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Tag Archives: Congregation of Holy Cross

Yes, I’m a Chinglican Who Celebrates Corpus Christi

02 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by chinglicanattable in Uncategorized

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academia, Anglican, Asian American, Audrey Assad, baptism, Catholic, charismatic, Chinese, Christian, communion, Congregation of Holy Cross, Corpus Christi, Eucharist, Flannery O'Connor, forgiveness, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius of Loyola, Jesuit, neo-Calvinist, neo-Reformed, Pentecostal, Real Presence, reconciliation, sacred heart, social science, Tobit

Today is Corpus Christi Sunday. The evangelical Anglican church that I attend probably doesn’t care very much, but I do. In fact, I care quite a lot, even though, unlike Churl and Audrey Assad down below, I actually don’t feel much need for myself to actually become Roman Catholic, much as I hunger and thirst for greater catholicity and for the Anglican and Roman Catholic communions to keep getting blown together by the Spirit. But still, I do believe in the Real Presence, I am looking forward to Pope Francis’s worldwide eucharistic adoration, and I celebrate Corpus Christi Sunday.

Why? especially because I’m not planning on becoming a full-blooded Catholic, remaining instead as what Churl calls a ‘knock-off Mars bar’ (don’t you worry, Churl, no offence given, no offence taken). My answer: Corpus Christi Sunday changed my life.

About four years ago, I was in a very similar predicament that I am currently in: I was doing a graduate degree in the social sciences while longing to study Christian theology. I hope I’ve made progress in both, especially in bringing the two together, but as it happened, my journey–in the middle of thesis writing that time, no less–took me to a retreat at a Congregation of Holy Cross house of studies in Berkeley, CA. I knew the house superior, as he was my creative writing mentor when I attended a Holy Cross high school in the Bay Area, and as soon as I got there, he piled on the Balthasar, O’Connor, and Hopkins and told me to read it all. I was very obedient, or so I think I was. I also read some Michael Ramsey during that time, I think, but shh.

In any case, during those two weeks, I had to do something I’d never done before: attend daily mass. I had served as a pastoral apprentice for three years at various Chinese Anglican churches before that, so I had some vague idea of what the liturgy was going to be like (not that I could do it from memory, like my pre-new rites Catholic brothers and sisters). Those two weeks, we read through the Book of Tobit for the first reading; though the Thirty-Nine Articles (#6) knocks off St. Jerome to say that it’s a book that ‘the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine,’ I have to say that the story of Tobias and Sarah, the demon Asmodeus, and the archangel Raphael made for a lot of good fun at 8 AM every morning, especially among people who saw the book as part of the canonical Hebrew Scriptures. One of the mass attendees, a staff worker at the Jesuit theological school across the street, told me after mass one day, ‘I love it every time we get around to Tobit. It’s such a thrilling story, don’t you think?’ (Confession: I then went and read Judith to see what that was like. Even more scandalous.)

I also wore a black hoodie to mass every morning to see if I could be mistaken for a Franciscan monk and given communion; I was asked if I was an ordained Anglican priest (I’m not, and don’t plan on being one), but no, unfortunately, it didn’t work. But it did get me, good evangelical Anglican that I was, exposed to Corpus Christi, a solemnity I’d never heard of (OK, at that point, I hadn’t heard of a lot of stuff; I had no idea, for example, what the heck the ‘sacred heart’ was, even).  I was exposed to Corpus Christi because the last Sunday I was at this retreat was Corpus Christi Sunday that year. Yes, I know that Corpus Christi is usually celebrated the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, but like many Catholics, the Holy Cross Center did it on the Sunday.

I didn’t actually go to mass that day, and I didn’t take part in any procession (true story: the first Corpus Christi procession I ever saw was in The Godfather, Part 2). Instead, I went to a Chinese charismatic church (gasp!). My fifth-grade Sunday school teacher was a children’s pastor at that church, and come to think of it, it was pretty meaningful that I got to see her on Corpus Christi Sunday because she was the first to teach me a high view of communion. She even advocated (unsuccessfully, unfortunately) for us kids to be able to go downstairs whenever the adults had communion and to simply observe if we weren’t baptized yet (we were credo-baptists, and I was baptized when I was nine, but that’s a long story–the short version is that my best friend was getting dunked, so I wanted to as well). She told us that communion is a sacred moment that we should get to observe and even partake of, as it’s a moment of being very close to the Lord. If my charismatic auntie didn’t know how close she was to the Real Presence, I hope she finds out some day that she set me on a sure course toward acknowledging the Real Presence in the Eucharist.

In any case, that year was a particularly difficult year for me because three years in the ministry apprenticeship meant that I had made a lot of enemies. This is not to say that everyone who does ministry makes enemies this early on in their career, but in case you couldn’t tell, I can be fairly outspoken, and I was confused on where I stood in relation to the neo-Reformed tribe, so that made for a fairly combustible combination. Suffice it to say that I lost some friends, managed to alienate others, had others alienate me, and suffered a few dating rejections too (as the kid in Love Actually says, there’s ‘nothing worse than the total agony of being in love’). As Corpus Christi Sunday was coming to a close, this charismatic auntie took me into her home for a session of healing prayer.

Yes, now that I’ve said the two words ‘healing prayer,’ you now know how deep in the bowels of Pentecostalism I was at this point. I saw my priest friends at the Catholic house of studies the next day and tried to explain why I had missed not only mass, but pizza and movie night, and I said that it was some kind of Ignatian thing where you imagine rooms and people who have hurt you, etc. etc. The priests looked at me really funny, like I had gotten involved in some kind of crock science, and if you know what ‘healing prayer’ is, I’ll bet at least one eyebrow has gone up on your face in both curiosity and ridicule. Let me confirm for you your worst fears. ‘Healing prayer’ is indeed sort of like the Ignatian exercises, except that you never get out of the first week and you focus on sins done to you, which is why you need ‘healing.’ Most people I’ve seen come out of ‘healing prayer’ thus have this sort of euphoric feeling of having dealt with everything bad in their lives, only to sink into a complete malaise and paralysis the week afterward because you just raised your awareness of stuff, given it a hurtful hermeneutic, and said that you dismissed it when you really didn’t. As a warning to the wise, then, if anyone ever approaches you to do ‘healing prayer,’ just go find a proper Jesuit spiritual director.

I had no such warning, but God is both humourous and gracious. I won’t describe to you in lurid detail what I imagined or saw or confessed, but suffice it to say that while my charismatic auntie wanted to keep taking me to the agony in the garden because my ministry experience was apparently very agonizing (it was, to be sure, but that’s a different post), I didn’t want to leave the Upper Room. I think as I described what I saw in the Upper Room and all the people I wanted to forgive (turns out, in hindsight, that I should probably have been asking for their forgiveness…OH WELL), she was like, ‘OK, can we finally go downstairs now? What’s with the Upper Room?’

It takes time to reflect on these things, but as I think back on that healing prayer session now, I think I was just basking there in the Real Presence, at least virtually speaking. Indeed, during those two weeks, a lot of eucharistic things happened. Yes, I was introduced to daily mass, the sacred heart, and Corpus Christi. Yes, I couldn’t get out of the Upper Room during healing prayer. But probably the most significant thing was this: the week prior, on Trinity Sunday, I returned to the church of my childhood after years of not having darkened its doors, after its multiple scandals had devastated many of my childhood friendships, and in an act of forgiveness and reconciliation, I took communion there.

It was in that act that I learned what a schismatic I had been for so long. Having left that childhood church after my friendships were devastated by Toronto Blessing crazies, a sex scandal, a leadership crisis, and the ostracization of our entire Cantonese congregation, I had been wandering, looking for a home, a place that I could agree with and a place where no more bad political stuff would ever happen. I never found it. So I wandered from church to church, even working at some of them, and in time, I also took on a sort of neo-Reformed persona to be able to articulate a theology of why I wasn’t about to stay at a church that failed to preach the Gospel. As my theological system lay in tatters, my social science thesis in disarray, and my personal church history littered with skeletons, I finally realized in that moment of deep forgiveness that I was the schismatic.

And that is why, as a Chinglican, I celebrate Corpus Christi.

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A PhD Hermeneutic for a Few Pop Songs

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by chinglicanattable in Uncategorized

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academia, Academics, Alice Walker, America Magazine, Asian American, Backstreet Boys, Basil Moreau, Chinese, Christianity Today, Congregation of Holy Cross, Disney, Don't Stop Believing, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Francis Xavier, Fun, funny, Glee, hermeneutic, humor, James Martin, Jesuit, Journey, joy, Karl Rahner, Little Mermaid, One Direction, PhD, pop, Some Nights, St. Andre Bessette, Vatican II, womanist theology

Today is St. Francis Xavier Day, and in the spirit of engaging “the world” as the Jesuits still do, say, at The Jesuit Post and at America Magazine, I’d like to share a PhD hermeneutic for some pop music I’ve got stuck in my head.

https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/Franciscus_de_Xabier.jpg/484px-Franciscus_de_Xabier.jpg

I first learned the word “hermeneutic” from a freshman theology teacher at the Holy Cross Catholic high school I attended. We called him “Papa Bear.”

https://i2.wp.com/www.berenstainbearslive.com/images/papa-bio.jpg

On the first day of class, he wrote the word HERMENEUTICS on the board. He asked us what it meant. Somebody shouted out, “J the C!” {See, he had mentioned that the right answer to every question in Catholic theology boiled down to ______ the ________. We filled in the blanks while playing hangman, and after a long time, we came up with “J the C,” which stood for “Jesus the Christ,” which only goes to commend Papa Bear for imparting the Christocentricity of Vatican II to us.)

https://i0.wp.com/chirho.me/memes/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/417364_162841723855349_987640500_n.jpg

Anyhow, “J the C” may have been the right answer for a Christocentric hermeneutic, but it certainly did not answer the question of what hermeneutics was. When all of us were finally stumped, he told us that it meant something along the lines of the interpretation of texts. (We were fed Gadamer early.) He then added, “When you go home to your family dinners tonight, stand up and tell your proud mom and dad, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m a hermeneutician.” I was one of two kids who did that. My theologically educated father said, “Get outta here.”

More years at that Catholic school would lead to further training in hermeneutics, including by a feminist theologian who taught us Genesis, Ruth, and Esther alongside Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. (She never told us that if we were using Walker, this should technically have been called womanist theology.) Imagine how tickled I was to find that the evangelical Christianity Today blog for women was called Her.meneutics.

hermeneutics_ct

The Congregation of Holy Cross has a lot of similar things to the Jesuits, not least with Blessed Basil Moreau‘s ultramontane sensibilities, i.e. he was loyal to the See of Rome over movements to form a national church in France, which echoes all sorts of ultramontane stuff in The Spiritual Exercises that progressive Jesuits, experimenting Protestants, and all other Rahner fans who use them conveniently ignore. It was also an order that was conceived as a family of priests, monks, and nuns who opened schools for kids who were too poor to go to school in the wake of the French Revolution and ended up starting (no joke) American universities like the University of Notre Dame. It’s fitting that our first saint was thus St. André Bessette, an illiterate monk/healer/”miracle man” who was the doorkeeper for the longest time for Montréal’s redux of the Congregation of Holy Cross, which ended up being built into St. Joseph’s Oratory.

https://i2.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Fr%C3%A8re_Andr%C3%A9_1920.jpg/220px-Fr%C3%A8re_Andr%C3%A9_1920.jpg

I owe my knowledge of the meaning of the word hermeneutics to the Congregation of Holy Cross.

https://i2.wp.com/ndtoday.alumni.nd.edu/s/1210/images/editor/NDToday/2011/august/ndt_aug11_faith_2b.jpg

So on this St. Francis Xavier Day, in celebration of the worldliness of the Jesuits, in gratitude to the Congregation of Holy Cross for teaching me hermeneutics, and with a nod to the work of Fr. Jim Martin, SJ, in Between Heaven and Mirth, I’d like to share with you some of my hermeneutics for a few pop songs.

https://i0.wp.com/media.patheos.com/Images/BC/BC_BetweenHeavenandMirth_rt.jpg

I’ve been listening to these songs at various stages of working on my PhD. I’d like to apply a PhD hermeneutic to them, insofar as this will be an exercise of interpreting the songs in light of my PhD experience. (We call this positionality.) It is, in short, pop songs through the hermeneutic of the PhD.

PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Here goes:

1. Comprehensive Exams: “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid

But who cares, no big deal…I want more [books]…

Alternatively, after three months of hibernation: I wanna be where the people are, I wanna see, wanna see them dancin’, walkin’ around on those–whaddya call ’em?–oh, “feet”…

Katy Perry’s thrown in there because when you’re in the midst of an all-day exam and midnight is approaching: …let’s go all the way tonight, no regrets…

2. Research Prospectus: “What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction

Differentiating antecedents for the you‘s, the first two for the committee, the third for the topic: If only you saw what I could see, you’d understand why I want you so desperately…

3. After many months of fieldwork: “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey

Remembering ethnographic minutiae: Hold on to that feeling.

4. Thesis Writing: “Some Nights” by Fun.

I still see your ghost [the previous argument’s]; oh, Lord, I still don’t know what I stand for…

5. TA Marking/Grading: “I Want It That Way” by The Backstreet Boys

Most frequent comment: Tell me why.

https://achristianthing.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/871ac-funny-fail-pics-how-to-fail-an-exam-find-x.jpg

Yes, Mom, Dad, I am still a hermeneutician.

[CUE BOND THEME]

https://i0.wp.com/i43.tower.com/images/mm107106662/name-rose-dvd-cover-art.jpg

A Day for Protestant Jokes

31 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by chinglicanattable in Uncategorized

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95 Theses, Anglican, Anglo-Catholic, Asian American, Chinese, Congregation of Holy Cross, death, denomination, Diet of Worms, ecumenism, Fun, funny, Halloween, humor, John Calvin, joke, Luther, Lutheran, Martin Luther, Michael Servetus, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Protestant, Rachel Held Evans, Reformation Day, Thomas Cranmer, Wittenberg

As CaptainThin pointed out, today is Reformation Day and All Hallows’ Eve.

I think it’s a good day for Protestant jokes.  Here’s one that my dad heard in seminary:

There was an interdenominational Protestant gathering, and a fire started in the sanctuary. The Pentecostals got up and screamed: “Fire!”  The Baptists shouted: “Water!”  And the Presbyterians said: “Order.”

Martin Luther once said that if he farted in Wittenberg, they smell it in Rome.  Recently, excavators found Luther’s famed cloaca, the secret place where he did a ton of writing.  It was a stone toilet.  Could this possibly mean that the 95 Theses originated from 95 feces?

More conservative Christians seem to be scared off by Halloween as a pagan holiday. This year, though, it’s not the Protestants but the Polish Catholic bishops who are decrying Halloween as a pagan holiday.

I think we could use a bit more holy humour on All Hallows Eve, though, and so does Fr. Jim Martin.

In light of this, I have a few suggestions:

    1. Nail the 95 theses on somebody’s door.  This seems to be a yearly ritual between Valparaiso University (the Lutherans) and the University of Notre Dame (Catholic, Congregation of Holy Cross).  This year, Nashotah House even had this done in-house.  I guess this is what happens when you’re Anglo-Catholic.  Note, though, that they use Rite I.  Smells like Cranmer.
    2. Tell a Protestant joke.  You know, for example, how some Protestants like to remember the Diet of Worms by portraying themselves as totally depraved worms in a fit of utter humility? Here’s Happy Reformation Day to them from Pope Benedict XVI.
    3. Go buy Rachel Held Evans’s book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood.  Why? you ask.  For the simple fact that it came out yesterday.
      It also brings to mind Nadia Bolz-Weber being portrayed as a comic book “pastrix” in a pic worthy of both Reformation Day and Halloween.
  1. Dress up as a morbid Reformation martyr.  For example, somebody could do Michael Servetus.

In the spirit of Chinglicanism, I’ll leave it at 4 things.  “4,” after all, is the Chinese superstitious number for death.

And that’s funny only if your hermeneutic for both Reformation Day and All Hallows’ Eve is the resurrection.

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