Taking Care of Your Soul
By Fr. Doug | April 23, 2009
I suppose the most meaningful piece of pastoral counseling I’ve ever given is, “Take care of yourself.” That sounds pretty basic, but sometimes people have to be reminded to do the simple things. Sometimes, people get so busy they forget to sit quietly. They forget to collect themselves. They forget to do the things that Christians have done for centuries, to live a composed Christian life. Consequently, their days are often fretful and harried.
To complicate matters, texting, cell phones and the Internet promise to save them time, so they can get more done. Unfortunately, technology has become part of the problem. Busy and distracted people often enslave themselves to their phones and PDAs, making it difficult to have a focused conversation, or a quiet meal.
It was Henry David Thoreau who said, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.” But for many people, life is becoming more desperate and less quiet. They are anxious, distracted, and unable to calm themselves.
In rare moments of reflection, when these people weigh the benefits of meditation and prayer against the affects of busyness and excess, they agree that the former is better than the latter. Yet they continue to run the rat race, as if propelled by an addiction. And in the end they wound their souls and hurt their hearts.
Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28). The rest that Jesus gives is not a luxury or option; it’s something we need, something we can’t do without. So, take care of yourself today. Turn off the cell phone, the computer and the TV. Take a long moment to remind yourself that the One Who watches over you neither slumbers nor sleeps (Psalm 121:4).
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Beer
By Fr. Doug | April 14, 2009
Your home brew was luscious. What was the name of it and where did you purchase your kit?
You tasted the Williams Double Stout from Williams Brewing. You can purchase a basic brewing kit for around a hundred dollars from williamsbrewing.com or call 800 759 6025 for a free catalogue.
How did you get interested in brewing your own beer?
I used to train for bike racing with a group of riders from Lubbock. We were slow pedaling to cool down after a particularly difficult fifty mile ride when one of my friends slid up beside me and invited me to his house for a beer. By the time we rode to his place I was tired and had a layer of dry salt from the evaporated sweat on my face. I sat in his garage while he did a perfect pour of two extra cold Summer Ale home brews. We toasted to hot summer days. It was the best beer I’d ever had. I got him to order me a kit and have been brewing ever since. That’s been over ten years ago.
In your opinion, what is the key to brewing a tasty batch of beer?
I follow the instructions from the brewer very closely. Sanitation and timing have a lot to do with it. The brew kits typically provide the recipes but you can make it as complicated as you like. You can grow your own hops for example and mix your own malts. I’m not that sophisticated yet. However, I will say that the worst batch I’ve brewed has been better than anything purchased from the store.
Home brewing seems to be a fashionable hobby these days. To what do you attribute its popularity?
I think we’ve become more educated, particularly when it comes to beer. The big brewers are experimenting more and offering up Ales and Stouts that were not available several years ago. Samuel Adams and New England Brewery come to mind. I also believe there’s a theological reason – people like to taste the fruit of their labors.
What would you tell someone interested in brewing their own beer?
Make an investment in a basic kit. Brew a couple of batches and have fun with it. I’d like to see more people in Amarillo get interested in home brewing. We could get together once a month and sample different brews and share recipes.
There is something about discussing theology that blends well with a good beer and a great tobacco. If I can’t think as deeply as C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton I can at least imitate their good taste.
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Suffering with God
By Fr. Doug | April 7, 2009
When our oldest son was five, he asked, “Why doesn’t God do something about abortion?” A few years later he wondered aloud, “Why does God allow bad things to happen?”Those questions still hound him. They hound me too. However, I have found a measure of comfort in knowing that when I suffer, I join with God in suffering for the world.
Isaiah 63:9 reminds us that God suffers vicariously through His children. “In all their affliction He was afflicted.”
Romans 8:26 seems to affirm this. “Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”
That word “groanings” conveys the idea of a heaving chest, deep sighs and shudderings. The pain God experiences in our behalf is so acute that He cries out for us.
When we suffer, we are not alone. It is not meaningless. God is suffering with us. And together we suffer with and for the world.
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Participation in God
By Fr. Doug | March 31, 2009
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Fr. Zosima introduced me to the interconnectedness of mankind. Garrison Keillor, host of Prairie Home Companion, made me smile at the idea.
Once, Keillor told a story about a fictitious character who was considering adultery. The man was sitting on his front porch, daydreaming about leaving his wife, when he realized how his act of betrayal would disrupt the entire community: “I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, they would be no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families, my infidelity will somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away, a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth.”
We are connected to one another, and this connection is a great mystery.
John Donne spoke of this interconnectedness in his sermon, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” “The Church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and engrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume.”
Then we have the immortal lines, “No man is an island. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Fr. Zosima and Garrison Keillor ask us to weigh man’s connectedness with man. John Donne invites us to weigh our connectedness with God.
Last night, while reading for a course I’m going to teach for Cranmer Theological House, I came across this quote from the dean of Anglican theologians, Richard Hooker. Here, he elaborates on our union with God.
And His Church He frameth out of the very flesh, the very wounded and bleeding side of the Son of Man, His body crucified and His blood, shed for the life of the world, are the true elements of that heavenly being, which maketh us such as Himself is of whom we come. For which cause the words of Adam may be fitly the words of Christ concerning His Church, Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones, a true native extract out of mine own body (Laws 2:239.22-29).
Little wonder that Christ said to Saul, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?” Little wonder that St. Paul would later write, “Ye are the Body of Christ.”
At the baptismal font we are cleansed of original sin, and brought into union with the Godhead. We pass through those waters into the very life of the Most Holy Trinity. And we maintain this union by participating in the Eucharist. Our Lord said, “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him (John 6:56).”
We are connected to God. We participate in His life. And this union is a great mystery.
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The Oxford Movement’s Slum Priests
By Fr. Doug | March 25, 2009
What motivated these men to take the Eucharist to the poor and to be their advocates before the rich? One priest, Robert Dolling (1851-1902), may have summarized it best when he wrote, “I speak out and fight about the [broken] drains because I believe in the Incarnation. As God the Father wills to be known in the Incarnation, so God the Son wills to reveal himself in the Breaking of Bread.”
Here, I am reminded of Eugene Petersen’s rendering of John 1:14. “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood (The Message).” Because God became Man, the Oxford Movement’s “slum priests” were compelled to make Him known, to take Him, as it were, to the forgotten sectors of society. In my estimation, they are exemplars and worthy of emulation.
Question: How would a patristic view of the Incarnation and Sacraments reshape our philosophy of ministry and invigorate us to do evangelism?
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Sin, Guilt, and Absolution
By Fr. Doug | March 16, 2009
“ALMIGHTY God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men; We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness. . .”
There is a poignant scene near the end of Shakespeare’s play, Richard III. The guilt ridden king awakens from a nightmare and says, “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues and every tongue brings in a several tale and every tale condemns me for a villain (V, iii).”
Richard is reminiscent of Henry Scoby in Graham Green’s novel, The Heart of the Matter. After sleeping with Helen, Scoby’s conscience gives him no rest, so he enters the confessional to acknowledge his adultery. But instead of promising to never see her again, he leaves the “upturned coffin” a tortured soul.
How does one deal with sin and guilt after baptism?
Some people simply absolve themselves. Remember Amon Goethe in the 1993 film, “Schindler’s List”? He was the evil Nazi officer who shot Jews from his balcony. Once, while looking at himself in a mirror, he touched his reflection and said, “I pardon you.”
Then there’s the indelible image of Robert Duval’s, “Sonny” in the movie, “The Apostle.” After murdering his wife’s lover, he walks into a lake and baptizes himself for the forgiveness of sin.
How do we deal with toxic guilt? Man’s list of remedies is seemingly endless. When Caddy loses her virginity in Faulkner’s, The Sound and the Fury, she sprays herself with perfume to cover her transgression. In Ian McEwan’s, Atonement, Briony tells a life destroying lie and is saddled with tortuorous guilt. Throughout the movie she is seen washing her hands in a vain attempt at purgation.
Unfortunately, many Anglicans find themselves in similar situations. Locked in Bunyan’s dungeon of despair, bogged down in the slough of despond, they look a lot like Sisyphus as they muddle through life, stooped with a guilty conscience. Unfortunately, there is no River Styx to drink from to make them forget the troubling shame of divorce, sexual promiscuity, abortion, molestation, etc.,
But, there is hope. I John 1:7 comforts us with this promise, “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” And it’s this promise of cleansing that prompts us to pray each Lord’s Day, “Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood.”
Yet, the stain of sin sometimes lingers like a haunting spectre. This is why Thomas Cranmer, the first Archbishop of Canterbury wrote, “Let him that is a sinner go to one of them [priests of the church], let him acknowledge and confess his sin, and pray him that, according to God’s commandment, he will give him absolution.”
According to Cranmer, the Sacrament of Absolution is a means of assurance. In other words, it one of the ways God embraces His children and relieves them of their guilt.
Cranmer elaborates on this in his catechism. “God dothe not speake to us with a voyce soundynge out of heaven. But He hath given the kayes of the kingdom of heaven, and the authoritie to forgyve synne, to the ministers of the Churche. Wherefore let him that is a sinner go to one of them, let him knowledge and confesse his synne, and praye him that, according to God’s commandemente, he will gyve him absolution, and comforte him with the word of grace and forgiveness of his synnes. And when the minister dothe so, then I ought stedfastly to believe that my synnes are truly forgiven me in heaven (Quoted in, Advice for Those Who exercise the Ministry of Reconciliation Through Confession and Absolution; Being the Abbe Gaume’s Manual for Confessors).”
The consistent withness of the Anglican Reformers, whether Puritan or Anglo-Catholic is that Absolution was given by God to help His children deal with the nagging problem of guilt and shame. When Anglican Christians live their lives in the bossom of their Mother, and enjoy Her gifts, they rest with the blessed assurance that they have been cleansed and forgiven of their sins.
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This is why you call me “Fr. Doug”
By Fr. Doug | March 10, 2009
However, there is more here than first meets the eye. Taken at face value, Jesus’ warning against calling any man “father” would not only rule out calling a clergyman “father,” it would also prohibit us from using that title for earthly fathers, grandfathers, the early Church fathers, or even city fathers.
Christ appears to say that only one Person is ever to be called “father,” and that’s our Father in heaven. If we interpret the words of Jesus in this way and never read the rest of the Bible, we’re okay. But it’s when we begin reading the rest of the Scriptures that we see the title “father” is a Biblical title, ordained by God to refer to pastors.
Consider what the apostle Paul wrote. “I am not writing this to shame you, but to warn you, as my dear children. Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel.” I Corinthians 4:14-15
Without equivocation, St. Paul claims to be the spiritual father of the Corinthians. “Father Paul,” if you please. Furthermore, in I Corinthians 10:1, he refers to his spiritual ancestry as “our fathers.” St. Paul also used the term “father” to refer to dads. Colossians 3:21 “Fathers provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.”
Inspired by the Holy Spirit the Apostle Paul used the title “father” to refer to different types of people. Hence, he didn’t interpret Christ’s words to mean, “Only call God your Father.” Abraham and St. Luke understood this principle as well. Read Luke 16. When the rich man sees Abraham in heaven with Lazarus, he addresses him as “Father Abraham.” Abraham’s silence speaks volumes. He doesn’t reprimand the rich man by saying “God alone is to be called ‘father’” Instead, Abraham replies, “Son . . . ”
Since we do not believe the Scriptures contradict themselves, the following explanation is offered as a cogent, widely accepted interpretation of Christ’s words. First, weigh the context of Christ’s prohibition. It was the rabbis’ responsibility to preserve the tradition of Moses and to faithfully pass it on to the next generation. Unfortunately, the rabbis all too often added their “personal wisdom” to the sacred tradition. In turn the disciples of the rabbis (after becoming rabbis) did the same thing. Finally, the tradition of God became the tradition of men and the law of Moses was rendered null and void.
In Matthew 23 Jesus is speaking to these rabbis. In verse thirteen He says “Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.”
So who is Jesus talking about when He says, “Call no man father”? He’s telling people, “Do you see these hypocrites who insist on private interpretations of the Scripture, these men who add to God’s word? Don’t call them ‘father.”
So, when you address me as “Father Doug,” know that you are using a Biblical term that is freighted with meaning. Here a few more reasons you address me with this title.
1. I am a father to you when I administer the Sacrament of Baptism and you receive the new birth
2. I am a father to you when I nurture you in the Word
3. I am a father to you when you come to me in your sin and affliction and I administer the Sacrament of Unction, speak the words of absolution, and give you spiritual direction
4. I am a father to you when I walk with you through the valley of the shadow of death, when I pray for you, pray with you, visit you in the hospital, sing to you, administer last rites to you, and preside at your requiem.
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When God is Absent
By Fr. Doug | February 25, 2009
In 2007, Doubleday published Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. The book is comprised of Mother Teresa’s correspondence with her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years. In these letters, Mother Teresa tells us that for much of her life (50 yrs.) she felt abandoned by God.
The weight of His absence began when she answered the call to care for Calcutta’s poor and dying. Though cheery in public, she lived in a state of spiritual pain which she describes as “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture.” At one point she says that God’s silence drove her to doubt His existence.
“When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”
A cursory reading of Christian history reveals that Mother Teresa’s experience, her arid life and deep seated feelings of abandonment, is nothing new. In fact, it seems to be “the normal Christian life.” In the 16th century the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross coined the term “the dark night” of the soul. In the 18th century the esteemed St. Paul of the Cross struggled with spiritual depression for 45 years.
Again, this is nothing new. Job sat in the backwash of disappointment, looks to heaven and says, “Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a mortal sees (10:4)?” Job wants to know if God is as compassionate as He claims to be, or is He just another stone-faced idol in the Ancient Near-Eastern pantheon – silent, unmoved, unfeeling.
David, Israel’s dearest and best experienced God’s absence. In Psalm 89:46 he cries, “How long, O LORD? Will you hide yourself forever?”
And his lamentation reverberates in us. H.G. Wells wrote the following in his autobiography: “My father was always at cricket, and I think [mum] realised more and more acutely as the years dragged on. . . that Our Father and Our Lord, on whom she had counted, were also away – playing at their own sort of cricket in some remote quarter of the starry universe (Quoted in, Paul Vitz, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism).”
The icon of this age is a painting by Edvard Munch titled, “The Scream.” Set against a lurid, blood red sky, the piece depicts an agonized figure, standing on a bridge, face in hands, shrieking. It captures the angst we sometimes feel, as we plod through a world that appears to be abandoned by God.
The French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre labeled what we feel, “the silence of God.” The German Philosopher Karl Jaspers named it “the absence of God.”
There have been times in my life when I’ve wondered if God was indeed the “Clock-winder” of the Deists, or the tender Deity revealed in the Gospels. In 1989 the terrible events surrounding my father’s death began to unravel. During that bleak season I needed to know if He was as empathic as He claimed to be. Silence.
Then in 1992 those questions returned while I was driving to Houston to bury my oldest brother. It was cold in the car. I teetered on the precipice of a dark abyss, wondering how life could be so cruel, so unfair. When Danny was a child, circumstances beyond his control damaged him and he never recovered. And I wondered if God even cared for innocents who cry alone.
I have come to the conclusion that there are no easy answers. So, when the world becomes opaque and gray I remind myself that this is normal, this is what all of God’s saints have suffered. After the death of his beloved wife Joy, C.S. Lewis wrote the following in his thin memoir, A Grief Observed. “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”
During these seasons I often return to those familiar lines in the Screwtape Letters. “Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of God seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” Often, life is reduced to doing what is right.
But always, in every dark circumstance, I remember the lines from the Holy Communion liturgy. “ALMIGHTY and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee, for that thou dost vouchsafe to feed us, who have duly received these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ; and dost assure us thereby of thy favour and goodness towards us . . .
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The Garden: Man’s Undefined Longing
By Fr. Doug | February 18, 2009
“And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, “Woodstock”
2009 is the 100th birthday of Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. It’s a magical tale spun with eternal truths that resonate in the heart and mind. The story opens with a straightforward sentence: “The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.” Then one sentence later: “Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.”
Divine discontent and longing permeating all of creation? Yes, Graham’s story of muskrats and moles turns on an idea that is lifted from the Psalms of David and the Confessions of St. Augustine. It’s a theme that reverberates within all of us. And this is why The Wind and the Willows has reserved itself a permanent place in the Western Canon.
This yearning for the numinous, this undefined longing is part of our genome. It’s woven into our DNA, and it plays a major part in the human meta-narrative. The writings of John Lawson Stoddard illustrate this.
Stoddard was a public lecturer between 1879 and 1897. His travelogues of the primary European cities, life, and scenery were popular fare for those who longed to escape. In the preface of his published lectures he wrote that man’s love of travel does not arise from any “ordinary restlessness” but rather “springs originally from the universal craving of the soul for something different from its usual environment.”
This desire to transcend time and space, to ascend upward, worked its way into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby. On a fate filled autumn night the young Jay Gatsby sees that the blocks of the sidewalk on which he and Daisy stand “really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.”
But this is as far as the sages, authors and academicians can take us – to the foot of Jacob’s Ladder. And there we stand, stooped and crestfallen, because we are unable to ascend. Mole always falls in the river, Daisy always dies and man is always left empty.
What we need is for the author of transcendence to descend and make it possible for us to ascend. And this is what the Most Holy Trinity has done in the Incarnation and Sacraments. The command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil becomes, “Take and eat” of the fruit of Calvary’s tree.
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Suffering: A Sign of God’s Absence?
By Fr. Doug | February 4, 2009
Confession: Some things in the Bible etch my face with lines of pensive sadness. Like Deuteronomy 7 and God’s command to destroy the Gentiles. I know why He commanded it. The text is clear. Never the less, I grow quiet and grim, avert my eyes and sigh when I think of skewered children.
The same thing happens after counseling victims of sexual abuse. My mind plays a continuous loop of images – God watching, but choosing not to intervene, so a frightened little girl leaves the light on and sleeps on her stomach; a shame laden boy with tear streaked face sobs.
Never mind Darfur, Stalinist Russia, and Moulin Rouge. There’s enough evil and suffering right here at home.
But the fact of the matter is this: as a Christian, I am not permitted to despair. Why? Christians cannot exalt formulas of human reason and logic over and above the Scriptures. That means we are not allowed to exegete our circumstances to interpret God. Instead, we are summonsed to believe what the Bible and the Church teach, even when they affirm hard truths like, Ephesians 1:11, God “works all things after the counsel of his will” and Amos 3:6, “If a calamity occurs in a city has not the LORD done it?”
As Christians, we are duty-bound to embrace the example of Job who, after losing all ten of his children said, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD (1:21). And after being covered with boils he lamented, “Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity? (2:10).”
And herein lays the upshot of this post. Evil and suffering are rude reminders that on this side of heaven, we are not omniscient; we will never understand the mystery of evil, suffering and God’s providence. We will never know why He allows us to be haunted by dark specters. So, instead of spiraling downward in grief, we must hope in an inscrutable God, Who dwells in unapproachable light and impenetrable darkness, while remembering the following axioms from Scripture:
1. Christ is in the suffering. He suffers with you.
2. When evil and suffering encroach upon us, we must join the Biblical writers in deploring our idolatrous devotion to human wisdom and understanding.
3. During crises we must not obsess over why it happened. There are no easy answers.
4. When disaster strikes we must not assume that the victim deserved it. We must repent, prostrate ourselves and ask, “Why didn’t that happen to me?”
5. When trouble kicks down our door, we must say, “I deserve much worse than this. He is merciful in that He waited this long.”
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