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11.30.03 ~ Advent Epiphanies and angst Have been reading a homily on the fear of death composed in lovely, King James English with attendant anomalous spelling. It is slow going because I have to read each sentence eight times before I can actually see past all the fun words with "e" tacked on the end and actually figure out what the words are about. It's a similar experience to listening to people with cool accents talk: you get so caught up in enjoying how they say things that you start forgetting to pay attention to what they are saying. My favorite excerpt so far: "Although these two causes seeme great and weightie to a worldly man, whereupon hee is mooued to feare death, yet there is an other cause much greater then any of these afore rehearsed, for which indeede he hath iust cause to feare death, and that is the state and condition wherevnto at the last end death bringeth all them that haue their hearts fixed vpon this world, without repentance and amendment." Hee. My automatic spell-check does not like that at all. Also, it is all one sentence so the grammar check would be up in arms if I had not already forcefully disarmed it. King James and Shakespearean English both give me warm delicious feelings not unlike those that accompany a glass or two of red wine. Preferable, actually, to the wine as red wine usually tastes to me as though the grapes were dragged across New Mexico behind an un-smogged Buick prior to fermentation. I have been reading the evening lessons (or at least trying to read them and succeeding about half of the time) out of the KJV Bible that Dad bought for me when I was confirmed. It doesn't have the entertaining spelling, but it does contain plenty of thees, thous and people being wroth. I enjoy the translation but have been considering the purchase of a New American Standard (the only version we don't already have in the house) for better accessibility. I am, after all, doing this reading at night and I am usually fairly sleepy by the time I get to having evening prayer. The KJV is sometimes difficult to concentrate on when I am not at full power as 'twere. On the other hand, I also want to buy myself a version of the King James with the words all spelled with the i's and j's swapped. Dad used to have one that Jim read out of when we had prayer all together. He somehow was able to decode the Olde English spelling fast enough to read aloud from it, which I have yet to be capable of. +++++ Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which means that the sermon was about penitence and preparation. Today's centered on the use of one's time to the glory of God as opposed to one's one designs. I am getting the impression that God is giving me a poke about my less-than-strict schedule of prayer and my endless frittering away of time that could be put to much better use. Sometime in early October, we went to a boutique at my grandmother's church. All the old Dames of the congregation had contributed cookies or clothespin reindeer or hand-knitted washcloths, and on one of the tables were several jars filled with what looked like rice. They all had tags that contained a little missive along the lines of: This jar is full of rice and walnuts. The walnuts are the works God has planned for you, the rice is all the things that you want to do. If you put the rice in first, you'll never get the walnuts in the jar. Only by putting God first can we fit everything into our daily lives. At the time I thought that it was a neat little object metaphor if a little unwieldy and counter-romantic (walnuts and rice being rather pedestrian and therefore ill-made for this sort of thing) and I went about my business which primarily consisted of wandering around trying to look interested in the motley wares of the boutique. Three days later I went out for coffee with Tiellan and we were kvetching about time and how we never have enough of it for everything we want to do. She said that she had been thinking of buying some flat river-rocks at a hardware store and painting pictures on them of all the things that were important to her. She then proceeded to tell me the walnut-rice metaphor, only hers used rocks and sand (much more romantic in the classic sense) and instead of what God wanted and what you wanted the analogy was rocks=important priorities, sand=everyday issues. And I thought "How funny that I just saw that and now Tiellan is telling me about it. That's a funny little coinky-dink." And once again I went about my business. Then (The Almighty--obviously and by definition--does not have any vices, but if he did, one of them would not be a lack of persistence) Peg Kerr wrote this entry in her LiveJournal, which contains a quick mention of the concepts of urgency vs. importance. Urgent stuff always takes the time at hand away from the important stuff, and the important stuff keeps getting shoved further and further back on the schedule to make way. Of course the important stuff never gets done with this system because there is an overwhelming wealth of urgent stuff in the world and there always will be enough of it to occupy the moment. Important stuff ends up assigned to "Later" and as I have previous discussed, Later never comes. So I read this journal entry and I pondered it and thought "The lesson here is very similar to that of the rock/walnut-sand/rice thing. Isn't that nifty." And because I am denser than the average Igneous rock, I once more went about my business. That same week, we had a sermon centered entirely on use of one's time and the fact that our time is God's and it should be treated as same rather than regarding it as something we possess that we grudgingly pay taxes on. Today we had another which touched on many of the same points. I am beginning to see a pattern here. Even Igneous rocks can get the point if it is made enough times. Perhaps my God's Will receiver is defective. Or maybe the message has been there all along, and I just haven't been listening. +++++ Speaking of not listening (and of Bible translations, actually) I have recently been worrying about my own inattentiveness to the service at church during mass. I sing in the choir, so I am forced to at least pay some degree of attention to what's going on, but I have recently rediscovered the fact that I don't invest any of my brainpower in the mass. We are Anglicans, which means that we are Catholic but Protestant, Episcopal but Conservative, Reformed but Traditional. There are a lot of capital letters involved with the defining of the exact nature of our denomination, as you can see, and I certainly know and understand only a fraction of them, so there's no point in me trying to define exactly what type of church I go to in the proper terms, but there is the fraction that I do comprehend. In practical terms (which are all I really have at my disposal) we are the type of church that has a choir instead of a band or a "worship team" and we do not allow the use of bongos or guitars during the mass proper. We have pews instead of those little convention-hall chairs that all link together to form rows. The people who occupy the pews are the "congregation" not the "audience" and they follow the service in the Book of Common Prayer (1928 edition) and hymnals as opposed to using pre-printed sermon notes and songs lyrics on projector screens. The people who stand up front and do the most talking are "clergy" rather than "leadership" and they wear funny clothes, mostly consisting of robes and stoles and that sort of thing. We have short sermons and observe Communion every week instead of long sermons and Communion once a month. We are also a liturgical church, which means that our service is a set collection of prayers and the creed with scripture readings and collects that change every week on a yearly rotation. This makes it possible to learn most of the service--and in fact all of the participatory parts--off by heart, which is especially easy if you've attended the same service since childhood. The problem being that since I can pretty much recite everything in the entire mass without ever needing to consult a prayer book, I have been doing so ever since I can remember and am now able to participate verbally without using much of my brain at all. While my mouth is naming off my cornerstone beliefs in the Creed, my brain is happily occupying itself with story ideas and worries about work. This is the last thing I should be concerning myself with in church, but somehow it has become almost automatic for me to drone out the collects and responsives while not even grasping the general gist of what I am saying. To take a quote from today's sermon, I am worshipping with my mouth but not with my heart. This is bad. If I am so preoccupied with mundanities and entertaining flights of fancy that I can't even be bothered to pay attention to my own church service then how can I criticize members of other religions who may be worshipping statues with more than the average number of arms but at least they are probably aware of what they're doing and saying. For all the good I'm currently getting out of my religion, I could go and be a follower of Glurg, the Goldfish God, patron deity of aquarium supply stores and probably reap the same benefits that I am now. If I can't take the ceremonies of my own faith seriously, how can I expect anyone else to? The answer being that I can't. This, also is bad. +++++ I should probably state categorically at this time that I don't want to offend anyone that isn't an Anglican Christian, and whose church uses worship teams, many-armed statues or goldfish deities for that matter. The fact is that I am a Christian (and a specific brand of Christian on top of that) and believe in the precepts of my religion despite my regrettable lack of focus in church. This of course means that I also believe that everyone else's precepts which do not agree with mine are incorrect. I do not buy the warm-fuzzy-make-everyone-happy solution of saying that there is no one true religion. There is one true religion, and as egocentric as it sounds, I think that mine happens to be it. This is, however, a fallen world and as long as we all occupy "this terrestrial sphere" as the poet said, I recognize that the only way we are going to get on with life with any kind of dispatch is to respect one another's rights to believe in goldfish deities and move on. The only reason I am still allowed to worship my God my way is because everyone else in the country is allowed to worship whatever or whomever they like in any way that does not involve killing virgins or cruelty to animals. So fine, I'm okay with that, I just don't want anyone up in arms about my religious discriminations. Of course, if no one was upset up to this point, someone probably is now, but what can you do. So yeah...back to the actual entry... Ahem...sorry 'bout that. +++++ Today's sermon was on the section of scripture wherein Christ enters the temple and overturns the tables of the moneychangers and drives out all the people selling sacrificial doves and whatnot. We also sang a piece of service music that concerned the parable of the virgins and their lamps. The whole message of Advent is of course penitence and preparation, just like Lent, but I think the emphasis for Advent is more heavily on the preparation while Lent leans more towards penitence. I have had both the passages of scripture mentioned above explained to me several times over in the course of my life. People usually try to communicate the idea of spiritual preparation by saying something along the lines of "You should live your life as though Christ were coming back today." If Jesus came to your house would you be ready to receive him right now and all that. I always found this to be rather cumbersome. Obviously if Christ were to turn up, one would want to be discovered studying scripture or feeding the homeless or rescuing stranded kittens out of trees. No one would like the Almighty to just show up while one was trying to decide which kind of spaghetti sauce to buy or heaven forbid when one was in the middle of a *cough* intimate moment with one's spouse. But that doesn't negate the necessity of spaghetti sauce (or intimate moments) so you really don't have much choice but to get on with things and hope that when Jesus comes to visit you won't be bingeing out on Cheetos and reading comic books. True some people do spend pretty much all their waking moments praying and doing good works, and they certainly have a higher statistical probability of being in the act of saving a kitten when the Second Coming occurs. But for most of us this is simply not practical and so thankfully it is not our calling. And since it is not our calling to save kittens twenty-four/seven, I always had the thought somewhere in the back of my head that we couldn't be expected to be doing anything much at any given time because we had lives to live and rent to pay and there's cat litter that needs to be purchased, and so on. But I think now that I may have missed the point a little. The point is not that you're required to be saving kittens at any given moment. It is okay to be buying spaghetti sauce and cat litter. The thing is that while you are buying them, you are supposed to be secure in the fact that you are doing God's will. Even in something so mundane I think there is supposed to be some sense that this is what you're meant to be doing. That you are completing a step in a long process that will eventually fulfill God's plan for your life. More to the point, you should be fairly sure that what you are doing is not actually interfering with God's will, that whatever comic book you're reading isn't taking you away from the destination that he's got planned. Which of course is not actually possible, because he knows everything and all things work according to his will, so even the things we do in disobedience only bring us closer to that destination and this is where it gets to be a little more than the average Igneous rock can safely contemplate without becoming thoroughly confused, so I'm going to stop now. All this was probably very obvious a long time ago, but we Igneous rocks have to figure things out "the hard way" as my dad says. That is to say we will spend hours of agony coming to the same conclusion that could have been reached in five seconds if we had been reading the flashcards God was holding in front of our faces the whole time. So I'm supposed to be doing God's will in all things, and a few pieces of scripture suddenly make a little more practical sense than they did previously. Great. So what is the will of God for my life? No idea. Am fairly clear on what the will of Marie is not only for my life but for pretty much everyone else's, too. Heck, I can tell you the will of Marie for the whole flippin' universe without pausing to think about it first, and let me tell you, it's the universe's good luck that I am not God. But back to the will of God, I think that's one revelation I'm going to have to spend some time on. There is probably some kind of limit to how many epiphanies can take place in the span of a single journal entry, and anyway this thing is already too long. The whole problem will likely come down to the "not listening" thing again, anyway, and we've already been there today.
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