And Also With You

There's an internet meme going around that is a joke about how you can tell Episcopalians, that when someone says "May the Force be with you," they respond, "And also with you".

The congregation gives this response three separate times during an ordinary Sunday service, so it's no wonder it's ingrained in us.  The first time is right before the Collect of the Day (that's the noun, COLL-ect, not the verb, col-LECT), a special prayer for that day.  The celebrant says "The Lord be with you," and the congregation says "And also with you," and the celebrant says "Let us pray," and then reads the Collect.

The second time is to kick off The Peace, which in my Mom's church is known as "Recess," the time when members of the congregation great each other, shake hands or sometimes hug, speak more informally, then, in our church, sit and listen to announcements before the more formal part of the liturgy begins again.  The priest who has been serving at our church this year as we search for a new Rector kicks The Peace off by moving out into the center of the sanctuary at the top of the stairs, not in the pulpit where he has just delivered his Sermon, not at the lectern where he read the Collect before, but right in the center, he raises his two arms up beside him (so his flowing robes, green and gold at this time of year, fall full and luxurious away from his arms), and he says with firm tones, "The Peace of the Lord be always with you," and the congregation replies as once, "And also with you!".  This one I always really feel.  We're greeting him as a man, and our words are to him, to include him as one of us.  Peace be with you, too!  I think this might be the only exchange that is so equal, him to us and us back again to him, and something about that makes it feel like a strong and happy declaration when I say it.

The third time is right at the beginning of the Eucharist service.  The Offertory (and its hymn, which is usually my offering because I am in the choir where the golden plates do not pass by) is over, and the Priest and Deacon and acolytes have moved back to the altar, and they are about to begin the ceremony, and here is how it starts, in a passage known as The Great Thanksgiving:

The people remain standing. The Celebrant, whether bishop or priest,
faces them and sings or says

                The Lord be with you.
People        And also with you.
Celebrant    Lift up your hearts.
People        We lift them to the Lord.
Celebrant    Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People        It is right to give him thanks and praise.

(from the Book of Common Prayer Online)

Our former priest, and in fact most priests of my experience, intone these words forcefully, with joy, and they usually jump to the next line almost before the congration's reply is finished, so this really moves along.  We are a community, coming together to share this meal, but this time he is our leader, cheerleader, coach.  Let us, he says.  We should.  Now is the time to do this.  Everyone, after me!  It's a different "And also with you," than the other two.

After the Eucharist, when everyone is on their knees on the kneeler pads and quite and contemplative, and not really interacting with each other (as I've talked about before), the phrase does not come back again.  The last part of service begins with the Priest saying, "Let us pray", and then we say together, still kneeling, this final prayer:

Almighty and everliving God,we thank you for feeding us with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Bloodof your Son our Savior Jesus Christ;and for assuring us in these holy mysteriesthat we are living members of the Body of your Son, and heirs of your eternal kingdom.And now, Father, send us outto do the work you have given us to do,to love and serve youas faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.To him, to you, and to the Holy Spirit,be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

"Send us out to do the work you have given us to do," I hang out for these words, and I imagine myself spending the rest of my Sunday loving my neighbor and glorifying in the beauty of creation and maintaining my own health and the health and flourishing of the world.  

The very final part of the service, after the final anthem (and the choir recession when choir is in session, so by this time I am at the back of the church), the last words spoken to us come from the Deacon, not the Priest at all, and she reinforces that reminder to take the good we have experienced and received here, and go out to the world to do something good with it.

There are four possible versions, but our Deacon usually chooses this one:

Deacon      Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
People        Thanks be to God.

Go in peace!  Which also sounds like something they would say in Star Wars.

Eucharist vs Blessing

My sister told me about a conversation she had with a coworker when the Priest at my church retired.  The coworker knew the Priest because she had been in a wedding at the church, and she liked him very much.  "He showed me the secret sign," she said, and crossed her arms across her chest.  It was great.

The secret sign is what you do if you go up to the rail during the Eucharist, the ceremony of bread and wine that represents the body and blood of Christ, but you don't want to receive the Eucharist, so you just get a blessing instead.  In my church, all baptised Christians are invited to receive the Eucharist, but that still leaves quite a few people out (when I was growing up, you had to have been Confirmed into that same church, so it was a more rare privilege, but I understand that ideas of membership and inclusion have changed a lot since then, which shouldn't be surprising because the whole Prayer Book was revised in 1982).

What happens when you go up to the rail and cross your arms over your chest, instead of extending them in a cupped form to receive the Host, is that the Priest puts his hand on your head and gives you a blessing.

I love it when the priest puts his hand on my head and gives me a blessing.  It happened to me during a ceremony to welcome new members to my current church, which I still remember vividly.  There were about four of us being welcomed (and I had been contacted the week before so I knew it was happening and that I would be called up).  The head of the welcome committee, a lovely and gentle and wise young woman, stood beside us four and said, "Father, I present with joy these new members."  I still remember the way she said "with joy".  The Priest then put his hands on our heads, one by one, and said a prayer.  I still vividly remember the feeling of his hands on my head.  They were firm, strong, authoritative, comforting, safe, confident.  It was way more than just a guy putting his hands on my head.  Priest's hands feel different, with the whole strength of God and the Church (and the strength from years of doing this kind of blessing) within them.  It really felt like a gesture from a "Father", which of course is what we call him.

Now, I go up to the Eucharist rail every Sunday with the rest of the congregation for Communion, and I have written previously about why, and what all it means to me.  But sometimes I think about crossing my arms across my chest instead, and making him put his hands on my head and getting the blessing that is offered to all, even the unbaptised, even the non-Christian, even the member of the wedding party who has never been to this church before but wants to participate.

So, why don't I?  I was thinking about this last week, and thinking about the different dimension that the Eucharist has.  Sure, it's a blessing too.  A "Father" is not just blessing you, he's feeding you.  But with it comes also a responsibility.  You are not just one person, blessed, you are, by receiving this food and drink, a member of the whole community.  And you take responsibility to carry this meal, to carry God who is now inside you, out the doors and into your next week.  "Now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do," is a line from the post-Eucharist prayer, the very last thing we say together before the final hymn and the dismissal.  I love that line.  The whole service reminds me, every week, to be more mindful and grateful of the beauty of reality and of life, and to appreciate all the good things and the people I love, and to do better to honor those gifts and act in a loving way and be the best person I can be, and be the best steward of this reality in which I live.

So, I still choose to extend my hands for the Host, instead of crossing my arms for a Blessing, even though Blessings are wonderful, and I long for that feeling of the Priests's hands on my head, but Blessings are just one-directional, him (plus God and Church) to me, whereas the shared Eucharist meal is a choice to belong, and an agreement to do your part as a member of the community.

On Dead Lions and Dead Babies

At the risk of further inflaming emotions on both sides, and knowing that there's no real need to spill yet more words out into the internet debate, I'm going to write down here what I think about two recent items in the news that some are linking together (mainly in order to call their opponents hypocrites), based on the admittedly incomplete and biased material that I have read so far by clicking through on friends' posts in social media.

Dead Lions - the story is, a Minnesota dentist paid for the opportunity to hunt and kill and lion and bring back parts of it as a trophy.  However, the people he paid lured a protected lion out of a reserve, and so the lion he ended up killing was a beloved local celebrity, whom researchers had tagged and had been following for many years.  The dentist released a statement that everything about the hunt was legal, but the storm of indignation and protest has made him close his dental office and go into hiding.

Dead Babies - some people posed as medical researchers, and recorded a conversation with a high-ranking person at Planned Parenthood, discussion procurement of fetal tissue from the abortions that Planned Parenthood performs, to use for research.

I think these have flamed up so intensely because the people outraged by the one or the other happen to fall on opposite sides of the political spectrum we have today.

I, though, have the advantage of a Ph.D. in Philosophy, which I remember a professor of mine once referred to as the Philosopher's "license to practice", plus I attended as a student and taught as a TA many ethics courses, so I do have some thoughts about these topics, and although I know I won't untangle them completely, I'm going to write them down.

Okay, so after having extensively broken my own rule of not apologizing for a speech before you give it, here we go.

The abortion topic - in practical terms, I think, as clearly we all think, that life begins at birth.  That's the date and time they put on your birth certificate, that's when you legally get a name and start to exist.  However, everything from the moment of conception is a potential person, and it's no good trying to act like it's not.  When I was studying, and around lots more people who were having sex without intending to start a family with anyone, the phenomenon of unwanted pregnancy was much more top of mind for me, In my own mind, as I tried to sort out my own views on when abortion was permissible, I came to think that if you had not intended to create a baby, then it was up to you to decide whether to continue with the pregnancy or not (however, having seen a number of my male friends' lives devastated, I did think that both parents should have a veto, and continuation should take two yesses).  However, if you had intentionally tried to get pregnant and create a new life, then you had the obligation to take whatever you got.  So I was not a fan of terminations due to a genetic disorder, like Down's Syndrome or Spina Bifida or whatever.  And I had read lots and lots of testimonials of parents of Down's Syndrome children who talked about the deep joy they brought to everyone in their world, and of people who themselves had been born with Spina Bifida and were grown up and living full lives and valued their own birth very much.  Every human life is equally valuable, and the ground of ethical behavior is to preserve and flourish human experience, and so if you meant to have a baby, you should love your disabled baby.

However, this, what I thought was morally sustainable and intuitively comfortable view on abortion fell to pieces when I learned that in the course of in vitro fertilization, often multiple fertilized eggs are implanted, and then the pregnancy is reduced to like one or two, however many babies the woman feels she can handle.  (When the woman gets to this point and morally blinks, and cannot go through with giving up some of those potential babies, then you get John and Kate Plus Eight).  I was appalled at this fact, but no one else seems to mind it at all.  Women who go through in vitro processes in order to be mothers are held up as the most heroic and virtuous people on the planet.  They have invested and gone through lots of trouble to fulfill the ultimate role of being a woman, which is to give birth to a child from your own body, made out of your own parts and those of the one you love (of course there's surrogacy and sperm donation and things, but I feel like those folks are less universally launded and held up as heroes, which is why I'm limiting it to couples using own egg, own sperm).  But getting there, on the very obvious path to intentionally creating a child and bringing it into the world, these very heroes do away with other potential babies.

So, my view fell to pieces, and I stopped thinking you could ever get a morally distinct line you could draw between when it's okay and when it's not okay.  And I have come to the practical view that probably nobody thinks abortion is a good thing, but sometimes having a baby at a particular time can devastate a life, and so the option should be there.

Okay, so from that position of retreat, what do I think about Planned Parenthood's actions?  I did see a piece online that tried to mount a vigorous denial of the claims by the people who posed as researchers and launched the protest, that the claims were not true, Planned Parenthood is not profiting from the sale of baby parts.  I clicked through and read the details and they were that PP was not profiting, because the money they received barely cover their costs.

This seems to miss the point entirely.  The margins that PP is making or not making doesn't weigh in at all.  What people are up in arms about is that baby parts and money are changing hands.  At all.

PP says that what they're doing is facilitating the patient's choice to donate fetal tissue from the procedure, which is a good thing.  But if you follow the money, the money is coming from neither the patient, or some sponsor of the patient, or PP itself, it's coming from the research facilities who are taking delivery of the fetal tissue.  That is buying.  That is selling.  That is what is making everyone so upset, because human beings should not be bought and sold, even formerly potential human beings.  However, I wonder what the model is for donation of cadavers for medical research - of former actual human beings - and if it is structured the same way?  Or former parts of still actually living human beings, like amputated limbs or removed tumors?  Everyone thinks medical research is important.  We want to facilitate it, to help actual presently living human beings more and more.  So, as long as body parts for research are traded the same way no matter who the parts came from, no one should object, but we should probably look at it across the board and make sure it feels more like "donation"and not like "buying" and "selling".

Okay, so on to dead lions.  The factors about killing that weigh in to this story are whether it is wrong to kill any animal - as a committed meat eater I can't lean on that principle.  Whether it is wrong to hunt for pleasure - I am a bit more down with that, I am against causing suffering to another creature for one's entertainment, from bullying to torture to murder.  But if you're pro-sport hunting, there's still the principle that you shouldn't hunt protected animals of whom there are very few left.  And it's definitely not sportsmanlike, whether morally right or wrong, to bait an animal to walk right in front of you so you can stand very still and shoot it.  That doesn't seem like hunting to me, that's just target practice.

But the very worst of all, and here we're just in an empirical realm, is that it is always bad to kill a creature that another human being cares about.  Even if you live in a society that eats cows, if a person has a pet cow, with a name and an ongoing relationship and everything, you shouldn't kill that cow, possibly because it's a wrong to the cow, but undeniably because it will hurt the person.

I can't find any independent objective metaphysical difference between the one cow and the other cow, on which we can draw our distinction, and in a society that eats meat you probably have the right to kill any cow you want, but even though it's just as morally permissible as something that happens in a slaughterhouse, you still shouldn't do it.  So, in the same way, if a lion has a name and whole large nation of people have a relationship with it, you shouldn't kill it, because it has really hurt those people.  The dentist's "But it was all done legally!" holds no weight at all.  "I kill lions all the time! It was never a problem before!" will not help his case.  He needs to apologize just as you would if you accidentally ran over your neighbor's dog.  "Oh, my God, I'm so, so sorry, I didn't realize, I didn't mean to."  He needs to apologize just as you would if you just shot your neighbor's dog, for fun.  Although I can't fathom how one could actually apologize for something like that, so maybe there's no helping this dentist.