By Ellen Painter Dollar

In Part 1 of this series, I told my story of living with a genetic disorder and choosing to have biological children with a 50/50 chance of inheriting the disorder. My exploration of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD—in vitro fertilization with the added step of testing fertilized eggs for a particular mutation) led me to focus on reproductive ethics in my work as a writer. Here in Part 2, I’ll summarize current ethical perspectives of the Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jewish traditions.

The Roman Catholic Tradition

Catholic opposition to artificial contraception, abortion, and any type of assisted reproduction, from artificial insemination up to IVF, PGD and surrogacy, stems from several basic principles:

• Marriage, instituted by God to unite one man and one woman, has two necessary and complementary purposes: unitive (two people becoming one flesh) and procreative (producing children). Each conjugal act that takes place in a marriage needs to be open to the potential for procreation, even if each act does not (or even, in the case of an infertile couple, cannot) result in conception.

• Sexual intercourse and procreation, both God-given blessings reserved for marriage, cannot be separated. Sex should not occur without the potential for procreation (hence the objection to artificial contraception), and procreation should not occur without sex (hence the objection to any method of assisted reproduction in which conception occurs independently of intercourse).

• When people separate the unitive and procreative purposes of marriage, deciding when they are and are not open to having a child through calculated use of artificial contraception, children become a project to be achieved or a product to be obtained to fulfill parental desires, rather than a gift that arises naturally from the marital union.

• The temptation to view children as entitlements or commodities, rather than gifts, grows with the use of reproductive technology. Because IVF and PGD require embryos to be selected for implantation in the mother’s uterus, an element of quality control is introduced (i.e., choosing the “best” or potentially healthiest embryos). This element, again, transforms children from gifts of a loving God to products manufactured by medical personnel to parental specifications.

• Because intercourse and conception are inextricably linked with each other, and intended for an exclusive marriage relationship, any reproductive technology that introduces a third party into conception, such as with donor gametes or surrogate motherhood, is unacceptable.

• An embryo is fully human, with all the rights of a human being created in God’s image, from the moment of conception. Any use, destruction or manipulation of an embryo, including freezing, genetic testing, disposal, abortion or medical research, violates the embryo’s dignity as a human being.

Many Catholics argue that they are not so much against all these technologies as they are for a perspective on marriage and sexuality that is radically different from that of mainstream culture. For example, Catholics who advocate natural family planning (NFP) argue that couples can make wise decisions about family size and pregnancy timing while also being open to God’s design for sex and procreation within marriage. In NFP, couples avoid conception at certain times by abstaining from sex during the wife’s fertile period, which she determines through detailed observation of such factors as body temperature and cervical mucus. Those who practice NFP argue that by subordinating their sexual desires to the God-given fertility cycle and their sense of when and how God calls them to parenthood, NFP enhances marital intimacy and interdependence, bringing marriage closer to the way God intended it.

Mainline Protestant Traditions

Mainline Protestantism, of course, comprises a diverse group of churches, so there is no one perspective on reproductive ethics. There are, however, some common assumptions and values that inform many Protestant churches’ discussion of the topic, as well as some specific conclusions that several mainline Protestant denominations share.

• Mainline Protestant churches tend to value individual autonomy and choice, and assert that individual Christians can inform their own consciences to grapple with moral decisions with the guidance of the church, scripture, tradition and reason.

• Given the value of autonomy and conscience, many Protestant churches encourage both clergy and laypeople to educate themselves about reproductive technology and related ethical concerns. Pastoral and genetic counseling are held up as vital resources for church members dealing with infertility or family history of genetic disease.

• Protestant traditions tend to emphasize marital companionship more than procreation, and allow more leeway in how the purposes of marriage play out for individual couples. For example, some argue that while it’s important for married couples to be open to the possibility of children, such openness occurs in the context of a lifelong marriage relationship, not just when the couple engages in discrete acts of intercourse. Therefore, using contraception to limit family size and time pregnancy is acceptable (and some argue further that because Catholic natural family planning, or NFP, attempts to control fertility just as artificial contraception does, there is no moral difference between the two). It is also acceptable to separate sex and procreation in limited instances, by using assisted reproduction to overcome infertility within a marriage.

• Many Protestant churches approve the use of assisted reproduction techniques to help couples conceive children within a marriage. However, techniques that compromise the exclusive marriage relationship or that allow for childbearing outside of marriage (such as donor gametes and surrogacy) are viewed with concern or disapproved altogether.

• Genetic screening is generally acceptable for disorders that significantly affect health and well-being, but should not be used either for gender selection (except in the case of sex-linked genetic disorders) or screening for non-disease-related traits. Human cloning is unacceptable.

• Embryos have moral status and should be treated reverently, but their status is not equal to that of a more developed human life. Embryos should not be created for the purpose of being destroyed through scientific research. Donation of embryos left over from IVF cycles is viewed more favorably, but efforts should be made not to produce more embryos than can reasonably be used in an IVF cycle.

• Protestant documents tend to emphasize issues of justice, recognizing the potential for assisted reproduction and genetic screening to be used in ways that compromise the inherent dignity of every human being, such as by ensuring that certain types, classes or races of people are not born.

Evangelical Protestant Traditions

With their strong pro-life ethic, evangelical Protestants tend to have more in common with Roman Catholics than with mainline Protestants when it comes to reproductive ethics. Concern for the human dignity of embryos fuels evangelical opposition to reproductive technology, such as IVF, that leaves behind thousands of unused, frozen embryos, as well as to the use of those embryos in stem-cell or other medical research. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is problematic both because it requires discarding embryos testing positive for a particular genetic disorder, and because of its potentially eugenic nature (i.e., the potential for people’s worth to be judged based on their genetic history, leading to the breeding of people for certain traits perceived as positive and the elimination of people with traits perceived as negative).

There is also an emerging openness among younger evangelicals to the Catholic practice of natural family planning (NFP) and the vision of marriage and parenthood that it entails.

Jewish Traditions

Judaism emphasizes the procreative purposes of marriage—its role in fulfilling God’s command to be fruitful and multiply—to a greater extent than either Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. Having children is one of the 613 mitzvot (commandments or rules) that Jews are to live by. Persecution of Jews has reinforced their emphasis on maintaining Jewish identity and community by having Jewish children.

Judaism tends to view assisted reproduction as a tool to help Jews fulfill God’s procreative purpose for marriage. In fact, Israel has an unusually high birth rate of babies conceived through assisted reproduction (about 5 percent, compared with about 1.5 percent of U.S. babies). Because the procreative purpose of marriage is valued so highly, Jewish authorities have few reservations about separating the reproductive process from the sexual union of married spouses. Because Jewish identity is passed down through the mother, however, Jewish authorities have expressed concern with third-party reproductive technology that uses donor gametes or surrogates, which might lead to confusion over the child’s Jewish identity.

Even though Jews have been targets of eugenic policies and prejudices for centuries, they have embraced the use of both genetic testing and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to help eradicate disorders common in the Jewish community. For example, Dor Yeshorim is a Brooklyn-based organization that has helped lower the incidence of Tay-Sachs disease (a fatal genetic disorder that primarily occurs in Jewish families) and other recessive genetic disorders through a proactive screening process. Young, unmarried Jews consent to genetic testing to identify whether they carry genes for any of a list of recessive disorders. If a couple determines, early in their dating relationship, that there is potential for marriage, they can call a special phone number, type in a PIN, and find out if both the man and the woman carry any recessive genes in common. If they do—meaning their children would have a 25 percent chance of inheriting the disorder in question—it is recommended that the couple end their relationship. The program has been successful because many couples do just that.

The Need for More Discussion

My goal in this series, again, is not to argue for any one approach as better than the others. (Although, as a good Episcopalian, I do tend toward a moderate, nuanced view of what is acceptable and unacceptable. This may doom my work to failure because, as my husband remarked recently, our culture does not do nuance very well.) Rather, I am motivated by that fact that, though Protestant resources in particular recognize the need for education, prayerful consideration and supportive counsel for both congregations and individuals making reproductive decisions, many Protestant churches, including the Episcopal Church, have not engaged as fully as they can with the moral quandaries raised by evolving technology. In the final, third part of this series, I will briefly review what the major moral quandaries are, and suggest some steps that congregations and individual Christians can take to move the discussion forward.

Ellen Painter Dollar is a writer whose work focuses on faith, parenthood and disability. She is writing a book on the ethics and theology of reproductive technology, genetic screening and disability, and she blogs at Choices That Matter and Five Dollars and Some Common Sense.

By Ellen Painter Dollar

If the title of my post has you concerned that you will be subjected to a treatise on the politicized, polarizing topic of abortion, I hope you’ll stick with me anyway. Reproductive ethics go far beyond pro-life/pro-choice debates. They also address the rapidly expanding, increasingly accessible and highly lucrative field of reproductive and genetic technology. Beyond that—and the main reason Episcopalians and all Christians should pay attention to this topic—reproductive ethics touch on fundamental questions of our identity as human beings made in the image of God and loved by God just as we are, how our sacred and secular cultures provide (or don’t provide) hospitality to people made in God’s image, and how we welcome children into our families, churches and communities.

Still with me? Good! You may be wondering why I’m writing about this topic—who I am and my professional background. Pastor? Theologian? Ethicist? Doctor? Genetic counselor? Nope, nope, nope, nope, and nope. I am a writer who focuses on reproductive and genetic ethics on my Choices That Matter blog, and I am writing a book that will be published by Westminster John Knox Press in 2011. But though I have some skill at putting words to paper, I write about reproductive ethics primarily because I have a story—a story that led me to ask wrenching, sometimes unanswerable questions of myself and my God, and then led me to read everything I can get my hands on about how people of faith have answered those questions. So I’ll start there—with the story.

My 10-year-old daughter and I have had, between us, about four dozen broken bones. We have a genetic bone disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), which causes fragile bones, short stature, bone deformities, spinal curvature and generalized weakness. We have the mildest type of OI; babies with more severe types are often born with dozens of fractures, and one form is fatal shortly after birth. But even relatively mild OI is no picnic. In addition to about 35 broken bones, I’ve had more than a dozen surgeries to insert and replace metal rods to stabilize my leg bones, and now, at 41 years old, I live with chronic pain as my joint cartilage, worn down by years of my uneven gait, falls to pieces. My daughter Leah, who inherited OI from me, broke her first bone on her second birthday, and since then has had nine more fractures. Two resulted from a scooter accident, but the others came about in the most ridiculously mundane ways possible. She slipped on a piece of paper, fell while dancing in her sister’s room, even broke a leg mid-stride—the leg broke and then she fell, not the other way around.

Because OI is an autosomal dominant genetic disorder, any child of mine has a 50 percent chance of inheriting it. My husband and I started contemplating having another child just as Leah was going through a cycle of six fractures between her second and fourth birthdays. She was encased in a series of pink fiberglass casts for an entire summer. So while we knew we wanted more children, we were intimidated and heartsick at the idea of having another child who would suffer as she was suffering (and, let’s be honest, we were suffering too, and it was no fun). We decided to look into preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which is in vitro fertilization (IVF) with the added step of testing fertilized eggs for a particular genetic mutation.

In September 2002, three days after Leah broke her femur (thigh bone) when she slipped on a picture book left on the floor, I started injecting myself with hormones to launch our IVF/PGD cycle. About six weeks later, we learned that the cycle had failed. I was not pregnant. We planned to try another PGD cycle in a few months. But before we got the chance, I discovered in late January 2003 that I was already pregnant. Our second daughter, Meg, was born in October 2003, and we had a son, Ben, in 2006. Both were conceived naturally, and neither has OI.

But even before I discovered my unexpected pregnancy in January 2003, we were leaning toward abandoning the second PGD cycle. We were emotionally exhausted and financially drained. More important, I was increasingly uneasy with the ethical implications of our using reproductive technology to produce a child without my bone disorder. My brain was swimming with hard questions about using reproductive technology in light of my Christian faith: Was it ethical to spend thousands of dollars to prevent our child from inheriting a disabling but non-life-threatening disorder? By allowing embryos with my OI mutation to be destroyed, was I committing murder? By ensuring that my child would not be disabled, was I contributing to a culture that would eventually become intolerant of, and refuse to care for, children who are disabled? Was my sense that God was calling me to biological motherhood authentic, or just a way of cloaking my selfish desires in a spiritual mantle?

In my search for guidance and support, I discovered that the Episcopal Church, and Protestant Christianity in general, are not well-equipped to counsel someone like me. This is, of course, a generalization. There are certainly individual clergy who could provide excellent ethical discussion and pastoral support. Indeed, our own pastor asked some good questions of us. Though his knowledge of the ethical issues involved was limited, his pastoral concern and acceptance were abundant. But for the most part, the Protestant clergy and laypeople we talked with seemed uncertain of what questions we should even be asking about reproductive ethics, much less what the answers might be.

The progressive Religious Institute recently issued a report confirming that, due to lack of training and education, as well as discomfort with issues related to sexuality and the controversy they stir up, clergy and other religious leaders are often ill-equipped to engage topics of sexual justice and ethics, including reproductive ethics. In a 2009 report specifically addressing assisted reproduction, the Religious Institute noted that, “Unfortunately, these topics are usually not addressed in seminaries, and if they are, it is likely in the context of a medical ethics course that does not engage the pastoral issues that religious leaders will face.”

The exception to this is, of course, the Roman Catholic Church, which has plenty to say about reproductive ethics. In the past 18 months alone, the Catholic Church has released two major doctrinal statements clarifying and expanding on their opposition to all forms of assisted reproduction and genetic screening. The 2008 encyclical Dignitas Personae came directly from the Vatican, while last fall, the U.S. Catholic bishops released their own document, titled Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology. Both documents provide extensive explanation of the theology, reasoning and ethical concerns behind the church’s position.

In contrast, the Episcopal Church has released three very brief, very general resolutions: A 1982 approval of the use of IVF to conceive children within a marriage; a 1991 resolution urging couples considering IVF to get counseling and consider adoption as an alternative; and a 2003 statement that genetic screening is appropriate for avoiding “clearly serious” disorders, and that human cloning is unacceptable. Well, I guess that’s something. But it’s not enough, given the complexity of reproductive ethics, and the fact that, as reproductive technology evolves, more and more people sitting in the pews of our Episcopal churches will be facing decisions about whether or not to use it.

As I research reproductive ethics for my book and blog, the most consistent and informed sources tend to be Roman Catholic. In fact, the person who ended up being most helpful to me and my husband in making our decisions was a good friend who also happens to be a Roman Catholic sexual ethicist. He and I disagree—vehemently in some cases—on the answers to some difficult ethical questions. But he, my other Catholic friends, and the Roman Catholic web sites and bloggers I follow have been my most valuable resource. I may not always agree, but because the Catholic Church gives priority to reproductive ethics, these resources are generally well-informed and thoughtful—two qualities especially important when discussing the emotionally charged questions of whether, why and how people should have babies.

In writing about reproductive ethics, I am not aiming to convince anyone of a particular position. In fact, I am still working out exactly what my position is. Rather, my aim is to convince people—especially my fellow Protestant believers—that reproductive ethics are worth talking about seriously so that people who have to make difficult reproductive choices do so with the guidance of their brothers and sisters in Christ, within a supportive community responding with common values.

In Part 2 of this series, I’ll review the Roman Catholic position—whether you agree with it or not, their position lays out some important questions and provides food for thought—as well as summarize both Protestant and Jewish approaches to reproductive technology. I’ll finish up in Part 3, with a brief discussion of the major ethical questions raised by reproductive technology, and recommendations for moving the discussion forward in our Episcopal congregations. I hope you’ll stick around, because all of us, both clergy and laypeople, are vital partners in providing loving, supportive, knowledgeable counsel to people struggling with complex reproductive decisions.

Ellen Painter Dollar is a writer whose work focuses on faith, parenthood and disability. She is writing a book on the ethics and theology of reproductive technology, genetic screening and disability, and she blogs at Choices That Matter and Five Dollars and Some Common Sense.

By Derek Olsen

The first half of Ephesians 4 clearly lays out the purpose of the institutional Church: that we may all come “to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph 4:13). Appropriately, then, we find it in our baptismal liturgy where parents and godparents solemnly promise that they will “help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ” (p. 302).
But what does this mean? What does this look like? If this is a central purpose of the Church, what guidance does the Church give us for what this may be?

In my doctoral dissertation on how early medieval monks read Scripture, I spent a large portion of chapter 2 looking at how the monks talked about saints. The monastic hagiographies—the accounts read in the liturgical Offices—gave communities a picture of sanctity, a glimpse of how the full stature of Christ looked, incarnate in different places and different times. Now, the history that I found in these could sometimes be…a little questionable, and I discovered that (for my purposes, at least) the less the monks knew historically, the better off I was. The least historical accounts were the most ideal: these texts sketched mostly clearly the idealized holy goals of monastic living.

Now—the Episcopal Church doesn’t talk about saints so much. In fact, within our prayer book only the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Apostles, Evangelists, Mary Magdalene, and Stephen the Protomartyr are so honored. However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have them… Even before the authorization of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the Episcopal Church envisioned a supplementary volume that would include Days of Optional Observance to liturgically commemorate heroes of the faith. With the authorization of the Prayer Book, General Convention also authorized this volume known as Lesser Feasts and Fasts (1979-A056) which commemorates Christians East and West from the earliest times down to the twentieth century.

Striving for clarity, 1994’s General Convention passed a set of criteria for subsequent additions to the book. The 1994 General Convention Resolution (A074a) can be found in full here. The money section is contained in the 8 bullets under Guidelines; the contents of these bullets describe qualities held by suitable candidates for inclusion:

1. Heroic Faith. This means bearing witness to God in Christ "against the odds." Historically, the greatest exemplars of such faith have been martyrs, who have suffered death for the cause of Christ, and confessors, who have endured imprisonment, torture, or exile for the sake of Christ. Following this precedent, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America has been very specific and has restricted the designation of martyrdom to persons who have chosen to die rather than give up the Christian faith, and has not applied it to persons whose death may have resulted from their heroic faith but who did not consciously choose martyrdom. There are other situations where choosing and persisting in a Christian manner of life involves confessing Christ "against the odds," even to the point of risking one's life. For this reason the Anglican Communion traditionally has honored monks and nuns like Antony, Benedict, Hilda, Constance and her companions, missionaries like George Augustus Selwyn, and people as diverse as Monnica, Richard of Chichester, and Nicholas Ferrar. More recently the Church has learned to honor social reformers like William Wilberforce and Jonathan Daniels for the same reason. Heroic faith is, therefore, a quality manifested in many different situations.

2. Love. "If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all that I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing...So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor. 13:2b-3, 13).

3. Goodness of life. People worthy of commemoration will have worked for the good of others. It is important to recognize that the Church looks not only for goodness but also for growth in goodness. A scandalous life prior to conversion does not disqualify one from consideration for the Calendar; rather, the witness of perseverance to the end will confirm holiness of life and the transforming power of Christ.

4. Joyousness. As faith is incomplete without love, so does love involve "rejoicing in the Spirit"--whether in the midst of extraordinary trials, or in the midst of the ordinary rounds of daily life. A Christian may not fail in the works of love, but still lack the joy of it--thereby falling short of true Christian sanctity. Such joy, however, is as much a discipline of life as an emotion. It need not lie on the surface of a person's life, but may run deeply and be discerned by others only gradually.

5. Service to others for Christ's sake. "There are varieties of gifts...and there are varieties of service" (1 Cor. 12:4-5). There is no true holiness without service to others in their needfulness. The Church recognizes that just as human needs are diverse, so also are forms of Christian service--both within the Church and in the world.

6. Devotion. People who are worthy of commemoration have shown evidence of seeking God through the means of grace which the Church recognizes, having "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42). We look both for regularity and for growth in the discipline of prayer and meditation upon God's Word; and we look for this devotion to be manifested not only in a person's private life but also in visible company and communion with his or her fellow Christians.

7. Recognition by the faithful. Initiating the commemoration of particular saints is the privilege of those who knew, loved, and discerned the special grace of Christ in a member of their community, and who desire to continue in the communion of prayer with that member now departed. Such instinctive recognition by the faithful begins naturally at the local and regional levels. Evidence of both (a) such commemoration growing locally and (b) such recognition of sanctity spreading beyond the immediate community is essential before the national Church has an obligation to take heed. It may, in fact, decide that the commemoration in question is best left to local observance.

8. Historical perspective. In a resolution on the Calendar, the 1958 Lambeth Conference of Bishops stated, "The addition of a new name should normally result from a widespread desire expressed in the region concerned over a reasonable period of time." Generally this has been two generations or fifty years after death.

Clearly items seven and eight are particular to the sanctoral process—otherwise, these criteria are a solid start towards what we’re looking for. This gives us a set of qualities that are specific enough to ground one’s character, yet broad enough to envision myriad ways in which they can be implemented.

This past year, General Convention authorized a new book. This text supersedes Lesser Feasts and Fasts and is entitled Holy Women, Holy Men. While it took some twenty years for guidelines to be placed in LFF, this new book has criteria in it from the start. Even at first glance it’s clear that something has changed, though. Here are the principles of revision from Holy Women, Holy Men which begin on pg 131 of the PDF from the Blue Book:

1. Historicity: Christianity is a radically historical religion, so in almost every instance it is not theological realities or spiritual movements but exemplary witness to the Gospel of Christ in lives actually lived that is commemorated in the Calendar.

2. Christian Discipleship: The death of the saints, precious in God’s sight, is the ultimate witness to the power of the Resurrection. What is being commemorated, therefore, is the completion in death of a particular Christian’s living out of the promises of baptism. Baptism is, therefore, a necessary prerequisite for inclusion in the Calendar.

3. Significance: Those commemorated should have been in their lifetime extraordinary, even heroic servants of God and God’s people for the sake, and after the example, of Jesus Christ. In this way they have testified to the Lordship of Christ over all of history, and continue to inspire us as we carry forward God’s mission in the world.

4. Memorability: The Calendar should include those who, through their devotion to Christ and their joyful and loving participation in the community of the faithful, deserve to be remembered by The Episcopal Church today. However, in order to celebrate the whole history of salvation, it is important also to include those “whose memory may have faded in the shifting fashions of public concern, but whose witness is deemed important to the life and mission of the Church” (Thomas Talley).

5. Range of Inclusion: Particular attention should be paid to Episcopalians and other members of the Anglican Communion. Attention should also be paid to gender and race, to the inclusion of lay people (witnessing in this way to our baptismal understanding of the Church), and to ecumenical representation. In this way the Calendar will reflect the reality of our time: that instant communication and extensive travel are leading to an ever deeper international and ecumenical consciousness among Christian people.

6. Local Observance: Similarly, it should normatively be the case that significant commemoration of a particular person already exists at the local and regional levels before that person is included in the Calendar of the Episcopal Church as a whole.

7. Perspective: It should normatively be the case that a person be included in the Calendar only after two generations or fifty years have elapsed since that person’s death.

8. Levels of Commemoration: Principal Feasts, Sundays and Holy Days have primacy of place in the Church’s liturgical observance. It does not seem appropriate to distinguish between the various other commemorations by regarding some as having either a greater or a lesser claim on our observance of them. Each commemoration should be given equal weight as far as the provision of liturgical propers is concerned (including the listing of three lessons).

9. Combined Commemorations: Not all those included in the Calendar need to be commemorated “in isolation.” Where there are close and natural links between persons to be remembered, a joint commemoration would make excellent sense (e.g., the Reformation martyrs—Latimer and Ridley; bishops of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste and Hugh).

The first thing that jumps to mind is that we have a genre change. This is not, as the list before it was, a list of criteria that gives us that snapshot of Christian maturity; this is very much a process for selecting historical personages for commemoration. Thus, these lists don't function in the same way, either rhetorically or catechetically. The new principles focus on process rather than qualities of life. As a result, the explicit naming of components of the mature Christian life have been curtailed. In their place we have business notes.

Naming sanctoral qualities is neither an abstract task, nor simply a liturgical one: it is a fundamentally theological and ultimately Christological task. The people the Church identifies as models—whether we call them saints or not—say something important about how we construct our understanding of the Christian life. How we construct the Christian life, in turn, speaks volumes about how we understand Christ. Just as we strive to see Christ in all persons, it is in the composite image of the saints that we find Christ at work in our own time, place, and station.

It’s not that I’m against the new criteria (although I’m not convinced that “memorability” is a theological category…), it’s just that I feel we’ve lost something. The guidelines of 1994 were like a few quick brushstrokes, or like the charcoal wisps on a sketch-pad that suggest a scene, a figure, leaving the rest to the imagination. They weren’t a full picture of Christian maturity—but they gave us at least a few key dots that suggest a shape. Leaning on Ephesians, looking back at the monks, I have to wonder: do we have anything like this now in our church—a clear sense of the goal; a useful, sufficient, and functional picture of Christian maturity? Have the new principles moved us forward or back?

Dr. Derek Olsen recently finished his Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University. He has taught seminary courses in biblical studies, preaching, and liturgics; he currently resides in Maryland. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X/Y dad appear at Haligweorc.

By Adrian Worsfold

I found the recent address to the Church of England General Synod by "David and Richard", clerical President and lay Vice President of the Methodist Conference, bizarrely childish. It was a presentation, one to the other and back again, much about basics of Methodism that many a Synod member should be aware, that is reminiscent of one of the awful methods of delivery given to trainee teachers in the manner that this is how it should be done to children in the classroom.

Beyond that was a basic message that Methodism in Britain would self destruct for higher ecumenical purposes, and not simply because of thoroughgoing decline.

I know about thoroughgoing decline in British religion, if only because I have returned to a denomination that started small and now has undergone structural faults at its central serving institutions. It has had to become more sparing and flexible, whilst interesting aspects are noted about how congregations hitting the floor do actually recover, over short periods, some even going on to prosper in comparative terms. When congregations decline that have continued on as doggedly sub-cultural, as sort-of-Protestants full of rules of process and cliques, they suddenly at a point of desperation learn to value the visitor, find flexibility, distribute roles and contributions, cut the little hierarchies, and use the unpredicted Internet to advertise an unconditional liberal unique selling point that relates to today's issues of new denominational identity. A congregation that sets its mind to the task can, with some luck and geographical fortune, turn itself around even in the tough environment of British non-involvement in churches. Well, if it doesn't it closes, and that's that.

Other denominations are much larger, and have always been so. The Methodists are one of the largest after the Church of England. The problem is that its attending population is top-heavy, and populations collapse in percentage terms. It has had an active policy of closing and disposing of unwanted chapels, but proportionately it can end up with one chapel per town (or less) as easily as the smallest denomination. Once the percentage decline hits the bottom, it hits the bottom. People die pretty much at once, no matter what the number.

Religious Trends used a survey in 2005 that demonstrated that a 4 million at least monthly attendance then would drop to under a million by 2050, a figure just about reached by Hindus (doubling in number) with nearly three times as many Muslim attenders as Christians. The reality of such a decline (should it come about) is that denominations will simply structurally collapse.

It is interesting how in Scotland there are continuous mergers taking place among so called mainline or reasonably moderate Protestant groups ('mainline' is a nonsense term these days - they are all tiny minorities) so that there will be the United Reformed Church (URC) and Church of Scotland there, but the URC is imploding already and establishment doesn't do a great deal for the Church of Scotland. The Scottish Episcopal Church is already quite tiny.

The decline is not helped by a few successful and somewhat deluded media churches, dotted here and there, nor even by the odd successful suburban church. Go to Bradford where evangelical churches struggle, because there is one media church that acts as a kind of vacuum cleaner over what's left.

One has to ask what is the unique selling point of Methodism, or the URC for that matter. Well, British Methodism has the uniqueness that its missing bishops are in its Conference. Whoopee, that'll attract them in. It does have an increased lay involvement, and rotates ministers on short contracts for little pay and increasing stress. Or take the URC, which preserves the notion that there are two rather than three orders of ministry. I bet that makes a difference. The URC is the merging of Scottish Presbyterians sent into England (most once Calvinist English Presbyterians became Unitarian) and Congregationalists (many of whom credally had resisted the liberal drift) that has since carried out more mergers, including into Scotland. The fact is that all these denominations were set up according to old arguments at the time, many of which have ceased to be relevant, many of which are now mergers waiting to merge again. The collapse of the Sunday school movement, or connections between church choirs and schools, has meant that there is no basic Christian memory across the population, never mind debate on the finer points of dividing up denominations.

Suggested figures by 2050 are just 3,600 churchgoing Methodists left, Anglicans at 87,800, Catholics at 101,700, Presbyterians (URC etc.)diminshed to 4,400, Baptists to 123,000 and independents to 168,000. Whilst big pinches of salt are needed for all such predictions (the Catholic figures included many Polish immigrants who have already gone home!), nevertheless the question has to be asked about what these denominations are for.

The Catholic Church knows what to do regarding Europe and the West. It is going on a mop-up operation to find and bring across remnants and others in different denominations sympathetic to itself, that can also bolster its conservative identity. It wants to be purer, if smaller, but it will take the Anglicans available and whatever other small groups exist. It makes sense - it also tackles its chronic clergy training shortage. It is amazing how rapidly Catholicism collapses after liberations as in Poland and, before it, Spain. Protestantism in East Germany, that allowed at least some popular democratic training under communism, is rapidly vanishing too.

It is because Methodists came from the Church of England and have 'missing bishops' that they can contemplate coming back into the Church from which they were ejected. On the other hand, as High Methodism (as in the Wesleyan denomination) is now pretty much defunct, some of the Anglican hierarchical and (even) liberal-Catholic tendencies might be too much of a cuture shock. A local group to which I present papers diverted its discussion to this issue recently, and no matter which way around the ecumenism would go, it all came down to adding a Methodist style extra service in the local Anglican church until it died out. Indeed, up and down the land, ecumenism would add up to one denomination's building hosting the other's service until one or the other approach died out with a bigger council and clergy numbers for the time being. And despite the five minutes extra walk, we said that the beginning of the ecumenical arrangement would involve a proprtion of the people using the transition as the moment to stop their attendance altogether.

But there is another point. Which Methodists would join with which Anglicans? The Anglicans are undergoing a kind of internal war, with the inheritors of the Oxford Movement leaving and the evangelicals taking on the liberal-Catholics for legitimacy. Liberal Methodists already get on with liberal Anglicans, and the same happens with evangelicals. Where there is a division in a town, as between, say, an evangelical Methodist church and a liberal-Catholic Anglican church, the ecumenism tends to be rather light and occasional at best - a sort of good wishes and a once a year dutiful mixing. The same divisions are within the URC and Baptists.

No matter which way one looks at it, the denominations will find their bureaucracies starting to cave in - too expensive and bloated for what is below. Perhaps with the traditionalist Anglo-Catholic wing bust and exported, the Anglicans will be able to absorb the Methodists. Perhaps, instead of a takeover, Methodists might merge with the URC and continue to sell-off plant and machinery more rigorously. Whatever may be the theological justification for structural ecumenism, or may be the resistances from old purist points of view, the fact is that the elephant in the room is the chronic decline going on now - and obvious just by looking around - and therefore effectively the ending of many once important but now unimportant traditions in the religious life of the United Kingdom.

Adrian Worsfold (Pluralist), has a doctorate in sociology and a masters degree in contemporary theology. He lives near Hull, in northeast England and keeps the blog Pluralist Speaks.

This is the second of two parts.

By Donald Schell

Though the attacks of September 11, 2001, had been a continent away, they had hit close to us in San Francisco. Two of our parishioners lost relatives who worked in the World Trade Center. Another parishioner’s best friend whom she’d just seen the week before was on one of the planes flown into the twin towers. ‘My best friend was killed by a terrorist,’ she said. ‘I’m frightened and I’m crying all the time, and I’m so angry I haven’t got the patience my kids need. And they’re frightened too.’ My cousin Bill was on the plane flown into the Pentagon. Bill was just my age. His younger sister Julia Caswell Daitch wrote about his death and the bitterly slow healing of angry grief in Not to Worry, I’m Just Collateral Damage.

The question persists – how do we live and love and serve without defining our lives by terror or a war on it? Don’t we really need to be afraid?

Another parishioner, an Israeli and former Israeli Air Force officer who had married to the daughter of an Episcopal priest, told us that San Francisco friends who knew he commuted to work across the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge kept asking him why he wasn’t afraid to cross the bridge. “Don’t you think it might be the terrorists next target?” they asked. He replied, “I’m from Jerusalem. You learn that you simply can’t live in constant fear.” My Jewish parishioner was speaking Gospel to us. ‘You can’t live in constant fear.’ And you can choose faith, hope, and love instead. I pray Ittai’s Jerusalem wisdom for us all.

Remember how often in 2001 we heard that ‘everything has changed.’ But what changed? Fear is so pervasive and deep for us humans that ‘Don’t be afraid’ seems to be the standard greeting for angels even bringing good news. Dare we protest that we’re more realistic than people two millennia and more ago, people who lived in cities that had been destroyed again and again by conquering armies. People whose babies died of simple, curable illnesses. People whose experience of the threat of every day life was as raw as our neighbors in Haiti or Somalia or Sudan or Thailand. Yes, we’ve always had really big things to fear. And probably there have always been people to make profit on our fears and use our fear to amass power. But when we accept fear as our baseline, defining condition, and as Clouzot and St. Paul suggest, our unconsciousness of the wages of fear will cost us dearly. And maybe that’s what ‘everything has changed’ meant it we accepted it. That fear become our postulate, the basic assumption underlying everything.

Fear fuels our country’s polarization. We’re so reluctant to trust one another that my good friend continued to suspect I’d re-written a national hymn for my own partisan purposes (and I have to acknowledge that I wished I had written those words). Fear undercuts friendship. Fear makes us xenophobic, anti-Islamic, anti-Republican (or anti-Democrat). Fear exults in the sloppy labels we paste on our enemies – Socialist! Fascist! Revisionist! Fundamentalist!

At worst our polarized church only offers its members and the broader society a different, more ‘Biblically’ or ‘theologically’ formulated list of fears from our polarized society’s politicians, public personalities and advertising firms.

In the early 1990’s our daughter Maria had a wonderful Croatian architecture teacher. She was a passionate, inspiring teacher though everything she had ever designed had been bombed to rubble in the methodical destruction of Sarajevo. She said she was finished with designing new buildings. “For me,” she said, “teaching the next generation is the only work I can do with integrity, that and telling anyone who can hear that what happened in Sarajevo could happen here.” She wasn’t afraid, and she hadn’t given up, but she knew that danger was real and that the chaos of war can eventually cross any border. So her teaching work was like Julian of Norwich’s ringing affirmation in the days of the Black Death, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Or as our twenty-two year old son says, “It’s all good.”

Neither Julian nor my Joshua imagine that ‘everything’s going to be fine.’ Their ‘well’ or ‘good’ are bigger than the simplistic security of gates communities (and our illusion that we can make the U.S. a continent wide gated community). Josh and Julian know that we live in a world where really hard things can happen.

In 2010’s continuing culture of fear, too often the church simply offers new fears for old, not inviting us into courageous trust and hope grounded in love, but the stern counsel that we’re fearing the wrong thing. Shouldn’t we fear the demise of our church? Global warming and other impending ecological disasters? Who wouldn’t fear tyranny and the loss of our liberties? Or priests who practice Buddhist meditation? Or leaders who mess with our Prayer Book? If perfect love casts out those fears, what will we have left?

Why are we so attached to our fears? And just what are we actually afraid of?

We might guess that the obvious answer is death, but my own experiences seems oddly distant when real threat of death presented itself -
- like when death on a bare ridge in Colorado was as close as the lightning hitting the ground all around us,
- or when I crested the hill in Idaho winter, saw the interstate traffic stopped dead for the jack-knifed big rig that blocked all lines, touched my brakes and felt the wheels lock on black ice, praying the Jesus prayer as I steered the icy 60 mile an hour slide from rear-ending a tiny sport scar and we skidded into a big, stopped truck,
- or when I was robbed at gunpoint walking home from the church one night.
In those moments the knowledge that death might come in the next moment only focused my praying. God felt alive and present in the trust or whatever could come (including death), the trust that’s sometimes hidden within or alongside faith.

So I don’t think it’s actually death that we fear.

We fear failure. We fear letting people down. We fear losing control? We fear that someone else may be right and we may be wrong? We fear getting found out or being judged or shunned. We fear decisions that may bring us and those we love suffering. We fear not knowing what to do.

In the moment he spoke it, and in that one phrase, Franklin Roosevelt wore the mantle of Anglican lay theologian – "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

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

By Donald Schell

“Tell us why we shouldn’t be afraid. Then tell us again. We can’t hear it too often.”

When my parishioner gave me that preaching mandate, I thought immediately of “The Wages of Fear,” Clouzot’s title for his 1953 gritty white-knuckle thriller film of desperate men driving tanker truckloads of nitroglycerin. To my ear Clouzot’s title echoes and comments on what St. Paul said in Romans, “The wages of sin is death.” “ Ah,” Clouzot seems to reply, “so apparently sin and fear pay the same wages.”

I write of the wages of fear in 2010 in the long wake of 9/11/2001 when a new doctrine (or heresy) of constant fear claimed to change everything forever. Maybe it has. I hope not.

6 p.m. that night, just twelve hours after the attacks, thanks to mass email, a sidewalk sign and Pacific Time’s extra three hours, we filled our church for a requiem and mass for peace. About a third of the people came with friends or from the sign or phoning the church. Prayers and singing, silence and tears filled the church that evening with a spirit blending like the sadness and hope of our truest funerals, a blend of Good Friday and Easter.

But afterwards one parishioner angrily complained at my presumption rewriting the evening’s final hymn. Politically more conservative than me, my old friend knew how her preacher mistrusted any rush to war, so she’d flinched when the leaflet gave her the unexpected and uncomfortable immediacy of singing,

“O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life!
America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self control, thy liberty in law.”

Friday watching our President on TV preach his call to war from the pulpit of our Cathedral in Washington fueled my anger: ‘Our responsibility is clear’ he said, ‘to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil…this nation is peaceful but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.’

‘Rid the world of evil?’ I muttered, ‘…an hour of our choosing?’

Hubris.

So the mercy and self-control I sort of wished I had written into that second verse were even farther from my mind as I prepared Sunday’s sermon. Most preachers feel it sooner or later; the exciting stirring of our inner Amos, the righteous, wrathful, prophetic voice we know will make people uncomfortable. Though I knew our congregation was raw and jittery, my Sunday sermon was full of angry, prophetic confidence. And it was after that liturgy that another voice, a real prophet, offered this preacher her urgent plea, “You’ve got to tell us why we shouldn’t be afraid. Then tell us again. And again. We can’t hear it too often.”

It is a strangely grace-filled thing to preach and preside for a congregation of friends and strangers who are desperately eager to pray, who long to hear a word of Good News, and who hunger to receive the body of Christ. With my mandate to address our fear, I climbed off my prophetic soapbox and listened like the rest of the people to the readings and my and our asking over the next several weeks preaching, “What do we have to fear?”

Extended preaching time with the question of how we live beyond our fear and how we lay our fears to rest, highlighted something startlingly new in our lectionary’s long Advent-themed Autumn –
- Godly hope, the promise of God-with-us,
- God’s desire that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God,
- and all the prophets’ promises and comfort were spoken to people whose lives had been devastated by war after war, by poverty, by famine, by the oppressive greed of a few, by their own lack of compassion and lack of love and forgiveness. Reading after reading looked on massive threat, chaos and sorrow without blinking. And where can we go from there? To St. Paul telling us (over and over) to give thanks in all things, and to the writer of I John telling us, ‘perfect love casts out fear.’

This ancient theme of fearlessness and hope in trouble resounds in the Black Church. Our sisters and brothers who have known steady and terrible suffering touch this holy fearlessness in music like ‘The Storm is passing over,’

Encourage my soul and let us journey on - For the night is dark and I am far from home Thanks be to God the morning light appears, The storm is passing over, The storm is passing over, The storm is passing over halleu Hal-le- (all) lu-jah, Ha-le-lu-jah, Ha-le-lu-jah, ah, ah, ah The storm is passing over, the storm is passing over, the storm is passing over halleu!

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

By Martin L. Smith

I've just recycled my Christmas cards and a last glance brought smiles of gratitude for old friendships. One card always makes me laugh, even though it's not intentionally humorous. It's just that a card from the rector whose curate I was almost 40 years ago reminds me of the pleasure we had working together, how hardly a day went by without laughter. Tension is often the order of the day between rectors and young assistants, but we enjoyed our friendship, respected each other's gifts, teased each other about our shortcomings and found endless merriment in our parish life. Humor was such a bond we even liked to preach together sometimes; I at the lectern and Robin in the pulpit, presenting the sermon as a dialogue. Occasionally we would improvise two-man plays which we would present in place of a sermon.

One thing that deepened our pleasure in preaching arose from a distinctive feature of the parish tradition. For a generation the parish had organized a pilgrimage to the Holy Land every three years. No one had much money, but the pilgrimage was cherished as a once-in-a-lifetime experience worth saving for. These pilgrimages had woven an extraordinary degree of intimacy with the stories of scripture in the congregation. At any service, more than half the worshippers had personal memories of the places mentioned and every reading triggered a ripple of response. All sorts of expressions would play across their faces, elbows would nudge to signal unspoken reminiscence, little sighs or murmurs could be heard.

"There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee…"; Even before we started our sermon, you could tell people were there, remembering how really nasty the local wine is, since we had tasted it (think rusty nails!) Or, typically English, we couldn't help looking down and noticing that the Orthodox priest showing us what purported to be one of the actual jars was wearing pajamas under his cassock. Mention the Sea of Galilee, and people were back on a beach there on the northern shore, or on a little hill watching the stars fade and the sun rise as the fishing boats set out from Capernaum. Memories wove a shared language: "Do you remember when we went to pray in the chapel on the site of Calvary, and the lady came in with her shopping basket full of cabbages and set it down by the altar so she could crawl on her hands and knees to the place where you could put your hand down a hole in the marble and touch the rock? How we gave that look to each other that said without words, "Well, if she can do it, so can we!" So that when we preached on Good Friday we knew that eyes were shining in the congregation from the felt memory of touching that bedrock of this strange faith of ours.

I've never been convinced by people who claim to be indifferent about visiting the places of where Jesus lived and walked. Surely, even if it were to mean scrimping and saving for a few years—or am I being hopelessly old-fashioned?—this is an experience worth having once in a lifetime, something that will change the way we experience the scriptures and worship and prayer. But of course fear – of what that vivid personal contact might entail – might be the real reason concealed behind the arguments used in dismissing the idea as ‘not for me.'

In a diocese like ours where we are aware of the struggles of the Palestinian people and we know what terrible contradictions roil under the old pious title ‘the Holy Land,' there are extra motives for making the pilgrimage, with opportunities for expressing solidarity with the wronged and for gaining first hand knowledge as a basis for political action and witness. But the core reason that has always moved people of faith to go on pilgrimage remains the same as it has been for millennia. The Word was made flesh, and the life of faith is an embodied experience. The spiritual journey is one we sometimes make with actual footsteps, the climbing that makes us out of breath, the immersion that gets us soaking wet.

I have a hunch that as more people restrict themselves to virtual experiences online, regaling themselves with the infinite array of images a key-stroke can summon to their screens, a counter-cultural revolt will not be long in coming. Communal flesh and blood encounters, incarnational practices, all that is face to face and physical and tangible will begin to be revalued. The Word was made flesh, and Christianity won't stand for that sacred flesh being volatilized into the virtual and evanescent. Real pilgrimages will be a part of that counter-cultural reclaiming of the embodied, sacramental flesh and blood experience in real time.

Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba's, D.C.

A review of The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600 – 1700 at the National Gallery of Art Washington DC., 28 February – 31 May 2010

By Nicholas Cranfield

Most of us expect sculpture, whether wood or stone, to be pure. Despite a large number of painted mediaeval statues we still tend to think of the marble sculptures of the likes of Bernini or the great temples of Greece and of Rome. Even now scholarly opinion remains divided as to how much Greek temple sculpture was polychromed despite the surviving traces of paint on columns and friezes. Nineteenth century attempts to convince historians otherwise continue. It is a shock to learn that what to our eyes appears classical in both simplicity and form was never originally unadorned and was once garishly painted.

The exhibition at the NGA The Sacred Made Real brings together for the first time just such richly polychromed statuary from seventeenth century Spain set in the context of the more recognizable paintings of the same period. The curator, Dr Xavier Bray, demonstrates the complimentarity of these thirty or so exceptional works and argues that Spanish art in the Counter-Reformation period, independently of Italy and the Renaissance, achieved startling levels of brilliance.

Much of the zeal within the Church has always come from within the Iberian peninsula beginning with Saint Vincent of Zaragoza and continuing into the mediaeval period with Saint Dominic and, in the sixteenth century, the founders of the Jesuits and the new reformed orders; Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.

It is against this background that this unique exposition unfolds making it ideal as an accompaniment to any Lenten devotion or Eastertide reflections. In London, where the exhibition ran successfully for three months, clergy and groups of interested lay people could be seen in the gallery every day and the silent awe with which gallery goers absorbed the show was palpable.

Inevitably, perhaps, the big names are those of the painters since it is with their works that most visitors will be familiar. The contemporaries Velázquez (1599-1660) and Zurbarán (1598-1664), as well as Jusepe de Ribera and Francisco Ribalta are all here while sculptors like Gregorio Fernández and Juan Martínez Moñtanés (who appears in a 1636 portrait by Velázquez), and Pedro de Mena are all rescued from obscurity.

Of the five Spanish saints canonised by Pope Gregory XV, on 12 March 1622, we come to meet Ignatius in a life-size statue made at his beatification in 1609 in which the sculptor had used a copy of the Jesuit’s death mask owned by the artist who painted it. No contemporary likeness of Ignatius was ever made as he personally rejected the idea but early Jesuits wanted an image of their founder. Paired with it is a second statue, of Francis Borgia, made later for his beatification (1624). Borgia, the duke of Gandia (1510-72), renounced his earthly diadem when he was widowed in 1536 and he is shown, both in the effigy and in a painting by Alonso Cano, gazing at the crown he has foresworn.

These figures speak strongly of the religiosity of Spain and stress both humanity in all its agony and ecstasy and real dogged determination. One glance at Mother Jerónima de la Fuente, painted by the twenty year old Velázquez, when she was 66 and about to sail from Spain to found a community in the Philippines, shows a redoubtable woman who would strike fear into any believer; the painted wooden crucifix she holds looks like an instrument of God’s holy war.

That should remind us how so much of this art was intended for the expanding colonies that Spain and Portugal held overseas. This in turn often involved what we might think of as mass production. As the recent show Sacred Spain at the Indianapolis Museum of Art showed (winter 2009/2010) statues could be readily transported to serve as models while increasingly Iberian born artists, like Antonio Montúfar and Sebastián López de Arteaga, settled overseas, serving the church in New Spain.

Such statues and paintings achieved a new verisimilitude in art which, the organisers argue, derived from the Low Countries where we know that van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden had also often painted statues in the early fifteenth century. The links between what became the Spanish Netherlands during the upheavals of the Reformation and the Hapsburgs in Spain introduced material influences, without direct reference to Italy. Sixteenth century artists like El Greco and Titian had worked in Italy before coming to Spain and engravings increased the awareness of, for instance, Michelangelo’s work beyond the Italian peninsula.

Across Spain there was a more rigorous demarcation between painter and sculptor than in Flanders; the finished sculpture had to be passed to a member of the guild of artists for the actual painting. I was longing to know whether Velázquez himself had undertaken this as we know that his former teacher and later father in law Francisco Pacheco did. As an apprentice he no doubt found Pacheco completing the gilding on statues such as that of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.

It is none other than Pacheco who is jointly credited, with Moñtanés, for the powerful life-size representations of St Ignatius and Blessed Francis Borgia (Seville University). Only much later did Pedro de Mena seem to break this unionised strangle-hold, painting his own sculptures in defiance of custom.

As well as being an artist (His Christ on the Cross from Granada (1614) is here) it was Pacheco who wrote on the art of painting, a practical handbook for all aspiring painters. In the wake of the restraints on images and decorum determined by the Council of Trent he recommended how best to treat of certain religious subjects and thereby established the parameters for much later iconography. He observed that the application of colour to statues revealed ‘the passions and concerns of the soul with great vividness’ (1649).

The paintings of Zurbarán form the core of this exhibition and his works outnumber those of other artists. The 1628 Zurbarán painting of the martyred Mercedarian Saint Serapion (from the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut) is the undoubted highlight. Despite his shocking death Zurbarán portrays him in sublime stillness. There is no blood and we, the devout, absorb and respond to the violence that is not seen in a profoundly visceral way. It was originally painted for a mortuary cell and would have allowed generations of monks to reflect on mortality.

Powerful among the many sculptures that, seen here as art rather than as overdressed devotional objects in cluttered churches, come to life is one of the many effigies of the Dead Christ, made by Gregorio Fernández for the Jesuit House in Madrid (1625/30) Newly cleaned for this show, the full horror of death is caught in the half open eyes made of real glass, the dirtied finger and toe nails of real horn and the ivory for the teeth. The thick blood clots and mess of death, his gashed knees and ripped palms, unflinchingly promote the Incarnation.

As striking but less bloody is the pairing of a celebrated painting by Zurbarán of Saint Francis in ecstasy, hooded and looking upward in a moment of rapture, and its half size ‘copy’, undertaken by Pedro de Mena for the sacristy of Toledo Cathedral some twenty five years later. In both media the saint is exclusively drawn away from us by his upturned gaze. This, and the bared foot, derive from a tale popularised in the 17th century that Pope Nicholas V had visited Assisi in 1449 and found that the dead saint’s body was perfectly preserved, standing upright as if still gazing at heaven.

But de Mena’s achievement, the tattered habit of the holy friar and the powerful cast of shadows, is perhaps the more striking as he was both sculptor and painter, bringing to his task the rich inheritance of both aspects of this extraordinarily vivid and expansive exhibition.

Dr Nicholas Cranfield is an Anglican priest based in a London parish and arts reviewer with a regular column in the Church Times (www.churchtimes.co.uk

By J. Carleton Hayden

Black History Week, now Black History Month, was founded in 1927 by Carter G. Woodson, chair of Howard University's history department, in the week that contains the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12), and Frederick Douglass (Feb. 14). For us Episcopalians, the month contains three remarkable descendants of Africa commemorated as saints of the church.

The first African American to be added to our liturgical calendar was Absalom Jones, a slave who through hard work purchased first the freedom of his wife, Mary, and then his own, founded the Free African Society, America's first formally organized social welfare association run by blacks, the Episcopal Church's first black congregation, St. Thomas African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, and became, in 1802, this country's first black priest. For the past 30 years, the Washington Chapter of the Union of Black Episcopalians has held a diocesan-wide commemoration of Jones, which this year is set for Feb. 14 at Calvary, D.C.

Janani Luwum, the martyred Archbishop of Uganda (feast day, Feb. 17), was recently added to our liturgical calendar. He denounced the brutality of Idi Amin, Uganda's dictator, and asserted the right of the church to promote justice and protect the oppressed. Summoned to the presidential palace, Luwum went boldly, declaring "I can see the hand of God in this." Idi Amin ordered him shot as a traitor, with some reporting that Amin himself had pulled the trigger. At the cathedral in Kampala, thousands gathered for a memorial service at an empty grave that had been prepared for Luwum next to that of James Hannington, Uganda's first bishop. Hannington, an English missionary, also had been martyred in Uganda on Oct. 29, 1885 (feast day, Oct. 29). A statue of Luwum now stands among the martyrs of the 20th Century at Westminster Abbey.

Anna Julia Cooper, a devout Anglican, feminist, educator and civil rights advocate, is currently my favorite Black History Month saint. She was added to the liturgical calendar in 2006. I first became aware of Cooper in 1969 as a Howard University graduate student. After the daily morning Eucharist, her grandniece, Regia T. Bronson, often treated this small congregation to breakfast at Cooper's stately but decaying residence at 201 T. Street NW, about a half block from St. George's, D.C. Bronson gave me some of Cooper's books, which are to me sacred relics, and her papers, which I deposited at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. These contain letters from such notable historical figures as Frederick Douglass, William Still, Alexander Crummell, and Mary Shadd Cary, a leader among African American refugees in Ontario and later America's first black lawyer.

Anna Julia Cooper was born into slavery on Aug. 10, 1858, in Raleigh, N.C., to Hannah Stanley and her slave master, George Washington Hayward. Cooper praised her mother for her sacrifices and guidance but stated she owed nothing to her white father "beyond the initial act of procreation." A cradle Episcopalian, she was one of the first students at what is now St. Augustine's College, established by the church shortly after the Civil War to educate teachers and priests to serve newly-freed slaves. She married her Greek professor, the Rev. George Augustus Christopher Cooper of Nassau, and the young couple labored in the Episcopal mission there until he died of pneumonia in 1897, just two months after being ordained as a priest.

Cooper earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Oberlin College, the first American college to enroll both women and blacks, and went on to teach at the AME's Wilberforce University, -- which was named for William Wilberforce, England's anti-slavery champion (feast day, July 30) – and at St. Augustine's.

In 1886, she read a sensational paper on the need to educate women at a meeting of the Conferences of Church Workers Among the Colored People at St. Luke's, D.C. The next year, she accepted a teaching position at Washington's segregated M Street High School, America's best high school for blacks. She worshipped at St. Luke's, boarding with several other professional women at the home of her rector, the Rev. Alexander Crummell. She was named principal of M Street High School in 1902. Four years later, she was not re-appointed following allegations by the white director of high schools that her discipline was insufficiently severe and her academic standards too high for black students. She taught at Lincoln University in Missouri and Langston University in Oklahoma, and spent summers at Columbia University pursuing her doctorate, eventually returning to M Street High School as a teacher.

Always an advocate for the rights of women and African Americans and a builder of institutions to prepare them for full equality in American society, Cooper wrote in her best-known book, A Voice From the South by a Black Woman From the South, (1892): "When and where I enter, the whole race enters with me." A prolific writer, she also penned an autobiography, A Third Step, Legislative Measures Concerning Slavery in the United States, among other works.

At the 1893 Women's Congress in Chicago, she lectured on the intellectual progress and achievements of African American women. When Crummell founded the American Negro Academy, a forerunner of the NAACP, to counter racism in the U.S., Cooper was its only female member. At the first Pan-African Congress, held in London in 1900, she presented a paper titled, "The Negro Problem in America," which described the plight of African Americans as pathetic for a Christian nation. Congress attendees included fellow Episcopalians William E.B. DuBois and Bishop James Theodore Holly, of Haiti, the Episcopal Church's first black bishop. Cooper also prepared the Congress's memo to Queen Victoria, protesting apartheid in South Africa.

At the age of 55, Cooper's life changed dramatically when she became the guardian of Regia Bronson and her four siblings after their mother died. She purchased a home on T Street, and became one of the first black residents of Le Droit Park.

At the age of 66, she was awarded her PhD from the Sorbonne, becoming the fourth African American woman to earn that degree. And in 1930, after more than 40 years at M Street, she accepted the presidency of Frelinghuyuen University, a struggling group of vocational evening classes taught by volunteer faculty and meeting in black churches. As finances declined, she moved the classes into her home, accepting neither rent nor salary.

She died peacefully in her sleep on Feb. 29, 1964, at the age of 105, and was buried in Raleigh, N.C. On her tomb were inscribed the words she had chosen, "Somebody's teacher on vacation… Resting for the fall opening."

What a blessing that every Feb. 28, we can celebrate her heavenly birthday and ask her to pray for us, her students, always being shaped as disciples waiting for the new school year.

The Rev. J. Carleton Hayden is a retired priest of the Diocese of Washington and a professor of history at Howard University. This article first appeared in Washington Window.

By Kathy Staudt

Except for a brief grocery run between storms, I was “snowbound” for nearly a week, from February 9-13, with the two huge storms falling on the DC area. It took 2 days for our suburban cul-de-sac to be plowed at all – and then the second blizzard came. Unlike many in the area we have had our power on the whole time, so we were not materially deprived, apart from cabin fever. It was just a long stretch of time at being at home, mostly it’s been an experience of just being “stopped.”

At first we celebrated this time as an “enforced Sabbath,” something that is welcome in the workaholic culture of the DC area, when the weather conditions and the slowness of the cleanup process simply force us to let go of whatever important things we were doing. And for a day or so, yes, it was a welcome “sabbath time.” But after that a more insidious inertia set in.

Indeed, I have been wondering whether an “enforced Sabbath” is kind of a contradiction in terms. Sabbath is supposed to be a regular spiritual practice, a part of our routine – a way that we simply let go of busy-ness to acknowledge that God is Lord of all of our time and work, and that our work is not our own, but God’s. It strikes me that perhaps a more regular practice of genuine Sabbath would have been a good preparation for the spiritual challenge this snowstorm posed for me. For what I felt most of the time was a deep restlessness, a sense of being unhooked from any reliable routine or pattern, and so an inability to settle to much of anything – even settling down to read a good book, as I’d longed to do, and had time to do, or to write, or pray, or do anything much more than responding to what came: answering email, gmail chatting, facebook, grading the occasional paper.

By the end of the week I was snowbound both outwardly and internally. Unmotivated. Stuck. It is a place in life I recognize, and perhaps it has left me with a useful image, a new spiritual metaphor to remember when I do not have control over the way forward, and the place I’m in seems crowded, enclosed, confused, with too many competing demands. Outwardly, I kept busy, apparently “doing things.” Since I work at home, the work was all there, looking at me, and I picked my way through it, in an unmotivated way. But any substantive or creative writing was just blocked. With the rhythm of days flattened out, I lost the internal rhythm of prayer, study, work and rest that would normally steady and settle me. The computer was too alluring – a way of staying connected with people, emails and facebook posts that make me feel needed, important, not buried at the end of a suburban cul de sac. My spouse was at home, also working, we broke for meals together, and I did find that losing myself in the creative art of cooking does help to redeem a snowy day -- but even that grew old after 5 days.

Inwardly, my response to this snowstorm and the break in our routine was beginning to feel more like the kind of “stopping” of life that comes with illness, or grieving, or other unexpected interruptions. Times when we are “brought up short” – as theologian Richard Osmer puts it – where we come up against a break in our regular expectations of life and are not sure what to make of it.

Then there was the shoveling out: my way to freedom, once the roads were clear, thwarted by my own bad choices: I had parked the car in the driveway after the first storm, to save the effort of shoveling our whole driveway, which slopes uphill from the garage. But the second snowstorm buried the car under a snowdrift – so the work of digging it out doubled. In the end I needed to dig the whole driveway, roll the car back into the garage, and begin again. . No work saved, and hard to see how long it would take me – and no help in sight. The neighbor who had helped me after the first storm was tapped out; my spouse was laid up with bronchitis. My car would be free only when I could get it out.

The task itself was clear enough, but discouraging. I would dig away at the snow but there was nowhere to go with it – the piles blew back at me, and though I’m in decent shape it grew tiring, heaving each shovelful to the top of the growing snowpiles along the driveway. Gradually I’d begin to see patches of pavement, mingled with ice -- but I’d think: “this will take hours – maybe won’t be done by dark today. I don’t know how long my strength will last.” All I could do was to keep filling the shovels fullpiling snow high on the already deeply covered lawn behind me.” An unrewarding task for long stretches, but obviously the only way out.

Gradually, shovelful by shovelful, I began to break through to a way out.. It was fine as long as I could focus on the single task: lifting the next shovelful, moving the snow, pausing to admire the brilliant sky and the sparkling icicles around me. When I started to obsess about how long it would be before I was dug out, and whether it would be today or tomorrow, discouragement quickly overwhelmed.. There was no way of knowing how soon my efforts would pay off. I simply had to keep on. Knowing it would be done eventually. Not knowing when, or how long I could last, this shift, before taking a break.

Help came, finally, when I was about ready to admit defeat. – from someone with fresh arms and a fresh approach. He moved the last few shovelfuls and backed the car out for me, up and over the icy hill, and finally, I was free.

I’m appreciating some spiritual insights from this experience of being snowbound. It may be reaching a bit, but the metaphor works for me, I shall try to remember all of this next time I am aware of being spiritually “snowbound” – in that place of interior “stuckness” that is all too familiar for me.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.