Skip to main content

Christian Names

The eminently sensible Bosco Peters posted this piece a day or two ago about the titles we clergy give each other and the preposterous getups we wear to distinguish ourselves one from the other. I agree with Bosco completely on this one, though I must say that in our diocese the issue isn't as huge as it is some other places.  The word hierarchy means "rule by priests" and the fact that it has entered the English language with the particular meaning we now give it is testimony to the development of the finely graded and nuanced pecking order developed in the church over the past millennium or so.

In the olden days, when the act of professing Christ meant inviting your neighbours to burn your shop and the government to burn your body, baptism was a brave and significant act. The new Christians were schooled in the ways of Jesus, then, before entering the waters of rebirth, removed all clothing. They were immersed into the death of Christ and raised to new life whereupon they were given a new set of white clothing and a new name signifying that the old had indeed passed away and the new had indeed come. As a baptised member of the household of God the new Christian had a new identity and they were known by the name given at the font: the name by which Jesus called them.

The old ways linger. We still give baptised infants a Christian name and this is the only name that matters within the Church. Sometimes we might name a role or a relationship in the church the way we might in any family, but our Christian name is the only name that needs to be used.

We still use the white baptismal garments, though these days not everybody gets to wear them. The clothing which marked new life in Christ have morphed into the albs and surplices and rochets which now proclaim not so much entry into the community of saints as authority within it. Now this is not a bad thing as the task performed by the clothing is still an important one.

As one of the Church's functionaries I must continually live with the question, by what right do I presume to stand up in front of people and speak to them? Why should anybody pay any attention to me? And of course the brief answer is that in my own right I have no basis for such a presumption and there is no reason at all that people should take a blind bit of notice of anything I have to say. But I don't stand up in front of people in my own right. I do it in the name of the church, which has, for better or worse, decided that I am a suitable person to perform acts of ministry  on the church's behalf. And in token of this, I am vested; that is, my own identity is masked. It is hidden within the garments which represent to the congregation the church's history and the Gospel out of which that history has grown. Take, as an example of ministry, the absolution that I pronounce most Sundays. I, obviously, have no ability to forgive anybody's sins. What I do have is the authority to pronounce the truth of God's forgiveness, given by Jesus to the apostles One of the signs that I am not speaking on my own behalf is the clothing I wear.

There are a number of things which have undermined the intention of vestments. One is the fact that after Constantine the Church became an instrument of state and the church's functionaries became important social figures. Vestments, while retaining their "masking" function became also badges of rank and prestige. Another is the tendency of clergy to personalise their vestments, so that they start to represent not so much the church's tradition and expression as the clergy's tastes and personal spiritual history. When this latter happens, vestments are working directly in opposition to their intended purpose. Another still is the expression of the emotional programs for happiness unconsciously invested in by all of us.

We clergy are as human as anyone else. We have our own unconscious needs and we are called by the Holy Spirit to recognise these and bring them to the cross, just as is any other Christian. It is a process which takes a lifetime, so most of our lives as priests, deacons and bishops is lived within the reality of these drives and we tend to shape our theology, order our churches, and vest ourselves in ways which are hugely influenced by our striving for safety and security, affection and esteem, power and control, just as you might expect. Recognising this tendency in ourselves is important. More important is subverting our unconscious motives in favour of the Gospel of absolute forgiveness, radical equality and conscious servanthood. So fancy titles and the subtly nuanced power games of  ecclesiastical costumery?  Well, perhaps occasionally, but only as a joke.
 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more