Category Archives: commonplace

The Triumph of the Therapeutic II

[Jung, Reich and Lawrence] tried, in their disparate ways, to go so far beyond psychologising that it would become a way of life, that culture would be destroyed as a system of controlling consolations and reconstructed as a system of more immediate releases of impulse… They did not so much seek some new consolation as that culture of release which would render the many consolations of high culture unnecessary. However, what they achieved was new consolations, locked forever in a struggle against defensive cultural ideologies.

Philip Rieff, ‘The Analytic Attitude’, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, (2006), p. 29

Things you’d never hear in church…

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A small summer, bank holiday tribute to Mock the Week:

“Things you’d never hear in church”. Contestants to the performance area, please…

  • Bless you, Vicar. You’re the one with the training. You decide.
  • I think as a PCC we just don’t pray enough.
  • No, our generation has had its own way for long enough. It’s time for you young people to show us how it’s done.
  • He’s a hard working man with his heart in the right place. He needs our support.
  • I’m sure we can find another £500 a year to pay for that project.
  • Let’s do something spontaneous, generous and anonymous for the vicar’s family.
  • I love the way children behave in church.
  • Thank you for pointing out my children’s inconsiderate behaviour. I’ll have a quiet word with them.
  • The diocese think we’ve paid too much quota this month.
  • Are you sure you’ve taken all your annual leave this year, Rector?
  • Surely we could give more to support the work of the diocese?
  • No, no, we don’t need you to be at this meeting, Vicar. We can manage without you.
  • Do we really need to set up another committee to decide that?
  • I know she never came to church, so I suppose she wasn’t really a Christian.
  • We don’t want to use this christening as just an excuse for a party. We want the service to be the important bit.
  • I’d really love to learn some new hymns.
  • I’m going to go home and really think about what you said in your sermon, Vicar.
  • I realise now that my Sunday School faith isn’t enough.

And, finally…

  • Yes. Let’s give that a go.

Commonplace (31) : Evensong and Theologians

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In 1935 Dietrich Bonhoeffer set up an illegal seminary in Finkenwalde, in opposition to the Nazi dominated structures of the National Church:

The programme for the day began and ended with two long services. In the morning the service was followed by half an hour’s meditation, an exercise that was not interrupted by the circumstances of the removal, though packing cases and youth hostel bunks were the only furniture. The services did not take place in church but round the ordinary dinner-table. They invariably began with a Psalm and a hymn specially chosen for the day. There followed a lesson from the Old Testament, a set verse from a hymn (sung daily for several weeks), a New Testament lesson, a period of extempore prayer and the recital of the Lord’s Prayer. Each service concluded with another set verse from a hymn. Readings from the Psalms and the Scripture took the form of a lectio continua, for preference without any omissions. In structure this very much resembled Anglican evensong. Bonhoeffer believed that this sequence of readings and prayers was the most natural and suitable form of service for theologians.1

Quite.

  1. From Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: theologian, Christian, contemporary. ed. Edwin Robertson, tran. Eric Mosbacher (London: Collins, 1970). [↩]

Commonplace (29)

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Huge Tragedy
John Ibbitson, of the Globe and Mail, on 14 September 2002 referred to an alleged conspiracy to murder an OPP police officer in Brockville in December 1999.

…the police and the local Crown attorney became convinced that they had prevented a tragedy of CNN proportions…

(… a tragedy of CNN proportions … Can a tragedy get any bigger?)

Commonplace (27)

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Dorothy Sayers’ Ethic

Do this, do that, love your friends and like your neighbours, be just, be extravagantly generous, be honest, be tolerant, have courage, have compassion, use your wits and your imagination, understand the world you live in and be on terms with it, don’t dramatise and dream of escape. Anyhow, that seems to me to be the pattern, so far as we can make it out here.
So come in again with your eyes open, when you feel you can.

Dorothy Sayers, quoted in Anglicansonline.org 1 September 2002

Commonplace (25)

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Jacob the Chandler
“What do you understand about St. John’s Apocalypse?” the friar asked the chandler. “At what university did you study? At the loom, I suppose? For I understand that you were nothing but a poor weaver and chandler before you went around preaching and rebaptizing. . . . I have attended the university of Louvain, and for long studied divinity, and yet I do not understand anything at all about St John’s Apocalypse. This is a fact.” To which Jacob answered: “Therefore Christ thanked his heavenly Father that he had revealed and made it known to babes and hid it from the wise of this world, as it is written in Matt. 11:25Open Link in New Window.” “Exactly!” the friar replied, “God has revealed it to the weavers at the loom, to the cobblers on the bench, and to bellow-menders, lantern tinkers, scissors grinders, brass makers, thatchers and all sorts of riff-raff, and poor, filthy and lousy beggars. And to us ecclesiastics who have studied from our youth, night and day, God has concealed it.”

Disputation between Jacob de Keersgieter and Mgr. Friar Cornelis, a Franciscan monk; in the presence of Mhr. Jan van Damme, Recorder, and Mhr. Michiel Houwaert, Clerk of the Criminal Court, on the 9th of May, AD 1569, quoted in Thieleman J. van Braght The Martyrs’ Mirror (1660)