For anyone who wants to know more about the Meeting where I worship, here is the Orange County Friends Meeting web site. Sometime within the next few days, I'll post about how Quakers are organized and how we do business.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 2:34 PM

That's about as much as I have time to post today, so I'll get to further thoughts on prayer to the saints either tomorrow or, more likely, Monday.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 11:45 AM

In comparing Episcopalians and Catholics, I wrote a lot both about both similarities and differences, with respect to practices concerning saints. When I come to Quakers, the question is more, does anything like the veneration of saints exist at all in Quakerism? Quaker meetinghouses have no stained glass windows, no images or any kind. There is no Quaker liturgical calendar whatsoever. The early Quakers didn't even pay attention to Christmas and Easter. Nowadays we'll sing a few Christmas carols or Easter hymns before Meeting for Worship, and people may even be moved to speak about the day, but beyond that there is no attention to special days. Certainly there is no calendar of saints, or even attention to All Saint's Day. If one has occasion to talk about Paul, or Peter, usually one doesn't bother with the preceding "Saint."

On the other hand, we do sometimes tell stories, particularly to our First Day School, about early Quakers. And we collect stories about Quakers in books. The most common of these stories are the ones in which Quakers stay true to the peace testimony, but still come through some situation where others might think we would just have to resort to violence. Since we're most counter-cultural in our peace testimony, that's the thing we are most likely to reinforce with stories. And I suppose these stories could fill a function similar to that of stories of saints and martyrs elsewhere.

Beyond that, Quakerism basically doesn't have anything like a cult of the saints. Nor do Quakers, as a group, pray for the dead (though I still do, privately). I suppose the general belief is that the dead have already arrived at their destination, and no longer need our prayers. Anyway, Quakerism seems about as far as any group from Catholic practice regarding the dead (both the saints and those in Purgatory).

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 11:44 AM

Marrying into a Catholic family when you were raised Episcopalian is, in some respects, like coming home. The Mass is almost the same as what I grew up with - only less formal. There's the same familiar bishop/priest/deacon division of clergy. The same liturgical calendar, lots of the same beliefs and customs. I can even go to Stations of the Cross and hear, between the stations, the very same "At the cross her station keeping, stood the mournful mother weeping" song, in which, between each station, Mary grieves the approaching death of her son.

Still, the place where the difference has hit me most forcefully has been in the attitude toward the saints. Of course, pretty much anything that Catholics do with saints, some Anglo-Catholic can be found to be doing as well. My mother (Episcopalian but not Anglo-Catholic), for example, for a while attended a church in St. Vincent where the pastor was determined to encourage the veneration of the Virgin Mary, and would always include the Hail Mary in the service. More usually, though, in the several Episcopal churches I've attended in my life, there's attention to the saints, to be sure, but still a very real gap from Roman Catholicism. Mary, for example. You can go to an Episcopal Church and hear a sermon (like, in fact, the sermon I did hear at my grandmother's church last Christmas) which extolls Mary's act in saying yes to God. Every Episcopal Church I've ever been in has at least one statue or image of Mary, and very likely more than one (as I recall, St. Mark's, the church in which I was raised, had a Madonna and child by the baptismal font, and on the way up to the communion rail you would pass under an arch on which Jesus was crucified, with Mary on one side, and John on the other). And I was always accustomed, growing up, to speak of Mary as the Virgin Mary (and all the other saints with a preceding "Saint").

But from the moment I stepped into my future mother-in-law's house, as the prospective non-Catholic bride, I encountered a whole different level of focus on Mary. There were the fifteen (I counted them - there are more now) Madonnas that greeted me, at different points, in my mother-in-law's house. There was the Rosary service I went to when my husband's grandfather died (I had never heard so many "Hail Marys" in my life before). There are the Catholic churches I've been in where I'll find, not just the couple of statues of Mary that might be in an Episcopal Church, but a whole side chapel area filled with images of Mary. And there are the doctrines: the Assumption, the Immaculate Conception, the business about Mary as Queen of Heaven (the only Marian title I'd been accustomed to before was the Theotokos/Mother of God one). And there's the way an otherwise nearly identical service will still differ by having a certain amount more attention to Mary (so, while we had the same Stations of the Cross service, and the same "At the cross her station keeping" song, the Catholic service I went to had actual prayers to Mary at a couple of the stations, as the Episcopal one did not).

Likewise with saints in general. I grew up understanding that churches were named for saints, that I might read their stories in a children's book of saints (I particularly liked Joan of Arc - an odd choice, I guess, for a future Quaker), that they were on our calendar and we might, on a particular day, for example, bring our pets to church in honor of the day of St. Francis. But we didn't actually pray to them.

Prayer for the dead we did do. Every Episcopal church I've ever been to has a portion of the service where the dead are remembered, and it's normal, if someone close to you has died, to ask the priest to include that person's name specifically. When Brian died I made sure to get Mom to include him in the prayers at her church. In typical Episcopalian style (Episcopalians don't have dogma; they have liturgy), this is done without any specific beliefs about where the dead might be at this moment, and for what they might be needing prayers. C.S. Lewis did believe in Purgatory, and I suppose some Episcopalians now do. But what I believed (and still believe) is simply that one naturally prays for the ones one loves, whether they are alive or dead. God can sort out what the prayers actually do for them once they are dead.

So, I suppose, if I look at Episcopalianism from the point of view of the Catholic division of Church Triumphant, Church Militant, and - what is it that those in Purgatory are called? - I think it is Church Suffering, then I can see all three represented, but not in exactly the same way. The bar I grew up with, on veneration of saints, was always set lower than I find it in the Catholic Church - no prayers, no profusion of titles for Mary, and certainly no relics.

In our own family life, Joel and I sort of split along traditional Catholic/Protestant lines in our areas of expertise. I am the family Bible expert, and he always calls on me when he wants to track down a Bible reference, or know what is said about some topic or other. He is the family expert on saints.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 11:33 AM

Before I get to my own thoughts on prayer to saints, I want to make a few brief remarks on saints in Anglicanism/Episcopalianism and Quakerism, but before I even do that, I want to respond to Eve's remark, in her response to me, that "I'm not sure whether Protestants who have a problem with intercessory prayer to dead holy humans also have a problem with intercessory prayer to angels--my guess is no, but really I have no clue." I'm pretty sure the answer is actually yes; definitely it's yes for the two groups I'm personally acquainted with. Although some Anglicans do pray to saints, none of those who don't pray to saints feel easy praying to angels, and I haven't encountered either prayer to saints or prayer to angels among Quakers I've known. Nor have I, in general, encountered Protestants who reported praying to angels and not to saints.

It did occur to me, though, after I read Eve's comment, that maybe in some respects, and for some versions of Protestantism, angels fill a function similar to saints in Catholicism. Well, not all the functions of saints, obviously, because angels have never been where we are, and we don't really know anything personally about them. More just the "potential miracle worker" function (which I suppose isn't the most important role of saints or angels at all, but it's the flashiest). I'm thinking of things like the Amy Grant song Angels Watching Over Me (which came out during that horrible year in which Brian died - I remember hearing it on the radio, loving the beginning of it where Peter is released from prison, and then wincing in horror when it got to "A reckless car ran out of gas before it ran my way" - because the reckless truck did not run out of gas before it ran Brian's way). I think Amy Grant is Protestant (I never do hear her described as anything other than unspecified Christian, and in the USA unspecified Christian usually means evangelical Protestant). And probably a song in which a saint intervened to stop that reckless car wouldn't have been so popular among Protestants. There might even be a theological reason why angels are allowed to go around intervening on people's behalf, and saints aren't, since I know at least some Protestants believe dead people are more or less sleeping until Judgement Day. Or maybe it's that miracles by saints are so obviously associated with the kind of veneration of saints that Protestantism rejected, that when any kind of divine intermediary creeps back into Protestantism, that intermediary is likely to be an angel. Nevertheless, though angels may be watching over us somewhere in the background, or the subject of sentimental stories, I haven't encountered actual prayer to angels among Protestants.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 10:54 AM

Finally back from his very long hammock break, Andrew Sullivan is now talking about rock music and gay assimilation.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 10:24 AM

Doug is a Mystic, characterized by his imaginative, intuitive spirituality, but it looks like I am "a Sage, characterized by a thinking or head spirituality." Maybe I should go read a little Thomas Aquinas. The quiz is
here.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 9:44 AM

"Teen-agers whose parents smoked were about 50 percent more likely to have had sex by the time they were 15, the researchers reported." And, for some weird reason, not wearing a seat belt encouraged sons, but not daughters, to have early sex. The article is here.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 9:25 AM

The custom of Friends (commonly known as Quakers), for 300 years, has been to meet together in silence and speak as the Spirit moves. Now, some Friends have since acquired pastors, and a regular order of service not unlike many Protestant churches, but I am of the silent Meeting variety of Quakers, and this is the custom we follow.

This past Sunday, I got to Meeting ahead of Meeting for Worship, and went to the library to look at a book which may be useful for my Bible study next Sunday. We are now studying the Sermon on the Mount, and, as we meet once a month, I expect it to take us several months to get through it. Last month we did the Beatitudes. There is a book in the library by Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia, a Christian farming community in Georgia which was interracial back in the days of segregation. Clarence Jordan also did Bible translations, what he called the Cotton Patch translations, in which St. Peter is Rocky, and everyone is basically placed among the cotton patches of Georgia. And he also wrote a book on the Sermon on the Mount, which was what I had set out to look at. More about that, perhaps, later, after next Sunday when I lead this month's Bible study on the Sermon on the Mount.

As I started to read, I could hear the singers, from the other room, begin a Quaker hymn:

My life flows on in endless song,

Above earth's lamentation.

I hear the real, though far off hymn,

That hails a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife,

I hear that music ringing.

It sounds an echo in my soul,

How can I keep from singing?

So I went to join the singers. Unlike the Episcopal Church, in which I grew up, we do not have singing during Meeting for Worship. At least, usually we don't, and never instrumental music. On a couple of occasions, I myself have been moved to sing a hymn, during Meeting for Worship, and these messages have always been as welcome as the spoken messages others give. I even once was at a Meeting for Worship that Joan Baez attended, at which she was moved to sing "Amazing Grace" (and did so, as you can imagine, far more impressively than I do when I am moved to sing), and one other time, at Yearly Meeting, someone was moved to sing "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God," and the rest of us were moved to join in, so that we were all singing the hymn together.
However, these are occasional things, which may happen as the Spirit moves. More usually, several of us will gather to sing during the half hour before Meeting for Worship, and one person will play piano. Margaret, who plays piano at our Meeting, will take any hymn people request, but if no one makes a request she generally picks one part of the hymnal and goes through the hymns one after another. There are a couple of hymnals: the red one with the older Quaker hymns, and the blue one, which is more modern. Once, when visiting a Meeting in another state, I found that they had happened upon an Episcopalian hymnal and were singing from it as a novelty, and so had the odd experience of hearing all the Episcopalian hymns I grew up with at a Quaker Meeting. Of course, some overlap anyway: we both have "Nearer My God to Thee" and "The Spacious Firmament on High" and "Jesus Christ Has Risen Today" on Easter, and many of the same Christmas carols.

Singing ends at about five minutes before Meeting for Worship, and we file into the room which is set up for worship. A few people are already there, settling into the silence. Sometimes it may happen that an entire Meeting for Worship is spent in silence. More usually, after a time, one of us is moved to speak, and then another. One is supposed to leave some space for silence between the messages. If there is too little space between speakers, we have what we call a "popcorn meeting." This isn't usually a problem in our own Meeting, which is rather small. It's more likely to happen in larger Meetings, particularly if some event in the news has people worked up.

Several people were moved to speak last Sunday. I won't give all the messages, but just describe three representative ones. One person spoke of the children at Yearly Meeting, and their epistle. Yearly Meeting happens, as its name implies, once a year. People from each Monthly Meeting (that is, what in another denomination might be called a local parish - we call each local group a Monthly Meeting because we meet to discuss business monthly, rather than quarterly or yearly, as the larger groups do) will travel to one town and there will discuss business, and also have worship sharing and other activities. At the end of Yearly Meeting an epistle will be read, which the Yearly Meeting sends to other Yearly Meetings (so that ours, Pacific Yearly Meeting, will write to, and receive epistles from, for example, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting or London Yearly Meeting). Several age groups of younger Friends will write their own epistles. This year, the children referred to a hymn that we sing about walking in the Light, and talked about jumping in the Light, and skipping in the Light, and so on.

Another person spoke of his family's experience in Japan during World War II, when a relative arrived for a visit from China and was suspected of being a spy, and of another person, in China, who spent time in jail on suspicion of being a spy, as it turned out due to a case of mistaken identity. Another woman spoke of her joy at seeing Orion when she went out before dawn to walk her dog. This is often how Meeting for Worship goes; a person will speak of some life experience, and perhaps he or she, or perhaps someone else, may draw from it a message - of concern for people who may fall under unjust suspicion during war, perhaps, or, perhaps, of thankfulness.

After the first fifteen minutes of Meeting for Worship, the children leave for First Day School. In other places this would be called Sunday School, but the old Quakers were averse to using pagan names for the months and the days of the week, and so, though nowadays we don't too much trouble that Thursday is named for the god Thor, we keep the old custom when doing Meeting business, and speak of Second Month or First Day. Some Meetings have the children in for the last fifteen minutes rather than the first; it's up to the local Meeting. For the first six months of this year, I was on a teaching team for First Day School, but now I am taking a break from that, and am just doing occasional baby care or after Meeting care. Neither of which I was doing last Sunday.

Meeting for Worship ends when the clerk, or perhaps someone else from Ministry and Oversight, shakes the hand of his or her neighbor, and so we all shake hands. Since we are a small Meeting (we had maybe thirty people this Sunday), we all go around and introduce ourselves, and a few of us will tell if something interesting happened to us during the week. At my old Meeting, before we moved from northern California to southern California, we were too large from that, but we would ask visitors to introduce themselves at the end, and people would be invited to stand up on the Sunday of their choice during the month of their birth and say something. After that we have announcements, and then refreshments. This time, the clerk happened to ask how our newcomers had heard about the Meeting. And three different visitors replied that they had found us through the Orange County Friends Meeting web site. A couple of other people who had begun attending relatively recently said that they had done the same. I guess that this is a sign of the times. If your Meeting (or parish) doesn't yet have a web site, start one.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:49 AM

Some people at Harvard Law School are trying to probe to find out which sites are blocked and which aren't. Here's the link if you want to join in the testing. Link via Agenda Bender.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:39 AM

Ever wonder why everyone shakes hands somewhere in the middle of Mass? Father Jim has a good explanation of the significance of this rite.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:15 AM

Yesterday my grandmother broke her hip. She's 95. She'll be operated on Saturday. Prayers would be appreciated.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:12 AM

A special report in the Economist on the ways in which various governments around the world have restricted civil liberties since September 11th. Link from Andrea See.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:11 AM

Hopped through from EveTushNet and saw your question about the saints. You
have a good handle on Catholic thought on the role of the saints.

Eve's answer was totally on track about prayer to saints as fostering a
warming sense of community. They are our older brothers and sisters, and
they understand what we're going through! Today, for example, is the feast
of St. Augustine who is the best guy to go to about sexual temptation, since
he struggled with it and wrote so honestly and searchingly about it. The
Liturgical Calendar takes us through the feasts and memorials of saints; we
are told all the family stories.

I do know that there are some Catholics who have only learned that St.
So-And-So is the patron saint of something and without any further reading
or study, they zing in a little prayer to that saint. That's not my style,
nor most educated Catholics' style, but I wouldn't presume that the saint
didn't intercede for them anyway, in response to their direct
tassel-of-His-cloak faith.

I know that my patron saint, St. Therese of Lisieux, has been a holy example
that the smallest act of self-denying charity is a way to love
Jesus. I am reading what she wrote and pondering it with her, as it were, in
prayer. I picture kneeling with Mary and the saints, taking my problems and
praises to God.

By the way, as a V2-boomer (made my First Communion during Vatican II, so I
learned everything both ways) I remember the rhyme going: "Please St.
Anthony, look around, what is lost, it must be found." Or, as George Carlin,
who still thinks and talks Catholic even though he is a professional
iconoclast, said, "Please, St. Anthony, tell God I need my keys!" We think
this is just Catholic hilarity, not the way to pray with the saints.

ThereseZ (too many Thereses around here!)

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 6:57 AM

That Rod Dreher article: Most of St. Blog's seems to have something to say about it, but I can't possibly keep up with linking to everyone's comments, so I'll just point you to Amy Welborn's blog, where an interesting discussion continues in the comments, blogs4God.com, which has linked to a lot of the discussion, and Disputations, which has a good post on the value of habits of peace and humility.

Archbishop Dolan takes over from Archbishop Weakland: And Karen Knapp is on the spot.

Support for good priests at Thank You, Father. Link from Amy Welborn.

Really creepy self-justification by a priest who molested 10 to 12-year-old boys, in this Detroit News article.

What nurses talk about: Crazy Tracy blogs an, um, interesting actual conversation with her fellow nurses. Be prepared to wince.

Or, if you prefer to see an online conversation, you can always go see Lizza Mayhem deal with an online "lesbian" with an AOL profile that screams "MALE."

The Grey Bird's dog complains in her absence: And our cat Tracy is joining in the discussion in the comments.

The truth in stereotypes about homosexuality: An interesting summary of an article about this topic at Jody's Naked Writing site.

Andrea See has an interesting post on promoting the study of the Chinese language in Singapore.

Prison ministry More on this over at Sursum Corda.

Tolle, Blogge continues to have good posts about the proposed war on Iraq.

Sainteros has some good posts on silence and on the Benedictine theme of enclosure.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 9:33 PM

This is one of my favorite passages in Augustine's Confessions (isn't it for everyone?), so I have to post it today:

Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within and I was without. I was loking for Thee out there, and I threw myself, deformed as I was, upon those well-formed things which Thou hast made. Thou wert with me, yet I was not with Thee. These things held me far from Thee, things which would not have existed had they not been in Thee. Thou didst call and cry out and burst in upon my deafness; Thou didst shine forth Thy fragrance, and I drew in my breath and now I pant for Thee; I have tasted, and now I hunger and thirst; Thou didst touch me, and I was inflamed with desire for Thy peace.

When I shall cleave to Thee with all my being, sorrow and toil will no longer exist for me, and my life will be alive, being wholly filled with Thee. At the present time, however, because Thou dost lift up whomever Thou fillest and I am not filled with Thee, I am a burden to myself. My joys, which are to be lamented, struggle against my sorrows, which are cause for joy, and I know not on which side victory may stand.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 8:57 PM

Eve Tushnet has a good response to my post, and I've also gotten more email. Thanks! I won't have time to blog more about this till the weekend, but in the meantime check out Eve's post.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 8:49 PM

We've been putting into a word processor, for my mother-in-law, an inventory of the possessions of his great-aunt. This is one of the items I was sure had to be a mistake in reading the handwritten list. What, after all, would a lady's spittoon be, that it would differ from a gentleman's spittoon? And why would Aunt Faire, who has never chewed tobacco, be doing with a spittoon anyway? But the list came back from my mother-in-law with this item uncorrected. I guess, after all, there must be spittoons made with that certain feminine style.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 8:40 PM

Those of you who have seen Dogma may remember the Catholic bishop in the movie who proposed replacing crucifixes with a more up to date, approachable symbol of Christian faith: the Buddy Jesus (a Jesus statue giving a thumbs up). I can't help thinking of this fictional bishop when I read (link via Holy Weblog) about the Anglican Bishop of Oxford who is suggesting that "the cannibalistic language of the Eucharist" needs qualifying so that people realize that it is a metaphor and aren't put off by it. Which, I suppose, would mean somehow revising the Prayer of Humble Access and some of the best Anglican hymns. I don't see it. Are there really lots of people leaving Christianity over "cannibalistic language"? And of what use is a half-hearted metaphor?

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 8:08 AM

There's a new blog by a Catholic Worker from Oklahoma City, Robert Walthrop, Bob's Blog. Thanks to Karen for the link. It's good to see a Catholic Worker blogger, and I'm loking forward to reading more. And, in the "new to us" category, Joel and I just discovered that our old net friend Andrea See now has a blog.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 7:45 AM

OK, a lot of you have already seen the link at Amy Welborn's site, where a heated discussion is going on, but for those who haven't, here is the article. And here you can find some followup discussion between Rod Dreher and Father Rob Johansen.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 8:06 AM

A Catholic reader responds to my question about prayer to saints:

You asked on your blog about the experiential aspect of devotion to saints. I'd have to start by recalling how one sometimes experiences God the Father, sometimes God the Son, sometimes God the Holy Spirit. One might find one's self calling on any one of these three persons of the One Godhead depending on mood and disposition.

Those who pray to the saints-and I know Lutherans who do-generally want the fellowship of that particular saint in some form or other if only in thought. The most popular saint for good reason is God's own mother Mary and one finds when speaking with her a sense of calm, very maternal and nurturing, a personality aptly described in the phrase "full of grace." Other saints bring with them whatever character or personality they won throughout their lifetime of serving God.

Of course, no such thing is necessary, and all the saints point us eventually back to Jesus. (They seem in my experience at least to point to him more than to the Father or the Holy Spirit). Mary especially is quick to point us to her Son and to explain-not in words but through her presence-him and his character to us in terms that we can understand. Also, one can only pray to saints in good conscience. Catholics who understand theology will tell you it's a sin to pray to saints if one does not believe in it. I've never found any one who gave it a shot and didn't find it rewarding though. I have friends, however, who say they've never developed a really strong relationship with Mary because they've never had a strong mother figure in their life. Just like some people have a hard time relating to God the Father because of static in their relationship with their father on earth.

posted by Lynn Gazis-Sax at 9:40 PM