Mood:
brightSo I finished the BCP Psalter this evening on the train ride home. I have been saying the Daily Office from the 1979 BCP, and this is the first complete month in my doing that, since I started late in September. I am really happy with that. Lots of human emotions find an echo in the Psalter, and it is all right to emote before God. From the evidence in Psalms, the ancient Hebrews did it all the time. God is the One we can talk to with complete honesty.
The translation of the Psalter in the 1979 BCP is really quite elegant; I had not thought of comparing it with the Hebrew original or with other English versions of Psalms, like the new RSV (which was actually new around 1990). It would be interesting to know just how close the Prayer Book Psalter is to the original, but I am not going to let that concern me very much.
A couple of things I might do, to make the Daily Office a little more special, is borrow some antiphons for the Psalms and canticles of feasts from a translation of the Roman Breviary that I have somewhere here at home and use the printer/scanner to copy the English metrical version of the Phos hilaron, for Evensong, so that I can sing it.
The Prayer Book office, in its simplicity and biblicism (you get to read a lot of scripture when saying the BCP Office), is another charming part of Anglicanism, and, thanks to the Episcopal Church's leadership in matters liturgical, one can say the Office without archaic language, a big improvement.
Tomorrow is the thirty-first of the month, and the BCP Psalter covers thirty days, so I was wondering what Psalms I would read tomorrow.
* * *
On another matter, I was reading the beginning of Thomas Oden's three-volume theological consideration of God. Oden knowledgeably draws on the major writers of Christian antiquity, the "Fathers," patristic authors. to illuminate what the faith says about the Creator. Then I started reading Hollaway's book-length recantation of Christianity, and, indeed, of the possibility of revelation at all. Hollaway's stance is a lot like that of the Unitarians on the UU theology discussion list, that religion is a purely human undertaking, not open to the possibility that Ultimate Goodness might address us. I guess it's obvious that those are the opposite ends of possibility, theism and, essentially, a-theism, which seems to have a lot a variants.
Belief is a gift, through grace, not given to everyone, it appears. It also seems the gift can be lost: Hollaway once preached an impressive sermon drawing on a Graham Greene novel, about a "whiskey priest" in Mexico, who "missed grace by seconds." I wonder if Hollaway ever thinks about that possibility now.
Posted by indactper-2009
at 9:02 PM EDT
Updated: Friday, 30 October 2009 9:45 PM EDT
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Updated: Friday, 30 October 2009 9:45 PM EDT
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