Beginning of this Blog

This blog was inspired (somewhat) by another blog. Writing to that blogger, I found myself encouraged to do as he was doing, and so here we are. The introduction I provided to him serves well to introduce this blog, so here 'tis ...

Dear Jonathan,

Thanks for the reply. Did I, perhaps, jog you into resuming the blog? I notice that you've made another entry.

As I said, I found your blog by searching around for blogs on liturgy and theology. So far, I haven't located exactly what I'm looking for, and so I may have to create such a thing myself. It could just be that I'm daffy on the angle I'm considering (it's been done before -- my being daffy, that is). But everything I've looked at so far is ... well, none of it is really on the mark.

I've delved into Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy, and several of Alexander Schmemann's works. But, both of these guys (and, I suspect, everyone else like them), because they are writing out of a communion that has long been sacramental/liturgical in its spirituality, they are very much like the fellow Chesteron describes in Orthodoxy:

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen." The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

I've cited this passage of Chesterton to correspondents with respect to a number of different notions, and it "fits" here with respect to the efficacy, the utility, the sheer wholesomeness of liturgy. People like Schmemann and Dix and so many others within the stream of sacramental/liturgical Christianity know this about liturgy. The problem is that they know it so well that they do not, evidently for the reasons Chesterton cites, really give an account of it.

So, along comes a Philistine like myself, called to faith in Christ within the anti-sacramental, anti-liturgical deserts inhabited by the 20th Century American spiritual great-grand-sons of Ulrich Zwingli. By the purest grace of God I figure out that my spiritual canvass has large areas where there seems to be room for color and shapes, which are nevertheless blank. I notice that those colors and shapes are not expounded in the "paint-your-spiritual-life-by-numbers" text I inherited from my Zwinglian fathers in the faith. Instead, they seem to say that my spiritual canvas will be all the better for these blank areas.

Curious, nevertheless, I look at Christians in other schools and find their canvases a riot of color and shapes just where mine are blank, and I suppose that their text in spiritual painting has some chapters that mine is missing. So, I switch schools; I enter the painting class where others' canvases are wildly and richly colored. I join the class without a text, but I'm eager to learn what may be learned by copying. We learn to speak this way, no? May we not also learn to paint this way?

Well, yes we can, after a fashion: slowly, and sometimes even with a certain flair. But, I want to know why it should be done just so; moreover, I want to know how the "just so" stuff came about, and why it "works" so well. But, when I borrow my new brother-painters' texts, I don't find any chapters in them explaining any of this.

Aarrrrgghhhh!

I suspect that if I "succeed" in finding what I seek, I'll be like that fellow Chesterton mentions, the one who is partially convinced of something because "he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it." I hope I can also reach the place where I will find that "everything proves it" -- that is, that everything demonstrates, supports, and validates the sacramental dynamics of spiritual life as one sees it in the lives of Biblical and extra-Biblical saints.

And, I hope I never reach the place where I can no longer expound, or teach, or explain what I am seeking right now.

Whether a blog will provide me a medium for working through some of this remains to be seen. I'll give it a go, and I hope I may find some happy chaps to spur me on with their criticism, questions, and contributions. I'm not eager to reinvent any wheels that are already running along quite nicely. Perhaps by attempting to invent one, I may be discovered by someone who will say, "Here, now, you blithering dolt! What you're doing is already done very well over there. Go take a look."

For the goal I seek, I'll take this latter option gladly should I ever encounter it.

Warm regards in Him,

Brother Quotidian