A Positively Poetic Priest

The use of personal candles in the church always evokes a child-like wonder response in me. The way the fire lights up our faces  and the way we get quiet and all the special prayers. Christmas, the Great Easter Vigil, Candlemas,  there are not a large number of services in which we use personal candles, so they add a touch of special right away. The child-like wonder aspect of our relationship with God is so important and its one we tend to lose in the middle of our lives. Children are blessed with the ability to wonder, and it seems to return as one gets older in life,  spending more time in quiet and reflection, but the middle years - so full of hustle and bustle and too many concerns, we complete overwhelm the child inside of us losing our ability to feel wonder, and in doing so, lose some of our wonder at God. At least, that can happen. There are ways to retain and practice losing oneself in awe and wonder most of which requ...

The foreign country I have been to the most number of times,  and spent the most amount of time in,  is Turkey. When I was in college, I went to Turkey for a class, almost three weeks in Turkey, reading, touring, learning and experiencing a very different culture. The class was a joint religious studies and geology class. We studied Paul's travels around Asia Minor, went to some of the same places he went on his travels and learned about the geologic nature of Turkey and the volcanic areas. We learned about the cave churches in the early centuries and climbed up into some of them, marveling at the audacity and perseverance of the early Christians,  who would sneak out of town to climb up or down into caves  in order to meet together and worship God. They would carve the rooms out of the volcanic rock, carving spaces for community members to be buried and rooms to eat together and worship spaces. The geology and geography of the land mad...

"Taste and see, taste and see  the goodness of the Lord. Oh, taste and see, taste and see the goodness of the Lord, of the Lord." Most of us know this simple and beautiful hymn written by James E. Moore in the 1980's. In the Episcopal Church, I have most often seen it used as a Communion hymn, inviting us to experience the physical sensations of tasting and seeing Jesus in the bread and wine. So often we allow ourselves to relegate the spiritual life to our minds and hearts and forget to include the very physical nature of our lives. Yet, Jesus, as a man who sat and ate, who fished and drank with his followers is the very incarnation of God, inviting us into the intersection of the spiritual and the physical worlds. This weekend here in Franklin, we have a whole festival dedicated to tasting and seeing! The Taste of Franklin festival features the goodness of the offerings of area restaurants. We get to hear the goodness of area musicians in their sharing of their...

"It was the materiality of Christianity that fascinated me, the compelling story of incarnation in its grungiest details, the promise that words and flesh were deeply, deeply connected." (Sara Miles, Take this Bread, page 71) There is a well known theological work (at least, well known in some groups of people) called, The Scandal of the Incarnation. In this book, Hans Urs von Balthasar, a prolific Swiss theologian and Catholic priest, thematically arranges quotes from St. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon and martyr of the 3rd century. St. Irenaeus wrote passionately about the importance and scandalous nature of God becoming human. He was originally writing against some of the Gnostic views of the time which denigrated our material lives, our bodies, their needs, and their place in religion.  Its funny how something scandalous doesn't seem so upsetting after two thousand years of getting used to the idea. As David Lose, President of Lutheran Theological Seminary at Phil...

The Greek word is Gnosis. It means knowledge or wisdom. In the early church world, the Greek philosophers had great influence. People would walk and travel hundreds of miles to sit at the feet of some of the great philosophers. There were teachers who were all over the spectrum from those who believed that experience through the body was the only way to knowledge all the way to the other end where only internal knowledge from asceticism and denying the bodily experience was accepted. The Gnostic tradition was developing at the same time as the Christian tradition and in many times and places, the two coexisted and co-mingled. Many of the early ascetics of the Christian tradition were under the influence of some of the Gnostic ideas about needing to transcend the body in order to experience the divine. Some of those who were exiled from the church because they went as far as to say that Jesus was not a part of the Trinity, merely a human being who was teaching his disciples how to ...