"Space Oddity"

Love this....

A revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

With thanks to Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran, Andrew Tidby and Evan Hadfield for all their hard work.

Captioning kindly provided by CHS (www.chs.ca)

Find out more:

Twitter: twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AstronautChrisHadfield?­­fref=ts
Google+: plus.google.com/113978637743265603454/po­­sts/p/pub

"Marcella Pattyn, the world’s last Beguine, died on April 14th, aged 92"

Here's Marcella Pattyn's obituary from The Economist.  (HT Anglicans Online.)

I'm especially moved by the idea that "The beguinages had originally been famous for taking the 'spare' or 'surplus' women who crowded into 13th-century cities in search of jobs."   We are headed towards this kind of society today, if we're not already there; global poverty is rising, and unemployment among some sectors of the population is very high.  Decent jobs are becoming scarcer.  The world doesn't seem to care for its "surplus" people much these days, either.  And, of course:  it's easy to understand why Marcella Pattyn would have been attracted to the Beguines; "But she was blind, or almost so, and no other community would accept her. She wanted to work, too, and was not sure she could in an ordinary convent."

AT THE heart of several cities in Belgium lies an unexpected treasure. A gate in a high brick wall creaks open, to reveal a cluster of small, whitewashed, steep-roofed houses round a church. Cobbled alleyways run between them and tiny lawns, thickly planted with flowers, grow in front of them. The cosiness, the neatness and the quiet suggest a hortus conclusus, a medieval metaphor both for virginal women and the walled garden of paradise.

Any veiled women seen there now, however, processing to Mass or tying up hollyhocks in their dark habits and white wimples, are ghosts. Marcella Pattyn was the last of them, ending a way of life that had endured for 800 years.

These places were not convents, but beguinages, and the women in them were not nuns, but Beguines. In these communities, which sprang up spontaneously in and around the cities of the Low Countries from the early 13th century, women led lives of prayer, chastity and service, but were not bound by vows. They could leave; they made their own rules, without male guidance; they were encouraged to study and read, and they were expected to earn their keep by working, especially in the booming cloth trade. They existed somewhere between the world and the cloister, in a state of autonomy which was highly unusual for medieval women and highly disturbing to medieval men.

Nor, to be honest, was it the first thing Juffrouw Marcella thought of when, as a girl, she realised that her dearest wish was to serve her Lord. But she was blind, or almost so, and no other community would accept her. She wanted to work, too, and was not sure she could in an ordinary convent. The beguinages had originally been famous for taking the “spare” or “surplus” women who crowded into 13th-century cities in search of jobs. Even so, the first community she tried sent her back after a week, unable to find a use for her. (In old age she still wept at the thought of all the rejections, dabbing with a handkerchief at her blue unseeing eyes.) A rich aunt intervened with a donation to keep her there, and from the age of 21 she was a Beguine.

Contentedly, in the beguinage at Ghent from 1941 and at Courtrai from 1960, she spent her days in tasks unaltered from the Middle Ages. She knitted baby clothes and wove at a hand loom, her basket of wool beside her chair, chatting and laughing with the other women. At lunchtime, like the others, she ate her own food from her own cupboard (identified by the feel of the carvings under her hands), neatly stocked with plates, jugs, coffee and jam. Cooking she was spared, ever since on the first occasion she had failed to see the milk boiling over, but she washed up with a will.

A good part of the time she prayed, all the prayers she could remember, but especially her rosary whose bright white beads she could almost see. Most usefully, since she was musical, she played the organ in chapel; and she cheered up the sick, as she nursed them, by serenading them on banjo and accordion. Almost her only concession to modernity was the motorised wheelchair in which she would career around the alleyways at Courtrai in her later years, wrapped in a thick knitted cape against the cold, her white stick dangerously levelled like a lance.

Love’s light

In her energy and willpower she was typical of Beguines of the past. Their writings—in their own vernacular, Flemish or French, rather than men’s Latin—were free-spirited and breathed defiance. “Men try to dissuade me from everything Love bids me do,” wrote Hadewijch of Antwerp:

They don’t understand it, and I can’t explain it to them. I must live out what I am.

Prous Bonnet saw Christ, the mystical bridegroom of all Beguines, opening his heart to her like rays blazing from a lantern. But a Beguine who was blind could take comfort in knowing, with Marguerite Porète, that Love’s light also lay within her:

O deepest spring and fountain sealed, Where the sun is subtly hidden, You send your rays, says Truth, through divine knowledge; We know it through true Wisdom: Her splendour clothes us in light.

When she was known to be the last, Juffrouw Marcella became famous. The mayor and aldermen of Courtrai visited her, called her a piece of world heritage, and gave her Beguine-shaped chocolates and champagne, which she downed eagerly. A statue of her, looking uncharacteristically uncertain, was cast in bronze for the beguinage.

The story of the Beguines, she confessed, was very sad, one of swift success and long decline. They had caught the medieval longing for apostolic simplicity, lay involvement and mysticism that also fired St Francis; but the male clergy, unable to control them, attacked them as heretics and burned some alive. With the Protestant Reformation the order almost vanished; with the French revolution their property was lost, and they struggled to recover. In the high Middle Ages a city like Ghent could count its Beguines in thousands. At Courtrai in 1960 Sister Marcella was one of only nine scattered among 40 neat white houses, sleeping in snowy linen in their narrow serge-curtained beds. And then there were none.

"Their sound has gone out unto the ends of the world...."

A wonderful essay in Anglicans Online this week, about the death in April of Marcella Pattyn, the "last Beguine."   Here's the second part of it:

Our devotion to the penultimate page of The Economist is the only reason we learned of the death in Belgium on 14 April this year of Marcella Pattyn, the last Beguine. Though this 92 year old was touted as the last living link to a way of life stretching back some 800 years, her death went unnoticed in wider news outlets. We felt compelled to write in praise of Beguines and their distinct way of living out the Beatitudes.

Beguines* were lay women throughout what are now France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany who organized their lives around shared religious ideals but did not take vows as nuns—and, in fact, could and did leave their communities to return to their families or to marry if they wished. From the 1200s until 2013, they lived out Christ's declarations about the blessedness of the poor in spirit, the peacemakers, the meek, the merciful, the persecuted, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and those who mourn, in ways that were and still are revolutionary. These women retained rights to own and inherit property. They were highly educated, and shared their education with the inhabitants of the cities where they lived. They chose to form urban families of affinity whose temporal stability was rooted in the beautiful béguinages that are still the architectural-historical pride of many northern European cities. The names of some Beguines are bright stars in the history of Christian mysticism: Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, for example. It may come as no surprise that some of them were also accused of heresy, and that they suffered their own persecutions at the hands of the Church whose best ideals they refreshed and enlivened through many generations.

To our mind, one of the most significant things about the Beguines was their decision to live lives of Christian fruitfulness, simplicity and seriousness not in isolation or rural retreat, but rather in the heart of bustling cities. With remarkable wealth around them thanks to the cloth trade in particular, Beguines situated themselves outside of prevailing economic patterns in favour of an individualism-in-community that allowed them both urban solitude and opportunities for effective service. Urban solitude is a thing known well to thoughtful persons who live in cities, but generally experienced only by individuals, and not in ways that make for wider cultural constructiveness. Whilst sleeping and rising alone-together, Beguines prayed bright fires of joy into being through dark nights near the North Sea, and they forged attitudes of apostolic generosity outside the conventions of their time.

As Anglicans, we believe that there are many good flavours and streams in the broad river of Christian spirituality. When identifiable emphases—in this case, on the gift of the individual to community without a loss of autonomy, on the ability of women to make their own religious decisions, on the primacy of mystical, contemplative prayer to bring about the soul's right relationship with its creator, and on the humble goodness of the created world—we can't help but see a wonderful way of doing something beautiful for God. Nobody who has read and understood John Keble could reject this confluence of attitudes as outside the inheritance of all Anglicans and Episcopalians.

We also can't help but reject the idea that Marcella Pattyn was really the last of her kind. Maugre the fact that all the béguinages of the middle ages are now empty but for scents and books and ghosts, we don't have enough fingers and toes to count all the urban mystics we have met in our lives. Some have jobs in cubicles or at desks in nondescript office buildings; some are homeless; some are clergy who have bloomed where they were planted, and never sought other soil or toil; some are waitresses; one is a barber; one shined our shoes last week; one is a phlebotomist; two are cooks; and most are not aware themselves of the reality of the effect of their concentrated prayer on the lives of the world around them. We feel a fair certainty that the things separating today's Beguines from the now-defunct Beguines who perpetuated much that was beautiful and good from the late medieval northern European world are linguistic, cultural, chronological and structural rather than otherwise substantial.

The Economist's obit ended with a line from Agatha Christie: 'And then there were none'. Our preference would be the more joyful 'Their sound has gone out unto the ends of the world, and their words unto the ends of the earth'.

* Some men, called Beghards, also embraced this way of life, but they were never the dominant participants in the movement.

This is interesting.  I'm going to be moving soon, and have been thinking about some sort of  "rural retreat."   I would like to help found a place like Regina Laudis:  a place where people can come to find "that simplest of happiness" when they need it.  

But now I'm wondering about modern béguinages, and how something like that might work out instead.; I've written a few times on this blog about the Beguines and the Beghards.  The only problem here is that living in the city is mostly too expensive these days.

(I've even been thinking about the "desert mothers and fathers," I admit.  A trailer park monastery in the Southwest, perhaps....?)

"The immense dignity conferred upon the human person...."

From David Bentley Hart's introduction to his Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies:

This book chiefly - or at least centrally - concerns the history of the early church, of roughly the first four or five centuries, and the story of how Christendom was born out of the culture of late antiquity.  My chief ambition in writing it is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting:  how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues.  Stated in its most elementary and most buoyantly positive form, my argument is, first of all, that among the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilization, whether convulsive or gradual, political or philosophical, social or scientific, material or spiritual, there has been only one - the triumph of Christianity - that can be called in the fullest sense a "revolution":  a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good.  To my mind, I should add, it was an event immeasurably more impressive in its cultural creativity and more ennobling in its moral power than any other movement of spirit, will, imagination, aspiration, or accomplishment in the history of the West.    And I am convinced that, given how radically at variance Christianity was with the culture it slowly and relentlessly displaced, its eventual victory was an event of such improbability as to strain the very limits of our understanding of historical causality.

Anne Bradstreet: Before the Birth of One of Her Children

At Poets.org:

by Anne Bradstreet

All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death's parting blow are sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh, inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon't may be thy lot to lose thy friend,
We both are ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when the knot's untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my days that's due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel'st no grief, as I no harmes,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms,
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved'st me,
These O protect from stepdame's injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honor my absent hearse;
And kiss this paper for thy dear love's sake,
Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.

 

"A Brutal Unity"

At First Things, a review by Peter Leithart of Ephraim Radner's book, A Brutal Unity. I'm not really a fan of any of these people, I should say!  Radner has been fighting the move toward acceptance of gay people in the church for as long as I've been a member, and First Things isn't exactly friendly in that regard, either. (I'm positive I won't like Peter Leithart's record on the topic, either!)

But Radner is dealing with something really important here, to my mind:   a millennias-old wrong turn in the church's history that's often resulted in persecution and violence - and the church's continuing furious denial of same.  Here's where the church itself needs to undergo the disciplines of "Confession and Penitence" - because it continues to make these mistakes.  I'm not sure if this is Radner's actual point - the reviewer seems to continue to talk about "unity" rather than "contrition" - but it will be interesting to see.   At least Radner is facing the delusion and actually discussing the brutality of the church as an institution - and anyway, this is one of those "only Nixon could go to China" issues.  

I've downloaded the Sample for my Kindle, but really do wish some of these things I want to read - I'm looking at you, too, Martin Thornton - weren't so expensive. I'm hoping a local library may have it.

Here's the full review.

Ephraim Radner is one of those rare theologians whose work can be described as “relentless.” His most recent book, A Brutal Unity, may be his most relentless yet. Radner dismantles every self-congratulatory, self-protective ecclesiology that blinds Christians to what is self-evident to everyone else: The Church is shattered. For Radner, our divisions are more than unhappy. One chapter title, “Division is Murder,” captures the book’s substance and its searing rhetoric.

Radner rejects traditional ecclesiologies, whether Protestant or Catholic, that exonerate the Church by treating division as extra-ecclesial. According to theologians who subscribe to such views, “the ‘Church as such’ is never divided,” and so whatever divisions occur must be happening to something other than the “real” Church. Protestants distinguish the true, united invisible Church from its visibly divided husk, and in Catholic Marian ecclesiology, the true Church is figured by immaculate Mary, untouched by the sins of her children. Radner has no patience for such cheap solace. The Church as such is a historical community and thus as such is both sinful and divided.

He finds a similar evasion in William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence. According to Cavanaugh, religion cannot be isolated from other aspects of life, and so religion cannot be said to be inherently violent. Religious people do violent things, but it’s a statist myth to say that their violence is caused by religion. Radner responds with a painfully detailed exploration of how the Church’s divisions contributed to the Rwandan bloodbath. “More people were killed during the genocide in church buildings than perhaps anywhere else,” and in Rwanda and elsewhere Christians have claimed to act violently “as Christians, for the sake of their belief in God.”

Even if Cavanaugh is right, the fact that the Church gets caught up in other people’s slaughters only underscores her political weakness. Though Cavanaugh doesn’t deny that Christians do violence in God’s name, Radner thinks his thesis makes it more difficult for Christians to view the carnage honestly and confess, “We did this.”

Radner traces the murderous divisiveness of Christianity back to Epiphanius’ fourth-century treatise “Refutation of all Heresies.” The “Epiphanian paradigm” treats intra-Christian discord as apostasy and preserves the unity of the Church by expelling those judged heretical. For Radner, this is another evasion since it literally places division outside the Church.

He doesn’t want to delete “heresy” from Christian discourse. As I understand him, he follows very strictly Jesus’ instructions concerning discipline. Sinners and false teachers who refuse to listen to the Church become “Gentiles and tax collectors.” But then Radner wants us to remember that Jesus lived among tax gatherers and sinners, and he calls his disciples to follow. Correct the false teacher, but then pursue him so that he can be restored to brotherhood. What the Church cannot do, if she is following Jesus, is set heretics out and then rest content with the unity that remains.

There is no “procedural” path to unity; building “consensus” is not the way forward. Rather, the Church must recognize that her unity has a “Jesus form.” The Church is not only fallible but “deformable, pervertible, turning into the contradiction of her own claims.” But Jesus cannot deny himself, so he continues to give himself to his denying Church. Likewise, “the story of the Church is the story of the self-giving of Jesus to the apostles and betrayers and indifferent.” The Church’s unity lies in her solidarity with “those who sin and who divide.” Division is, paradoxically, internal to the Church’s unity. It must be so because the figure of Jesus has been pressed into the Church’s life.

Radner’s relentlessness can sound like despair, but that description would be unfair. In the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15), he finds “a classic instance of ecclesial unity at work.” This conciliar unity, though, emerges in a Church already shaped by gathering, prayer, devotion to apostolic teaching, Eucharist, and sharing of property: “Only out of this comes ‘one mind and one heart.’” His reading of Acts is not Pollyannaish. The early Church was united in one mind precisely because she followed Jesus in giving herself to deniers.

A Brutal Unity is a lament and a call to repentance. That is entirely appropriate, but some of its Lenten tone arises, I think, from Radner’s austerely Levinasian insistence that “all unity within the Church is literally ‘unilateral,’ one-sided in its motive force.” That is at best a half-truth. It is true that “we find nothing of reciprocity” in Jesus’ dealings with sinners, yet Jesus goes to the cross in hope of resurrection joy and glorifies his Father, praying that the Father will restore him to the glory they have shared from the foundation of the world. When we stand among (other!) sinners and dividers, we do so in hope of reunion.

For this too is figured in the figure of Jesus. Israel and Judah went to the grave of exile as two peoples, but Ezekiel promised that in the furnace of Babylon the two would be forged into one. When raised up and restored to the land, there was no more Israel or Judah, only Jews.

Any future unity will still display the form of Jesus, will still require that the Church “suffer contradiction” in herself. But we are not condemned to repeat forever the horrors of Rwanda. Reunion is God’s work. He may do it by turning up the temperature. But he can do it. He has done it before.