts it, that Christ who is seated at the Father’s “right hand in the heavenly places” is also the one “who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:15-23)?

I found help for my questions in a wonderful essay by the exiled Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov (1874-1944). Bulgakov takes up the quandary of the Ascension and solves it by drawing on the tradition of the Holy Grail with a brilliant twist. The Holy Grail tradition, of course, is that the cup Christ drank from at the last supper was then given to Joseph of Arimathea who used it to catch the blood and water that spilled from Christ’s side when he was pierced on the cross. Legend has it that Joseph then took the Grail to England where it was hidden and became sought after by such great knights as Sir Galahad of the King Arthur’s round table.

These are legends of course, but Bulgakov draws on these legends to say something profound. “The image of the Holy Grail, in which the holy blood of Christ is kept,” he writes, “expresses precisely the idea that, even though the Lord ascended in His honorable flesh to heaven, the world received His holy relic in the blood and water that flowed out of his side...And the whole world is the chalice of the Holy Grail.”

The world is the Holy Grail! This means that though Christ has ascended in body, his life blood is also still here. In the Incarnation and his sacrificial death, Christ became so mixed with the creation that the world is now infused with Christ, filled like a cup with his life. “Through the precious streams of Christ’s blood and water that flowed out of His side,” writes Bulgakov, “all creation was sanctified--heaven and earth, our earthly world, and all the stellar worlds.” This means, he writes, that “The world has become Christ.”

And if the world has become Christ, this changes everything about how we understand the Ascension. We can begin to make sense of how Christ can be seated at the right hand of the Father and still be embodied in the church and the world, filling all in all. In the Ascension Christ does not leave us, but instead, just as he is the “first fruits” of the resurrection, he has Ascended to begin the motion that all of his body will join and follow, until earth becomes heaven and heaven earth.

We all have the opportunity, then, to become like the nights of the round table or Indiana Jones. We too can go on a quest for the grail. To begin our search we do not need chain mail or a fedora. We only need the eyes to see the sacred reality of Christ all around us—this sacred world in which Christ is present and also drawing us to our fullness. When we drink from this grail its miracle will be our own transfiguration, our bodies becoming his body, earth becoming heaven, his descent becoming our ascension into the divine.

This Feast of the Ascension then becomes a day on which we glory in what Christ has become and seek to welcome that becoming into the world, saying to all the powers of Death, all the pretended rulers of the earth, that Christ is not only resurrected but also ascended, abiding on earth and ruling in heaven until both are joined through his love.

There is a place in a forested park near my home, on the lower side along the creek, where my family likes to spread a blanket or hang a hammock in the nearby trees. We love the water and the life it feeds. It is a good place to sit and be and watch. Once along this creek we found the iridescent wings of a Great Purple Hairstreak butterfly; another time we discovered a salamander, swimming among the rocks. There are always plenty of birds and dragonflies and water bugs moving about.

Beside the creek, on the opposite bank, there is a Black Willow tree that hosts Yellow Warblers each spring. In summer, its leaves are food for the caterpillars of the Eastern Tiger Swallow-tail.  And in the winter, it offers a perch to Goldfinches. The Black Willow is a native tree in Arkansas, common along creek and riverbeds. It grows quickly and helps control erosion along the banks. The willow’s wood is useful for a variety of purposes from making artificial limbs to baseball bats, and the pollen from its flowers is known as a source for particularly delicious honey.  It is a tree full of life and healing.

On a recent visit to the creek, I noticed that this Black Willow had been cut to a stump of a couple of feet. I don’t know why, but for some reason the parks department decided to remove the tree. I doubt that as a result anyone is sporting a new limb or that a child has a new bat to use on the softball fields across the street. It was cut, hauled off, and likely turned to mulch. Despite the waste, however, I was glad to see that the willow was on its way back, not ready to accept its death. From the stump there are now several new trunks developing, working back up toward the sky. It is hard to kill a willow like this, for its true life is beneath the ground. 

In the final chapter of the book of Revelation, we find a description of a river and a tree growing on either side of it. As I imagine the scene, I think of a willow like the one in the park. And that image is strengthened for me by the way John of Patmos, the author of the Apocalypse, describes this Tree of Life. 

We have different ways we talk about trees. Go camping in a National Forest and we might remark about of the beautiful trees around us. Get a logging contract for that same forest and we’d talk about the timber. Biblical Greek is no different. Dendron is the word for tree, the kind you might see camping, but the word xulon—that meant timber or lumber. And strangely it is xulon that is the word used in Revelation for the tree beside the river. What we read as “the tree of life” could more literally be translated as “the timber of life.” Not quite the same ring to it, but it is an accurate rendering.

It is hard to know, of course, what John meant to say through this choice of words, but I think we have some license to believe using xulon rather than dendron was important to him. Revelation is a poetic book where word choices matter and carry a lot of meaning. Maybe John wants us to understand that this tree is not just any tree. Maybe he’s hinting that the tree of life is the cross resurrected.[1]

It may seem strange to us to think of the cross as a tree, but in the New Testament Luke, Paul, and Peter all refer to it that way. Christ was “hung on a tree” they tell us and in every case they use the word xulon. In this use, they are providing us with a different image of what the cross is—not merely a source of death, but also a bridge to life.

Historically, and across many cultures, trees have long worked as symbolic links between the realms below and above. They are rooted firmly in the ground, connected to the depths beneath the surface, and yet they can tower into the sky. The cross, John seems to be saying, is just that kind of bridge. It is the tree that provides the way by which God finally brings earth to heaven and heaven to earth. In this image, heaven isn’t some distant spiritual realm, but a reality that comes among us, renewing all things. God comes down, making God’s home among the finite, embodied creatures of earth. And all creation once again becomes God’s temple.

At the center of all this new reality is a tree that was once dead. Yet this tree now lives, because like Christ who made it meaningful, it has a deeper source of life. Christ’s life was not an independent reality that could be done away with according to the whims of an Empire. He was connected to the source of all life—God’s holy breath that works among the roots and brings resurrection to what once seemed lost. The invitation to us, is to also live from those depths.  Heaven and earth have not yet been renewed, creation still groans with longing, but like a tree that grows deeper into the ground over the winter, we are invited to root ourselves in the life of God. It is that life that can bring us back from whatever storm may batter us or whoever tries to cut us down. 

How do we live into this now, joining in the power of the Cross-Tree Life? The willow along the stream bank has many roots, some large, some small—all entwined and connected to the roots of other plants, a whole household of life beneath the surface. It is hard to grow without community and there is little hope of renewal without it. True community is not found in the mirrored halls of online life, it cannot be mediated by screens. Community exists in the embodied creaturely presence of those gathered, sharing breath and food.  It takes patience and work to enter that sharing. We must show up, engage and risk, give and receive. We make our worship together.  The living of this common life is often imperfect, it would be much easier to receive some slick religious goods and services, rather than welcoming Christ’s life among us in a homemade faith. But if we keep going back to our roots, conspiring together in the Holy Breath that is our Advocate, then we will find our way.

 It is a way most of all of prayer—the primary roots of all our lives.  Prayer in common, in silence, in the morning and the evening and along our way.  Prayers of quiet listening and reception, prayers of offering, prayers of asking and interceding.  In our prayer we are linked even when we are not together because we are joined in God who dwells at the deepest regions of ourselves.  It is in prayer, here and now in the mess and grit of life, that we can begin to welcome heaven into earth, and bring earth into heaven, living from the energy of God rather than our own limited power.  Prayer is our rooting ourselves in the depths despite what happens along the surface.  It will connect us to the life that brings not only survival, but resurrection whatever might come our way.

That Black Willow along the banks of the stream in the park will likely be cut again, but because it is rooted in a community of life, and lives from a source of growth beneath the surface, it will come back.  And each time it does, it will put on leaves to feed caterpillars and flowers to make honey.  It will make seeds and spread them.  Already, there are many other willows growing along the stream, and they will keep growing long after there is a parks department or a city here.  And one day, the tree of which it is an image, will come and be a source of healing for the nations—the cross that joined heaven and earth, and turned death toward resurrection.

[1] The possible reference to the cross by the use of xulon was first suggested to me by Wes Howard-Brook. His “Radical Bible” series on YouTube is well worth watching.