Posted on 07/28/2006 6:45:14 PM PDT by sionnsar
For those wondering what inspired the Episcopal Church's newly-elected, female presiding bishop to refer to "Mother Jesus" during the General Convention, the answer might be found on the "Office of Women's Ministries" (OWM) page on the official national church website.
Indeed, this is not the first time that the OWM has gotten into liturgical mischief.
The phrase used by Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori appears in a "Eucharist Using Female Nouns and Pronouns" on the OWM's section of the Episcopal Church (TEC)-sponsored website. The rite is accompanied by "Morning Prayers to the Lady" - and this does not mean our Lord's mother. Both services offer worship to "Our Lady" and to the "Holy Mother," and end with the salutation "Blessed be" - a common statement of farewell among Wiccans.
The author of the services, Sandra Thomas Fox, wrote them in 2001, five years after she had a feminist epiphany during her first walk in a labyrinth - a spiritual exercise that actually has New Age roots - at the National Cathedral. There, she became sensitized to "the misogyny in the liturgy."
The webpage that leads to the two feminist liturgies has an all-capitalized disclaimer for each: "NOT AN OFFICIAL LITURGY - FOR USE IN DISCUSSION." Nevertheless, the pages from which each of the services can be downloaded invite readers to use them as well in "gathering communities of worship." Therefore, these services can be used anywhere.
The feminist "Eucharist" invokes God thus: "Blessed be the Lady who births, redeems and sanctifies us."
The threefold Kyrie Eleison becomes this: (Celebrant): Loving Lady, have mercy; (People): Mother Jesus, have mercy; (Celebrant) Loving Lady, have mercy" - thereby giving Jesus both a sex change and children.
The prayers of the people - addressed to "Mother" - include the request that "every member of the Church may be your handmaiden" - thereby praying that all men in the church get a sex change.
The prayer of confession is addressed to "Most Merciful Lady."
The Great Thanksgiving begins, "May the Holy Mother be with you," and continues: "It is truly right, Mother, to give you thanks; for you alone are the I AM, living and true, dwelling in light inaccessible from before time and forever," and adds: "Blessed is she who comes in the name of Love."
With the prayer "Mother, you loved the world so much that you sent your only Son to be our Savior. Incarnate by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary," the consecration prayer claims that Jesus has two mommies - and no Father.
Immediately after the consecration of the bread and the wine, the celebrant says, "Mother, we now celebrate this memorial of your redemption." (A Freudian slip, perhaps?)
Oddly enough, the Lord's Prayer is unchanged - so this is the only spot in the service which addresses God as "Father."
The "Mass" ends when the celebrant tells the congregation, "Let us go forth empowered by the Love of our Lady," and the congregation replies, "Blessed be."
THE FEMINIST "MORNING PRAYER" service is similar in spirit. After the confession of sin (again addressed to the "Most Merciful Lady"), the celebrant says, "Nurturing Mother, have mercy on us; forgive us all our sins. Through your beautiful Son, Jesus Christ, strengthen us in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit sustain our eternal life."
Before the psalms, the celebrant says, "The mercy of our Lady is everlasting: come let us adore her." After the Psalm readings, the celebrant sings a new age Gloria Non Patri: "Glory to the Mother, and to her Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever."
In this service, too, the Lord's Prayer was unmolested - but the celebrant precedes it with "May our Holy Lady be with you...Let us pray the words of her beautiful Son, Jesus Christ."
The prayers of the people include "Keep your example of Motherhood ever before us; Let us see in all our children a sacred trust from you" - an invocation that seems out of place here, since the Women's Ministries site lists the pro-abortion Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice among "social justice" groups.
The General Thanksgiving at the end of the service starts, "Most merciful Mother, we your handmaidens give you thanks for your great love for us and for all you have made." The service ends when the celebrant says, "Let us give thanks to our Lady;" the congregation replies, "Blessed be."
AS EARLIER NOTED, this all began with Ms. Fox's first experience with walking the labyrinth at the 1996 Sacred Circles conference at Washington National Cathedral. That day, "during a guided meditation led by Dr. Sarah Fahy, I had met the wise woman who had told me, `Women are beautiful. You are beautiful,'" Fox wrote. "Immediately after I...walked one of the labyrinths set up in the nave. To my surprise, as I entered the path I dissolved into tears. Questions welled up inside of me. Why had no one ever told me I was beautiful? Why did I need to be told that women were beautiful? I sobbed my way into the center, where I sat until I was once again composed. As I began my walk out, the Eucharist was being celebrated at the high altar. I decided I would silently say these comforting, familiar words as I walked...But on this day, to my horror, these words I loved turned to dust and ashes in my mouth. All I could hear was `He, Him, Lord, Son, Father'...I had heard the misogyny in the liturgy, and there was no going back."
Fox continued, "I realized that I did not see my mother, my two daughters, or myself as made in the image of God. When I looked at the liturgy I discovered there are 195 male nouns and pronouns in Rite I and 145 in Rite II. In both cases, there is one reference to a woman - the Virgin Mary in the Creed. If our liturgy is our story, the telling of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, where are the voices of the women that Jesus loved, respected, and held dear? Where is an understanding of the holiness of being a daughter, wife, or mother? Wondering what it would be like to have a service to the Divine Feminine, I used Rite II, Prayer D [from the 1979 Prayer Book] as a starting point and wrote such a Eucharist in 2001.
"If one feels that reading this service is blasphemous, I can only say that writing it felt even more so. Yet I felt called to continue, for what else would allow us to see the narrowness of our current liturgy?...My hope is that this Eucharist will begin a dialogue about the ways in which language affects the quality of our worship, our feelings towards God, and our sense of being created in God's image."
As earlier indicated, this was not the first foray into the bizarre for TEC's Office of Women's Ministries. In 2004, there was an outcry over two other offerings on OWM's section of the official church website: "A Women's Eucharist: A Celebration of the Divine Feminine" and a "Liturgy for Divorce." The Women's Eucharist made no mention of Christ, nor of his Body and Blood, but gave thanks to "Mother God" for things like menstrual blood and breasts.
It emerged that the Women's Eucharist had been on a Druid website since 1998. What's more, it had been penned by "Glispa," who turned out to be part of a husband/wife Episcopal clergy couple who up until a short time earlier had also been involved with and promoting modern-day Druidism, including nude mating rituals and invocation of the "Horned God." Once exposed, Pennsylvania clergy Glyn Ruppe-Melnyck and her husband, W. William Melnyck, repented of their Druidry; Mr. Melnyk lost his parochial job over the issue but Mrs. Melnyk kept hers.
The two offending services, which were removed from the OWM website in the 2004 controversy, were part of OWM's "Women's Liturgy Project" to collect worship resources written by women for women - an initiative that, given the latest from the OWM, is evidently ongoing.
*Sources included: Sandra Thomas Fox, "Reflection on the Holy Eucharist,"
Women's Ministries, http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/41685_60499_ENG_HTM.htm;
Women's Ministries, "Liturgies Using Feminine Images," http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/41685_60497_ENG_HTM.htm, a page that links to texts for the two liturgies;
Women's Ministries, http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/41685_31001_ENG_HTM.htm, a blurb for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
Unfortunately, that is simply not correct. A few years ago I was visiting my Bro-in-law in Santa Barbara, California. On that Saturday morning there was a two page spread in the paper about an organization housed at the mission there, whose basic tenet was that Mary was indeed divine, and was co-redeemer, and they were making as much noise as they could (with the help of the local rag) and petitioning pope John-Paul to make such a declaration.
Catholics that are properly practicing Catholicism do not view Mary as divine. Did Pope John Paul II make this declaration? No he did not and it is not proper Catholic teaching to view Mary in that way. There's always bad apples in every bunch.
Yep!
What was the rag? Doesn't the fact that a NEWSPAPER was pushing it sound a little, i dunno, PHONY to you?
>> Worship Mary? Worship dead Christians of ancient renown? <<
The author states that her meaning when she says "worship" is to give honor as one worthy of emulation.
>>Patron saint of... taxi drivers ... venereal disease ... horticulturalists ... hemmorhoids <<
So you go and look up the most outrageous, extreme example so you can ridicule it. Wonderful, you've reached the intellectual maturity of the Daily Show. And ooh, you can cite a reference source that any drunk can create the references for. Please, Wikipedia measns something when there's a community of people hammering away a definition... for obscure Catholics saints, it's about as reliable as a source as the nearest Wiccan allergist.
It so happens that St. Fiachre was renowned for miraculous healings, including converting sexual sinners to Christ, and healing many forms of polyps, cists, and what probably would now be called cancer. And, yes, he stood as a witness to God's miraculous mercy extending even to those afflicted with venereal disease.
So, exactly why is it a bad thing for those Christian converts who suffer from veneral disease and hemorrhoids to know that they have someone in Heaven praying for them?
But I though you said he was a misogynist.
Welcome back! Stick around. Lots to hear lately. 8~)
Does "Mother Jesus" then make it "Father Mary"? Life is so confusing these days. ;O)
**So, exactly why is it a bad thing for those Christian converts who suffer from veneral disease and hemorrhoids to know that they have someone in Heaven praying for them?***
***Send them to a doctor instead. Even a Protestant doctor.***
They could call priest to lay hands on the afflicted region of the patient. Annointing it with oil or some other preparation (for some reason the letter "h" comes to mind).
No, I'm not aware of that, since it's not true. Augustine recognized the existence of free will, of true merit on the part of the justified, even to the point of meriting eternal life, (cfr. On Grace and Free Will, for the first, throughout, for the second, chapters 18-21), the possibility of a failure to persevere on the part of some of the faithful and the consequent impossibility of an absolute certitude (without special revelation) that one will persevere (cfr. the The Gift of Perseverance, chapters 19, 21). Moreover, nowhere in his works do we find the doctrine of the "irresistible grace" (not to be confused with the idea of an infallibly efficacious grace, which he held and which is a legitimate belief among Catholics, cfr. the Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "Controversies on Grace").
As the denial of these points and the affirmation of the irresistibility of grace constitute the major portions of the so-called "doctrines of grace" that we disagree with (we stand with you in rejecting semi-Pelagianism and Pelagianism, of course), I feel quite confident in claiming Augustine for the Catholic side - he is, after all, the great "doctor of grace" for us Catholics, too.
Admittedly, arguing over who is following Augustine's teachings is a bit pointless since, after all, you can always reply that you'd rather take scripture over what he said!
Not quite equivalent. The Protestant (I take it you are one) doesn't assign a normative value to tradition. I don't overthrow the basis of your belief in Calvinism even if I prove that no one between 100 AD and 1520 AD held to the distinctively Calvinist systematic theory of grace. I presume you'd base your belief on scripture, and after all, you yourself said that Calvin explained it better than Augustine did.
In any case, if you want to discuss Augustine's doctrine, I'm certainly happy to do so as a historical matter, and I refer you to the references I gave in my previous post for important differences between Augustine's teaching and that of John Calvin.
A topic for another thread. And Orthodox Presbyterian would be the true Protestant champion for Augustine's grace. He has posted on this topic for years. He could probably assemble 50 pages of sinewy argument on the subject quite easily.
Hmm.... er, yeah, actually, we do. A "standard" which "possesses utility"? I think that would describe the Old-School Baptist and Presbyterian consideration of Tradition. The difference is simply that Protestants do not assign a pre-eminent value to Tradition; Protestants believe that the relative worth of Patristic Tradition should be judged against the bar of Scripture (rather than the reverse, as in the Roman practice).
I don't overthrow the basis of your belief in Calvinism even if I prove that no one between 100 AD and 1520 AD held to the distinctively Calvinist systematic theory of grace.
Depending on just how narrowly you construct your definitions, you could just about prove that no-one since AD 1536 "held to the distinctively Calvinist systematic theory of grace", either... I suppose, if your definitions were sufficiently narrow, you could "prove" that John Calvin himself did not.
However, if one allows for a reasonably inclusive definition of doctrinal equivalency, there's ample evidence from Roman Catholic monks, bishops, and even popes acknowledging that groups of Western Christians independent of the Roman See held beliefs "the same as that of" Calvin, hundreds of years before John Calvin was born.
In any case, if you want to discuss Augustine's doctrine, I'm certainly happy to do so as a historical matter, and I refer you to the references I gave in my previous post for important differences between Augustine's teaching and that of John Calvin.
There are some differences between Augustine's beliefs and those of John Calvin (Luther was actually closer to Augustine himself; much of Calvinism is essentially Lutheranism with certain of Augustine's errors redacted); for example, Augustine believed that all unbaptized children dying in infancy automatically go to hell, whereas Calvin believed that the preponderance of Biblical evidence (if not, perhaps, "proof beyond a reasonable doubt") suggested the opposite. They were, however, both unreservedly monergistic on the doctrine of absolute predestination and the initiation of Salvation; and this is the key point of agreement Calvinists draw from Augustine.
Incidentally, some of the "differences" you purport to describe between Calvin's views and Augustine's actually prove just how identical their beliefs really are. For example, Calvinists do not deny the existence of "free will", either; Sinners freely will to Sin, for that is what they want to do... and what is more, I'm fairly confident that you could replace the term "Irresistible Grace" with "Infallibly-efficacious Grace" in every work of Calvinist theology ever written, and it would not change Calvinist theology one whit -- we wouldn't even have to trade in the TULIP acronym.
I could go on, but that really would be a subject for another thread.
Best, OP
Hi OP,
As far as "normative" tradition, sorry for any confusion. I meant as a norm or rule of faith. Obviously Protestants do recognize normative traditions such as the Lutheran Confessions or the WCF but they aren't rules of faith.
I can't agree that Calvin recognizes the existence of a "free-will" in the sense Augustine does. Augustine recognizes that, even under the influence of efficacious grace, the will retains the power to resist, i.e. its freedom. Calvin, so far as I can tell, doesn't.
As far as the other points, I'll leave them for that future thread.
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