where the ignes fatui dance

THOUGHTS
on
CHIEF EPISCOPAL OFFICERS,
BLOODY BIG RODENTS,
and the
FUTURE of the DANCE

(in three parts to save your sanity).

PART THREE: “where the ignes fatui dance”



[So to a third installment ... if you have stayed with me: we were on a dark march, 

“I had not thought death had undone so many,” wrote Dante, and it is undoing many more, trudging, trudging. Grossman wrote of the darkest of deaths: “immediately behind Viktor, right at his heels, followed doubt, suffering, lack of belief,” and then bleakly, “we will have vanished – just as the Aztecs once vanished.”  

Okay?]

But for the ecclesiastical community that was once a community of resurrection faith, the community that has become no more than a huddle of Labour Party, Green Party, Troglodyte Party, Masonic Party at prayer, this death is a wasted, self-inflicted death. It is death embraced in stubborn refusal to reach from sombre darkness to a crazy God-filled dance beyond the austere gate-keepers and their hostile portals. It is death clung to by those who sink unnecessarily with their leaking boat.

Just beyond the stern visages of the gate-keepers, the joyless CEOs and acolytes of prose, just beyond those standing there and grimly monitoring balance sheets and manning exits, just there dwells a dance. Gate-keepers and CEOs, Ads and RDs (but not LBWs)  could dance too, if only they reached out of fluorescent dull-holes and performance indication reports. Even the tax-collector Matthew danced. Sadly the majority of the pure and the holy did not, but stayed, counting beans, selling doves in the Temple to make the columns equate. The bridegroom went and danced elsewhere, and the columns crumbled. 

Yet just there, so within reach but beyond the reach of those who annihilate imagination, is the dance of the divine Ignis Fatuus, divine Will o’ the Wisp, divine firefly. He, She dances eternally. She, He, Wisdom, Word, dances before and after time (unless our prosaic theology has reached the depths in which the great mysteries of pre-existence and Resurrection are turned to dross and discarded). As the English Carol put it,

                Then down to hell I took my way
                For my true love's deliverance,
                And rose again on the third day,
                Up to my true love and the dance.

                Then up to heaven I did ascend,
                Where now I dwell in sure substance
                On the right hand of God, that man
                May come unto the general dance.
 
               Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,
               This have I done for my true love. [1] 

Ignes fatui, dancing fireflies, or the mysterious (but also oh-so ambivalent) glow-worms, Lord of the Dance, leading on to … to death. But death happens. My death, your death, gate-keepers’ deaths, even dancers’ deaths, Baxter’s death, Merton’s spectacular death, death of a star, death of a universe. And beyond?

A firefly dances. The Lord dances. CEOs? Do they dance, even in funny hats and purpled shirts?

Death of a church. I wrote of that previously. Mother Ecclesia, shuddering on the fangs of an iceberg. And CEO types shuffle deckchairs, pore over balance sheets, seek redemption in columns of diminishing returns. Jettison vision, jettison hope, jettison dance, jettison Ignis Fatuus, for though these weigh nothing they weigh too much, and only the dreariest rationalism remains. 

Ah, Merton! Ah, Baxter! So many whose dance led them beyond the gate-keepers’ hostile, frozen ice-berg edge, beyond to dancier places where fireflies and Ignes fatui play. Ah, Francis and Clare and Heloise and Cecilia, dancers all beyond the barricades! Ah Desmond whose dance is visible still and dear God did he dance in ways most unbecoming of an Anglican! Praise be to the God of the dance, because you moved beyond prose to poetry, beyond mumble to melody, beyond  a gurgler’s pissant[2] throat  to piscina’s holy caress (because the latter points to the belief that water used in sacred rites is so holy it deserves caress). 

Praise God for those Holy Ones who irradiate blundering souls. Pray God Mother Ecclesia, her CEOs and their clay footed acolytes may learn to dance again. There’s room, my friends, in the boats beyond, out where the Ignes fatui dance the dance of the Risen Christ!

[1] No, Bill Gates and autocorrect, not “puissant”, a very different gurgler no matter the alliteration.
[2] From the English Carol “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day,” whose obscure origins are probably late mediaeval. Sidney Carter re-vivified the carol in his 1963 “Lord of the Dance.”

the dreariest rationalism

THOUGHTS 

on 

CHIEF EPISCOPAL OFFICERS, 

BLOODY BIG RODENTS, 

and the 

FUTURE of the DANCE

(in three parts to save your sanity).

PART TWO:

“The Dreariest Rationalism”

 [To recapitulate, where we left off ...
 

So: deacons, priests and CEOs? Apprentices, sub-branch managers, RMCs, ADs, RDs and CEOs? Phew. Now we’ve sorted that out and ciboria and piscine are in their rightful place in the rubbish dump of history, this strange beast called Church, Anglophile branch,[1] should burst at the seams. Okay?]

Except Merton again. “It seems to me that the best of Anglicanism is unexcelled, but that there are few who have the refinement in spirit to see and embrace the best, and so many who fall off into the dreariest rationalism.”[2] What was this mad ’merican monk on,[3] or on about? While this, from a Roman Catholic, reveals hints of the doctrine of “salvation by good taste” that I have heard one colleague parody Anglicanism as, it does critique the slow sad slide of a glorious conduit of mystery into dull pragmatism. I doubt the zany Dylan-loving monk was applauding Anglican penchants for obscurantism, but rather its ability to convey divine mystery – and the converse, lamenting its 1960s proclivity to strip bare possibilities of divinity, still apparent in Aotearoa Branch as a tendency to resemble the Labour or Green Party at Prayer.

So, given that Merton was to some extent an outsider, and to most extents a prophet, was he issuing a warning that has fallen on mainly deaf ears? Another devotee of Merton, incidentally, was that other mad prophet, James K. Baxter. He noted of Merton, “his books went out, into the world, knocking at every door, saying: ‘Mourn and rejoice! Your respectability is no use to you any longer. It can’t hide you from God. It never did; you only thought it did. Come out and meet your Lover.’”[4] It seems there are critics of a doctrine of salvation by good taste. But I suspect that, at the same time, Merton and Baxter alike would decry that other emerging heresy, salvation by executive order.

For, buried in the obscurity of rite and ritual, sometimes abused but sometimes a vehicle of unspeakable mystery, is something important. There dwells there some impishness, some playfulness, some exotic craziness that perhaps could convey eternity, could convey Om, could convey an Omega point or a nirvana beyond the mundanity of those trials and tribulations, Shakespeare’s “slings and arrows or misfortune” that dog us “all the day long of this troublous life”. Certainly it could do so with more accomplishment than the language and structure of a suburban sub-branch, the “respectability” that Baxter loathed and that is strangling still the lifeblood from God’s crazy people.

All the while the slow strangulation was aided, abetted and I suspect master-minded by purple shirted and purple-aspirant CEO- and AD- and RMC-types, as they breathily chased administrative and theological mundanity, respectability, banality. Because as it happens, though they weren’t heavily into genuflection,  they so  horizontalized the mysteries of the Church’s core business of worship  that ironically they were prostrate, worshipping faded middle-classness in the service of something called “relevance,” “the dreariest rationalism.” 

Baxter’s Holy Spirit famously squawked and laid an egg[5] and the Incarnate Baby slid silently down the bathwater’s ecclesiastical gurgler (too dull and prosaic to ever be a piscina) and slid past glaring gate-keepers, out the door, into city streets and bars. “Come out and meet your Lover.”

Ah, the gate-keepers! The psalmist saw them long ago: “I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.” They are still there for now, at the door, keeping seekers out and the submissive in. Burnt-out clingers to past dreams, aesthetes whose version of good taste, often paradoxically prosaic, is the apotheosis of aspiration. That’s not the way we do it here, which means “that’s not the way we did it as Mother Ecclesia died around our ears, but we’re still here.” The purple-shirted and their acolytes often love them, because: deep pockets. Because compliance.

Because boat-unrocking stagnant dreariness. 

So where now, Mother Ecclessia?

Will o’ the wisps, or in Latin “ignes fatui,”were considered dangerous things, leading the vulnerable to sticky ends. Fire of fools. But perhaps there is a clue there? Fools for Christ perhaps?[6] Perhaps where Mother Ecclesia has become the hoax that Merton feared is where it became afraid to be foolish. 

We are called to a dance of fools. Out where the ignes fatui dance. Out beyond the stern, glum gate-keepers of propriety and dignity. Out where the dance is undignified, crazy, holy.

Merton fought against this “out”, trying to stay on board, trying to hint from within at the possibility of a dance, a holy manic largesse of spirit. He tried to persuade his gatekeepers of a mad manic faith so bizarre (yet, ironically, so disciplined) that he dare liken it to a tab of LSD. Oh to have faith that might be likened to the outplay of a tab of LSD! Oh to have joy that might suggest drunkenness at nine o’clock in the morning!

I once experienced a bum acid (LSD) trip. For umpteen hours I was trapped in a body that was being strangled from within, strangled by the God I did not believe in. Perhaps it was prescient. Since then I have also experienced life trapped inside a body of faux-­Christ. Trapped where the lights are going out, trapped and soul-strangled from within by a small g- imposter-god, a faux-god called “how we’ve always done it,” and “how it’s safe to do it” and strangely, because faux-gods will always shape-shift, actually a god called “how the ticket collector did it” and “how the auditor did it” and a myriad other invitations to a living death.

Yet, just beyond the hunched shoulders and glowering visage of that faux-God, beyond the glaring gate-keepers and their stern visages sneering in cold contempt, do I see ignes fatui, dancing on the marsh, threatening to lead journeyers to their death?

Not leading though, to the death of hope. Not leading to the desperate death of the respectable, to the dreary rationalist death of the already lifeless. Not beckoning the banal, prosaic pragmatism of a club-church in which croziers became iPhones and piscinae became gurglers, the club-congregation of the already-dead. Leading to a holy death.
  

That body of banality is an imposter. Its death knows no hope: abandon hope, all ye who enter. CEOs going down out of habit more than courage, followed by their acolytes with extinguished candles, trudging together in a self-inflicted death, death without dance. “I had not thought death had undone so many,” wrote Dante, and it is undoing many more, trudging, trudging. Grossman wrote of the darkest of deaths: “immediately behind Viktor, right at his heels, followed doubt, suffering, lack of belief,” and then bleakly, “we will have vanished – just as the Aztecs once vanished.”

[More later ... because after Good Friday comes Easter]

---

[1] Because here in the antipodes we don’t like to think “English”, though sometimes we skip the Angles and Saxons and claim the Celts.

[2] Merton, to Donald Allchin, April 25^th 1964. Reprinted in Furlong, Merton, 274.

[3] In a tongue-in-cheek letter to a friend Merton suggested the latter send “a barrel of LSD” along with some Bob Dylan records. I am informed a “barrel” was slang for a mere tab, but Merton’s humour was terribly risqué and with that sort of impishness he could never have been an Anglican, I’m sure. Merton, to Edward Rice, July 20^th 1964. Cited in Furlong, Merton, 296.

[4] James K. Baxter, Complete Prose (Volume 3. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2015), 38. 

[5] James K. Baxter, “Ode to Auckland”, Collected Poems (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1979), 598.

[6] For those who feel that foolishness belongs outside the hallowed grounds or faith, 1 Cor 4.10 and surrounds makes interesting reading.

Googlies and Curve Balls

THOUGHTS 

on 

CHIEF EPISCOPAL OFFICERS, 

BLOODY BIG RODENTS, 

and the 

FUTURE of the DANCE

(in three parts to save your sanity).

PART ONE:

“Googlies and Curve Balls”

So Merton writes to Rosemary Radford Ruether (and there’s two names it’s privilege to cite), as quoted in full in Furlong (another worthy of whose sandals, etc) saying,

… where is the Church and where am I in the Church? … Is the Church a community of people who love each other or a big dog fight where you do your religious business, seeking meanwhile your friends somewhere else … I do wonder at times if the Church is real at all. I believe it, you know. But I wonder if I am nuts to do so. Am I part of a great big hoax?[1]

Now there’s a thought. I’m no Merton, but it’s always a treat when the sheer iridescence of the Holy Ones irradiates blundering souls. Renewed acquaintance with Merton this week has done just that. 

“Am I part of a great big hoax”?

In the, I dunno, nearly 40 years since I backslid from atheism into faith I’ve seen increasing degrees of toxicity in Mother Ecclesia. After a brief flirtation with the ecstasies of rah-rah Jesusism, with its fascination with finding Satan hiding in every record cover and determination that women should submit to men (if they didn’t it was probably because Satan had snuck out of a 10CC[2] album and nabbed them), I stumbled more or less by chance into the arms of Mother Cantuar. I have stayed there, by the skin of my toenails, ever since. Probably because I still have 10CC on my shuffle. 

It seems to some that Mother Cantuar is like a secret society. Dig deeper and deeper into the onion and new mysteries are revealed to the elect. Not so, alas, though I admit a few aspects of its culture can seem a little quaint. But that’s Cantuar for you. Actually it’s English for you, the language, the culture. Any race that invents a game with roles like Silly Mid Off, First Drop (though that terminology seems to gave died these days: PhD thesis on semantic shift in cricket, anyone?) and “bowled a googly” is likely to have one or two obscurities. 

Actually many (ecclesiastical, not cricket) terms were borrowed. But, yeah, they can be bewildering, and I still recall, as I mentioned before, my shock before my first theological college chapel service when a sophisticated second year student demanded “Godfrey, grab a corporal and get the ciborium from the aumbry opposite the piscina and place it on the credence table.” I thought it was illegal to grab corporals, at least without mutual adult consent. 

Cricket has been well explained for the more prosaically inclined:

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.

When both sides have been in and all the men have gone out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.[3]

Compared to that, Anglicanism is a cinch. Though there are a few idiosyncrasies. Like archdeacons. To understand that title you have to understand that there are only three “orders” in the Anglican Church (stolen from the Catholics): deacon, priest and bishop. They sometimes seem to be hierarchical, so that bishops are senior to priests who are senior to deacons, all of whom of course are senior to mere laity but that won’t do at all, so a position (not “rank” because that would be hierarchical and therefore naughty) called “archdeacon”, that is a sort of bossy deacon with lots of oversight and some insight, was invented. And anyway, not hierarchical, because that makes the baby Jesus cry.

Noting that a “deacon” is a servant, theoretically waiting at table and washing feet and stuff, the archdeacon is a really important servant who is actually a priest and not a deacon, though all priests and bishops were once deacons (and once a deacon mostly always a deacon unless defrocked but see below) who arches over everyone except bishops and archbishops, and of course archbishops arch over bishops and archdeacons and everyone else. Once a bishop always a bishop of course (except if formally defrocked, because bishops and priests and deacons all wear frocks to remind them how humble they are, and they can be dee-ed if they're really naughty, though some who are naughty just breeze on regardless, surrounded by adoring acolytes) though originally bishops were just pastors shepherding flocks, caring for them like, you know, Jesus said and stuff.  

Oh, and occasionally archdeacons have been deacons but not priests but bishops have never become archdeacons as far as I know though in theory that too could happen if a bishop so decreed and that’s not confusing at all.  

Like both sides having been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out. That’s not confusing. Not at all. Why would it be?

In recent decades some Anglican leaders have got  jack of all this and decided to invent titles like “RMC” (don’t ask) and “Area Dean” or “Rural Dean” so as not to confuse punters, and you know, relevance and all that. Though I’d have to say once you get initials and acronyms things get no clearer. It gets worse when you find that a dean is normally the priest (and occasionally is a bishop but don’t go there) of a cathedral (and a cathedral actually just means “supposedly big and sometimes important church where the bishop parks his or her bottom habitually”) unless he or she is an Area Dean in which case they’re just a sort of RMC with a meaningless title, or perhaps they’re even a sort of Archdeacon (but they’re not normally a deacon except in a perpetual sense), then you discover that, like the explanation of cricket, nothing is much clearer anyway, and the queues have not formed at the door of the core church business of worship because, well, who cares?

Americans of course got rid of things like googlies and silly mids off and wicket keepers, replacing them with back stops and first and second bases and curve balls, which just wasn’t cricket. How they ever produced the great poets and novelists that they have I really don’t know, but it shows poetry can transcend pragmatism. I’m pretty sure they may have got rid of a lot of funny titles, too. And roods, chains and perches, which is why they can't measure a cricket pitch.

Anyway a whole heap of Anglicans drifted into the decision that pragmatism was a thing for Anglicans as well as Americans and bishops (the latter recognizable outside Sydney by wearing really strange hats, called “mitres” after a New Zealand mountain,[4]  in processions, and purple shirts everywhere (except an important bloke called Welby who prefers black shirts) and began to operate like CEOs. 

And that’s another set of initials, though admittedly the boys and girls in purple have not officially adopted it yet. They don’t, after all, want to be confused with an RMC or an LBW. Or a ROUS.[5] Nor have they adopted the iPhone as a symbol of their authority; they still use a crook, but they call it a “crozier” to avoid confusion with anything that might seem crooked. That day might come though, because, you know, relevance and all that? These days far more of their work relates to the sort of business done on an iPhone than the gentle shepherding, the pastoral caring in a Jesus-time Middle Eastern sort of way that was envisaged when bishops really were pastoral. Which was long ago, before 312 CE. One day when they are processing in queues of ritual significance they will carry a strange and important-looking black glass and aluminium tile to signify how busy and important they are and historians will research and discover that in the twenty-first century it was believedthat these rectangular tiles were the means by which the Holy Spirit spoke to and through church leaders).

So: deacons, priests and CEOs? Apprentices, sub-branch managers, RMCs, ADs, RDs and CEOs? Something like that. Phew. Now we’ve sorted that out and ciboria and piscine are in their rightful place in the rubbish dump of history, this strange beast called Church, Anglophile branch,[6] should burst at the seams.
 

[There's more to come ... but perhaps this potted history of Anglican protocol is enough? If you've read this far receive a virtual bronze medal]

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[1] Merton, to Ruether, January 29^th 1962. Reprinted in Furlong, Merton, 299.

[2] Allegedly named after the average emission of human ejaculate.

[3] I first saw the explanation on a ta towel in the 1970s, which is, I believe, where it first emerged. So I’m sorry I can’t cite origins on this one.

[4] Yes, alright, I jest. About the mountain, not the hats.

[5] But only the cognoscenti know what they are.  And anyway, I don’t think they exist.

[6] Because here in the antipodes we don’t like to think “English”, though sometimes we skip the Angles and Saxons and claim the Celts.