The Dish

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer presented the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) to the Church of England in 1549, introducing the phrases “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” “till death do us part,” and “speak now or forever hold your peace,” among others, to the cultural lexicon. In an interview about his new “biography” of the BCP, Alan Jacobs discusses how different Christian traditions perceive the book:

What about some of the problems that evangelicals have had with the BCP over the years? For instance, you show in your book how some evangelicals have viewed the prayer book as a kind of rote formalism that quenches revival and the free movement of the Spirit.

The evangelical suspicions of the prayer book have been varied over the years. Some of them are linguistic: Why do you call that table an “altar”? Why do you call that minister a “priest”? Some involve gestures and objects, even those that are not prescribed by the BCP but are not forbidden by it: Why do you light all those candles? Why do you ask people to kneel to receive Communion? The general suspicion seems to be that if it looks like Papistry and sounds like Papistry and smells like Papistry (e.g., incense), then it must be Papistry. …

What would you say are the strengths of the historic prayer book tradition? More specifically, speaking as an evangelical Anglican yourself, what do you think evangelicals can learn from it?

In making his prayer book, Thomas Cranmer wanted to make sure that the people of England were constantly exposed to Holy Scripture in a language they understood, working through the whole of the Bible regularly and the Psalms every month, while following a calendar that rehearsed in every church year the whole story of salvation starting with the Fall and culminating in Christ’s unique sacrifice of himself on the Cross and his glorious resurrection, the benefits of which we are not worthy to receive on any merits of ours—”we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from under Thy table”—but only through the purest grace extended on the basis of Christ’s unique status as Lord and Savior.

How can you get any more evangelical than that?

(Image of title page from Cranmer’s Prayer book of 1552 via Wikipedia)

“Both in the substance and the parabolic method of his teaching about love, Jesus never asks anyone to accept anything except on the basis of their personal experience of human love. In using the terms Father and Son to express the relation of the divine and the human, rather than, say King and subject, he makes the relation a physical not an intellectual one, for it is precisely because in the relation of parent and child the physical material relation is so impossible to deny, that it is so difficult for a human parent not to love their children irrespective of moral judgment. They can do so, but it is very much more difficult for them than for those who have not such an obvious physical connection.

Jesus in fact is asserting what the psychologists have confirmed: that one does in fact always conceive of one’s relations with life in terms of one’s relations with one’s parents, and in proportion as these were bad, one’s attitude to life is distorted. But though parental love is often imperfect, it is good enough and often enough for us to have no doubt about what it should be like. We expect parents to love their children whether they act well or badly because it is our experience that they usually do: we expect a physical relation to override morals. In speaking of the fatherhood of God, Jesus is teaching that God does not love us because we are ‘good’ or because he is very ‘good’ and merciful but because he has to, because we are part of him, and he can no more hate us if we act badly than a man can hate one of its fingers when it aches: he can only want it to get well,” – W.H. Auden, The Prolific and the Devourer.

The literary critic D.G. Myers, who has prostate cancer, reflects on how he’s preparing for the end:

Dying is the problem, not death. As an Orthodox Jew, I believe with perfect faith in the resurrection of the dead, but until that happens, death is the termination of consciousness. No peeking back into life. I won’t get to keep a scorecard of who is crying at my funeral, who is dry-eyed, who never bothered to show up. If I want someone to cry at my funeral, I need to patch things up with him before the last weak images flicker out.

In the past few weeks I have been approaching ex-friends whom I have damaged to ask their forgiveness. I’ve been behaving, in short, as if dying were a twelve-step program. Step 8: “Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.” Step 9: “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” Not that I mind having enemies. One person whom I approached recently accused me of “basking in self-importance,” which is one possible way, I suppose, of describing the tireless knowledge that death is near. But there are other persons, including some with whom I have had very public fallings-out, whom I don’t want as enemies when I pass away. To die without accepting responsibility for the damage I have done to relationships that were once meaningful to me would be shameful and undeniably self-important.

Timothy George explains why 17th century poet and priest John Donne “continues to attract readers, especially among Christians, and especially during the season of Lent”:

Above all, Donne is the poet of embodiment. He writes about things we can see and feel: fleas, ants, bearbaiting, the sudden blush of a young girl, a long voyage at sea, theatres that “are filled with emptiness,” and wartime in an “age of rusty iron.” He also writes a lot about himself and his torturous relationship with God. After he died, Donne was called “a second St. Augustine.” The Doctor of Grace is quoted more than seven hundred times in Donne’s surviving sermons. There is no doubt that he read and lived out the Confessions over and over again. The Augustinian themes of restlessness, original sin, repentance, forgiveness, pilgrimage, predestination, the resurrection of the body, and the overarching hope of salvation born of pain—these are all present in a language that still dazzles in both poetry and prose.

[Literary critic Stanley] Fish considers Donne a self-aggrandizing poet, one who feigns devotion to God as a pretext for abusing and lording it over others, especially women—his mother, his many lovers, his poor wife Ann. Donne is a spiritual sado-masochist, Fish thinks, in verba if not in res. Such a gendered, ultramodernist reading, however, ignores the much more subtle dialectic between religion and sex (Augustine again) that pervades Donne’s work—both his earlier “secular” love poems and his post-conversion sermons and devotional verse.

David L. Edwards, in his superb study, John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit, gets it right: “Here is a man who is thoroughly human, and energetically masculine, as well as being highly intelligent, yet he cannot stop talking about religion when he is supposed to be talking about sex, anymore than he can stop talking about sex when we expect him to be pious.”

Previous Dish on Donne here and here.

(Image of Donne in his shroud, c. 1631, via Wikimedia Commons. Donne commissioned the portrait shortly before his death and hung it on his wall as a reminder of the transience of life.)

Jeffrey Bloomer considers what Boyfriend Twin, a tumblr dedicated to gay couples who look alike, tells us about human sexuality:

Straight couples who are confused for siblings have been ticklish fodder for lifestyle stories for years, but the boyfriend twins take that a step further, suggesting that what we’re really searching for is our own romantic clone.

This anxiety, of course, long predates the Tumblr, as its anonymous creator has acknowledged, telling BuzzFeed loftily that the photos are intended to spark a conversation about “narcissism, exhibitionism, and sexuality.” For every gay guy who laughs it off, the boyfriend twin is another one’s worst fear realized. One Slate colleague told me his partner will demand a wardrobe change if the two men so much as wear the same fabric on the same day. His fear? “It confirms the whole dumb Freudian model of homosexuality as a kind of narcissism.” Is that really it? Is the lookalike lover a symptom of excessive self-regard, or is it something more elusive?

The answer depends on whom you ask, and there’s plenty of disagreement, even among people who make a living studying such things. But two things are clear: This phenomenon is not particular to gay men, and people do tend to be drawn sexually to people who look similar to them. The real question is why and how that works.

(Image from Boyfriend Twin)