Archive - 2017
October 29th
Postulant to an Unknown Tradition
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/29/2017 - 08:43It is a rainy Sunday morning. One of the cats has crawled into my lap and the dog sleeps on the couch next to me. It is supposed to rain hard here today. I check my messages on Facebook and plan my day: church, followed by choir and a meeting, and then home to study. Yet I know I must be gentle with myself today. Five years ago today was hurricane Sandy and the death of my mother.
Yesterday, my youngest daughter had a recital. She wore a necklace from my mother, and my mother would have been very happy. My mother loved to sing and would have heaped praise upon her granddaughter.
Yesterday was also the anniversary of being informed that my application to become a postulant to holy orders in my denomination had been rejected. It was a spiritual trauma on the level of losing a mother and I continue to struggle with it in many ways.
One of these ways is the frequent reminders I get when people referred to me a priest, reverend, or a member of the clergy. Usually, I just let it pass. I am part of the royal priesthood of all believers; a priest forever, echoing the title of a book by Carter Heyward that a friend recommended to me, that is still on my “to be read” list. In this sense, I am a priest in the Jesus Movement, to borrow Episcopal Presiding Bishop Curry’s language, even though a particular branch of the Jesus Movement has rejected my postulancy to ordination.
At the same time, I realize there are people for whom the word priest carries a special meaning. They often put a plus sign at the beginning or end of their name and are very concerned about whether someone wears a stole or a tippet. I don’t what such people to feel that I am misrepresenting myself and when one of them refers to me as a priest, I feel compelled to offer some sort of correction and amplification.
I ran into this today as I looked at my Facebook feed. A friend had added me to a closed ‘clergy support group’. The group is described as “a group of Pastors, Deacons, Priests and Bishops from Independent Catholic, Episcopal, Anglican, Orthodox, and other Christian traditions who are united in intra-faith efforts in order to further the spread of God's love to all people around the world”
Should I remain in this group?
As I try to discern whom God has called me to be a priest, I’ve been spending more time paying attention to Independent Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and other Christian traditions. Perhaps, as a member of the Royal priesthood and a postulant to a yet to be determined tradition, this is where I am supposed to be right now. However, I don’t want people to have the wrong impressions.
Several months ago, I had sent an email to a friend who is an ordained priest in the denomination that rejected me expressing my uncertainty about whether I could remain in that denomination. The next day, I found she had added me to a clergy support network for ordained priests in that denomination. I believe she had done that in error and given the pain and confusion around my process, I quickly left the group.
The dog snores, the cat is meticulously grooming himself. The rain has paused. I will post this to the clergy support group and see what they have for feedback. I will head off to church and remember my mother and all those who grieve on anniversaries of the deaths of their loved ones.
October 26th
Reconnecting Spirituality to Daily and Political Life via Lobbying and the News Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/26/2017 - 05:23This is a commentary that I wrote for the News and Religion course that I am taking at the Religious Freedom Center at the Newseum.
“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, oh LORD, our strength and our redeemer.” Psalm 19:14
How would an epigraph like this sound in our pluralistic secular media? Would we wonder about the use of a quote from the Judeo-Christian tradition instead of from some other tradition, or perhaps a humanist perspective? What role does or should spirituality play in the news media of today? How do views about this vary between the general public and reporters?
The report, Most Americans say media coverage of religion too sensationalized explores some of these issues.
The public and reporters also have different perceptions about what makes for good religion coverage. More than two-thirds (69.7%) of the public says that they prefer coverage that emphasizes religious experiences, spirituality, practices, and beliefs. In contrast, more than three fifths (62.9%) of reporters say that the audiences they serve prefer religion coverage that emphasizes religious institutions, activities, events, and personalities.
The problem is that “religious experiences, spirituality, practices, and beliefs” are often very personal and subjective and are often not breaking news. As a friend of mine quips about spiritual practices, “with priests these days, it’s out with the old and in with the ancient.”
Yet underlying the “religious institutions, activities, events, and personalities” that reporters like to write about these days are these “religious experiences, spirituality, practices, and beliefs”. In our modern age of objectivity, we are losing touch with this spirituality.
A few years ago, my daughter, who grew up in a land of McMansions decided to build and move into a tiny house. She did it as an art project. During her gallery talks, she would speak of the goal of reconnecting art to daily life. Our large houses are filled with mass produced merchandise and we too rarely take a moment to see beauty around us. The same could be said about spirituality today.
Spirituality, morality, and the stuff of religion should be informing our daily and political lives. Yet in our efforts to be objective as well as our efforts to be tolerant of other beliefs, we seem to have lost touch with the spiritual and moral in the public sphere.
I have run for state representative multiple times. While we might acknowledge God in an invocation to an event candidates are speaking at, and our biographies should mention the religious institution we belong to, we seem to rarely bring our spirituality into our stump speeches.
In 2016, I reluctantly ran for state representative again. I wanted to focus more of my time on my priestly journey. I tried to bring the two together as much as I could, and watched my audience squirm as I started a stump speech off with the quote from Psalm 19. It seems like many of us want coverage about spiritual issues, we just don’t want to have to grapple with it in our own lives.
Yet there are people that want to bring the religious into the public sphere and the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life report on Lobbying for the Faithful explores more than 200 “organizations engaged in religious lobbying or religion-related advocacy in Washington, D.C…. [that] collectively employ at least 1,000 people in the greater Washington area and spend at least $350 million a year”.
There are also numerous media watchdog organizations seeking to ensure that faith is adequately and accurately covered. There is nothing particularly new or unique about such organizations. In 2003, I was part of the Dean Rapid Response Team. This was a group of volunteers from across the country that worked together to support Gov. Dean in his presidential bid. There was a feeling that the media coverage of Gov. Dean did not adequately represent his views or our thoughts about why he would be a great president. We had a mailing list where we would share links to articles that we felt needed responses and talking points to help our members respond.
More recently, this week I sent an email to the communications committee of a church I attend. Like the volunteers in the Dean campaign many years ago, we are trying to find ways to get information about our church presented in the most positive manner possible. The local newspapers are short staffed and generally don’t write about matters of faith, so we seek to provide editors and reporters with as much usable information as possible. Often, that includes providing material that can be copied and pasted with minimal effort.
Whatever our cause, we are likely to feel that the news media provides inadequate or inaccurate information about it. We will seek ways of using any media we can to correct this.
Underlying all of this is the question of how we help reconnect the spiritual to our personal and public lives, and do it in a way that embraces other faith traditions. To put it another, even today, we continue to struggle like the psalmist to find ways to make our words and thoughts always acceptable.
October 22nd
The Things that are God's
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/22/2017 - 19:26This is the prepared text of the homily I delivered at Chapel on the Green in New Haven, CT, 10/22/2017
Give to the Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. It’s a well-known quote that we can look at a bunch of different ways. It is Jesus giving a clever reply to some people trying to trap him. We like clever replies; especially in this age of Twitter and Facebook, where the snarkier a reply is the more we like them.
Jesus’ reply takes the focus away from the Pharisee’s challenge to his authority, and puts it on the bigger issues: taxes, money, and God. None of us like not having enough money. We don’t like having to give our money to other people, especially when we don’t seem to have enough money for ourselves. And in all of this, we too often forget about God. We need to be thinking about what we should be giving to God.
After all, that picture on our money is of some dead politicians, but we are serving a living God. Look around you. Where do you see the hand of our living God? Where do you see God in this beautiful fall day, in the leaves changing color, in the squirrels running across the green? Do you see God in the faces of those around you? Do you see God in your own reflection? Think about that for a moment. Stop and look around. Where do you see God?
This is the place in the homily where preachers normally go on to explain that ultimately all things come from God and we should be giving back to God some of the wonderful things God has given us. But sometimes – sometimes it just feels like all those wonderful things from God are too few and far between. We might try to think of great things God has given us and even be able to recognize that this beautiful day is a gift from God, but somehow, in our pain and brokenness, it just doesn’t feel like a great gift.
So let me offer another way of thinking about this. If all things come from God, where do you and I come from? That’s right. God. Each one of us is a gift from God. We are a gift from God to ourselves and to the people around us. We are gifts from God just waiting to be seen and recognized. I see you. I recognize you as a beautiful gift from God, even when you might not feel like a beautiful gift from God.
In a little while, we are going to share food, smiles, perhaps even some hugs. We are going to share with one another some of the gifts God has given us. I hope we will also share the recognition that each one of us is a gift from God, a gift from God that Jesus has called us to give to God. I hope that as we go forth from Chapel on the Green, we will remember that we are gifts of God to the people around us and that we can truly be that gift when one of our friends is particularly struggling.
Give to the Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.
Amen.
October 21st
October
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/21/2017 - 10:09T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month. For me, it is probably October.
Forty-one years ago, I was off in college and received a letter from my mother that one of my high school classmates had disappeared. I called home frantic. Over the rest of the month, I received additional letters from home; newspaper clippings of the search for Rocky, followed by the bulletin from her funeral service. They never found the murderer.
Five years ago, on Sunday, Tropical Depression Eighteen formed south of Jamaica. Over the following week it gained strength and made its way up the coast as hurricane Sandy. As I was digging out after the storm, I received a Facebook message from my sister, “Aldon call me immediately”. There had been a car accident. My mother was dead.
This morning, Facebook suggested a memory from a year ago, my blog post, Good Friday Open Heart Surgery. I spoke about the discernment retreat I was about to go on with the Commission on Ministry and my hopes and fears. A week later, my greatest fear happened.
I am still putting together the pieces from each trauma
October 14th
The Inter-relationship between News, Culture, and Religion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/14/2017 - 13:32This is another article written for the News and Religion course I am taking at the Religious Freedom Center at the Newseum. I will be participating in the classes DC Immersion Experience Monday through Wednesday of this coming week. This will include a Open House which I encourage friends in the DC area to attend.
Now, on with the article:
This week in News and Religion, we are grappling with the question, “What is the role of Religion and its value in today’s news media environment?” It makes me think of the quote attributed to Karl Barth, “We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” Underlying this is the age-old question of the relationship between culture and media. To what extent does media shape culture and to what extent does media reflect culture? They are inter-related.
This becomes all the more complicated within a pluralistic culture. What happens when people from one culture, or religion, report on people from another culture or religion? What happens when one culture adopts actions, symbols, or beliefs from another culture? What is the relationship between trans-cultural diffusion, cultural appropriation, and the remix culture?
Let’s start by looking at the role of today’s news media on religion. News media provides us information. It may be simple information about when an event is happening, what happened at an event, or what was preached about from a given pulpit on a given Sunday. It may be more complicated stories about ecclesiastical struggles related to moral issues and the culture wars of today.
A good example of this is the article, Anglican leaders head to the Communion’s “Mother Church” for 2017 Primates’ Meeting. While much of the focus on this event in the secular press has been around issues of human sexuality, the article by the Anglican Communion News Service focuses on other issues of perhaps even greater importance, such as climate change, human trafficking, and mission strategy.
Human sexuality is a titillating subject that a lot of people have a lot of opinions about. The articles in the secular news media about how a faith tradition understands human sexuality draws a lot of attention, although it is questionable how much such articles help shape our views. The Anglican Primates meeting in early October provided a great example of this. Much of the secular press prior to the meeting focused on possible sanctions against the Scottish Episcopal Church for their decision to allow same-sex marriage. The reports from the meeting, however, ended up with a very different focus: “The sense of common purpose underpinned by God’s love in Christ and expressed through mutual fellowship was profound.”
Climate change is an interesting topic that is discussed a lot in the secular media, usually with a political focus. Yet many people of faith feel they are called to respond to issues of climate change from a religious perspective. Coverage of climate change from a religious perspective in the secular media has the potential to further shape the political discourse around climate change.
The news media helps the broaden community understand know what is going on in religious communities and helps shape opinions and cultural history around important issues.
This leads us to “the role of Religion and its value in today’s news media environment”. First, we need to consider the role of Religion, in and of itself. While it is important to differentiate between religion and ecclesiastical organizations, it might be helpful to look at how the Episcopal Church describes its mission in its Book of Common Prayer.
The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.
Religion is the context within which news happens. It is the way people relate with one another and with the divine, especially as it relates to current events. News happens within a context; within a cultural context, a political context, and a religious context. Good reporting contextualizes the stories being reported on. So the role and value of religion in today’s news environment is to provide a key context so that the readers may more fully understand the stories being reported upon.
The problem that this raises is that we live in a pluralistic society. There are many different religious viewpoints. This can become even more complicated when one culture appropriates ideas, symbols, or beliefs from another culture.
Cultural appropriation has become a major topic in American discourse these days. Jenni Avins article in The Atlantic, The Dos and Don’ts of Cultural Appropriation provides a valuable exploration of this topic, including discussing the adoption of “sacred artifacts as accessories”.
How do we differentiate between trans-cultural diffusion and cultural misappropriation? Avins article provides some useful guidelines, and it is something reporters need to be especially conscious of. Are they simply reporting trends in trans-cultural diffusion or are they contributing to cultural misappropriation?
Religion, culture, news, and entertainment are all delicately interwoven in the fabric of our society. They each influence one another and are influenced by one another. We should all seek to be culturally aware in our discourse lest we tear at the fabric of our society.
