General Convention - 2

I thought it might be useful to set down the basics of what has happened on this trip day by day and let thoughts, if any, emerge from them.

It turns out my suspicion about the distance of the motel from the Convention Center was correct. I'm glad I rented the car. The walk takes 20-30 minutes, along the heavily traveled Disneyland Drive. It is nicely landscaped, but a long haul, at least for me. Some of the CAROA folks enjoy the walk, to which I say, God bless you.

Don Anderson, Director of CAROA, Fr. Gregory, OJN, President of CAROA and I assembled the booth on Tuesday morning. One of the St. Margaret sisters arrived as we were starting and helped. It looks fine. There's a wide, flat screen tv that plays the CAROA video in a loop. We are giving out the dvd of it along with a brochure to anyone who asks. It is a little weird to hear Br. Scott's radio announcer voice all the time. The Order of St. Helena has its own booth next to us, with Srs. Cintra, Deborah Magdalene and Sophia Woods doing the honors.

That task was done about 11:00 or so, so Don and Gregory came with me for a little "inside Anaheim" tour. We went past where my old house was (much improved), then to St. Michael's. The secretary let us in to the two churches and the other spaces, and we saw pretty much everything. Then up to my favorite taqueria, Guadalajara on Anaheim Blvd. Don and Gregory were in a new world, with Mexican food in an untranslated menu. I had my favorite burrito pura carne al pastor (all meat, pork). Then on to the Anaheim Police Department where Sgt. Chuck Knight, Warden at St. Michael's in my time, was desk sergeant for the afternoon. Chuck gave us a little tour, including the dispatch center, which has very spiffy new computer stuff. Then to the local Vons supermarket for supplies, back to the motel, plug in the fridges in the rooms and load the produce in. And then we walked back to the Conv. Center. We wanted to hear the Presiding Bishop's opening address in the afternoon but did not understand the schedule correctly, and so missed it.

Tuesday was not the official opening day, but there were lots of people I know among the exhibitors and volunteers, many happy reunion conversations. A trickle of visitors. It is clear that everyone wants to know about what will happen in Santa Barbara.

CAROA is supposed to man the "Prayer Chapel" (as distinct, I suppose, from other sorts of chapels) which is WAAAAY at the north end of the huge exhibition spaces lobby, on the second floor, around a corner, tucked away next to the ultimate pair of bathrooms in the complex. You really have to be intentional about prayer in this space. No cheap grace. Your typical bare, room-divider divided, high ceilinged, overlit, "smaller" convention space. Some weird furnishings ordered up included four very colorful 5-6 foot pavement candles; an incomplete (8 of 14) set of "stations" -- a face with various expressions set against a dark background; a large square purpose built (two by fours and plywood) altar with fabrics (iridescent orange and a squarish fair linen); and most interestingly, three Asian (Tibetan?) umbrellas on long poles anchored in concreted plastic buckets. Later we met Randy Kimmler, who works in the LA Diocesan offices, who told us he was responsible for setting the room up. We came back a little before 5 for Evening Prayer and the rooms looked fine, the orange iridescent altar with the pavement candles creating a space in front, fifty chairs in three groups, and the station pictures in a semicircle behind. See the picture above.

So we (Don, Gregory and myself, and 3 OSH) had Evening Prayer. Don and I headed back to the motel on foot, took a detour into Disney's Grand Californian Hotel, sat in the beautiful Ahwanee-style lobby for a while, found our way into Disney Downtown, which was packed, and then got lost trying to get back to the sidewalk on Disneyland Drive. It is pretty clear that walking outside the Disneyspace is not greatly encouraged. We finally found our way back. I wanted to take Don to Nory's, a wonderful hole in the wall Peruvian-Japanese seafood restaurant in a strip mall, but when we got there, it was closed on Tuesdays. So up to another old favorite, Marie Callender's, where St. Michael's folk often congregated. Middle American comfort food. As Pepys would say, And so to bed.

General Convention - 1

I was wide awake at 4 am from jet lag, so here's a new blog.

Our Superior, Br. Robert, asked me some time ago to help represent OHC at the GC in Anaheim, so here I am. The trip yesterday was fine. I took the 8:56 am Metro North train from Poughkeepsie to 125th Street and then got the M60 bus ($2.25 - a pretty good deal) to LGA. The train took 90 minutes, the bus arrived at the stop in 5, and 45 minutes later I was at the Delta terminal. The flight, to Minneapolis and then on to Orange County (SNA) boarded but then waited 50 minutes for takeoff. No problem in the plane change at MSP. I'll be here until Sunday morning, July 12.

During the flights I started Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight, which has been sitting on my shelf forever. Finally shamed into reading it. Pages and pages of dialogue which seems to be going nowhere, and then all of a sudden, a passage of narrative that just grips you and won't let you go. And Julia S. Konstantinovsky's new Evagrius Ponticus: The Making of a Gnostic. I'm three chapters in and it promises to be one of the best things going on Evagrius.

In addition to schmoozing for OHC, I am helping out with CAROA, the Conference of Anglican Religious Orders in the Americas, which will have a booth in the exhibit hall. The point of it all is to be visible, to connect with old friends and make some new ones, and basically to hold up the flag for Holy Cross and the religious/monastic life in the Episcopal Church.

I have been to several GCs before: New Orleans (1982), Anaheim (1985), Detroit (1988), Phoenix (1991), Denver (2000), and now back in Anaheim. It is huge: each diocese (110 or so, including 10 foreign dioceses) is represented by four clergy and four laity, plus alternates, as well as its bishop. There are two legislative houses, like the US Congress: The House of Bishops (the bishops) and the House of Deputies (the clergy and laity). You can do the math. A minimum of 990 people to do the business, depending on how many alternates show up and whether there's an extra bishop or two. Well over a thousand official members of the Convention. But of course that's just the beginning. Most of the national church staff is here and a lot of diocesan staff people as well. Then there are the official organizations of the Church, from the Pension Fund on down, with people from the myriads of committees and commissions, the different official ministries, and a lot of unofficial ministries. The vendors of church stuff of all kinds. The exhibition hall is always huge. And of course faithful (or at least interested) church people drop in. It is a huge event.

My friend Tony Jewiss worked in the GC office for 8 years or so, retiring in 2007, and so I got a peek inside the planning process. It is complicated work, with facilities having to be locked in years in advance, schedules to be coordinated, people's egos to be massaged, and enormous amounts of detail work.

I was the Rector of St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Anaheim from 1992 to 2001, so the first thing I did after checking into the Motel 8 on Disneyland Drive, where CAROA are staying, was to drive up to see it. There was a gathering of Native American ministries just ending, and I wasn't dressed to be recognized, so I just poked my head in here and there to see how it looked. Pretty good was the answer. St. Michael's has had hard financial times recently. It is one of the largest Hispanic congregations in the Episcopal Church, and most of those folks are poor and virtually all of them were raised in the Hispanic Roman Catholic culture where stewardship is handled quite differently. Maybe I'll write about that someday, but the bottom line is, there are a lot of dollar bills in the plate on Sunday morning, but not enough of them.

I had been back to Anaheim for a wedding at St. Michael's some years ago, so this was not the first time. But it is a strange feeling. Fortunately the first person I ran across remembered me (bless you!).

More later.

The House of the Redeemer

Last week I was trying to get over a chest cold and so was unable to attend one of the favorite things that happens in my life each year: the annual Garden Party benefit at the House of the Redeemer, an Episcopal house of retreat in New York City. I'm glad to say that it was a smashing success. By all reports it was a lovely event, the people were interesting, and lots of money was raised.

The House of the Redeemer, on 95th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, was founded in 1949 by Edith Shepard Fabbri, a great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. She and her husband, Ernesto Fabbri, built it during the First World War to a Florentine Renaissance design. The architect was Grosvenor Atterbury. It incorporates many original elements brought over by ship, including a spectacular Library, the woodwork of which is from the library of a palace of the Dukes of Urbino, and is certainly one of the great rooms of the City of New York. The House is among the few standing great homes of New York, very few of which retain their original character as homes, with many of the original furnishings and works of art intact, as the Redeemer does.

Mrs. Fabbri was a devout Episcopalian, and a woman of considerable spiritual depth. When it came time for her to consider the disposition of her house, she decided she wanted to create a retreat center, "a place apart", as she put it, a place of beauty, quiet and prayer in the midst of the City. The Board was created in 1949 and the house deeded to the Board. It included Bishop Robert Campbell, OHC, who was then the Superior of the Order of the Holy Cross. Bishop Campbell had been the Bishop of Liberia, but had returned to the U.S. for reasons of health. The Board asked the Sisters of the Community of St. Mary to staff and run the House, and they did so until 1980.

The House's offerings have grown to include musical programs, lectures, group spiritual retreats, and meetings and events of non-profit organizations of all kinds. But its primary work is as a place of retreat and prayer, and the Chapel sees daily Morning and Evening Prayer Monday through Friday every week,as well as the Eucharist on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the House is open. The public rooms are not air conditioned, so the House is formally closed in July and August, though some guests brave the rigors of summer. There is a faithful band of people who worship regularly together with the priest in residence, who changes monthly. Many individuals and groups, Church related or simply spiritually minded, who value quiet and calm come to stay at the House when they are in New York, making a time of retreat their base for whatever else has brought them.

I became involved with the House in 2002, during the first year after I moved to New York City to became the priest at the Church of St. Edward the Martyr in East Harlem. I was looking around for a congenial church or community related activity to join, to give me a larger scope of interests and contacts and to be useful. My friend Fr. Tom Synan invited me to the 2001 Christmas benefit at The Church of the Heavenly Rest, at 90th Street and Fifth Avenue, and in the course of that I had a chat with the Rector, Fr. James Burns. I indicated I was looking for something additional to do, and his face lit up and he told me about the House. He was on the Board and would introduce me. It seemed a good fit for me, as I had been Prior of Mount Calvary in Santa Barbara for nine years and Guestmaster there for two years before, so I knew the retreat business pretty well.

Jim introduced me to the Board President, Frances Reese, known to all as Franny. Franny was a legend in her own time, a tireless worker for Episcopal Church and environmental causes, and a member of one of the old-line New York families, with deep roots in Dutchess County and in New York City. I was elected to the Board of Trustees in May, 2002. In the fall Franny drafted me to work on a subcommittee with the excellent Barton Jones, of the Church Pension Fund. We did our work, made our report the next Spring, the issues were resolved, and I went on vacation.

I was in Sevilla. I had wandered over to the local internet cafe and was checking e-mail, and learned to my horror that Franny had been killed in a terrible automobile accident. This was a real crisis for the House, as Franny had led the efforts which had reorganized the House's ministry and governance and had begun to put it on a secure administrative footing. We were devastated.

To my surprise, the Board asked me to be the new President. I was elected in December, 2003, and have served as President since. It has been wonderful, with many interesting challenges, and with some complex and difficult decisions to make. It has been my joy to work with a wonderful group of Board members and with a terrific staff, headed by the marvelous Judi Counts. When I moved back to the Monastery last fall, I asked the Board if they wanted me to continue as President, since I would no longer be close by, and they asked me to stay, and re-elected me last October.

I would like to encourage all the readers of my blog to become acquainted with the House of the Redeemer. It is one of the great places.

A Great Library Retreat

Last week we held our second library volunteers retreat here at the Monastery. It was wonderful. The first was in November and attracted eight volunteers. This one brought three people back from the first retreat plus nine more, for a total of twelve.

I was a little concerned that we wouldn't have enough jobs for everyone, but I needn't have worried.

Holy Cross's library is located on the ground floor of the new monastery building, where it occupies most of the space. It is, next to the Chapel and the Refectory, the biggest area in the monastery. I would say that we have perhaps 15,000 books. The collection is an organic one, as most monastery libraries are that do or did not also serve as school, college or seminary libraries. That is, it has grown in response to the needs and interests of the community over the years. Our library is strong in areas you would expect, in older Anglo-Catholic materials, spirituality, and in religious biography. The older generations loved reading lives of holy people -- Fr. Huntington recommended it in his Rule. The scripture section is not huge but serviceable. The section on the religious life has some interesting strengths, particularly in materials on Anglican religious life. And there are some surprises. For example, in the 70's many of the brethren were involved in addiction ministries, so we have a fair collection of books on that subject. And quite a lot of liturgical materials, dating from Bonnell Spencer's days.

The collection uses the Dewey Decimal system. But not exactly, of course. One of the older fathers, now gone to glory, John Baldwin, tweaked it to fit his ideas. Actually, wrenched is a better word than tweaked. Whole sections were reassigned, including the religious life. When we made plans about the Library a couple of years ago, it was decided to get a computerized system which would allow more or less automatic data retrieval and cataloging. But it was clear that the work involved in switching over to the Library of Congress system was so great that, given the fact that we can't hire staff, it might never get done. So we have retained the Dewey system, and are gradually changing our special categories back to the normal ones. This means a lot of recataloging will be going one for quite a while. It also means that we will have the old card catalog and the new computer system (a creature named ResourceMate) side by side for years to come, if not forever.

One of the projects I started when I become Librarian last October was to move all the books published in 1900 or before into a protected area, which, if not climate controlled exactly, at least has a de-humidifier. We had already moved the Patrologia Latina and its Greek companion set there. There is a surprising number of books from 1900 and before, and looking at that collection gives one a snapshot of the Community's interests at that point, just before we moved from Westminster, MD, to our then-new Henry Vaughn-designed Monastery in West Park. Lots of the sorts of books you would expect from Anglo-Catholic monk types, but some interesting outliers as well. The room needs some new shelving, which will probably cost several thousands of dollars. For the time being it is a hodge-podge of smaller shelves, not quite enough to house them all as they should be.

The volunteers were wonderful. A couple of them started work on the old book room, reading the shelves against the cards, which had been carefully removed by volunteers from the first retreat. We had missed a fair number in our first pass through the shelves as it turned out. Several worked on the oversize books, opening up new shelf space for additions. The growing cd collection needed to be put in order, uncatalogued for the moment. One of the men is a church sexton and was able to clean the enclosed skylights which had grown filthy over the years, letting in more light. His wife is a computer wiz, and started cataloging existing books into the computerized system. She made some good progress. One of the volunteers straightened up the Guest House library and then added about 35 books to it from the proven duplicates in the library office. Three continued reading the shelves against the shelf listing, discovering books that had "walked". An interesting finding was that a whole section of books on Vietnam had disappeared. My guess is that a previous regime decided to de-accession them and had forgotten to take the cards out of that section of the file.

And one brave soul began something close to my heart. She started to check bibliographies of monastic history to see what we might have, and more importantly, what we might not have. Most of our acquisitions come from two sources: gifts of collections by people who are downsizing their libraries, or after death, and books that the brethren have acquired and which filter down the stairs in due course. But we have not had much deliberate acquisition over the years, mostly because we have such a small budget. The first step in improving the collection is to find out what we need.

I have two great dreams for the library. The first is to begin systematically building up our collection in areas important to us, especially in scripture and monastic studies. Since many of the books we will want to fill out the collection are out of print, the best way is to identify the ones we want and then start looking for them, purchasing what we can find and afford (donations anyone?) and beginning a regular list of desired volumes on the website that people might donate. The second dream is to begin welcoming writers and scholars to use the library. It is a small collection and probably never will be a scholarly destination for the holdings. And we don't want the books to circulate outside the monastery. But our library is a very congenial environment for study, reflection and writing. The Community, which has not been intensely focused on the library over the years (for many members, it is just there, as it were), has begun to wake up to the ministry possibilities our collections may hold.

It gives me enormous satisfaction to watch the collection improve. And as it does, it is even more satisfying to watch the brethren and others take a renewed interest in reading and study.

St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville

I spent most of the week after Easter at the Conference for Benedictine formation directors, held at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, MN.

The trip there was only mildly arduous, involving an overnight stay in New York City with one of my oldest friends in OHC, Fr. Carl Sword. Carl has been a psychotherapist practicing in NYC for many years, and like me, for many years a monk not in residence. I was up and out early on Tuesday morning and took the airport shuttle bus from outside Grand Central Terminal to La Guardia. The Northwest (becoming Delta) flight to Minneapolis was uneventful. At the gate for the connecting flight to St. Cloud I found Fr. Aelred Glidden, the Prior and Novice Master from St. Gregory’s in Three Rivers, MI, and Fr. Joel Rippinger, our conference leader. Fr. Joel is a well-known Benedictine scholar whose specialty is the history of the monastic movement in North America. He is the author of the standard history of American Benedictine communities, and is a monk of Marmion Abbey in Aurora, IL. The flight to St. Cloud lasts about 11 minutes, shorter than its attendant preparation and debarkation procedures. The flight steward was humorous throughout in the best self-deprecating Lake Woebegone, MN, fashion. Jokes about the flight to and from Minneapolis and the St. Cloud airport are de rigueur at St. John’s.

We were met by Br. Paul Richards, the Novice Master at St. John’s. Last summer, Br. Paul finished a 20-some year stint as director of the boys’ choir associated with St. John’s schools, and took up his new work at the same time I did. I sat up front in the van and had the opportunity to talk with him at length. He took us the scenic way. I had never been in Minnesota before, but it looked a lot like I remember the area around Lansing from my Michigan State days – flat to low rolling countryside, patches of woods and occasional wet areas. The campus of St. John’s is very large, encompassing farmlands and St. John’s University. The monastery is only a small part of it, forming a bridge between the Church and the University buildings.

The Church is enormous, looming over everything. Designed by Marcel Breuer and built in the 1950's, it is resolutely mid-20th century modern, representing I suppose an ecclesiastical version of brutalism in its style. The famous front is dominated by the campanile wall. I had seen pictures of it, but had no idea of it as a functioning building nor of its relation to its surroundings. After four days of worship in it I found it a liturgical success, both for the Daily Office and for the Eucharist.

The Community at St. John’s could not have been warmer in its welcome. My entire time there was punctuated by kind greetings and the small conversations between monks which indicate good will and benevolent interest, from the retired monks to the newest members and even to the Abbot, who sat down next to me at lunch on Friday. Abbot John Klassen is a listener, and obviously both a kind and a firm father of the community. He, like our Presiding Bishop, is a scientist by training. The atmosphere of the monastery and community was one of respectful, mutual and loving patriarchy in the best Benedictine sense.

We were housed in the monastery, some in the older section, others (including me) in the newer Breuer wing connecting to the Church. These newer rooms are functional, laid out like simple motel rooms: an entrance area with closet on one side and bathroom on the other, then a fair sized room with a big window and sliding door with view of the lake which the monastery property encompasses.

The daily worship schedule begins with morning prayer at 7, then noon prayers, Eucharist at 5, and evening prayer at 7. We were busy in the evenings, but my impression is that Compline is voluntary and private. They generally wear habits but no big fuss is made if some of the monks come in civvies. They use their own books -- well-printed and loose leaf, a seven or eight binder set -- for the daily office, as one would expect at this great liturgical center. The psalms are the Grail translation, the music is to modern modes – two or more simple melodies in a set, much as our Camaldolese friends do, and which Holy Cross uses in Santa Barbara and Grahamstown. The St. John’s usage is distributed with artful variety and care between the two sides of choir and one, sometimes two, cantors, which they call soloists. The organ backs up the melody. The singing is well-modulated and in the somewhat indistinct acoustical environment of the Breuer church it blends well and sounds good. I am not a huge fan of this setting for the Office, but at St. John’s it works and I enjoyed it. I found myself looking forward to the next time of prayer.

The other participants included Aelred and Paul as well as the three-man formation team from St. Meinrad’s, in southern Indiana, and individual “formators” (as the Roman Catholic world now designates those who usher in the new monkly generation) from St. Gregory's Abbey in Shawnee, OK; New Subiaco in Subiaco, AR; from Blue Cloud Abbey in Marvin, SD; from Holy Trinity in St. David, AZ; from Christ the King in Schuyler, NE; and from St. Benedict's in Oxford, MI. It was quite a jolly group.

The conference itself was wonderful. On the first day Fr. Rippinger led us through some strategies for teaching the Rule of St. Benedict, and on the second day ways to approach teaching our individual monastic community history. I found it very useful.

One of the blessings of our time at St. John’s was the funeral of Br. William Borgerding. He was a classic monastic character. His uncle had been a monk there as well, a missionary among the Native Americans who formed part of the monastery’s original ministry in Minnesota. Br. Willie was in charge of cattle until they gave that up, and then was monastic night watchman for both the monastery and the university. He was both loved and legendary among the students, and when the student pub opened, they voted to name it after him – Brother Willie’s Pub. I imagine that his legends include reasons for his name being appropriate to a pub. It was a privilege to share the rites surrounding his burial, which included the reception of the body and vigil on Wednesday evening, and the office of the dead, funeral and burial on Thursday. The monastic community, including all of us attending the conference, processed chanting in double file, leading a large gathering of family and friends, to the cemetery overlooking the lake, where Br. Willie was laid to rest, the latest in lines of hundreds all buried in their new order of precedence, that of their entrance into the Larger Life of the Risen Christ.

Family Tidings

My Aunt Mary, known to the world as Mary Catherine McCoy McKay, died on Monday. I learned about it on Wednesday from her son, my cousin Bruce McKay. She was 101. Aunt Mary (if you just called her Mary, you might hear a word or two from her!) was the second girl in a family of five children: Emily, Gauin, Orlo, Mary and Duncan, who was my father. They grew up in a fairly large but by no means pretentious house in Smethport, PA, in McKean County, northwestern PA. My grandfather, Guy Huenerfeldt McCoy, worked in the bank and later in the drug store owned by my grandmother, Edna Dunbar McCoy. Aunt Mary became a nurse, and a part of her training was in New York City (grandfather had studied pharmacy at Columbia). She spent part of her practical training in East Harlem, which was my home for seven years. She married Alexander McKay, who became an architect, and after World War II Alex was posted to Germany, where they lived for some time. They returned to Pennsylvania, then lived near Rochester, NY, where Uncle Alex designed tract houses. After he died, Aunt Mary moved to Silver Spring to live near Bruce and his wife Suzie and their children.

Aunt Mary turned 100 on January 1, 2008, and practically the whole family was there. I saw cousins I hadn't seen in 40 years. I decided there must be something to genetics after all. I got out of my car, dressed in khakis, turtleneck and a wool sport coat. Across the way was my cousin Guy, a retired physician who lives near Albany, dressed in khakis, turtleneck and a wool sport coat. Bruce opened the door to us, dressed in khakis, turtleneck and a wool sport coat. So it is genetic!

She had all her marbles that day, and it was glorious. She was a keen genealogist, and several of the younger folk have taken her interest to heart. One cousin by marriage had prepared a really fascinating account of the family. I had known that we were related collaterally, through the Dunbars (my grandmother's paternal line) to Henry David Thoreau. But the great discovery was that in the 1600's we had a pirate, and not just a run of the mill pirate, either, but one who left his wife and family in Denmark (I think) and landed in North Africa, converted to Islam, and became the ruler of a small city state in coastal North Africa. I think we're descended through the Danish line. He changed his profession once he went south and apparently made his living by capturing people in Iceland and selling them in North Africa. So, we have a pirate king. I have always loved that song from Pirates of Penzance, and now I know why.

She was also a keen Christian and Episcopalian (except when she got mad at one of the Sunday School teachers and moved the family to the Methodist Church for a while). The McCoy family attended St. Luke's, Smethport PA, where an uncle, William Van Dyke, was the rector. He was a huge influence on my father's vocation to the priesthood. He also had been a novice for a time in the Order of the Holy Cross.

This fall Aunt Mary began to suffer psychological disorientation, probably due to brain function changes. She had to have more intensive care. A few weeks ago she fell out of bed and broke some ribs, and began to decline.

She was a wonderful human being, full of life and love and always with that McCoy edge that I think is also genetic. We all have it. Her funeral will be at Grace Church, Silver Spring MD on Wed., April 22, at 11 am.

In the course of spreading the news about Aunt Mary I learned that my brother Duncan has entered politics and won his first race. He was elected to the City Council of Boulder City, NV, in the first election by more than 50% of the votes, which allowed him to avoid a runoff.

Dunc has been a professional librarian all his working life, specializing in directing city libraries in Kansas (I forget where), Colorado (Rifle), Wyoming (Laramie) and Nevada (Boulder City). He retired last year. He says that his wife encouraged him to get out of the house and find something useful to do, so he did. He has always been a schmoozer, and hides a keen intelligence behind a facade of western good old boy-ness. I am very proud of him.

Texts in Context

In the course of teaching Bible and early monasticism over the years I have become aware, as I suppose is inevitable, that modern readers come to these texts with our own presuppositions. This is not exactly news. But it is also not always obvious to us when we are reading. We aren't usually conscious of the biases of our own culture until we have something to compare it to.

The first thing to know about an ancient text is that it was not written in our language. English as we speak and read it only emerged between 1500 and 1600. And for quite a long time after that, there are enough differences between our form of English and theirs to require fairly heavy notation. In fact, our language is always changing. Something written 50 years ago can already seem linguistically and culturally dated.

For many people this does not seem to be a problem, though. Just get it translated. And so we do, and we can read Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer in our own language. Except then we soon discover that the text we are reading doesn't make much sense. Not because the words aren't clear, but because what they are saying isn't part of our world. Translating the words is just the first step.

In fact, with any text older than approximately this morning we need to do historical and cultural translation as well. When we read things from our own past, or see an old film or hear an old song or look at an old photograph, we do this automatically, remembering the date it was produced and adjusting our focus accordingly. We can do this because we have the tools to understand the context in which what we are reading or hearing or seeing was produced, because we lived in that context and can remember it. If we were alive and conscious when it was produced we can retrieve the context. In doing so, we automatically make what might be called a hermeneutic shift, imagining ourselves back into the original context and then comparing it to what we might make of it in the present moment.

This is the essential process for confronting anything from the past. And since we are used to that process in things within our own range of experience and memory, we apply the same process to things from before our time. But unfortunately, we don't always have the tools we need to interpret the past. Translation is only the beginning, and it is often problematic itself, as anyone who has compared vastly different translations of the same text will know. A translation is always dependent on the cultural presuppositions of the translator, and translators sometimes have agendas. Think of translations of the Bible which serve different theological and denominational interests.

I have long thought that the best way to study anything from the past, including the Bible, is to read it with a double focus: What did it mean to its author and his original audience? and, What does it seem to mean to us today? Then the task is to move beyond our (always at least partly) uninstructed contemporary perceptions of what we are reading to ask a second level question: What would be an analagous meaning in our own terms?

But to tell a group of students or a Bible reading fellowship that they can't really understand the text or artifact they are considering until they understand its original context is not very helpful unless they have some access to that culture, that context. And unfortunately, most of the time the answer is to point them to the library, where, if they apply themselves, they will soon discover themselves mired in the almost trackless forests of academe. The minute you think you have a grip on some important cultural fact that allows you to go back to your text and approach it with a new and better instructed confidence, along comes another scholar ambitious for fortune and fame, or at least tenure, and knocks that down.

What to do, short of discouraging people from reading intelligently at all? Well, one might provide some tools for reconstructing context.

Some years ago I discovered an approach that I have found consistently illuminating. An old friend, Phina Borgeson, years ago, recommended the work of a cultural anthropologist named Bruce Malina to me. I went looking and eventually discovered his major work, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology. Originally written in 1979, and now in its third edition, Malina outlines major cultural categories that are different from ours. I have to say that this book completely changed the way I have read older texts, and not just the ones from the New Testament period. This alternative cultural understanding opened my eyes to the possibility of the double focus, the hermeneutic shift, not simply as a theoretical possibility but actually.

Malina uses major categories of cultural anthropology and compares those of the New Testament period with our own: Honor as the primary cultural value instead of material and professional success; the absolute importance of locating oneself in one's in-group for identity instead of achieving one's own autonomy; finding one's psychological identity in what others think of you instead of cultivating your own interior self (the dyadic personality); the idea that the wealth of the world is a fixed quantity (limited good) and all that flows from that in terms of fixed status hierarchies instead of our assumptions of social mobility; and so much more.

With these categories the stories of Scripture take on new life. The Prodigal Son moves from a touching drama of family forgiveness to a confrontation about the nature of God: in the values system of Jesus' time, a father who allowed a son to behave as the younger son did was endangering the family's future (by halving its resources, which were not likely to recover) and inviting public shame by the violation of the family's honor (the direct insult of the son to the family demanded a severe and public punitive reaction from the father). What the people listening to that story would hear in the extravagant welcome of the son home would not warm their hearts, but chill them to the bone. If this father is a stand-in for God, then God is violating every norm of civilized behavior, is in fact undermining the very fabric of human life as they understood it. The parable should be called the Prodigal, that is, Criminally Irresponsible, Father. And of course, Jesus is telling the story to make the point that God's love for us transcends the assumptions of our culture which would bind and constrict a human father's love and condemn a wayward son for life instead of reincorporating him into the family.

And then, more importantly for us, how does this story challenge us? We can be smug and tell ourselves, Well, thanks to your teaching, Jesus, we don't live in those presuppositions anymore, and so we're home free on that one. Our fathers can welcome their sons home without the tiresome cultural baggage of the past. But that would be a false reading, I think. In place of adopting the specific cultural shift Jesus seems to be recommending to his culture as our own and then basking in our superior understandings, I think we should ask ourselves, What process of cultural criticism would be analagous to us? What fundamental presuppositions of our culture would come under judgment if God acted so recklessly in our terms? That might set us back as much as it doubtless set Jesus' hearers back. The message for us both would seem to be, God really is not interested in validating our deepest cultural assumptions when they would stand in the way of redemptive love.

I have found Malina's book so profound that I have introduced it to almost every class I have taught both in Bible and early monastic texts. It gives some actual, helpful categories to place our encounter with ancient texts in context. It gives us a way to analyze ancient texts and the compare them to our own situation. It helps our reading move away from cultural solipsism. I heartily recommend it.