Becoming a People of God's Mercy & Delight, Part 2

Obstacles to Experiencing God’s Delight

We are made for delight. But our sinfulness, brokenness, and weakness prevent us from seeing or entering into that delight, delighting in God, in his creation, or in other persons created in God’s image. I know I am not all that delightful much of the time. And I do not always think about, talk about, or treat others with mercy and delight.

Parable of the Lost Chalice

There was once a beautiful, priceless silver chalice engraved with gold and decorated with precious gems. It was an invaluable and cherished sacred vessel in a medieval cathedral. It bore the Blessed Sacrament of Communion Wine. But the cathedral was raided by Vikings and the chalice was carried off. The Viking who stole it buried it with other plunder intending to return to claim it another day. And it was lost. Centuries later when it was discovered, the chalice was crushed by the weight of the ground in which it was buried. It was tarnished and encrusted with dirt and rust. It was scratched and dented. It was missing some of the gems.

But the one who uncovered it recognized its worth. He knew it was an object of inherent beauty. And he set about repairing and restoring it.

The world is that chalice. Each of us is that chalice.

We are in great need of repair and restoration. We need transfiguration. We cannot fix ourselves. But the One who made us knows our worth and our inherent beauty. That One delights in and cherishes us. God desires to redeem, repair, and restore us.

We need mercy

We are finite, fragile, fallible, and fearful. We bruise, we break, we bleed. We are sinful and broken and weak. Too often we fail to see or share God’s mercy and delight. Rather than renouncing “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God” (Holy Baptism, Book of Common Prayer, p. 302), we turn away or, worse, we collaborate with those powers. We contribute to the damaging of the chalice that is the world. And the chalice that is other people. And the chalice that is ourselves. Rather than renouncing “all sinful desires that draw us from the love of God”(Holy Baptism, Book of Common Prayer, p. 302), we indulge, rationalize, or excuse them. We contribute to the damaging of the chalice that we, ourselves, are meant to be. God created us for delight. God created us to be sacramental bearers the Wine of Communion with God and one another. But, we are bent out of shape. We are a mess and we have made a mess of the world.

Our world needs mercy. We need mercy. Thanks be to God, in sending Jesus and giving the Holy Spirit, God has lavished his mercy upon us. Like a fine art restorer, God desires to clean the chalice and bend it back into shape, restoring it to its original beauty.

Three Aspects of Mercy

Mercy is sometimes reduced to forgiveness – just maybe God will not punish us as we deserve. Forgiveness is indeed a fundamental aspect of mercy. Thank God. But it is about more than that.

Psalm 103 points out three aspects of mercy.

1. God knows us

In Psalm 103:14 we read, “For he himself knows whereof we are made; he remembers that we are but dust.” God pays attention to us knows us as we are. We see this even more clearly in the incarnation.

In Jesus, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15)

One aspect of mercy is deep understanding, empathy, and solidarity. Jesus demonstrates that mercy as Immanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23).  The Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14). God knows us, understands our weakness. God knows whereof we are made and is patient with us.

If we come to know that, we can become merciful, too. We can seek to know each other and be patient with one another and ourselves.

2. God forgives us

“He forgives all your sins.” (Psalm 103:3)

We know we need forgiveness. We know we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We know we have contributed to the denting of the chalice. Forgiveneness is what God offers. In Jesus, “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Colossians 1:13-14)

If we have received the mercy of God’s forgiveness, we can forgive as the Lord has forgiven us.

3. God heals us

In Psalm 103:3 we also hear that God “heals all your infirmities.” Each of us is broken in one way or another. We are the chalice, smashed and lost. If we are honest we know that each of us is among the walking wounded. We don’t have to look hard to see that brokenness in our own families and among our friends. And the world is broken by war and hatred, greed and sorrow.

One of the things Jesus was about more than anything else was healing. “Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.” (Matthew 9:35)

That healing includes our transformation, indeed, our transfiguration.

That healing includes reconciliation and the repair of broken relationships.

Toward the end of the Book of Revelation we hear the promise of a greater healing, “Through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2). The whole world is destined for healing and transfiguration.

As we experience the mercy of God’s healing we can be a healing and reconciling presence to those we encounter and in the world. We can begin now to live in light of what we believe the end will be.

Becoming a People of God’s Mercy and Delight

We are meant to delight in what God delights in and to extend mercy to others, to be agents of God’s mercy and delight in a world hungry and thirsty for both. Our Lord commanded us to “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” (Luke 6:36)

But, we are neglectful, distractible, and disobedient. Because we do not attend to God’s mercy and delight, we are restless, anxious, bored, angry, impatient, contentious, lacking inner peace, etc. And we find it hard to delight in one another or to extend mercy to one another.

The Church is meant to be communities of people who see each other with the eyes of

God, who welcome each other with mercy and delight. As the body of Christ we are called to be a people of God’s mercy and delight in the way of Jesus.

How do we become this kind of people? We start by repenting and calling on the Holy Spirit to work transformation on us. We cannot fix ourselves. But we can attend more seriously to the things in our own hearts and lives that get in the way of experiencing more of God’s delight, the things in our own hearts and lives that keep us from delighting in God, in God’s creation, and in one another.

We can attend more seriously to the things in our own hearts and lives that get in the way of experiencing more of God’s mercy and channeling that mercy to the world around us.

We need to lighten up and get serious. We can lighten up because God has already lavished his grace – his mercy and delight – on us. There is nothing we have to prove. We are free. You are free. So, lighten up.

But we also need to get serious. Each of us is a chalice far from being restored. God promises to transform and transfigure us – but, with our cooperation. Let’s get serious about cooperating in God’s work to restore us to beings of mercy and delight. Let’s get serious about cooperating in God’s work to restore God’s creation. That will require some effort on our part.

We cannot be complacent. We cannot be self-indulgent. We need to learn self-control. We need to learn and relearn to pay attention to the state of our hearts. We need to pay attention to how and whether we engage other people with mercy and delight. .And we need to pay less attention to the things that distract us from attending to God’s mercy and delight, the things that distract us from Jesus.

Being people of mercy and delight is not an easy or sentimental thing. It is actually a call to deny ourselves and take up the cross. It is about protracted and difficult, sometimes uncomfortable transformations. The chalice does not necessarily appreciate being bent back into shape, cleaned, and restored. Julian of Norwich heard Jesus say,

“I shall completely break down in you your empty affections and your vicious pride, and then I shall gather you and make you meek and mild and holy through union with me.”

Being people of mercy and delight will mean daring to follow Jesus into the messy

neediness of others. Rowan Williams wrote,

“Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the

neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering, defencelessly alongside those in

need. If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led

towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.”

(Being Christian)

To be continued . . .

Over the next weeks, I will be posting a brief meditation, poem, or quote on the theme of Delight on Mondays and on Mercy on Fridays. 

Previous: Becoming A People of God's Mercy & Delight, Part 1 – Delight

Becoming a People of God's Mercy & Delight, Part 1

Grace first and last

For Christians,

The first word is grace

The last word is grace

And every day along the way is grace, grace, grace

Grace is the free gift of God. This includes the many gifts of creation and the gifts each of us has. But, the ultimate gift of God is the gift of God’s own self which he bestows upon us freely and lavishly.

He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. (Ephesians 1:5-8)

I suggest there are two movements to God’s grace – Mercy and Delight. A basic Christian discipline is learning to pay closer attention to God’s mercy and delight. We are invited to be transformed by God’s mercy and delight. We are called to become ever better channels of that mercy and delight to this sin-sick, suffering world. As the body of Christ, the Church is to be a people of God’s mercy and delight.

At the 2015 Convention of the Diocese of Fond du Lac, I called on the diocese to become a people of God’s mercy and delight. Over the next weeks I want to explain more of what I think that means. I’ll begin with a bit about delight.

Delight

The Hebrew word most often translated “delight” is chephets, the root meaning of which is “to bend toward.”

Delight = Love + Joy + Attention. And that is what we have received from God through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit.

God delights in creation

Creation itself is grace – the free gift of God.

When God finished creating this world, he saw that it was good, tov in Hebrew. Tov can also be translated "beautiful." God delights in the beauty of his creation and God delights in each of human being created in his image. One possible meaning of the Garden of Eden is the “Garden of Delight.”

God delights in us

In the lesson we heard from Proverbs 8, the Wisdom of God – prefiguring Jesus – proclaims, “[At creation] I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”

Julian of Norwich, one of the Church’s great theologians of God’s mercy and delight declared, “For we are his bliss, because he endlessly delights in us; and so with his grace shall we delight in him.”

Pay attention to that. Do you believe it? God delights in the human race. God delights in you.

The Incarnation confirms God’s delight in his material creation and in each of us as that part of creation created in God’s image. In Jesus Christ God has bent toward us in cherishing, attentive love – in delight.

We are made to delight in God

“Taste and see that the LORD is good; happy are they who trust in him!” (Psalm 34:8)

“Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:5)

We are made to delight in God’s good creation.

Creation is sacramental – it is always and everywhere a potential encounter with God’s goodness

“The whole earth is full of His glory." (Isaiah 6:3)

“Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving.” (1 Timothy 4:4)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

 It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

– Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur

Are we paying attention to God’s delightful creation? Do we delight in it? Or are we too busy, too distracted?

We are made to delight in one another as images of God

“God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27)

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.” (Psalm 8:4-5)

Each human being, created in God’s image and for whom Christ died, is sacramental – an icon of God right in from of us. Are we paying attention? In his essay, The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis wrote, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way.”

Can we learn to delight in other people the way we delight to receive the sacrament of bread and wine? Are we paying reverent attention to the holy object that is every other person?

Perhaps we can even delight in ourselves – delighting in the delight God has in us as holy images of God.

But . . .

This all sounds wonderful. And it is. Christians rejoice in the truth of it. But, we all also know that the reality of the world and human history are often much less than delightful. In is difficult to find the delightful in some people. And we each know that there is much about ourselves that is less than delightful. Though all of creation is a gift of grace and inherently delightful, there is also deep and radical brokenness and rebellion. We need mercy.

Next: Becoming A People of God's Mercy & Delight, Part 2 - Mercy

On Not Bearing False Witness

"If Luther’s interpretation is correct, the eighth commandment is an epistemic principle: it has to do with figuring out when we have found the truth about our neighbor. When it comes to the assessment of our neighbor’s words and deeds, we should ‘find ways of excusing him, speak well of him and make the best of everything’ – or as it is often rendered, ‘put the best construction on everything (Small Catechism I.16). This is not just a rule of etiquette. We cannot keep this commandment by first discovering what we suppose to be the hard truth about another’s words and deeds, and then politely keeping quiet about, or softening up the rough edges. The commandment not to bear false witness surely cannot be an injunction to dissemble. Rather, obedience to this commandment has to enter into our very effort to discern the truth about our neighbor in the first place; we cannot suppose that we have got the truth about our neighbor’s words and deeds until we are sure we have put the best possible construction on them. In just this sense, presumably, the apostle Paul enjoins us to speak the truth in love, and warns against ‘evil talk,’ namely that which fails to build up and give grace to those who hear (Ephesians 4:15, 29). If we sense a conflict between what we want to say about our neighbor and that kindness and tenderness of heart without which we grieve the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 4:30, 32) we have a sure sign that we have so far failed to find the truth, and have fastened onto falsehoods of our own invention."

-- Bruce Marshall, quoted by Eugene Rogers in Sexuality and the Christian Body, p. 33

A Walk on the Farm

I walked on the farm again on Saturday. I wrote the following four years ago. I decided to share it again:

I walked on the farm this morning. It is the only home I knew growing up. It remained my father’s home until he died five years ago. Now it belongs to my sister, my two brothers, and me. It is a sort of pilgrimage site for me. It contains layers of memories.

We rent the land to a young farmer who rented it from my father after he retired. That farmer bought and lives on the farm a mile or so to the east where my dad grew up and where my grandparents lived until Grandma died 12 years ago.

I start back the lane, a cornfield on my left and soy beans on my bright, serenaded by red-winged black birds.

I pass by the spot where a big walnut tree used to stand. I remember the purply black stains handling the light yellow-green husks would leave on my hands.

A rabbit hops across the lane a few yards ahead of me.

At the dog-leg in the lane I turn left then right and continue back the lane, now with a cornfield on my right. On my left is the solid green wall of the Huckleberry Marsh where we used to pick the berries for which it was named. It is also the place where, as a boy, I imagined exploring a prehistoric swamp. And where I hunted frogs.

I can hear the huu huu grunt of a deer but cannot see him.

I cross under the electric lines and the great steel tower that was built beside the lane when I was a kid. My father had offered to pay to have them go around our farm, but imminent domain won out and so an electric buzz drowns out most natural sounds for a bit.

Passing beyond the Huckleberry Marsh I have a field of corn on my left. As I approach what is now the end of the lane, a kite or falcon skims the top of the corn and flies to the electrical tower behind me.

I stop for a bit where the lane ends. A couple of monarch butterflies dance among a stand of trees on my left. Ahead and to the right is the Muck Field planted in soy beans. Across the muck field, to the right, is Windmill Hill. The windmill is long gone, but I remember it. The lane picks up at the hill and enters the Back Woods.

Straight ahead, at the end of the field, is Christmas Tree Hill. When my dad first bought the farm, he planted some pine trees there. When I was little we went back to this hill to select our Christmas trees. I remember the tree dragging behind the tractor leaving a pine-swept trail in the snow.

Between the hills a bluish mist blankets the soy beans and the tall grass beyond.

At the far left corner of the field I see a doe. After watching her for some time, I notice a buck almost straight ahead at the foot of Christmas Tree Hill near where the Gravel Pit used to be – now a grass-covered scoop in the hill. He must be the one I heard grunting earlier. I head in that direction, walking between the rows of soy beans. I get a little closer to the buck and stop. We stare at each other for a while. Then he bounds up the hill and disappears among the trees. But I can hear him snorting and stamping for a while longer.

Continuing to the scoop that was the gravel pit I walk up the hill. I hear the deep chatter of squirrels and see one in a tree to my left and another in an oak tree to my right. I walk to the base of the oak, notice the entry to a ground hog den at its base, and look up at the loquacious squirrel. He scolds me for a while and then climbs further up the tree.

I come down the hill and head into the field between Christmas Tree Hill and the Back Woods. The soy beans end where I suppose the field has become too wet to plant. There is nothing but tall grass soaked with dew. I head into it and am soon soaked myself up to my hips. I try to avoid the occasional nettle plant. Despite my caution I begin to feel a familiar sting on the outside of my left calf where I must have brushed a nettle.

At the end of this field I reach the Muskrat Pond. Though it might not be particularly ‘PC’ I have fond memories of trapping the eponymous water rodents to sell to a furrier for spending money when I was a teenager. The pond is full of lily pads – more than I remember.

There is a scar on the side of my left hand from a barbed wire incident near here. This place has marked me in more ways than one.

I turn right and head into the Back Woods. It is good to get out of the wet grass, but my hiking boots and socks continue to squish as I walk on the brown carpet of last year’s leaves.

Now I am home. These trees were – are – my friends. This was the refuge of a young, day-dreamy introvert.

Here is where extended family and friends would hunt mushrooms each spring. Soaked in brine, rolled in a soda cracker batter and fried in large batches, they tasted simultaneously wild, earthy, and homey.

Walking on I see a hickory tree that, about twenty feet up the trunk, is split – I suppose by lightning. One half rests on the ground, its leaves still green. The other half is cradled in the branches of neighboring trees.

A little further on there is an old rotting, sawed-off stump. I am filled with memories. My father, who owned a sawmill along with the farm, would occasionally cull lumber-worthy trees from these woods. I am flooded with memories of the sound of whining chainsaws and crashing timber and the smell of sawdust. And the biting cold of frozen steel log chains, leading to numb fingers and toes when the logging happened in winter.

I walk on and come upon an arrow on the ground. It has not been here long. Perhaps last fall’s hunting season? The three-bladed tip is slightly rusted, but still looks deadly. It evidently missed its target. Did that deer live to see another day? I take the arrow with me.

I find the lane and continue to walk through the woods, soaking up the sights and sounds and smells. I come out of the woods at the top of Wind Mill Hill. And there in the middle of the muck field is another doe prancing through the soy beans. She meets up with another and together they gracefully bound away from me across the field, waving their white-flag tails until they disappear into some trees.

Crossing the muck field I head back up the lane, grasshoppers, dragonflies, and little white butterflies dancing in front of my feet now and again as I walk.

Nostalgia and contentment mingle as I make my way back. Much has changed. I have changed. But this place endures. And being here grounds me and nourishes my spirit like nowhere else. In the homogenized, contextless space that is much of our contemporary world where we are reduced to tourists and consumers, I am aware of the gift it is to have such a sense of place. And I am grateful.

Michael Ramsey: Fret not, only believe

In a recent post I listed some of my Anglican mentors. I have subsequently had reason to revisit some of the writing of one of them. I came across something I think is worth sharing:

The Christian gospel is largely concerned with the issue of fretting and not fretting. We live in a fretting world, and the gospel can be paraphrased "fret not, only believe".

. . .

There is certainly much to fret about. In the world there are ugly and frightening spectres; the contrasts of affluence and poverty; racial conflict mounting higher; the drift of the Western democracies into spiritual aimlessness. Who would not fret with these spectres at the door? Not only the world but the Church as an institution makes you fret. Many, I know, find it difficult to serve it with happy contentment. Sometimes it frets by its old-fashionedness, its inability to reform itself, its shirking of challenging issues. And sometimes it frets in the opposite way: by a seeming loss of historic values, by a playing down of the supernatural, by a concern to be "with it". If we are ourselves conceited, we fret about what others in the Church are doing or not doing in a "we and they" superiority; if we are humble, we include ourselves within the criticism. In either case, we may fret; and a kind of nervous fretting can bedevil the Church's life. So the world may fret you, the Church may fret you, and there will be the frettings of a more personal kind always round the corner. Tiredness, monotony, staleness, the small results which seem to come from immense expenditure of labour. So, all in all, there will be times when you find yourself saying, "Who will show us any good?"

So a mist comes to hide from your awareness some of the realities in which you believe: sin and judgement, mercy and joy. The answer is drawn from the scriptures, from our divine Lord, from the lives of the saints, and from your own experience as a Christian. The answer is a deep, sparkling well of truth, which is Christ himself, and from it our fears are washed away and our thirsty spirits are refreshed.

– Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today

A Response to the Orlando Shooting

Again this past weekend we have been confronted with the evil and violence of human brokenness and sin as 49 people were killed and 53 injured by a gunman at an Orlando nightclub. According to those who knew him, the shooter appears to have been a troubled, angry man prone to violence. He was also given to angry anti-gay rhetoric. And he expressed a somewhat confused affinity for groups espousing violent versions of Islam.

There is no doubt this was a calculated terrorist attack. The groups with whom the attacker verbally aligned himself are evil perversions of Islam specializing in terror. While these groups represent a strain of "extremist" Islam, we need to be clear that they do not represent all of Islam or the majority Muslims.  And we need to be wary of responding to their violent rejection of all who differ with them with a similar rejection of those with whom we differ. We must counter their ideology and theology of death with an ideology and theology of life and peace (Romans 8:6).

There is also no doubt that it was not a random attack. It was a targeted attack against gay and lesbian people – people who are all too often the targets of physical violence and violent, disdainful rhetoric. We can give thanks that another attack apparently targeting a Gay Pride parade in Los Angeles was thwarted by police. But, we also need to recognize that the Orlando shooter did not need inspiration from foreign terrorists to conclude that the presence of gays and lesbians is somehow an egregious moral threat. Rhetoric like that is common enough in America – and in American churches. We need to find better ways to talk about and to one another, regardless of our convictions about human sexuality.

I suggest that the best way to respond to the Orlando shooting is with the basic Christian disciplines of hope, love, and peace.

Hope. If we have died with Christ in baptism with the promise of sharing in his resurrection, we have a hope stronger than life or death or anything in between. With St. Paul, we can live convinced that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). With that assurance, we can dare to live without fear, including without fear of those who are different from us or with whom we disagree.

Love. Free from fear, we are free to learn to love. The love Christians are called to practice is not a sentimental feeling, but a determination to die to self in order to make space for the other. It is the way of the cross that calls us to love even our enemies and those who wish us harm. And it is a love that challenges us to consider where we have hurt or offended others. Love seeks more to understand than to be understood. Love demands that we take care how we carry others in our hearts and on our tongues. How we think and talk to or about one another matters (Matthew 12:36; cf. Matthew 5:22, James 3:2-9, 1 John 4:20)

Peace. As with love, there is no sentimentality in following the way of the Prince of Peace – it is the clear-eyed determination to bless rather than curse, to seek peace and pursue it (Psalm 34:13-14 & 1 Peter 3:8-22), and to not be conformed to this world, but transformed into a people who return good for evil (Romans 12). There have been mass killings in the United States inspired by violent strains of Islam. But, there have been more that had nothing to do with Islam or any foreign terrorist group. We need to come to terms with the violence of our society. We need to reconsider our own ready embrace of violence as a solution and the idea that if we all just armed ourselves more we would be safe. That is not the way of Jesus.

Hope, love, and peace are basic disciplines of the way of Jesus. Living lives of deep hope, love, and peace is our best and most faithful response to the violence and hate that represent conformity to this world – from without and from within. And they will prompt us to take action accordingly.

Why Anglican/Episcopalian? Mentors

My understanding of God, the world, and humanity has been formed and my imagination – which is another way of saying my capacity for faith, love, and wonder – has been shaped and expanded by several representatives of the Anglican way:

C. S.  Lewis
Charles Williams (friend of C. S. Lewis)

Dorothy Sayers (greatly influenced by C. Williams and a friend of Lewis)

Charles Gore ( an influence on Charles Williams)
Austin Farrer (theologian who preached at Lewis' funeral)

Evelyn Underhill

William Temple

E. L. Mascall

Martin Thornton

Madeleine L'Engle

Michael Ramsey

N. T. Wright

Rowan Williams

Other contemporary Anglican theologians I have read appreciatively are John Milbank, Sarah Coakley, Kathryn Tanner, and Mark McIntosh. And two contemporary converts to the Episcopal Church, Stanley Hauerwas and Miroslav Volf.

To that list of 20th century authors I would add these classic Anglican worthies:

Richard Hooker

Lancelot Andrewes

John Donne

George Herbert

Jeremy Taylor

Thomas Traherne

F. D. Maurice

Phillips Brooks

From even further back (before the break with the Roman Catholic Church) I have been influenced by Julian of Norwich.

I am inspired and informed by representatives from other traditions – Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Reformed, Lutheran, etc. – but I have found myself most at home with these.

I have also been influenced by more personal mentors – Fr. Mark Dyer of Christ Church, Hamilton, MA (later Bishop Dyer of the Diocese of Bethlehem and, still later, professor at Virginia Seminary while I as a student there) and Fr. Steve Ellis of St. Anne, Stockton, CA who helped restore my faith and instructed me toward confirmation in the Episcopal Church

They are in many ways a disparate group of folk who would not agree with each other on everything if could magically gather them together in one room. But, they share some common traits.

Each of them exhibits a commitment to a vision of Christian faith I've identified elsewhere in a series of blog posts, Anglicanism is . . .

One way or another reading each of these authors evokes Christmas for me which is one of my basic tests for whether or not someone is onto something. They bear witness to the hope that now that Christmas has arrived in the coming of Jesus Christ there is the promise that we might be overcome by Christmas any time, any place, even in the midst of whatever winters we endure as we await the final Advent of the King. 

There is more to this sense of Christmas. There is in the writing of each an emphasis on the centrality of the Incarnation. The Incarnation, of course, includes the way of the cross and the crucifixion. But the Incarnation has rich purpose, meaning, and wonder in itself.

To varying degrees most of these mentors also bear witness to the goodness of being human in the midst of the splendor of God's good creation. As Richard Hooker wrote, "All things are of God (and only sin is not) have God in them and he them in himself likewise." There is goodness and beauty in humans and the all creation because God who created it all is Good and Beautiful.

I [Wisdom – traditionally identified with the Word who became flesh in Jesus] was daily [God’s] delight,

rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the human race.

(Proverbs 8:30-31)

Consequently, they tend to hold to a sacramental appreciation of all created reality as having the potential of mediating the divine Presence.

At the same time, none of them is bashful about naming the reality of human sin and the very real sinfulness and brokenness in the world that corrupts the goodness of creation. They write of the need for atonement, redemption, and the hope of restoration.

Thus, in each is a serious engagement with spiritual disciplines that make for sanctification in the context of God's grace revealed in Jesus Christ.

Each is more or less an exponent of what Evelyn Underhill called 'practical mysticism':

“Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man is here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels of the world. Thus he may become aware of the universe that the spiritual artist is always trying to disclose to the race. This amount of mystical perception–this 'ordinary contemplation', as the specialist call it–is possible to all men: without it, they are not wholly alive. It is a natural human activity.”

Nearly all of them represent a high church, catholic Anglican way of seeing things that draws abundantly from the deep well of Christian thought, practice, and worship.

For the most part they each express an expansive orthodoxy – solidly orthodox with an appreciative engagement with non-Christian ways of thinking and being (which is not the same thing as unChristian ways of thinking and being, which they are not shy about challenging both within and without the Church).

Each also holds to a typically Anglican reticence which is wary of claiming to know overmuch about God or God's ways. They accept that God has been revealed in Jesus Christ and the scriptures that bear witness to him, but each retains a posture of humility and awe in the presence of the untamed, wild God at the heart of it all who is, as Lewis says of Aslan, "Good, but not safe."

No doubt we could name other common themes, but these are the ones that occur to me at the moment. In any event, their themes and presentation of Christian faith resonate deeply and inspire me. I am an Anglican and Episcopalian partly because of these  and other 'Glorious Companions'.