by Donald Schell

To my surprise, a couple of events in the past week had me thinking freshly about the Ascension. And to write about them coherently I need to make a couple of confessions.
First - I’m the kind of person who, once I’ve read far enough to know I care about a novel to finish it, will read the end (same for a mystery). Then knowing where it’s going, I go back to my bookmark and watch the storyteller at work. It turns all narrative into a kind of remembering that in life only comes with retrospection. More on that one after…

My Second Confession - when I was a college student seeking ordination and planning to go to seminary, I got invited to preach the Sunday after the Ascension and I preached a “challenge” to the congregation based on the premise that a progressive, open-hearted reading of the New Testament still had to acknowledge as FACTS, fragments of narrative like Luke/Acts account of the Ascension. I said something like, “We may not like it, but if we claim we’re Christian, we need to believe that God actually could and did lift Jesus heavenward from a hilltop in Israel and that he disappeared into the clouds like a rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.”

So, Ascension - why does this particular account from Luke trump the other three Gospels? Same for Annunciation and Pentecost? Why does Luke define our liturgical year so decisively? Luke’s birth story defines Christmas on the calendar. Matthew’s version gets squeezed in to Epiphany. Two Gospels choose to have no birth story. And why do we celebrate Pentecost fifty days after Easter (following Luke) instead of on Easter Day (following John)? Forty-five years of listening to colleagues preach Gospel narrative with grace have made me grateful that the one story of Jesus is emphatically NOT a coherent narrative, and I’m intrigued and moved to consider how oral tradition, preaching, teaching, and evangelism shaped the narratives we receive from the communities whose versions we’ve made canonical. But it’s a different story with the liturgical year. Ascension is a Lukan celebration, a story missing completely from the other Gospels and a prelude to Luke/Acts unique telling of the Pentecost.

Why is Luke given prominence in shaping our liturgical year?

I suspect the author’s declared purpose of creating a synthesis appeals to liberal literalists. Our church is full of liberal literalists, people (including clergy) whose hearts are in an open place pastorally, people who long for justice, people who listen to NPR, and people who read the Gospels as if they were an eyewitness accounts. I know we’re in trouble when I hear a preacher wonder what Jesus or Peter or someone in the narrative “must have felt when…”

Trial lawyers tell me that they know eyewitness testimony wins a case because juries believe eyewitness is as close to hearing the ‘the truth’ or ‘what really happened’ as you can get. And friends who are trial attorneys acknowledge research demonstrating that eyewitness is the least reliable form of evidence because it’s all based on memories patched together and reinterpreted to make sense of things. Luke admits he’s doing just that, collecting and synthesizing stories to make a whole. Luke declares to Theophilus (his real reader of an imagined “lover of God”) that he has deliberately gathered and compared the stories to create a coherent narrative. We have to surmise what case he’s arguing, but he means to offer us evidence and closing argument for a verdict. And his coherent narrative gives us our now assumed governing structure to think about all the stories and experience of the four Gospels and beyond, stories that entirely burst the boundaries of narrative. Luke’s imposed order encourages us (and the church year) to imagine we’re thinking or hearing ‘what really happened.’

To his credit, Luke also is very interested in the wild, unpredictable workings of the Holy Spirit, and the coherent narrative that he crafts repeatedly tells the story where the Spirit showing up changes everything. Luke’s distinctive ordering is genuinely graceful, and this reminder of the Spirit a note in scripture that I wish we valued more. But neither Luke nor the liturgical year offer us coherent historical narrative. And the other Gospels insistently remind us that there are other tellings of this mysterious story making the rounds of early communities.

So then, the next question – why does Luke come up with Jesus’ rocket-like ascent into the clouds?

Two of Luke’s problems crafting his coherent narrative push for the Ascension. First there’s the question of just where Jesus might be NOW. We’ve got the disciples (and Paul’s) experience of the Risen Jesus, and then this logical question – is he still around that way, how ever or whatever ‘that way’ or a visible, touchable risen Christ might have meant to any of these communities (or St. Paul)? And if we don’t see Jesus now, where is he? The other Gospels leave the question wholly unanswered. One mystery opens to another. But Luke comes up with an answer, pointing toward the clouds, Luke says – “He’s not here that way anymore. He’s up there. At the Right Hand of the Father.”

Conveniently “up there” helps with the second narrative problem. As the other Gospel-making communities seem to have done, at least sometimes, Luke partially reframes Jesus’ message of the radical presence of God’s reign NOW. The early communities, facing hardship and persecution, lay a future promise on top of Jesus’ urgent proclamation of the divine now. Whatever was less than God wanted and hoped for would be resolved when Jesus “came back from heaven.” The early communities supplied a Deus Ex Machina to make Jesus’ proclamation of radical blessing now work out. When I’m reading a mystery and skip ahead to find out “who done it,” I’m reading a finished book. Skipping to read life from “the end” doesn’t work because “the end” is hidden in darkness and the mystery of God’s unfolding creation.

We can actually only read our lives and the life of our community of faith as they unfold. But we seem to imagine that if we can promise ourselves an ending that will tie up all the loose ends, we can make more sense of the narrative we’re living. The earliest Christians took that apocalyptic impulse they’d inherited from one strand of first century Judaism, a bit like my reading the end of a mystery before finishing the book, and grafted it back into Jesus’ teaching. And Luke’s Ascension gives us a map of heaven and earth and imagines a second to the last chapter that together make Jesus’ return from heaven work.

Bishop Pike fretted that the 1967 Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, the earliest liturgy in Trial Use that led to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer introduced ‘strange and erroneous doctrine’ with its non-Episcopalian emphasis on the second coming, what we have now in “Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again.” At the time I felt scornful of Pike for dismissing what was so evident in the Bible’s story, or thinking of Ascension in Acts and the angels’ reproach and promise in Acts 1, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” There it is, what goes up must come down, Luke’s schema for the Second Coming.

Over the years since reading Gospel scholars convinced me that Jesus was preaching a non-futurist re-visioning of the present action of God – a ‘kingdom of God’ that wasn’t just at hand (John the Baptist’s message) but here, now, among us.

Preaching that God’s power is fully present and realized among us now has all kinds of problems, and not just the problem of evil and suffering (consider how Luke fixes the problem of Jesus’ outrageous declaration of God’s blessing on the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, and those who mourn. But it’s not just evil, there’s also the problem of any future at all. If God’s new life, the infinite holy possibility of the present is already here, what’s tomorrow? Memory and anticipation look like a workable answer. But consider what do we do with memory.

Daniel Simons at St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Wall Street preached a sermon that touched on memory. Preaching the ultimate fallibility of memory at the church that has been the pilgrim destination for 9/11 requires a certain courage, or at least ruthless clarity. Daniel was talking about what lasts, about the transformative and enduring power of love, the very thing that seems most fragile and ephemeral. And he quoted a saying (probably from the Mexican Day of the Dead tradition) about our final death, which is not the moment our hearts stop or the moment we’re consigned to a crematorium or buried in the earth, but the last time our name is spoken on earth.

If love is truly stronger than death and sin, it’s also got to be stronger than memory, because, as the Whiffenpoof song brutally reminds us, eventually, “we’ll pass and be forgotten like the rest.”

At St. Paul’s, backing up to Ground Zero and the World Trade Center site, you see constant crowds lined up to visit our most recent ‘eternal memory’ destination. Walking along the Hudson River on the West Side of Manhattan, I paused to read another, lesser memorial. It’s not even a plaque, but a laminated photograph and text marking the dock where the Carpathia docked delivering 700 survivors from the Titanic disaster to safety.

What makes us say we’ll ‘never forget’ those who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or ‘never forget’ those who went down with the Titanic? What is our cultural investment in this lie of eternal remembering? I’m named for an uncle who died in World War II. I had a cousin who was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I can tell you their names and some story, and my children can offer a smaller bit toward names and story, and what will their children know to tell?

Memory and forgetting, the power of love, and the power of death were all on my mind when I went through security at JFK’s terminal 2. I read the caption beneath a large American flag on the wall:

This Flag contains the names of those killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 Now and forever it will represent their immortality We shall never forget them.

Then I looked again and saw that the stars and stripes of the flag were all made of tiny print. The names of those killed, undoubtedly including my cousin’s name. It was a poignant reminder of a solidarity in death of a large, diverse group of people. The flag itself was moving. But the pious caption was simply and patently false.

Immortality? I recalled going to a reading and talk by Wallace Stegner with my daughter Maria. Stegner read and told stories and Maria leaned over to me and said, “Dad, it’s like listening to Mark Twain live.” I nodded. When Stegner invited questions from the audience, someone asked, “Mister Stegner, how does it feel to have earned a permanent place in the pantheon of American letters?” Wallace Stegner laughed. “I don’t think there is such a permanent pantheon. I love going to used bookstores and finding several copies of now forgotten treasures from ‘immortal’ writers fifty years back. We forget more than we remember. Finally we’ll all be forgotten. I hope I’ve contributed something to readers today. It would be wonderful if my books still speak in a generation, but who knows?”

The flag, like Luke’s Ascension story, hopes to shape our experience of the present, to project a memory (or a not forgetting) to a remote future and then read the narrative of our lives from knowing this is how the story will end. Gospel doesn’t offer that, it delivers us from it.

But the church calendar gives us the Ascension. Luke’s solution to where Jesus went and how he’ll come back gets celebrated every year, so what does commemorating the Ascension invite us to as preachers and lovers of Scripture?

In sacramental theology class, we learned that a distinction between Luther and Calvin’s understandings of Christ Presence in the Eucharist paralleled their two interpretations of the Ascension. Calvin didn’t, in fact, teach the Eucharistic was a ‘mere memorial.’ He insisted that Christ was SPIRITUALLY present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Present, because that was Christ’s promise and spiritual because Christ’s physical body and blood had ascended to the right hand of the father where he’d remain physically until the second coming. Luther, on the other hand, said that the Ascension taught us that the Risen Christ filled all creation, where else would you find the ‘the right hand of God.’ Not somewhere distant and above us, but inhering in all things, the presence and power that blessed all with life and possibility of holiness. So, we learned, Luther said taught knowing Christ present in the Eucharistic bread and wine we glimpsed the hidden fullness of Christ in everything. Here, now, and in all. For me that’s the Ascension worth celebrating.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.

Christian teachings about Jesus’ ascension are uncomfortably problematic.

First, the image of a king ascending to heaven, residing there as a god worshipped by his former subjects, is not unique to Christianity. Romans believed that Romulus (a boy and only later mythologized as a wolf), who with his brother Remus founded Rome, ascended at death to heaven and became the popular god Quirinus. Other ancient figures alleged to have ascended to heaven include Enoch and Elijah in the Old Testament, Hercules, Empedocles, and Alexander the Great. Was Jesus’ ascension historical fact or simply a well-intentioned attempt by Jesus’ first disciples to frame his story in language and metaphors widely known and understood in the first century? If the latter, the story has become a dated and generally misunderstood attempt to describe the intimacy with God that the disciples experienced in their relationship with Jesus.

Second, the image of Jesus ascending to heaven from Palestine, which several hundred years ago was a favorite subject of artists, today often evokes the continuing conflict between religion and science. The pervasive imagery, if taken literally, presupposes a flat earth, flat not because of globalization but because of a wrong view of the solar system. Thinking that heaven connotes a physical place – necessary if one believes in a physical resurrection - poses the additional difficulty of identifying that place’s locale, presumably somewhere in this physical cosmos.

Third, understanding the imagery subtly suggests that earth is at the center of creation, something ancient mapmakers who placed Jerusalem at the center of creation recognized. Nothing in the Bible requires this view; contemporary astronomers convincingly marshal evidence to the contrary. Earth is far from the cosmos’ center; humans are not necessarily the apogee of creation.

Fourth, spiritualizing the image of Jesus ascending to heaven, while avoiding the previous two problems, may imply that heaven is better than earth or that the future is preferable to the present. Yet God created heaven and earth. Valuing heaven more highly than earth requires considerable hubris: who are humans to assess God's handiwork? Admittedly, individual humans may reasonably prefer heaven to earth (e.g., the Apostle Paul, frequently persecuted for his beliefs and practices) or earth to heaven (e.g., people who believe that death is the end of existence). If, however, as the Church has long taught, God determines the number of a person’s days, then being where God wants one to be – earth or heaven – is best for that person at that moment.

Fifth, the New Testament repeatedly states that God is at work reconciling all creation to God's self. Unfortunately, widespread emphasis on heaven as the locus of life after death not only devalues the earth but also causes the Church and Christians largely to ignore the importance of caring for all creation. God calls humans to join God in the work of reconciling all creation (and not just fellow humans!) to God.

Finally, the New Testament and orthodox Christian theology incorporate a commonly unacknowledged contradiction. On the one hand, Jesus says that he must leave the disciples but promises the gift of the Spirit to his disciples as a guide and advocate in his absence. The Nicene Creed affirms Jesus’ absence – he sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven – and the Church celebrates the gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. On the other hand, much of the Church believes that Jesus is present in the Eucharist: this is my body; this is my blood. Whether understood in terms of transubstantiation, real presence, or spiritual presence, this affirmation is a prima facie contradiction of the premise that Jesus is now present in heaven rather than on earth. Furthermore, Christians for almost two millennia, notably including the Apostle Paul, claim to have encountered the risen Jesus on earth in spite of Jesus having ascended from earth into heaven.

So what can Christians meaningfully say about Jesus’ ascension?

First, Ascension reminds us to understand our theology metaphorically, to hold even the most cherished concepts gingerly, tentatively. Contradiction becomes paradox when we recognize that neither claim is ultimately true, that both claims at best represent partial truths, and that the claims’ incompatibility points to a mysterious otherness into which we can live but which we can never adequately articulate or describe. Like the early Christians, we do well to frame our experience of God in the language and metaphors of our time and culture, always cognizant that these are earthen vessels. After all, these earthen vessels are all that we have.

Second, struggling with Ascension’s problems offers a helpful antidote to our proclivities for hubris and anthropocentricity. Thinking about Ascension can remind us that although God created humans and crowned us with glory and honor, God's love has a breadth and depth that encompasses all life and the whole cosmos. Ascension, rightly understood, emphasizes God's reliance upon us as co-redeemers rather than passive participants of creation’s renewal. Jesus is not here; we are; therefore, God relies upon us to act.

Third and finally, Jesus’ ascension is a sign of hope. God remains involved with the cosmos. Whether conceived in terms of the activity of the Son or the Holy Spirit – thankfully, this post is about Ascension and not the Trinity so I, in good conscience, ignore that issue – God’s activity continues. God's reliance upon us to act is not an abdication of God's responsibility but an invitation to partner with God. We do not have to understand how that occurs, correctly identify which person of the Trinity acts, or even accurately discern what God is doing. We can know that our work of reconciliation will ultimately prevail because God works with us. This hope is Ascension’s real message.

George Clifford is a priest, writer, and ethicist who serves as Priest Associate at the Church of the Nativity, Raleigh, NC. He retired from the Navy after serving as a chaplain for twenty-four years and now blogs at Ethical Musings.

by Linda Ryan

One of the most important parts of our Education for Ministry (EfM) group is the TR, the Theological Reflection. We consider a word, a text, a picture, video, movie, experience or issue, form a metaphor encompassing what stands out for us from the topic or artifact (objects), and then consider the world of the metaphor through the lenses of tradition, culture, position and action. It's a way of teaching us to look for God, faith, meaning and opportunity for learning and ministry in everyday things. The discussion varies from week to week, sometimes very focused and sometimes, as we call it, like herding cats, but the beauty is that something comes out of it no matter how scattered or tightly focused the discussion. That something often goes with us through the week and makes us see things -- people and situations-- in new ways.

On this occasion the metaphor we were using involved considering a washing machine, how it worked, what it did, what could go wrong with it, what could put it right. We spoke of feeling the "thunkety-thunkety" of the unbalanced load, the noise of the spin cycle and other metaphors for life as a washing machine or the clothes in it. Then someone brought up that packing the washer too tightly resulted in wrinkled clothes. I hadn't really considered it in that light but it gave me something to think about, something that said any time something is crowded it often gets crumpled and not able to stretch and breathe. It gets unhealthy and, in the end, produces something wrinkled that doesn't look good or seem clean enough. Someone asked if those clothes got ironed and that's when the fun (and the "AHA!" moments) began. Some owned irons and used them, whether sparingly or frequently. One knew someone with an iron they could borrow if necessary but hadn't felt that need as of yet. I have an iron but am not precisely sure where it is.

I can see myself as a washing machine as well as the clothes in one, but when it comes to an iron and what happens when it is used, that's something else entirely. I'm one who ignores the wrinkles for the most part and just wants to get on with whatever has to get done. I snickered to a classmate that for me, ironing was like the doctrine of substitutionary atonement: I just didn't believe in it. Maybe that's a bit whimsical, but that's how I feel about it. That's just talking about the physical act of ironing --- like clothes, church linens and the like. The metaphorical ironing is a bit different.

I have a wrinkled soul. I know it, God knows it and quite a few people know it as well. Some can deal with it, some can't see how I can deal with it, and occasionally I wonder the same thing myself. In terms of a ministry, the wrinkles show up as wanting to do things but not being able to or not being willing to step out in faith and try. In terms of my personal life, it's in the relationship with different people. With God, however, I sort of look at it as God accepting that I'm wrinkled and ever so gently touching me up with an iron to smooth out the rough spots, but only when I notice and am uncomfortable enough with the wrinkle to really want it gone. God will do that for me, but only if I really want it to happen. I have to invest in it myself for it to have value, just as I have to invest in the right detergent and softener to get my clothes and things both clean and soft. Some wrinkles are unavoidable but most can be, if I care enough to do the things that will help prevent them.

I don't know what others came up with as insights, but for me, it was a change of perspective that I probably need to consider. That's one thing about this part of EfM that we call a TR: it makes me look at how I see things and begin to discern what works and what doesn't, what I need to learn and also to unlearn, what I think, what I believe, and what all those mean to me in my life. The trick now is to take that insight and actually do something with it, along with being glad God is there to help me get rid of the wrinkles.

Now to just remember not to overcrowd the washing machine or overcrowd my life with inconsequentialities. Oh, and I must learn to sort more carefully so the socks won't fade on something important. Come to think of it, black socks are like sin -- they kind of leave a stain, no matter how carefully I think I've sorted it out. I don't want my clothes coming out looking dirtier than when they went in, or more wrinkled than they need to be. Small wrinkles may be easily overlooked like small imperfections, but dingy or spotted clothes are a lot more obvious, like the sins I accumulate during a day or a lifetime.

Gotta love a device that allows me to put my feet (and my mind) in a different place with a different perspective. That's what TRs do for me.

Now if I could just use a TR to help me figure out how to always have socks that come out of the washer in pairs.

Linda Ryan co-mentors 2 EfM Online groups and keeps the blog Jericho's Daughter

by George Clifford

Is supporting their clergy the raison d’être for congregations to exist?

In 2010, half of the 6,794 congregations in The Episcopal Church (TEC) had an average Sunday attendance (ASA) of 65 or fewer people; 58% of TEC congregations had fewer than 200 active, baptized members and only 15% have more than 500 active, baptized members. Nevertheless, TEC congregations generally want to have the services of a full-time, paid clergyperson.

click to enlarge (C. Kirk Hadaway, “Episcopal Congregations Overview: Findings from the 2008 Faith Communities Today Survey,” March 2009, available at here)

Having served small (ASA under 20) and large (ASA over 500) congregations, I find it impossible to imagine that small congregations (e.g., those with an ASA under 150 or fewer than 350 active baptized members) require the services of a full-time paid cleric.

The smallest congregation that I have served was a Royal Navy (RN) Church in London, England. Ministering to my active parishioners left me ample time to minister to the spiritual needs of my 2000 plus military parishioners and their families not active in the Church, to manage some local RN social service programs, and to design, obtain funding for, and oversee construction of, a new multi-purpose facility (church, pub, and theater). That experience confirmed the jaundiced suspicion with which I have long viewed the need for small congregations to have full-time paid clergy.

The bald truth is that small congregations spend a hugely disproportionate, even scandalous, percentage of their resources, especially financial resources, on clergy compensation. If the cleric receives a not very generous annual stipend of $50,000, healthcare insurance costing $12,000 and payments into the pension fund of $11,160, then the cleric’s total package costs the congregation $73,160. That represents 25 donors, each giving $2926 per year, or 50 donors, each giving $1463. To put those numbers in context, the average pledge in TEC today is approximately $1500. Thus, the 12% of congregations with an ASA of 25 or less who have full-time paid clergy either have exceptionally generous contributors or pay their bills from an endowment.

The Church does not exist to provide full-time employment for the clergy. The Church’s mission, broadly conceived by H. Richard Niebuhr, is the increase of the love of God and neighbor. As the author of I Timothy remarked, clergy, like all laborers, are rightly paid for their labor. However, clergy, like any laborer, should not expect full-time compensation for performing what are actually part-time duties.

Congregations and clergy share responsibility for this ugly form of clericalism. Few priests (or bishops or seminary faculty members!) question the prevailing ministry model with its strong presumption of at least one full-time paid cleric for every congregation. Their silence makes them complicit in sustaining a model that diverts resources from bringing new life to maintenance of the dying.

Similarly, few congregants vigorously, persistently, and effectively question congregational decision makers (bishop, clergy, vestry, bishop’s committee, wardens) whether the grossly skewed expenditure of funds on clergy compensation reflects the most prudential use of monies received as offerings to God. Our culture has a strongly normative belief that having a full-time, paid cleric on staff and owning a building are minimum essential hallmarks for a Christian congregation. In other words, this is not a problem unique to TEC>

Yet half of all Americans have incomes near or below the poverty level. Hunger in America is on the increase. And the plight of our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world makes most of the poor in the U.S. seem wealthy. The percentage of Americans who self-identify as Christians has declined from 86% in 1990 to 76% in 2009; during that same period, the percentage who identify as “no religious preference” has doubled. Is clergy compensation the best, the most prudential use of the gifts that God's people give?

If the Church does not exist to support the clergy, what can we do?

First, TEC and its clergy can establish a fuller, healthier mutual accountability for clergy and congregations. A relative handful of clergy who serve small congregations devote much of their time to managing mission endeavors the congregation sponsors. A smaller handful spend their time effectively growing the congregation (It’s true! TEC does have some small congregations that are growing numerically). Most underemployed clergy, however, lack the opportunity or skills for either of the foregoing. They, or perhaps their successor, should become bi-vocational, serve multiple congregations, or combine part-time in the small congregation with another part-time clergy position (e.g., chaplaincy, staff for an ecumenical group, diocesan staff, or assisting in a larger congregation). Regular and rigorously honest mutual ministry reviews that discuss how the clergy use their time represent an excellent opportunity to move toward institutionalizing a fuller, healthier accountability.

Second, TEC needs to make seminary education more affordable, so that graduates leave without debt. Consolidating our eleven seminaries is one possibility for achieving this (cf. A word on our seminaries: Consolidate!). Well-intentioned initiatives to provide clergy for small congregations that lower educational requirements risk creating an under-qualified, ill-equipped, second-rate set of clergy for small congregations. Leading a small congregation requires considerable expertise and as comprehensive a skill set as needed to lead a very large congregation. God's people deserve the best. TEC has no shortage of people who hear a call to ordination. Making seminary affordable represents a significant step toward solving TEC’s problem of a mal-distributed clergy, i.e., too many clergy need full-time salaries that too few congregations can, or should, pay.

Third, we can change our thinking about Church. The older form of clericalism identified ministry as the work of the clergy, isolated them on pedestals, and invested them with the responsibility of managing the Church (i.e., made them holy authority figures) is thankfully dying, a casualty of healthy changes in the last 50 years. The new form of clericalism tacitly presumes that the Church exists for the clergy, providing them full-time compensation in exchange for being a person of faith, saying the prayers others are too busy or too doubtful to say, and maintaining the Church. Sometimes the cleric literally maintains the building, arriving early to adjust the thermostat and to make coffee, and then leaving late, taking out the trash, and locking the doors after the last person has left. More often, the cleric is the lynchpin for ensuring the congregation’s organizational functionality.

Neither model of clericalism is faithful to the mutual ministry of all God's people. The four orders of ministry identify functional and not spiritual distinctions. Clergy bring certain gifts and authority to their ministry within a congregation, but those gifts and that authority (e.g., preaching and consecrating sacraments) are no better than the gifts and authority that lay people bring; indeed, without the gifts and authority of the laity, the Church reverts to the worst of the old form of clericalism.

If The Episcopal Church is to once again thrive as a vibrant, fully alive branch of the larger Church, then TEC congregations must cease existing to support their clergy and instead discover new patterns of mutual ministry to reach a world that is literally and spiritually hungry. The clergy’s raison d’être is to support the Church, not the other way around.

George Clifford is an ethicist and Priest Associate at the Church of the Nativity, Raleigh, NC. He retired from the Navy after serving as a chaplain for twenty-four years and now blogs at Ethical Musings.

by Maria Evans

Almighty God, Author of the Universe, you imbued your creation with myriad seasonal joys. Through their brief temporal windows, open our hearts to a like-mindedness towards the fleeting moments when we can see Your heavenly realm on earth. Grant us the same eagerness to embrace these moments in humble service to You, as eagerly as we embrace the beauty of nature. All this we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, whose own short temporal window to this world gave us our salvation through the New Covenant. Amen.
--A Prayer for the Seasonal Beauty of Nature, ©Maria L. Evans, 2012

As a longtime resident of northeast Missouri, I have to admit one of my favorite things about my rural lifestyle is the roughly four-week window that the morel mushrooms are in season. (Yeah, I know, for any of you mycology purists out there, they are not a true "mushroom" but another kind of fungus...but "mushroom" is burned in the vernacular, so "mushrooms" they shall be.) In these parts, morel season has at least a rough correlation to Easter season, so the two kind of go hand in hand for me.

I've been hunting morels since I was five years old--first with my dad, then for many years as an adult, and just this year I had the pleasure of going full circle by hunting them with my cousin's youngest child, who is not yet six years old. There's something alluring about tromping about in gum boots around the woods near the river bottoms to find one of the last things on the planet that more or less defies cultivation and, in a world of near-year-round commercial produce, truly remains seasonal. (Oh, I know one can buy those "morel kits" on the Internet, but they are not the same kind of morel we have here, and for whatever reason, they just don't taste the same.)

Morel hunting has an egalitarian aspect to it--a ten year old can be just as successful a morel hunter as an adult--maybe even better as the ten year old is a little closer to the ground. There's definitely an intimacy with sharing a mushroom spot--we don't give our spots away to just anyone--and an intimacy with whom we share our bounty. The people who are not into mushroom hunting think we're stark raving mad, because for those few weeks it's all we think of, and riding in the car with us often results in several stops by the side of the road to peer into ditches and briefly wander around.

I can't think of a better metaphor for the Resurrection than the humble morel.

For starters, one never knows when one will see them. The emergence of morels starts when the overnight ground temperature consistently is over 50 degrees. They are as whimsical as the April weather patterns. The places one expects to see them, don't always yield results, and it changes from year to year, decade to decade. I think back to what used to be one of my best spots in my younger days. After the Great Flood of 1993, I haven't found squat in the way of mushrooms since--and I still try to go back to that spot every year.

Sometimes it involves days and days of faithfully going back to the same spot and looking around and coming up empty, day after day. Sometimes it results in an abundance, filling up several plastic grocery bags full, and sometimes the best we can do is a few handfuls after a couple of hours' worth of tromping around. They emerge out of nowhere, like magic--in the space of an hour, a barren spot can be walked by a second time and sport four or five morels. Even the act of consuming them is a bit of an exercise in acceptance--despite soaking them in salt water to get the hundreds of gnats out of their pores who made the morel their temporary home, a person has to accept that he or she will eat a few gnats along with this delicacy.

The parallels to living a faithful life as a practicing Christian astound me. How many times, once we've been exposed to the initial awe of the resurrected Christ, on a bright and joyful Easter Day, do we find ourselves weeks later in the humdrum of the Long Green Liturgical Season? How many times do we yearningly look for the Resurrection and not even catch a glimpse of it, but the next day when we are totally unaware, see it in all its grand glory? How many times have we insisted in tromping in the muck out of season, "because this is the time of year we've always done it," when in reality we were the ones out of season? How many times have we attempted to "cultivate" the awe-inspired Resurrection Moment, and discover it's just not the same as finding it by accident? How many times has a ten year old gotten the message of the Good News in Christ more fully than an adult?

The seasonal wonder of the lowly morel is a reminder that Resurrection simply is not of our making. We don't control it, we don't manage it, and it defies cultivation. All we can do is be faithful in our search for it, steward the places where we've seen it happen before, and enjoy it when it appears.

Maria Evans, a surgical pathologist from Kirksville, MO, writes about the obscurities of life, medicine, faith, and the Episcopal Church on her blog, Kirkepiscatoid

by Linda Ryan

I'm proud to be part of EfM, Education for Ministry. I've been a student and am now a co-mentor to two fine groups of intelligent, inquiring, contributing souls who meet weekly to worship, chat about goings-on in our lives, study and be involved in both theological reflection and a ministry of prayer. They are not much different than most EfM groups except that the folks in my groups have, for the most part, never laid physical eyes on other members of the group. My groups meet online and represent people from all over the country. Even if they are not at home, many fire up the laptops while they are traveling in order to join in the session. It's a unique and very great way of learning, interacting and preparing for ministry both inside and outside the church walls.

One question that often comes up when talking about EfM online is "How can you possibly be a community of you have never met anyone else in the group? How can it be a community when all you see are words on a screen with no body language, facial expression or tone of voice?" The answer is simple, "We can and we do."
What exactly is a community? It's a group of people with similar goals even when there are very different ideas of how to achieve those goals. It's a group where each person is important and where each person's talents and abilities are honored and their thoughts and beliefs, even if not shared by any or all in the group, are considered valid for that person and respected as such. Whether or not the group is all under one roof literally or figuratively is less important than that they all subscribe to a set of norms upon which they all agree. It is a place where confidentiality is respected and participants feel safe to express ideas, beliefs and concerns in a place where no conversation is complete until every voice is heard with respect and openness.

So how can this be achieved when even in places where people meet face-to-face have difficulty doing so? For one thing, groups online have to work a little harder since there are no visual or auditory cues to follow. One of the most important lessons is to assume good intent; what someone reads in a person's words might not be precisely the same thing that the speaker meant, so it behooves us to read generously. That might not be such a bad idea when reading the Bible as well, since what we try to read into it is far from what the original writer or speaker intended it to mean. For another, seeing the words rather than just hearing them enables us to go back and reread statements that we might have otherwise missed. But, like every group, community is achieved by the weekly reporting in of events of the week that are part of what we call the "onboard" question such as "If your week were a bookstore, which section best describes it?" or "Where was God present or absent in your week?" It is also built when prayers are sought for friends, loved ones, mere acquaintances, people impacted by tragedy, world events, illnesses, deaths, thanksgivings for the group or for blessings received. As we learn each other's stories, we form bonds that transcend distance. They truly do become a community, as real and as bonded as any face-to-face group can be.

Last week I had the pleasure of having dinner with two members of one of the groups I co-mentor. One was a lady whom I had met several times before, a delightful person and a fascinating person with whom to talk. The second person was someone whose writing I had read for some time before "meeting" her in class during her first year of EfM. The three of us sat down and the conversation flowed as if we had always met around a dinner table in person rather than being names, pictures and words on a computer screen. We simply picked up a conversation we might have just discontinued an hour, a day or even a week before. It was a testimony to the power of community that can be built in a virtual world.

EfM online offers a course of study in topics usually not covered in a local parish or in a place other than at a seminary or theological school. What it also offers is a place where one can attend class in pajamas or business suit, never miss a discussion or theological reflection, comment on a topic that was written several weeks ago, and feel a part of a community of others who care about one another and who are committed to bringing out the best in each other. So can a virtual study group become a community? Indeed it can -- and it does.

Linda Ryan co-mentors 2 EfM Online groups and keeps the blog Jericho's Daughter

by Donald Schell

We’ve titled our new All Saints Company book of liturgical music and hymns, “One Heart and One Song,” a line from the 19th Century English hymn, “From glory to glory advancing we praise Thee, O God,” which in turn translates a prayer from the ancient Liturgy of St. James. One heart and one song. Human solidarity begins in our ancient ancestors’ ability to sing together. As recently as the American Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Viet Name War Movement, and South Africa’s ‘Revolution in Four-part Harmony,” we’ve seen music bind people together to face injustice the threat of violence. And then strangely, we silenced our songs. And perhaps not so strangely, church assemblies got grayer and quieter and fewer visitors stayed to sing. What songs do people have in common? A verse of “Amazing Grace,” “Happy Birthday to You,” a verse and a half of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and maybe “Auld Lang Syne.”

I’ve promised fellow neuroscience geeks some building blocks for a natural theology of community, human formation and some startling new hints of what God is doing in our singing. First I want to suggest that the two crucial formational issues (human formation and Christian formation alike) are:

what binds us together? and
how can we, born in community, be inspired to individual creativity, courage, and compassion?

what makes solidarity reconciliation or
what undoes the bondage and the killing solidarity of scapegoating violence

Imitation is the core of creativity and the source of our finding freedom to act as we need to. As jazz musician Clark Terry says, “Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate,” or as we used to say it in Music that Makes Community workshops, “Imitate, Repeat, Improvise.” Imitation births relationship to one another, and in the mind of Christ, the imitation that makes us not clones, but more uniquely ourselves, imitation can take us to that freedom we find in the Spirit of the Lord.

Either way – the ground of imitation is in our embodied sense of another person’s intention and presence, what Mario Iacaboni writes about in Mirroring People, the Science of Empathy and How We Connect With Others, Iacoboni, an M.D. and a pioneer neurological researcher at UCLA lays out the emerging brain research that identifies specific neurons and kinds of neurological connection we share with some other primates, with whales and with dolphins and elephants. These nerve paths (and the particular kind of nerves, mirror neurons) allow us to feel or sense directly in our own bodies the affective state of our fellows (and some other mammals). In wonderful, page-turning scientific argument, Iacoboni describes experiments that make very good sense, and guides us through the logic of what they prove. Iacoboni and Frans de Waal (below) are lead researchers in the emerging science of empathy/compassion.

As a pastoral theologian, I’m grateful that both are also realistic about how mirroring can lead to competition and sometimes violence. But both see in our ability to take the role of the other, to feel the other’s experience, an inborn (I’d say God-given, but that’s not their argument) basis for the kind of communication that makes community possible.

In The Age of Empathy, Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, Frans De Waal comes at connection and community formation of character as a primatologist, observing and experimenting behaviorally with our primate cousins. Like Iacoboni, English is de Waal’s second language and like Iacoboni, he writes elegant, clear English. The two books make an intriguing complementary pair. Iacoboni gives us a guided tour of the brain (ours and those other mammals). De Waal observes and describes behaviors (our own and other animals’) that our mirroring brains make possible. Like Charles Darwin (whom he quotes), de Waal argues that cooperation, collaboration and compassion contributed as much to our evolution as competition. Like Darwin and Iacoboni, he acknowledges the sometimes violent character of our primate cousins (and other mammals whose behavior is shaped by mirroring/imitation), but his work is a thorough corrective to earlier primatologists who argued that we were descended from purely, and unalterably violent primates.

In the previous essay, I mentioned Stephen Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals, The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, which marshals evidence from neurology and paleontology, from cross-cultural studies in language development in infants, and from archaeology to argue that human language and community evolved from our ancestors’ ability to make primordial melody and gesture, that is that music and movement, fundamental building blocks of ritual, were essential in the formation of primal human communities. Gesture and melody allowed our earliest human ancestors to collaborate for survival. Mithen argues that human language came from music, sentences came from melodies, and finally articulated words emerge from sentences. Mithen’s evidence also invites us to notice that rationality is rooted in feeling. Whether we want to see that feeling is the vessel for articulated meaning, or (with Parker Palmer) to invite and encourage ‘thinking with the mind in the heart,’ Mithen’s evolutionary evidence makes it clear that rationality and logic rest on melody and feeling for the energy of their meanings.

In the last essay, I suggested that in Cognition in the Wild Edwin Hutchins offers scientific observation and (so good natural theology) to support Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori calling individual salvation “a heresy of our time.” How can science address a question of heresy? The PB is pointing to a theological heresy that contradicts good sense anthropology and neurology.

Over the last three hundred fifty years, the Enlightenment discovery of human rights and the essentially ‘thinking’ self of Enlightenment philosophers like Pascal and Descartes, has become something else - the triumph of individualism or me-ism. Hutchins helps us begin to see how the self or ‘I,’ of my thoughts and personal purpose emerges from our communication. Self comes to be in community. Thinking is interactive and conversational. The community that’s working together is essential to thought. For serious individual thought, we carry on a conversation with internalized voices of others to help us think.

Hutchins observes groups outside of a laboratory context making complex decisions, using seagoing navigation as his wild, non-lab environment. He sees ‘self’’ as a kind of local center, free but also born to and inseparable from a wider human system.
We have lots of new brain research on the areas of the brain and connections among them that we’re engaged in when we’re making music, working together, feeling compassion or affection. Oliver Sacks, Musicphilia and other recent books on the neurology of music-making and listening observe that music-making changes a musician’s brain. It makes so many more neural connections between the parts of the brain that together shape what we call ‘music’ that a pathologist doing an autopsy will recognize visually the brain of a music-maker. Meanwhile, in a parallel discovery, Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman in How God Changes your Brain, Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist tell us that praying to a judgmental, condemning God actually measurably decreases the richness of brain activity and makes us less creative, less flexible, and dumber while praying to a compassionate, forgiving God opens new neural pathways and makes us smarter, more creative, and more flexible in our thinking. How are these two observations connected? I’m hearing neurological and electro-encephalographic evidence that, on the way to compassion and one heart, whoever sings prays twice.

Two more remarkable books for anyone who has hung in to the end of this – David and Eric Clarke, editors, gathered the papers from the first International Conference on Music and Consciousness in 2006, in Music and Consciousness, Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, and Daniel Siegel gave this neuroscience beginner a belated but very welcome guided tour in his Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology that includes a working description of ‘mind’ that he developed to bring together a forty person interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, organizational theorists, contemplative practitioners, parenting researchers and religious teachers. Siegel offers us this, “A core aspect of the mind can be defined as an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information.” “Embodied and Relational” jumped out at me right away.

And what Siegel rights about is the plasticity of the brain, the reshaping of how we remember and how we choose from seeing one another, being attuned to one another, making fresh choices.

Mind. Mine, yours, or ours? Of course it’s all three and “embodied and relational” points us to how WE have the “mind of Christ.”

See also Part 1 and Part 2.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.

by Donald Schell

My older daughter and I were exiting the Imperial War Museum in Manchester (U.K.) where she lives. It was bright outside from the late afternoon sun playing on the network of deepwater canals that surround the museum. By the water people in and around a half dozen or so pubs were singing, all of them, singing - team songs, or “She’ll be coming round the mountain,” or hymns. By the colors they were wearing we could see that fans of Manchester United (Man. U.) and fans of Glasgow’s Celtic Football Club were singing at one another from full pub gatherings, a scene and song of dueling solidarities, pub and club gatherings trying to out-sing one another across the echoing canals. And then sometimes unexpectedly one group’s song would good-naturedly answer another which the first group would receive with a gale of laughter. But the air was so charged with energy that I asked a fisherman quietly casting into the canal whether he thought there’d be trouble after the game. “No,” he said, “it’s two Catholic teams. Today all this competition friendly.” It would have been otherwise with Man. City of the other Glasgow team playing.

We’d spent the day with another kind of conflict, compelling historical displays portrayed the war that had devastated Europe. I wouldn’t imagine myself to be a fan of a war museum, but my father, my daughter’s grandfather, flew a B-17 bomber in World War II. Dad returned from the war with a new vocational goal, to become a physician. When I was old enough to ask him about the war, he’d only say, “I came back wanting to save lives if I could.” Dad was in medical school when I was born, and then a physician until he died, and from the brief words I just quoted, I learned that the father I knew would only talk around the edges of the war – his love of flying or his decision to become a physician. Partly he guessed that my childish curiosity was eager for war stories and heroism. He’d seen horror and loss. But I also wanted something else. I knew I’d come from him, been born from the desire that he and my mom had held while she was in California and he was a continent and an ocean away flying daily through anti-aircraft fire. I wanted to know more parts of him because I carry them and him within me.

How within me? Within me like a feeling before thought that moved me to leap out of our car and run up the hill to break up a fight – three kids had set upon a fourth. They’d pinned him to the ground were banging his head against the concrete. I left my wife and child in a risk-taking folly that may have saved that fourth kid’s life. Where did it come from – my dad – both the pilot and the physician - breathed life into me in that moment. Where does our conscience come from? What gives us courage to act ?

My daughter and my visit to the museum moved us closer to hearing and feeling something of the startling experience of my dad’s learned competence, feeling and imagining a bit of how a twenty-three year old officer would fly a heavy bomber and be responsible for his plane and crew or how that very young man might have felt seeing friends’ planes torn from formation next him with anti-aircraft guns and flak to fall from the sky. We wanted to glimpse something important about someone we loved, something that he was reluctant to describe.

Two pairs of eyes and ears and our conversation responding to the displays made them real for us in another way.

I got another glimpse into my dad from Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist,” a New Yorker article about bomber pilots and ICU physicians and nurses

The article tells how effective a simple checklist was in reducing infections in the Intensive Care Unit, but it begins with the horrifying and enlightening story of the expert test pilot crashing the first completed B-17 bomber prototype early in America’s preparations for World War II. At the time, the big B-17 with its 4 supercharged engines and all sorts of other advances was the most complicated airplane ever built. The post-mortem on the wreck revealed that the expert pilot had skipped a step in the start-up procedures, a switch that needed to be switched on - just wasn’t. Whenever you see a movie of pilot and co-pilot going through a start-up checklist, your finding the solution the B-17 engineers found to consistently engage knowledge and procedures too complicated for any one person to hold dependably in mind. “Fuel pressure?” “Check.” “Right flaps?” “Check.” And so on.

Writers like Atul Gawande in “Checklist” and The Checklist Manifesto or like Edwin Hutchins in Cognition in the Wild offer us both experience and scientific thinking we can use to support our Presiding Bishop’s warning against “the great Western heresy –“

—that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. . . That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being.

Solidarity and bonding together and even our hope in God’s work of reconciliation can go awry. Manchester United and Celtic pre-match singing won’t lead to a riot or war. Other pre-match singing might. But whether for good or ill, the bonding and collaborating that make us human begin in song and gesture - before we knew our mothers were different from ourselves, the gazer and the gazed on, the singer and the listener were one.

Human formation happens in nurturing community and so, of course, Christian formation does too. The rapidly emerging neuroscience of cognition and consciousness and new studies in anthropology and primatology have much to teach us about what we do together that brings us to common mind and to the possibilities of individual and personal discovery that come from our common mind.

In these first two parts of this series, I’ve sketched what may appear to be an air castle, some broad strokes to claim that we are together before we stand alone, that and pointing to research that singing and gesture birth language and the possibility of individual thoughts. In my final piece, I’ll tour some highlights of the scientific research that should inform our theology and practice of community and person going forward.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.

by Donald Schell

Headwaters are places of beginning and ongoing generation. Headwaters can be huge like the Blue Nile Falls, where the Blue Nile begins in a wild rush of falling water a rising cloud of spray that make a lush riverbank in the arid Ethiopia of our first human ancestors. Or headwaters may be tiny and look insignificant like the divided rivulets flowing off ridges in the high Rockies, half flowing east into the Missouri and on to the Gulf of Mexico and half south and west into the Colorado and down though the Grand Canyon where dams and viaducts divert it from the sea to Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
In 2004 and 2005, not yet knowing I’d begun searching for headwaters, I was obsessively asking musicians and composers what they knew of traditional, pre-literate music-making. Did they know of anyone composing music in the old forms? I was looking for liturgical music including chants and new hymns that our congregation could sing together in dim candlelight. Working to problem-solve for that service prompted me to wonder what we might learn from the ways people sang together in evenings not just before electric lights, but before printed music and texts. Spirituals, work songs, world music, summer camp music, ancient liturgical music fell into this category. What about Russian and South African choral folk traditions? What was happening with rhythm and melody? How did these forms find energy in dissonance and resolution in harmony without notes on the page? What basic underlying forms made it easy to learn by ear and join in? Repetition obviously, but more than that; What intuitive strategies for making musical and textual variety kept structure evident to people so they they could sing tune and words moment to moment?

In 2005 Yale School of Sacred Music sent Emily Scott to All Saints Company for a summer internship. By then I had found a dozen and a half composers around the country for her to interview by phone, people who were interested in the questions of traditional forms or for other reasons were asking similar questions to mine - what kinds of singing would draw everyone in and what beauties we might find in old ways of singing?

Emily and I talked at length and developed a series of observations and questions to ask the church composers we hoped would help us. Emily took extensive notes from the rich conversations and distilled from them an initial description of the old way of singing. Then she called the composers back to describe what she was hearing, and found eight composers whose enthusiasm for the conversation told us they wanted to join in creating something new, robustly congregational and musically satisfying from these inherited forms – simple melody, call and echo, call and response, layered, and rounds.

In late spring of 2006, All Saints Company gathered those eight composers for a working retreat at St. Dorothy’s Rest, an Episcopal Retreat Center, in the redwoods north of San Francisco. There I scrambled to edit and re-edit words from scripture, from mystics and poets so the composers could find new music in or for the words. Together we reflected on their fresh work, sang it together in workshop as it was born, tried it different ways, and offered impressions and ideas, all the time shaping our thinking about the forms. By the end of the retreat we had about fifty short new pieces of music, and with that core of a book, Marilyn Haskel joined Emily in soliciting more music adding about a dozen more contributors from around the country, and from the core work and further compilation, in 2008 Church Publishing published Music by Heart, Paperless Songs for Evening Worship.

At the composers’ retreat, Ben Allaway, made the astute observation that litereate people buying a book of pre-literate formed music would still be tied to the page - without coaching, they’d photocopy to leaflets or project the music on a screen when we knew a skilled leader could teach it by ear and in the moment. So with Music By Heart still on the press, we held our first Music that Makes Community Workshop Intensives, three days of teaching participants the practices of leading what we were calling “paperless music.” As of this March, we’ve had sixteen more of these three day workshops around the country and our ten or so leaders/teachers have continued to discover as much as the seventeen workshops’ four hundred seventy-five participants about music and leadership and group dynamics and the creativity of the Spirit. Our Eighteenth workshop will be this June in St. Mary’s City, Maryland.

The workshops and this way of singing drew on theological and process discoveries we’d made in forty years of mostly unaccompanied congregational singing in a college chaplaincy, a small town congregation and in founding St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco. We mirror the leader, as St. Paul says, ‘imitate me as I imitate Christ.’ Singing together is a crucible for our undeclared collaboration in learning – a practice in which we discover that ‘we have the mind of Christ.’ Dynamically and literally, singing forms us. We breathe one Spirit together in common in-spiration. We listen to one another. We negotiate and discern leadership. We practice forgiveness. We create together. We ride the sparkling currents of consonance and music-energizing dissonance. And all singing, but particularly the old way of singing, shapes minds and bodies in community. Singing is a practice of reconciliation and at-onement. It also births individual freedom as we learn together to trust the voices God gave us.

The challenge of finding composers to make new music for a candlelit evening liturgy plunged us into startling discoveries of how it felt to learn music relationally, how a leader modeled the music and gave it away, and how people singing claimed the music as their own and lived into their own authority as music-makers. I felt and saw this in people’s faces and bodies. In singing together, something powerful emerged in embodied relationship and a common mind. Singing emerged and grew in face to face embodied relationship. Even with years of sung liturgy behind us, this felt like a discovery – not better music, not always even different music, but a musical path that had taken us into the forests of humanity’s earliest days. We’d stumbled on to the fresh, cold spring of human embodied consciousness and community, the gushing headwaters of the great river of our liturgy and shared meaning.

Through these last seven years of gathering shared leadership teams from a dozen or so wonderful musicians to lead seventeen Music that Makes Community Workshop Intensives, I’ve become a hungry reader of neuroscientific and anthropological studies that point to music and gesture at our beginning.

What made human community, speech, and articulate thought possible for our first human ancestors? How did we form groups that could hunt stronger and more dangerous prey? How did we care for our slow maturing babies? What made it possible for us to work and think together? How are freedom and individual thought and imagination possible when we’re so dependent on groups for our survival? We can touch this holy genesis in singing.

In secular neuroscientific research, primatology and studies of other mirror-neuron- equipped mammals, music research, therapies for stroke damaged brains, and more; we’re making daily new discoveries about human formation that inescapably inform our best understanding of Christian formation.

Any regular listener to NPR or reader of The New York Times or any viewer of TED talks will hear, read or see countless leads to new books sharing discoveries of the workings of our minds and consciousness. Learnings are coming to us from human and primate behavior, from neurology (especially in our new capabilities to monitor blood flow and electric impulses in our living, working brain) from watching how brains recover from strokes, from new understandings of the unique workings of differing kinds of human minds and differing ways we learn.

In the two essays that follow, I’ll offer additional hints that finding a common mind points to an antidote to the heresy of individual salvation in the theological truth that communities birth individual people (more truly and deeply than complete individuals aggregate to make a collective whole). And then I’ll offer a quick tour of some accessible books on neuroscience research, hoping I’m not the only complete natural theology geek who reads the Episcopal Café.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.

by Maria L. Evans

"Christian contemplation is precipitated by crisis within crisis and anguish within anguish. It is born of spiritual conflict. It is a victory that suddenly appears in the hour of defeat. It is the providential solution of problems that seem to have no solution. It is the reconciliation of enemies that seem to be irreconcilable."
~Thomas Merton, "Ascent to Truth"

"Oh, you have several choices," the cashier at Carlsbad Caverns told me. "You can take the elevator down and up, you can take the natural entrance in and out, or you could do one going in and the other going out."

It had been thirty years since I had visited the caverns, and I had all morning. So I chose to take the elevator down and walk out the natural entrance. I figured it was a nice mix of quiet time and exercise.

But when I started out the pathway to the natural exit, I had discovered that literally everyone--EVERYONE--I met was going INTO the caverns via this route, not OUT. I did not see another single person on this journey going out the natural exit. I had to maneuver past people going downhill while I was going uphill. Some people were considerate of that; some were oblivious that going up out of it is a little trickier than going down into it. One woman looked right at me and very sternly announced, "You are going the WRONG WAY." It was truly disconcerting to her!

After a while, I started taking note of the places to rest on the way out, and making use of them here and there. I particularly remember one at a time I was breaking out in a good sweat and had ignored the previous resting place. It was a place to sit and observe a rather open room in the cavern. So, with my chest heaving, and the sound of my heartbeat in my ears, I just sat and observed for a while.

It wasn't long before my eyes caught a glimpse of a particular rock formation on the wall of that room--it looked like Christ hanging on a cross. I found myself sitting there in quiet meditation for half an hour, and as the noise of my own heartbeat began to subside, I discovered thoughts in my head that hadn't surfaced in ages. I thought about the time I was there thirty years ago. I was 22 years old, and I had felt that I had failed miserably at my first teaching job. The guy I was planning on marrying was now planning to marry someone else. I was discovering that "going home" wasn't a great option because some heavy-duty dysfunction was brewing. I was dealing with that feeling of having started out in the penthouse of elation as a recent college graduate, ready to take on the world, and now being sent to the outhouse. I had gone to the desert to clear my head and get my bearings on a great solo adventure.

My mind turned to other stories like that in my life, and I began to see the pattern. My subconscious choice that day, perhaps wasn't so subconscious. I had chosen to take an elevator ride to the abyss, wander around in it a while, and then choose to walk out uphill. I've been told before on those journeys that I was going the wrong way, but in retrospect, it was always the best way. I sat there and looked at that cavern wall and it suddenly hit me: "This is the way of the Cross--to be plunged into the depths and emerge. This is the way of baptism. This is the path to resurrection."

As I got up to leave, I looked back the other direction. Had I gone into the cavern via the natural entrance, the rock formation that had so captivated me was not really visible from that angle. Had I chosen to go in the cavern that way, I would have missed it. I would not have seen the Corpus that nature had molded. I would have missed the most profound part of my trip. When I reached the opening, I was surprised to discover from the ranger that going out the natural exit was the equivalent of climbing 75 stories. Had I known that, I would not have chosen this path. I would never have known the things I now knew were on that path. I would have been in the dark about it rather than have been shown a wonderful light.

As much as we yearn for those inner joys of a life in Christ, the truth of Holy Week is that its uniqueness is framed by the road to the Cross. The joys are there, but so are the sorrows--and it is in the 75 story journeys we didn't know we had in us, where we most see the presence of Christ.

Maria Evans, a surgical pathologist from Kirksville, MO, writes about the obscurities of life, medicine, faith, and the Episcopal Church on her blog, Kirkepiscatoid