September 16, 2003 Morning

I sit here this morning, wondering how to marshal my thoughts and incorporate some of the insights. It’s funny how different two days can be, and I find it hard to explain why today I wake up joyful, with a spring in my step, eager to sing the whole Morning Office, with feeling. While yesterday, I had to force myself to do the bare minimum, and all day felt like I was forcing myself except for the little time I spent writing on the blog or writing an email to a writer’s list I belong to.

Was it the weather? The hot, humid, cloudy weather that ended in rain showers last night? Was it something I ate? Was it the anticipation of bad news about a loved one who is ill and nothing can be done to stop the advance of the illness? I have in the past often found that I experience bad news in advance in my body, then when I actually hear the news, I’ve already processed it somehow, and can face it with peace, er, well, most of the time. For example, two days before I was let go from my last employ, I felt an awful sense of disquiet and angst, even though my immediate superior assured me that I would be okay when a new boss took charge. By the time that same immediate superior told me he had some bad news for me, I didn’t need him to tell me what it was. I already knew.

This morning’s prayer was profound for me. I noticed that the morning’s first lesson was from Isaiah 7, and I wondered why we were suddenly skipping in the lectionary from 2 Kings to Isaiah. Was it a feast day? A day to commemorate some martyr?

Then, I saw the sense of it. We’d been reading in 2 Kings about King Ahaz, and in today’s chapter from Isaiah, the prophet arranges to meet Ahaz.

I had a chill go through me. I hadn’t really enjoyed the heavy slogging through all this stuff about this and that King. Ho hum, so what, let’s summarize this stuff, okay? Most of them did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and did not tear down the high places to other gods.

But then, it struck me full force that what I was reading in 2 Kings was a historical account, as factual as the Kennedy assassination, or the destruction of the twin towers on 9-11. Right in the middle of that historical account, this historical figure, the prophet Isaiah goes to meet Ahaz.

He prophesies that Ahaz is not to worry about the enemies that surround him. Then this:


“Moreover the Lord spake again unto Ahaz, saying,
As thee a sign of the Lord thy God; ask it either in the depth , or in the height above.
But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.
And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; it is small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also?
Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:11-14).

Reading this prophesy and seeing it anchored amidst the bloody turbulence of the warring kings of Judah, Israel, Syria and so on, brought me to tears.

The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is the central Fact of human history. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

I used to be one who was more like Dostoyevsky who said if Christ and the Truth were not one and the same, he would prefer to stay with Christ. Here's his exact quote from a website:


I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly and more perfect than the Savior;...If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not the truth.

I too, would prefer to stay with Christ. I used to believe that there was something mystically, or psychologically true about the Gospels in their spiritual sense that were more important than whether the physical facts, “on the ground” as it were, were true or not.

I still may carry some vestiges of that around with me, but these are imaginings that I choose now to cast off. Now, increasingly, God is showing me that the facts on the ground are of crucial importance. I'm shedding my Gnosticism and finding a sacramental faith. God really did become flesh and dwelt among us. He is living in us now.

Before I started my prayers, I got an email from a friend of mine that he’s given me permission to share.

It was so in keeping with what God is impressing on me this morning.

My waking thought (Incarnatus est)

“Lies! lies! ... everywhere I look, lies!”

This was a general observation, but I was thinking specifically of something said casually yesterday by a certain bookseller -- not the most gliberal person I know, nor the least educated, nor unsympathetic to the Christian religion (his father was an Anglican priest, & his own bookselling vocation a natural progression from that).

He said, & I paraphrase, “We developed this critical methodology & then applied it to the Bible; I look forward to seeing it applied to the Koran.”

What he said was nearly the opposite of the truth. Our “enlightened” critical methodology was developed almost entirely ON the Bible, & then applied elsewhere. Our scholarly ancestors were faithful men, who believed their religion to be founded in the facts of early first century Palestine. They cared a great deal to get these facts straight, & thus their religion straight. They did not wish to believe in lies. To them, as to St. Paul, as to all faithful Christians, if Jesus Christ were not the incarnate Son of God, all of our beliefs were vain. (“And the way I’m dressed is ridiculous,” as my old parish priest, Fr. Harold Nahabedian, used to add.)

That is why we kneel at the words, “and was incarnate” in the Nicene Creed.

At least, that is why some of us still kneel: in acknowledgement of the Fact of Christ's incarnation, not of some Abstract Idea. (Even most Catholics, today, have been taught by the gliberals to remain standing through this passage, as through the rest of the Creed; & they mock the tradition of standing, then kneeling for one phrase, then standing up again, for it “looks” ridiculous to them -- to they who found their religion on appearances, as they found their wardrobe in the latest style.)

But I digress. ... My point is that the “sceptical & critical rigour” that we associate with the Enlightenment was not something imposed on Christianity by scientific pagans from outside. It was something imposed BY Christianity, & which was brought in THROUGH the Church, & TAUGHT to the scientific pagans. And whether Protestant or Catholic (it is certainly both today), it is in direct descent from the "sceptical & critical rigour" that was the conscious aspiration of the mediaeval Doctors of the Church; & before them Augustine; & before him to be found in the very formation of the New Testament canon.

David Warren
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com

Here is an edited version of my response:

Hey David,

Can I post this in my blog this morning? May I use your name and put a link to your website (little by little I grow more adept at doing things like providing links).

I was just sitting down at my dining room table to do my morning prayers.

Before going to my little heavenly cathedral, I barely knew the Nicene Creed, and had certainly never heard of kneeling during it, but at our little place, we all kneel at those words, and we bow at the name of Jesus.

I was reading a little Francis Schaeffer last night and the whole thrust of his apologetic was that not only is Christianity mystically true it is factually true.....that to cut the Christian faith off from its factual moorings was to undermine even science itself, because true science and objectivity is moored in the idea that God created a universe with laws and that there is a Truth that can be discovered.

If today’s scientists believe there is no truth, that there is only Hegelian thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, with a new thesis brewing to create a new antithesis and so on, then science will cease to exist. What we’ll end up with is only technology, an argument I’ve heard John Patrick make often at the little Augustine College breakfasts.

All I can say is Amen! and Amen! to your post this morning.