Writing

Recall last week when I had all those writing projects to do? Most of those are now done, but I still have three remaing: a blog piece for Episcopal Cafe, a column for the February Anglican, and the Christmas Pageant. The Pageant is actually the easiest of those, since we are simplifying the parts that don't involve rapping and dancing to make room for those that do!

I've also been asked about another article that would potentially appear in an even larger venue. Big, big deal if it happens, and I'm deeply honored that they are considering me. Apparently I'm getting a reputation as a writer on matters of faith!

So now I have come up with new ideas on what to write about. Interestingly, I had a real downpour of ideas when I was walking to St. Paul's Bloor Street last week. I had to stop on the street to write them down lest I forgot. I was thinking about St. Andrew's Day and an amazing sermon given by Mark Frank in 1672. In it he used the image of St. Andrew leaving his nets when called by Christ:

And alas! what have we, the best, the richest of us, as highly as we think of ourselves and ours, more than Saint Andrew and his brother: a few broken nets? What are our honours but old nets to catch the breath of the world, where the oldest is the best, and where that which has most knots, most alliances and genealogies, is the most honourable? What are all our ways and devices of thriving but so many several nets to catch a little yellow sand and mud? And if you will have it in somewhat a finer phrase, [what are they but] a few silver scaled fishes, in which yet (God knows!) there are so many knots and difficulties, so many rents and holes for the fish to slip out of, that we may justly say they are but broken nets, and old ones too, the best of them, that will scarce hold a pull, all our new projects being but old ones new rubbed over, and no new thing under the sun. Our very life, lastly: what is is it but a few rotten threads knit together into veins and sinews? (source)

This notion of casting off "networks" of connection and entanglement is strikingly modern in sentiment. But I guess there really is no "new thing under the sun." So from this I thought of this phrase to work into one of the articles I'm writing: "Somewhere between the fierce urgency of the holy and ascetic now and the Parish Strategic Plan with its Tactical Appendix is the tippy centre of our fishing boat." I'm thinking, of course, of the paradox between Christ's call to abandoning our nets and yet also to build the Kingdom. It's a struggle I think many church leaders feel: the tug between getting necessary things done and yet cultivating the kind of detachment that seems part of Jesus' teaching. Simply going to the extreme one way or other won't do--but how to stand in the tippy centre with something like grace and joy?

-t