Diagnosis: Prayer hurt heart patients

This is pretty funny. Patients who were prayed for without knowing it had similar outcomes to those who didn't get prayed for, and those who knew they were being prayed for did worst of all. (This certainly explains a couple of my exam grades in college, Grandma.) Maybe now people will quit studying prayer. It bugs me every time they announce another study that shows that prayer helped people recover from this or that. Oh, well, I wasn't praying for his surgery before, but this changes everything? Studies that thinly hide attempts to prove various matters of faith only contribute to the popular attitude among intellectuals that believers must be dogmatists or naive, and unfortunately, this outcome dresses that stigma up in poetic justice. I sense a certain giggle in the voice of this editorial in the American Heart Journal, where the study was published: they said researchers "must be vigilant in asking the question of whether a well-intentioned, loving, heartfelt healing prayer might inadvertently harm or kill vulnerable patients in certain circumstances."
 

Dorothy Day's parish could close

The parish where Dorothy Day worshipped, the Jesuit-run Church of the Nativity in New York, is on the list of parishes tapped by the archdiocese to close. I was thinking about whether Dorothy Day would be sad about this. From reading her biography, I have the sense that she accepted the necessary loss of physical space, even those she had worked very hard for--the Catholic Workers' self-sustaining farm and the beach house where she raised her daughter and which eventually passed into the CW community. It's never easy to say goodbye to a beloved place, but I think the closing of a parish community--and the services it provides in the East Village--would have troubled her more.

On the other hand, Dorothy Day deeply loved the sacraments, and would not have accepted the division we often see between service-minded Catholics and pious ones. The Catholic Worker house where she lived, Maryhouse, is still active in the neighborhood, but where will they worship now?

I'm trying to decide whether it would be fitting, in her honor, to send the Church of the Nativity something in hopes they can stay open, or whether I should just send it to Maryhouse, who will probably end up ministering to Nativity's needy if it closes. At any rate, I found both their addresses:

Church of the Nativity
44 2nd Ave
New York, NY 10003
(212) 674-8590

Maryhouse
55 East Third Street,
New York, NY 10003
Tel: 212-777-9617

I Don't Wanna Read the Hebrew Bible

One of the great things about the class I'm taking on Biblical spirituality is that I'm reading much of the Bible I haven't spent much time with before. One of the less appealing things about it is the part about reading much of the Bible I haven't spent much time with before. There's a reason they publish volumes with just the New Testament and Psalms--Jesus' teachings and the prayers he grew up with are transparently relevant and full of solace. If you're having a tough time, it's pretty easy to flip through the Psalms or the Gospels and find some comfort in the fact that God promises to lift you from despair, or just to blow off your feelings in the course of meditating on how great God is.

The Pentateuch and the Prophets, in contrast, are full of terrible things happening to the Israelites, dire imprecations against their enemies, God imposing arcane rules, violence, despair, and genealogy. Individual stories are too long to fit the lectionary or too thorny to fit in a picture book (which explains why there are names I've never heard before) and, toughest of all, they don't have clear morals. It's like, okay, a bad thing happened to that person. Why? God met with Moses and was about to kill him. Huh? I thought God liked Moses. See, that's the great thing about the Gospel parables--sometimes their points are stated right in there, and if not, you've heard them in church or in cliche so often that you know what you're in for. It's easy to see why a person trying to add some Bible to her spirituality would stick to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and David.

But that would be cheating, and Theologienne is deeply suspicious of anything that's too easy. Some folks hold that the only way to make the Bible liberative is to toss out parts of it, but I disagree. To say that any part of the Bible can't reveal some aspect of God's will to us shows a failure of imagination, and by that I mean not making stuff up but deep openness to the Holy Spirit, willingness to let your mind move in ways it hasn't traveled before. It's a good challenge to think about what meaning the saddest stories in the Bible had for those who wrote them down and what hope they can carry for us today. You might need to know the context and you might find it buried in tension, but if you trust that God wants us to hope, the good word has to be in there somewhere.

Tomorrow, my reflection on Lamentations . . .

Green beer flows, religious freedom triumphs

So if you're like me, you daren't let the word "holiday" cross your lips lest Bill Donohue and his ilk leap out and start whacking you with an Advent wreath, a copy of Left Behind or something even more holy. But where is the president of the Catholic League when the only saint's day most Americans celebrate (well, Valentine's, okay, but at least that's about love) is incarnated as Mardi Gras for cold weather? Getting all stoked about how he's allowed to eat meat on Friday. Could we change the name to Freedom from Snakes Day and see if we can get a rise out of anybody? And why does the media always assume everybody's going to be fascinated by the St. Pat's Lenten exemption? Do they just want to help justice be done by getting the good word out to Catholics? Anyway, go mairir is go gathair!

Falling in love with God this Lent

In college a friend of mine quit a club with the simple excuse that
he'd gotten engaged. Some of us thought this was pretty funny at the
time, but there is logic to it. Sometimes it takes all your mental
energy to be in love, and all the boring business of everyday life
that interferes with being in love just falls away. In Lent, by
cutting down on some of the more useless elements of life's business,
we give ourselves a chance to recapture or find for the first time a
frisson of Divine love, to remember what it feels like to be in deep
mutual love with God.

Whatever you're doing for Lent, use it so that God has a chance to
reach you. If you're giving up TV, don't pick up a new hobby: find
time for silence or manual work so that God can speak. If it's a food,
that's (at least) three times a day you'll be reminded that God
affects your daily life. What else can you do with that knowledge?

All the space we could possibly make for God by eliminating TV or
iPods or by praying more would make no difference if God didn't reach
out. But the truth is that God is constantly reaching out to us, not
just during Lent; calling, sending flowers and divine text messages (I
<3 U n U R MINE.) We are too good at shutting ourselves off from God's
call, at distracting ourselves so that no insight can slip through, at
talking ourselves into the ideas of our culture and out of God's
genius plans for us. We know what we're about: deep down we know that
falling in love with God is a scary proposition. Better to fill our
ears with buzz and our days with tasks than to leave ourselves open to
the kind of enormous change our enormous God could demand.

But if we keep ourselves shut off from God's gentle nudge, we also
shut out the courage and energy and faith that God offers along with
those enormous, scary plans. And so we force ourselves to open, even
if it's just a chink in the armor, because we know God can shine great
light through a tiny crack. We risk and we receive, and we allow
ourselves to fall in love.

Adam and Eve is about humanity, not gender

This is my biblical spirituality class reflection from last week (wow, could I possibly have a backlog of material?) on Genesis 2-3.

In her book, which we use in class, my professor understood this creation story as a description of ideal mutuality and equality between man and woman. We’ve all grown up learning that the story of Adam and Eve and the rib is an affirmation of marriage and of married sexuality. This is an important angle, especially given the history of our faith to disproportionately value asceticism and celibacy, a prejudice that survives in the canonization process. But as a single person, I contend that writing this story off as simply marriage is simply not good enough. This story is one of our fundamental Biblical insights into our relationships to God and to one another. Is there nothing deeper to say about men and women in the world than “it’s good when they’re married?” (It’s very odd that traditional Catholic biblical commentators have explained away the Song of Songs, which clearly does describe earthly love, as a metaphor for Christ’s love for the church, and yet the best they could do with this mythic and mystical Creation story has been “an affirmation of marriage.” )

I’m glad that the church is moving towards affirming marriage and married sexuality, and that I won’t have to grow old in a church that thinks marriage and sex are the last resort of the weak and lustful. But too much conversation around relational spirituality, from the Vatican to National Catholic Reporter, still focuses exclusively on marriage and the family unit. Single people are not just miscellaneous laity in some sort of pre-married state. I know that every bit of the Bible is relevant to me now and will be at every stage in my life. There is a distinct spirituality of singlehood to be found, but our humanity and our relationship to God are the lowest common denominator brought into focus through this story. Taking the sheen of marriage off Adam and Eve not only makes their story more universally appealing to the faithful, it clears the field for deeper messages of human nature: equal to one another and created by God.

The Inquisition, Part Deux

The apostolic visitation is back. Formators warned our seminarians: "There are three words that are going to mean very different things to the bishops than they do here: relativism, critical (as in thinking), and feminism."

Because who needs academic rigor and inclusion when you've got absolutism, dogmatism, and misogyny?

The church is us

Here's a great comment from a friend of mine on the Church, the body of Christ. He's responding to efforts by Boston's archbishop, recently named Cardinal O'Malley, to change Massachusetts law so Catholic Charities of Boston will be able to bar gay couples from adopting Catholic Charities' kids. My friend wrote:

The church IS good. It is the body of Christ. We are all the body of Christ. What O'Malley and other officials choose to say and do often challenges my faith in the Church, but it shouldn't because the Church is something much more profound than O'Malley. That being said, if one believes that there is illness within the Church, it is his/her duty to heal it rather than abandon the whole and set up a "virtue colony" which will probably end up being hypocritical in the end anyway. It may seem contradictory that the church is "good" but that it also "needs healing," but I think that this gives pretty good witness to the temporal and transcendent nature of the Church and Catholicism's integrated corporeal-spiritual duality.

My response: This exactly captures what I never seem to be able to articulate to people about the church. I agree that the flaws in the Church show its incarnationality. The beautiful flip side of that incarnationality is that you or I are as much of a part of the church as Cardinal O'Malley--we are each the same size light in the kaleidoscope. Sometimes it seems unequal because only some may make policy and get interviewed by the media, but that's false because the Church is only tangentially about internal or public policy--it's about the love of Christ in the world, and you and I have the chance to love like Christ and to show Christ's love in ways and in situations that O'Malley never could. The Spirit moving in the people of God is like a breeze in a field--every stalk moves differently, some of them even move in the opposite direction. And a stalk, obviously, has no hope of knowing the entire picture. But we believe that the Spirit is leading God's people somewhere good.

Ash Wednesday Mosaic

Ash Wednesday Mosaic
Originally uploaded by theologienne.

I envisioned this project during Ash Wednesday service at a downtown church, where everyone from the very rich to the homeless came to be marked. Although Ash Wednesday is solemn, it always has an exciting air for me because it's the day you get to find out who's Catholic, or better, you see many others (not all Catholic) who like you are interested in attentiveness to the path we're on. Focusing on the commonalities we choose--the ash and the simple gesture used to apply it--also beautifully highlights our diversity.

Idaho priest: Gay unions will strengthen society

Rev. W. Thomas Faucher, in religious life since age 13, wrote in the Idaho Statesman:

For a Roman Catholic priest to address anything to do with homosexuality at this point in American history is probably not a wise move . . . But I have not always been particularly wise. [Us either.] It is not the right nor the responsibility of the Legislature to decide moral issues. . . The argument says that allowing two people of the same gender to form a legal union would weaken marriage and weaken family life. I strongly disagree and, in fact, believe that allowing same-gender legal unions would strengthen marriage and family life.

Father Faucher dares to acknowledge the goodness of gay and lesbian people and to suggest that American law is not a vehicle for religious doctrine: fellow Christians are going to give him a lot of flak. Send him your support at (no spaces) w t fauch (at) aol (dot) com. He ministers at St. Mary's in Boise.

Ash Wednesday quasi-poll

I'm actually working on a special Ash Wednesday or I guess slash Lent project for the blog, but let me throw this out really quickly:

• What did you hear from the person who gave you ashes today: "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return" or "Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel?" Which do you think is better?

• What are you doing, giving up, adding in, changing or adhering to for Lent?

A blessed and fruitful Lent to all.