St. Patrick's Breastplate

St. Patrick's Breastplate is a classic prayer, which works on so many levels..

Here is the audio of David Ruis 's musical/spoken word version of it;
(thanks to a (post)modern day Celt named Keltic Ken).
It comes from the long out of print classic Powerscourt album, recorded in Dublin, with songs led by Ruis and Eoghan Heaslip (son of Jack Heaslip, U2's chaplain.)

Play/pray it often.

This one goes out to St. Rick Bartlett.

"we ordain everyone"

I hope all the recent discussion/controversy over Adam Walker Cleveland's delay in ordination doesn't cause him more trouble than it's worth (I am familiar with the mainline denominational process), but it sure raises a lot of the right questions.

This is no small landmark in the current shift.

Maybe the best place to start is the Out of Ur column, pasted below, you can follow the links from there:

"Tony Jones: We Ordain Everyone"
Fron Out of Ur,Posted by UrL Scaramanga, link

Has denominational ordination jumped the shark?

Do you believe in ordination? Or, more accurately stated, do you believe in denominational structures that regulate who is ordained for ministry based on prerequisites, credentials, and education?

Tony Jones, author and a leading voice of the emergent church, has started a ruckus on his blog about the legitimacy of denominational ordination after watching his friend, Adam Walker-Cleaveland, endure a slow and difficult ordination process. According to Jones, Adam has “suffered abuse” through the ordination process of his denomination. Jones wrote:

Few things piss me off as much as the sinful bureaucratic systems of denominational Christianity. When rules and regulations trump common sense, then the shark has officially been jumped.

But what gets to me even more is that bright, competent, and pastorally experienced persons like Adam continue to submit themselves to these sinful systems. They assure me that it's not for the health insurance or the pension. They do it cuz they feel "called." And if I hear another person tell me that they're sticking with their abusive denomination because, "They're my tribe," I'm gonna go postal.

Jones’ frustration led him to launch an online petition calling Adam to circumvent his denomination and accept ordination by “the body of Christ.”

The petition states:

Adam Walker-Cleaveland, having watched you be ritually abused by the ordination process…we beseech you to forsake ordination in said bureaucracy.And please accept the following: We, the body of Christ, hereby ordain you as a Minister of Word and Sacrament, and we grant you all of the rights and responsibilities thereto. May God bless your ministry.

In a follow up post, Jones outlines some of his own thinking about ordination. Referring to the practice in his church, Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis, he says:

We ordain everyone. If you want to be ordained to perform a wedding, or to be a lawnmower repairman, we'll ordain you to that ministry.

This is not to vaunt everyone to a high position, but to subvert and deconstruct the very notion of ordination. It is NOT like what John Wesley did (although there are some interesting parallels) or like what the fundamentalists did or the Lutherans or the Calvinists. We ordain everyone, and I started an online petition to ordain Adam, to be ironic. It's to point up what I consider to be the arbitrariness of the bureaucratic systems, and, to be honest, the tax benefits, of ordination. In other words, this is the opposite of a YoungLife leader who writes away to some dude to get ordained for the housing allowance write-off. This is, instead, to show how that entire system leads to such ridiculousness.

I realize that both Jones’ style and theology is a lightning rod for some Urbanites. But he is opening the floodgates on a very relevant question. What is ordination? And what makes an ordination legitimate?

-Posted by UrL Scaramanga, link

amazing definition of 'erotic'

'Everything that is distinctively human gets formulated in our prayers:
our pathos, our nobility, our creativity. Also, interestingly, everything that is disreputable in us--lust, avarice, pride. pettiness--disguises itself in prayer in order, if possible, to get us credit instead of shame. But either way, whether in disguise or reality, prayers show us at our best.

Except for the Psalms. The psalms set their faces against this lush eroticism, this rank jungle growth of desire seeking fulfillment..

The erotic ( our human pathos, nobility, and creativity seeking for that which it does not have) is not absent from the Psalms. It would not be possible to have authentically human speech here without it; but it is not encouraged--it is wrestled into obedience."

-Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer pp 6-7

pomo slomo: unbuilding

Having posted yesterday from one new (used) book on the call to build on, and integrate past seasons in times of transition,

it is only appropriate, and subversive, to post today from my other new (used) book, offering an opposing/complementary view.

All churchfolk should read "Rubble:Unearthing the History of Demolition" (:

Nothing sums up the postmodern world better than a fast-melting building..Baudrillard, one of the maverick pundits of postmodernity, riffed on the subject of unbuilding. The implosion [of a buildng] 'openly declares that our age will no longer be one of duration, that our only temporal mode is that of accekrated cyle and of recycling.' ...Impolsion was a ign of the times. "Panic in slow otion,' he called it.. .."Demolitionists...are ready guides to our immaterial future. The destructive character sees nothing permanent. . But for this very reason, he sees ways everywhere . Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere , he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force, sometimes by the most refined..."what exists, he reduces to rubble--not for the sake of the rubble but for the way leading through it." -Byles, 312-3 .

God and Godiva

“…the Bible clearly makes the journey important. In fact, you might call the gospel a theology of journey. To keep our “eyes on the prize” doesn’t keep our hands from racquets, or our mouths from Godiva chocolates, or our noses from lily of the valley flowers, or our feet from dancing. If you don’t meet God along the way, you’ll never meet God at the destination. That’s the dynamic tension.”

-Leonard Sweet, 11 Indispensable Relationships You Can’t Be Without, p. 18

dueling dualism

Leonard Sweet Loving Seoul & Asia & remembering Goethe's claim that the very act of contrasting East and West itself represents a Western mode of thinking

24 minutes ago · Comment · Like

David Banks at 12:26pm May 12

it is the same as suggesting that the left hemisphere of the brain is superior than the right.

" I actually receive my mail there"

"Men live in a fantasy world. I know this because I am one, and I actually receive my mail there."
  - Scott Adams