Interview: Robert Siegel, poet of Maine USA speaks with the writer on his work–another in the ongoing series of conversations with Anglican and Christian poets

This writer says as note, I have been thinking about how to make the Eucharist a Christmas 2011 statement, and also to introduce the article-interview with Maine poet Robert H. Siegel about his work which is a gift. [Certainly, Christ's birth is a gift to mankind—as is the Eucharist. In a manner, so is the gift of poetry a kind of birth in the poet’s life, as the poem does take on a life of its own after its “birth.” A poem requires nurture.]

The interview with Robert Siegel was conducted by email, and questions were answered in writing by the poet.

The following quote displays his poem about finches, and was one inspiration for the title of his book, “A Pentecost of Finches: New & Selected Poems…” It is from the Houghton College interview conducted by John Leax and noted as partial reprint later in this article.

Matins

By Robert Siegel

It is morning. A finch startles
the maple leaves. Everything’s clear
in this first light before all thins
to a locust harping on the heat.

While day clutches at my pulse
to inject the usual anesthetic,
now, Christ, stimulate my heart,
transfuse your blood to fortify my own.

Let no light upon these sheets
diminish, Lord, before I feel you
burst inward like a finch
to nest and sing within this tree of bones.

INTRODUCTION

For my way of thinking, the work of a poet is the result of a gift. This is especially true of Robert Siegel of Maine, USA; he is a man with a gift. He is also a man who writes poetry that reflects his faith while writing about God’s creatures in a way that a naturalist can love.

This article-interview on Robert Siegel is another in the ongoing series of interviews with Anglican and Christian poets. The poet wrote in an email:

You asked about a person, or persons, who know my work. On my website (robert-siegel.com ) I’ve included six complete reviews of my last two books of poetry. You might want to look at Paul Willis’ review in Christianity and Literature, as he touches on the relationship of poetry to faith and the spiritual. So does Thomas Bontly in The Sewanee Review. Robert French in The North Dakota Quarterly comments on my animal poems, which I consider my most characteristic, and (it seems to me) gets at what I’m trying to do in these and others.

I was raised Presbyterian but I have been an Anglican for 49 years this November, having been inspired to change by C.S. Lewis (and by my lovely wife, who preceded me into the fold).

Robert

POET PAUL WILLIS’ REVIEW, IN PART

Here is part of one review of Robert Siegel’s book, “A Pentecost of Finches: New & Selected poems,” Paraclete Press (Brewster, Massachusetts) from his website.

Professor of English at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, Paul Willis wrote:

Sometimes Siegel ventures into the realm of specifically biblical creatures, to fine effect.

In “A Colt, the Foal of an Ass” from the selected portion, the beast of burden reflects on “this moment of bearing the man, /​ a weight that is light and easy” (118). “The Serpent Speaks” which concludes the first part of the new poems, is perhaps the greatest achievement of the collection. This long, sinuous monologue tempts us all over again—”I am another vine”—even as it rehearses the infection of all of history and the inevitable diminishment of the diabolical speaker (28). And yet the serpent is always a serpent, slithering side by side with the other natural snakes in this volume, all exquisitely observed.

To continue with a long quotation from the review written 2009, and appearing on the poet’s web page here, the review goes on in detail:

… I want to hasten to point out other glories of this collection. Prominent among them are the portraits of New Testament characters that comprise the second part of the new poems. These rough sonnets crystallize the inner lives of a whole array of individuals. Take, for example, “Perfection,” on Mary Magdalene, whose flask of perfume has been brought from Egypt by a Roman general and given to her with the command, ‘”Never age…. /​ Stay perfect. This will help”‘ (37). Or “Judas” who confides to us, “All along I was the only one who seemed to know /​ what the Man could do if he put his mind to it” (41). Or “The Epicure” who enjoys

… a pleasant life: at night the temple girls,
occasionally, after lunch, the flute-playing boy.
A moderate life: poetry for the heart and prose
to temper the mind, though I found less and less joy
in it….

Then, one day, happening to hear in the agora “one speak of a strange god,” suddenly he “heard Pythagoras’ /​/​ golden spheres turn for a second” (46).

It is the turning of these golden spheres that points to Siegel’s abilities and aspirations as a poet. His way of seeing is not merely sacramental but ultimately mystical. In “Annunciation,” he marks the coming of Gabriel in the most homely and heavenly of ways:

Things grew brighter, more distinct, themselves,
in a way beyond explaining. This was her home,
yet somehow things grew more homelike. Jars on the shelves
gleamed sharply: tomatoes, peaches, even the crumbs
on the table grew heavy with meaning and a sure repose
as if they were forever. (34)

Likewise, in “Patmos,” Siegel records the vision of John, “now in the blaze of noon and when the stars sang to his eyes” (47).

This anagogic impulse is sustained in poems throughout the volume. Part three of the new poems begins with the shaped stanzas of “Peonies”: “we see in them absolute /​ fire at the center, stasis /​ of star’s core…” (51). They are as “Dante saw the stars in a glass, /​ a corolla of souls, /​ each reflecting /​ the other’s light /​ and charity…” (51-52). Not surprisingly, another poem in this section is titled “Traherne,” a tribute to and imitation of that supremely mystical seventeenth-century English poet. Siegel glosses him when he writes, “The smallest grain of wheat would light the ground…” (60). The very last poem in the volume, “Voice of Many Waters,” with an epigraph from Revelation and a dedication to Clyde Kilby, is reminiscent of Traherne as well. First to last, in poems that span perhaps forty years, Siegel has stayed wondrously true to this vision.

INTERVIEW BY EMAIL WITH JOHN LEAX RE ROBERT SIEGEL

John Leax: I was a student of Clyde Kilby at Wheaton in the early sixties. I believe he first told me about Robert Siegel, holding him up as something of a model for me, one of the times we talked about my ambition to be a poet. Bob, with his degree from the Hopkins Writing Seminars and PhD from Harvard, I agreed was worth emulating, but I couldn’t imagine myself following that path. I was too much an indifferent student to achieve on that level.

About ten years later, after I’d gone to the Hopkins Writing Seminars (but not Harvard or any other PhD) and had begun teaching I finally met Bob at a conference on teaching creative writing sponsored by the Library of Congress. I believe Mel Lorentzen, a former teacher of both of us from Wheaton, introduced us. Bob, who was sitting with Richard Eberhart, was very polite. I was a bit in awe, somewhat tongue-tied, and awkward. What contact we had following that conference I can’t remember.

In 1980 or early 1981 I invited Bob to visit Houghton where I was teaching. I think our friendship really began then. I was editing a small magazine then and interviewed Bob for it. (I’ll arrange to have it scanned and emailed to you tomorrow.) A couple years later when the group of writers that would become the Chrysostom society met at New Harmony, I was included at Bob’s invitation. (He had written an introduction to my first book of prose that had just appeared.) Our friendship, encouraged by yearly visits and the shared concerns of thesociety, grew from that time. I may have been on the board at the same time as Bob, I can’t remember.

For the last ten years, we have been working together with Jeane Murray Walker on a collaborative poem on the seven deadly sins. The idea for this came from Bob and was worked on while hiking along the gorge in Letchworth State Park. This work has overflowed the boundary of the literary project and infiltrated my life. If I was in awe when I first met Bob, I am now deeply humbled by his craft, learning, wisdom, and generosity. In a strange way, largely because of my personality, our friendship while warm remains a bit formal. I still regard Bob with a bit of awe and can’t imagine imposing myself on him. (I know his character is such that he would find that sentence impossible.)

One thing that should be added: If one walks into a room filled with laughter at the Chrysostom Society, most likely Bob Siegel and Richard Foster are at the center of it. Somewhere in the archives is a collection of “roasting” limericks exchanged between them and others (often Luci Shaw) over dinner.

Jack

——————————————————————————–

INTERVIEW WITH MAINE POET ROBERT SIEGEL

Peter Menkin: Take us down the road a little on the journey of the poet. By this I mean, what is it that the ear is tuned to, and the eye wanting to see, and the heart moved by when it comes to the life of a poet and the work of poetry in one’s life.

Robert Siegel: Even before I could read I enjoyed the sound, rhythm, and texture of words in nursery rhymes like the following:

Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
She shall have music wherever she goes.

Later I played with words on signs and billboards while riding in a car. Gulf Gas spelled backwards created the abysmal monster Flug Sag, and Standard Oil became Dradnats Lio a mythical half dragon and half lion. I wrote occasional rhymes As a sophomore in high school Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar inspired a somber sixteen-line poem called “Anthony’s Revenge” that began ,“My grief it knows no fathom, my wrath it knows no end,” It impressed my teacher, but chiefly I wrote poems as an adolescent to impress and woo the girl who is now my wife of 50 years.

In my college freshman comp. course I wrote a love lyric that came out of nowhere one lunch hour. The professor liked it well enough to read to the class and suggested I enter it in a contest. After that I was hooked. I took a couple of creative writing courses and every literature course I could find, and in my junior year started gathering weekly to workshop poems with other students, some of us bringing in three or four poems every week. We called it the Poets’ Corner, after that corner of Westminster Abbey.

During that time there was a definite moment when I felt called to a life as a poet. It happened in the fall of my senior year. I was in the Morton Arboretum looking at a spectacular array of fall foliage, when I rounded a corner and stopped in awe of a brilliant red tree—a crabapple, perhaps, or a Japanese maple. As I looked at its intensely red leaves they mesmerized me, as if they were on fire. And yet they were still, as if I ‘d stepped out of time. In that moment the thought came to me: “So this is Beauty and I am called to reveal it to the world.” It was very distinct, and after that I knew clearly what my poetry was for. It had the force of a religious vocation.

After that it was inevitable I’d apply to the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. After taking the master’s degree, and a year’s teaching in Chicago, I enrolled in Harvard’s graduate school—partly because the poet Robert Lowell was there. I had read his early poetry, such as his elegy, The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket. Lowell was a great inspiration and I worked with him my four years there, His approval confirmed my vocation. Early in my first term there I went to his office hours with nine poems I had written that fall. I found him alone, and had an hour and a half with him before another student showed up. I handed him one poem after another. After reading a few he said to me. “Other people have played this trick of handing me one poem to read and then another and another, but this is the first time I’ve looked forward to the next.” Obviously these words burned themselves into my brain, along with other very encouraging comments. Each fall from 1963 to 67 I attended his morning office hours, which by the second year had turned into an informal seminar. He urged me to send out poems and liked particularly my poem “Hanscom Air Field” so well he carried it to Robert Manning, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, where it appeared in June of ‘67. Later he recommended to the publisher my first book, The Beasts & the Elders..

Peter Menkin: You have also been a teacher for many years. Some schools where you taught are these: Siegel has taught at Dartmouth, Princeton, and Goethe University in Frankfurt, and for twenty-three years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he directed the graduate creative writing program and is currently professor emeritus of English. He has degrees from Wheaton, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard. He is married to Ann Hill Siegel, a photographer, and lives on the coast of Maine. So your website tells its readers. Is there a similarity to the work of teacher to that of poet? Or more, does being a teacher feed your poetry, and sense of the poetic?

Robert Siegel: I feel very privileged to have taught. Not only did teaching provide the time for writing, but it meant that I was always working with literature and with students who were learning to write poetry or fiction.. It was wonderful to have the chance to teach Paradise Lost, King Lear, and Heart of Darkness to Dartmouth freshmen, Coleridge to seniors, and, later, Yeats to graduate students.

We were particularly fortunate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to have a large graduate program in creative writing with students in their twenties to mid-seventies. Not only did this mean we had mature students, but also ones with some life experience to write about. I had one lady in her seventies who had survived Hitler’s camps—though much of her family didn’t—and ultimately published two books of poetry about it.

I think writing and teaching draw upon the same energy, for I did not write as much during term time. But teaching a subject helps you to continue learning it, and you learn in various ways from students. For instance, I think the critiquing of student poetry in seminars no doubt sharpened my ability to revise my own work.

One thing I learned while teaching in our graduate program in an urban university is how much talent there is out there, and how many people with talent fail to fully develop it—often for understandable reasons. This has always seemed to me to hint at the reality of an afterlife—there is so much more to people than can be fully discovered and developed in one lifetime.

Peter Menkin: I think people believe the poet is like the philosopher, like the teacher, like the musician—also the painter. In essence, the poet is a writer. Will you tell us if you agree with these statements and talk a little about your own work, especially that of the religious and faith kind. Does it either increase for you and even others food for thought about the Almighty and his Son Jesus Christ? Do you think that there is a sense of the grandeur of life and that of the Almighty? If so, how and even why? I know these are pointed questions, especially regarding religion and God, but my work as a Religion Writer sometimes asks I talk about such things with people. I am hoping you will take some time and talk to us about such things.

Robert Siegel: Yes, there is a connection between the poet, the musician, and the philosopher. Also the painter. I particularly identify with the painter in the use of imagery. We have several artists in the family, including my wife, a truly gifted photographer. Walter Pater said poetry aspires to the condition of music, and music is certainly of the essence too. Pound said that in addition to visual imagery and music, poetry had to have substantive meaning (I think the exotic term he used for this was logopoeia) which certainly connects it to philosophy.

For me that meaning is ultimately spiritual. Charles Williams said somewhere there are four sources of natural revelation: Love, Art, Nature, and the City. I’ve never related well to cities but the other three have been the source of poetry for me and means of apprehending and expressing my spiritual convictions, however indirectly.

In college I was fortunate in my English major to take courses in the major poets, Chaucer , Spenser, Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, and Shelley and Hopkins, and Eliot. to mention some of my favorites. They presented love, poetry and nature to me as sources of the divine. I will talk more about romantic love later. But I’ll quote here two lines from Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” that struck me my freshman year in college:

What is this world, what asketh man to have,

Now in his love’s armes, now in his colde grave.

As for nature, they –even T.S. Eliot—found “splendor in the grass and glory in the flower,” as Wordsworth put it, and shared in various ways a neo-platonic view of the world where everything is capable of revealing the divine , no matter how lowly it is on the great chain of being. Hopkinscalled this inscape, and he found it in everything from an eyelash to a wave of the sea. Poetry then became for me a possible sacramental, a way of final participation in Owen Barfield’s sense, of “finding the presence of God in everything,”or in Browning’s “God is seen God, / In the star in the stone in the flesh in the soul and the clod.”

The experience of a calling I referred to earlier helped me to understand this. And before that, a conversion experience I had in college where God revealed His reality to me . Immediately afterwards I transferred toWheatonCollege a strong, non-denominational Christian institution , where I knew my faith could be nurtured and I might grow in Christ. There I encountered C.S. Lewis’s works and was confirmed in the Anglican Church. In the last decade I have started regular centering prayer, according to the method taught by Father Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk, and find this contemplative method has certain qualities suggestive of the act of writing.

In turn the act of writing poetry becomes for me a kind of sacramental experience. Bruno Barnhart, a Camaldolese hermit, says that the “unitive” aesthetic experience offered by literature and art—when we feel one with what we are reading, looking at, or hearing– is a step toward experiencing union with God and I would agree. Our best experiences with literature and the arts are contemplative, a union of ourselves with the beauty before us. Literature and the arts can help us to forget ourselves and experience a completeness, a wholeness, for a moment or an hour. We forget our incomplete, divided selves and for a time are made one with what we are contemplating. This unitive experience can lead us to see beyond the work of art itself to what may shine through it, the world of the spirit.

This unitive experience may often lead me to write a poem. As I’ve described it elsewhere: “Most of us [writers] share a desire to call up things into words. This is the alchemy that fascinates me. A sensation, impression, or image will step out from its surroundings and demand my total attention. the thing itself will appear to rise up as words and send me fumbling for my notebook or keyboard.. Here is the wonder of what Keats called ‘natural magic’ as the image reaches up toward the words, the words become the image, the thing itself. For one happy moment they are fused. Thing becomes word and word becomes thing. . . substance and meaning are fused. The terrible gap between experience and the articulation of experience is closed. The mind is one with what it perceives.”

In my animal poems, especially, I attempt to become one with the animal while remaining my human self, and thus, I hope to create a third thing or voice, which is something like a totemic presence. The act of becoming one with something as you contemplate it or write is what Keats named “negative capability.” Much of his poetry comes from this experience. He once commented that if “a sparrow comes before my window I take part in its existence and peck about the gravel.”

Here are several examples of what I do in the animal poems. In each case I’m quoting a short part of the poem (all from A Pentecost of Finches: New & Selected Poems. Copyright 2006, Robert Siegel. All rights reserved.):

from Deer Tick:

No larger than a period I scramble
among the sequoia of your armhairs
unable to decide in this vast wilderness
where to drill for the life-giving well,
the water of life, the warm blood.
For I am sick unto death: in my abdomen

the spirochete turns its deadly corkscrew
which I must shortly confess to the stream
pulsing from your dark red heart,
setting at liberty this ghostly germ
large in the deer’s glazed eye
and the mouse’s tremble. . . .

from Inchworm:

I am of two minds moving out of sync—
when one’s in action, the other’s resting,
and so I never come to a conclusion
though we move in the same direction
by separate steps, by little omegas,
yet neither end comes ever to an end. . . .

from Mussel:

I am
tasting the ocean
one mouthful at a time.
It is a slow rumination,
a reading of incunabula
in my cloister,
in this cell where light
fills me totally like an eye
then washes away. . . .

Slug

White, moist, orange,
I crawl up the cabbage leaf exposed,
too much like your most intimate parts
to be lovely, to be loved. I weep to the world,
my trail a long tear, defenseless
from its beaks and claws
except for my bitter aftertaste.
He who touches me shares my sorrow
and shudders to the innermost–my pale horns
reaching helpless into the future.
In plastic cups filled with beer
ringed like fortresses around your garden,
your lie of plenty,
we drown by the hundreds,
curled rigid in those amber depths,
so many parentheses surrounding nothing.
You do not understand nothing:
the nakedness to the sky,
the lack of one protective shelter,
the constant journey.
Millions of us wither in the margins
while food rots close by.
Nothing is a light that surrounds us
like the breath of God.

Interview: Messianic Jewish American poet talks of his work as a beginning writer

In an effort to find out what is on the mind and in the work of a beginning poet, in this case Robert Siegel of Redding, California, this writer interviewed the Messianic Jewish believer. Redding, California is north of San Francisco by 230 miles. Gateway community Christian Church of the Nazerene is important to Mr. Siegel.

Mr. Siegeel attends Messianic Jewish services, and is a friend of a local Nazarene Church in the area. An Evangelical Church, Nazarene Church has about 2 million members in the United States and almost 60 seminaries or schools. The pastor of the Church Mr. Siegel attends was ordained by the national church, like all their pastors. Pastor Bob Rupert started Messianic group. He is with Nazarene Church.

The worship service for Messianic Jewish members is more like a Jewish Temple, Mr. Seigel tells this writer.

It is out of this tradition, this Nazarene Church and its adjunct worship church of Messianic Jews where Mr. Siegel’s poetry springs. He says, the Old Testament is a favorite book of the Bible for him. Much of his poetry expresses these feelings.

This interview-article is part of the series of ongoing interviews with Christian and Anglican poets. I came across Mr. Siegel’s work through an error, thinking him the same Robert Siegel who wrote the recent poetry book, “a Pentecost of finches.” There will be an article-interview with the established and well-known Robert A. Siegel. The “real” Robert A. Siegel is an Episcopalian.

The Messianic Mr. Siegel tells me about his poetry, “I have shared them with a close circle of friends around the years.” Some of his work is in the Addendum to the interview in this article. Regarding his education, he graduated with high honors in Pastoral Leadership from a Bible College. Was a missionary in Europe. The Bible Colleges Mr. Siegel attended, were, Stevens School of the Bible. He afterward relocated to Maryland Bible College and Seminary, Lenox, Massachussets. He has been writing poetry since 2002.

Film Review: Unique and beautiful statement of history as portrayed by art, ‘The Mill & The Cross,’ directed by Poland’s Lech Majewski

THE REVIEW OF THE MILL & THE CROSS

How can I laud this film I liked so much, and enjoyed? Let me try a number of ways. For this is a movie that asks for many things of its audience. This film is a work of art.

Called the wisest philosopher among painters, “Pieter Bruegel’s epic masterpiece The Way To Calvary depicts the story of Christ’s Passion set in Flanders under brutal Spanish occupation in the year 1564, the very year Bruegel created his painting. From among the more than five hundred figures that fill Bruegel’s remarkable canvas, THE MILL & THE CROSS focuses on a dozen characters whose life stories unfold and intertwine in a panoramic landscape populated by villagers and red-caped horsemen. Among them are Bruegel himself (played by Rutger Hauer), his friend and art collector Nicholas Jonghelinck (Michael York), and the Virgin Mary (Charlotte Rampling).” So says the distributor about the film they distribute, Kino Loberer of New York City.

Before going further with some remarks on the film as a work itself and its credits, note that the part played by Rutger Hauer is done with dignity and offers a stoic painterly attitude of heroic disengagement with the large scene he paints. A handsome man, the character played by Rutger Hauer, Bruegal himself does as the other actors do: plays the role with a balance of speaking and silence, with emphasis on the silence. Quiet in dialogue, that is silent moments, is a notable feature of the playing style in The Mill & The Cross. Here is a well chosen means of conveying meaning as audience members become attuned to the rhythm of acting style performed by not only this excellent player, but all the competent and experienced main players in their parts. There is a shadow and light to the acting sensibility, not in literal use of cinema and play of film, but a kind of sensibility of both knowing and not knowing. But it is Rutger Hauer’s character who appears, if one grasps the painting as shown in the style of the cinema itself, as a man who has eyes to see and a distance in objectivity in mind to patiently portray what his eye sees.

Of the many positive reviews written about the movie to date, this writer was taken with a review by Kina Laurer–more than with the distributor’s press release description, though it a good one. Laurer said in the Huffington Post on the internet this of the director of the imaginative and courageous work, one so well worth seeing in all its glory, quietude, artistic vision, and even originality. Directed by Les Wajewski, who had the courage to move forward with his digital experiment that shows so well the painter’s work as backdrop to the film. Keep in mind that actors played on an empty set, one filled with equipment, not in front of the vista the audience sees on the screen. Director Wajewski took a chance with his digital experiment, for it wasn’t really known if it would work—and if so, how well would it work: “An accomplished artist and composer, Majewski, also wrote and co-produced Basquiat, directed later by his friend Julian Schnabel. His new feature film, The Mill and the Cross …is an elaborately layered, computer-generated tableaux of another classic, Pieter Bruegel’s 1564, The Way to Calvary – a composite of multiple light sources and seven different perspectives that Breugel had used to trick the eye.” (See her whole review here.) Director Wajewski, a citizen and resident of Poland, is himself a painter. Please consider, The Mill & The Cross was screened at the Louvre, it as film so painterly and to some digital effect that is transparent, a miraculous work of technical accomplished. Or so this writer has heard about its visual success of technical means.

Suffice it to say: working in a dramatic and stylized way of silence, quiet, and what turned out to be effective and creative as well as courageous methods, actors, cinematographer, and director brought to life this painterly vision with cinematic success. A film well worth seeing, just to say one has seen it, let alone appreciate it and to enjoy (especially if the art of the painter and the art of the actor, and the art of the director interests or even fascinates a theatre goer), the first thing this writer did when seeing the film and taking notes was write a poetic statement of description:

Beautiful: Fabulous vista of morning./ The unchanging and august scene/ Portrays the Mill as started on awakening, as if / God , and man in the hopes and struggles /Take on the day, knowing or not knowing God/ Is present and aware of dawning, its maker both /Engaged and distant watching, too, as Christ weeps./ / So injustice of man against man in the acts/ Of Christ’s passion and his suffering on the Cross/ Are known in the present time of Flanders 1500,// The crows set on the man persecuted by man/ In the cinematic cruel and even graphic scene of black/ Crows eat his eyes./ Painting, cinema, history meet at the Cross.

Review: Follow your bliss touted in California filmmaker’s, ‘Finding Joe’

One reviewer wrote:

This is an inspiring documentary. For those who feel they’ve dead-ended in life, it’s worthwhile to see people out there that have found divine joy in their lives. It’s self-help- (almost to a fault) but this film isn’t preachy.

In a documentary that touts the virtues of new age philosophy, Finding Joe speaks of finding one’s bliss in a series of interviews with people you may know as motivational speakers, authors of bestselling books, the Deepak Chopra, a surfer, and a skateboard professional among others. A kind of advertisement in style and cinematic form, the film opens with the story of the Golden Buddha and lets the viewer know that each of us is golden.

What does that mean? First it is said by Alan Cohen in a way that has authority and believability, a real conviction, and a sense of religious enthusiasm. It is really not a nonsense statement, but a way of starting this documentary series of interviews and statements with a myth that offers how key subject of the film is saying: Joseph Campbell, a writer about myths whom many have respected and enjoyed for what he’s offered as insight in living life and the story presents the hero’s journey: a path to bliss.

The Press Notice provided by the producers reads: Rooted in deeply personal accounts and timeless stories, FINDING JOE shows how Campbell’s work is relevant and essential in today’s world and how it provides a narrative for how to live a fully realized life—or as Campbell would simply state, how to “follow your bliss”.

The film features interviews with visionaries from a variety of fields including Deepak Chopra, Mick Fleetwood, Tony Hawk, Rashida Jones, Laird Hamilton, Robert Walter, Robin Sharma, Catherine Hardwicke, Sir Ken Robinson, Akiva Goldsman and many more.

While studying myths, and writing on the human experience, Joseph Campbell was a professor at Sarah Lawrence College for 38 years. His seminal work, “A Hero with a Thousand Faces” was published in 1949 and greatly influenced generations of artists and writers, including Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Jerry Garcia and others.

Director Patrick Takaya Solomon said “Joseph Campbell’s work has influenced every major turning point in my life, including my decision to become a director. I owe my good fortune to the ‘aha moments’ I experienced while reading his books. I was compelled to make this film, and look forward to working with Balcony to share it with audiences across America.”

Probably the most succinct statement about the way the film depicts the journey of life and finding meaning, outside the Christian faith and within the California dreaming popularity of New Age sensibility, is how one woman says she learned about Joseph Campell when studying religion in College. The actress tells us she was, “God smacked” by the transformational power of Joseph Campbell’s teachings, and how she learned, “all religions are the same.”

Review: Playwright Bill Cain’s new American regional theatre play about grace in dying–with brief excerpts from the manuscript

INTRODUCTION

This play, How to Write a New Book for the Bible, is good regional theatre USA. This play is well worth the price of the ticket, which for the seats held by this writer and his assistant were each $53. Good seats they were, for we were able to see and hear everything. Terrific, though pretty basic as that kind of arrangement and need in a theatre may be, it is written about here to let the reader know that this size theatre, in this venue, is such a good place for a play like Bill Cain’s new work that is in development. After all, the play is new and the manuscript, let alone the players in their role, still being formed and developed. This adds to the fun, and though some say an Opening Night isn’t the best night to come to a play, there is an excitement about Opening Night and the opportunity to see a kind of birth of work in the theatre. Let this writer add to such excitement, Hallelujah! A birth of a play by Bill Cain in the theatre is presented in Berkeley, California USA on Addison Street in San Francisco’s Bay Area.

(By the way, parking in a nearby garage was a mere $5. This is an added attraction.)

How to Write a New Book for the Bible is an intriguing title that reflects the playwright’s comment that each family creates a Biblical story, a drama, and epic, and myth, and a statement of human lives on earth as created beings of God. That isn’t something that is said so often in the theatre in so clear a manner, or so interesting a form without it being heavy handed. The play has a human touch that is while sorrowful, and amusing, also somewhat ironic and reflective. That’s a lot to pack into an ethos, but since the work is a kind of diary and the character Bill is a kind of narrator and observer (is he not a writer?), we get the journey of a life lived and the end of a woman’s life who is clearly identified as a strong woman and mother.

The theatre Berkeley Repertory is an attractive place for a play, a place to visit, and located in a safe district that has an air of a small city’s sophistication, enough of that in this neighborhood to suggest an excitement and that in this way the handsome front of the modern look of the building is a marker for a living theatre district. Berkeley Repertory Theatre has many kudos from its life of presenting work in the theatre, and this is not the place to say it has a good reputation and that this writer isn’t alone nor the first to notice the quality and even a kind of élan of this place in the University town of Berkeley, so well-known for its more liberal ideas and various political concerns. But the theatre does not follow the party line of the City, per se. One thing I like about this theatre is they are willing to publish a brochure on the play, which was handed out to the Press among others that says, “World Premiere.” In a way, this is true for How to Write a New Book for the Bible.

This is its launching place, a new work that will appear elsewhere in regional theatres in the United States in years to come. Directed by Kent Nicholson, and a co-production with Seattle Repertory Theatre where it will go after the Thrust Stage location within Berkeley Repertory run from October 7 through November 20, 2011, a postcard tells us that all one needs to do to learn more is when visiting the internet, click Berkeleyrep.org. Here is the text from the postcard, a postcard from the theatre:

POSTCARD FROM THE THEATRE

Every family creates a sacred story out of love. In Bill Cain’s poignant new play, a man moves in with his mother when she becomes too frail to care for herself. Their reunion heals old wounds, opening a heartfelt and humorous new chapter in their relationship. From the award-winning author of Equivocation and 9 Circles, this timeless tale celebrates a mother’s love and a son’s devotion. Respected director Kent Nicholson comes back to the Bay Area for the world premiere of How to Write a New Book for the Bible.

LETTER FROM THIS REVIEWER AND WRITER

Bill Cain in his new play, How to Write a New Book for the Bible talks about his mother getting old and dying, about being a son and going through the death of a parent, but mostly the work was noticeably active in a way that brought the audience to laugh out loud at the premiere of the work, performed opening night, October 12, 2011, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. This is a play about what it means to be a family. For Jesuit Priest Bill Cain, who as theatre person has the name Bill Cain, no Father Bill or The Reverend Bill, but plain Bill, the story is one of Biblical kind. More on this later.

This writer was interested that a Jesuit Priest lived the theatrical life in the regional theatre of America, wrote successful and lauded as award winning works, and also entered the world of television writing. He said in his interview, found below, that the Jesuits go into the World to find God. I assume they also bring God to the world. By this God is meant as the Triune God and Christ in particular.

Before opening night, where this writer was part of the audience and joined in the pleasure of what some said on exiting the theatre after the night of performance that lasted 2 hours 20 minutes for two acts, a “wonderful” work, an interchange of emails with the Berkeley Repertory Theatre press officer told this truth. The Press Officer said that everyone called Bill, Bill. Apparently, this writer was the only one he’d heard refers to the Jesuit Priest as Father Bill. So I stopped doing so, recognizing the theatrical name of a playwright, and the writing name for the author of this really sensitive and beautiful work.

The manuscript sent to this Religion Writer prior to the opening night production is a lovely piece of craftsmanship, and though at the reading I did in one seating I found it more beautiful and touching than funny; the opening night audience of the just about packed theatre saw it as a funny play. Lots of laughter, enjoyment, fun and just plain real attention played to a performance that started out a bit off timing and as the evening progressed gained its feet and went so very well. This writer found the evening’s work of performance engrossing.

One thing noticed by me was that the actor Tyler Pierce playing the lead role of Bill, whose mother was in her last time of life, moving in journey to death and in pain while that transpired, as too young to be believable in the part. Also, the role of Bill wasn’t interpreted in a Priestly manner, not in a character and demeanor of authority and compassion as this writer knows Priests offer in their real presence.

Disturbing to this member of the audience as that was, it began to dawn on me that I wasn’t tracking this imaginative play with its spare and symbolic set of few pieces of set on the stage in the manner it was presented and meant to be enjoyed. The audience needed to have imagination, and they themselves, as I did, had to engage their imagination to see the different speeches, and intertwined statements and little scenes come to credibility, life and understanding in its directorial and theatrical presentation. This even by the written style and structure of the play by the playwright that skillfully intertwined various parts well. This isn’t to say the play is a radical work of structure and writing. It is not. It is to say that at Berkeley Repertory Theatre one must as audience member “get with” the point of view and kind of casting choice made to get the full impact of the style presented in the staging of the work. This member of the audience had to, anyway.

Of course, in time this play may as it is developed see other interpretations, and this creative one was intriguing when thought about in retrospect.

A word on the lighting and sound: No doubt someone gave thought to both, for both contributed well to the kind of structure of small, intermixed scenes in time and character, almost like a series of speeches and eras of memory in the life of the son Bill and his Brother—even his dead father who appears to speak in the play.

Imaginative, Yes. Engrossing, Yes. Does it work, Yes. Thank you for a skilled piece of playwright theatre Bill Cain, or if you prefer, Father Bill Cain, Jesuit Priest who lives in the world of the theatrical community. Excellent work of imagination by director Kent Nicholson, especially his staging.

One thing that bothered this Religion Writer was how irreverent the handling was of the more Holy parts, and hopefully later in a more narrative time of this review there will be more specific reference to what is meant by narrative time and Holy dialogue and invocation. Some will be noted in the Postscript with excerpts from the manuscript.

Interview: American Anglican poet Luci Shaw at 83–with Addendum of her poems

Here is the interview done with American poet Luci Shaw, of Washington State in the Northwest. This is another in a series of interviews with Anglican and American poets. (Luci Shaw is an Anglican—attends Episcopal Church in her Washington State.)

She decided to respond to questions by writing answers, and this interview reflects her request so that she could email her answers. She did so and the answers were received October 1, 2011. At 83 years old, with 30 books to her credit, she’s finished another work that she hopes to see published about what it means to get to be older in years. This writer asked her a little about the subject of her book proposal, and herewith the interview.

1. In your poem, “Mary Considers Her Situation,” there is a simplicity and at the same time reality to your statement about her as Mother of God. One question that so many poets are asked is what is their muse that brings them to write about a certain subject? That is my first question, but more, what is there about Mary as a figure in the story that captures the eye of your imagination? Will you share something of this vision and faith with us?

I find in Mary, the mother of Jesus, and her willing involvement in the drama of Incarnation, an almost infinite world of possibility for reflection and poetry. My collection, Accompanied by Angels, includes many poems about this ordinary, extraordinary young woman. She can be viewed from so many different angles.

I have always seen her as a model, to both women and men, of active participation in the work of God no matter how tricky or risky it appears to be. She said Yes to being pregnant with God by the Holy Ghost, well knowing what that might do to her reputation as an unwed mother. She considered the call of God on her to be paramount.

She is also an example to all of us who wish to know new birth and growth in our own lives. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 8, particularly in Eugene Peterson’s translation, I read:

“All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us. It’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We are also feeling

the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting.”

So, Mary is our example of fruitfulness. She also shows us what active submission of the finite to the Infinite looks like in an ordinary human being. She herself incarnates that obedience in a way the whole of Christendom remembers, if we reference all the religious art that features her through history.

In my poem, “Mary Considers Her Situation” (which will be featured in The Christian Century during Advent, 2011) I tried to be Mary, to get into her experience first-hand, to feel what this shocking event would evoke for her emotionally. I used the simple language of an untrained teenage girl. And her first thought, “What will I say to my mother?” echoes what an adolescent today would ask herself before the amazement of the moment overwhelms her. And then, the reality. She will be “split” both physically, in birth, and split from the rest of humanity by her unique role.

2. When I get in a conversation about getting older, and I am coming to my 65th birthday in October 2011, I try to admit to them and myself that this is a new stage in my life. But most people with whom I speak talk about aging and getting older as something to avoid, and their response is always, You are not so old. If I speak of someone in their 80s, this same kind of person says, They are not so old. I wonder what they will say if asked about someone in their 90s. My question for you because your latest book proposal is on getting into the later years of life, and you yourself are 83, what are a few of your thoughts and even poetic imaginings about aging? Is it such a fearful thing that so many of us must deny that getting old is even old at all?

Getting older is so universal, so inevitable, so impossible to avoid unless you die young, that it is surprising to me that so many are in denial about it. The common view of aging is that it is a state of weakness, pain, passivity and immobility in which meaningful life has ceased to exist. The book I have just written is a demonstration that the opposite is possible. That spiritual and emotional growth and insight can happen. That the accumulated wisdom of a life-time becomes available for younger generations as the “senior citizen” continues to engage in the community.

Undoubtedly getting older has its downsides. Energy declines, bodily infirmities appear and multiply, memory may weaken, but the essential spirit of creativity and joy can still survive and flourish. My strategy is to stay aware of the wider world through reading, films, music, and the company of kindred spirits of any age. Most of my closest friends are decades younger than I am, but our age is not the focus of conversation, or our common ground, and even the issues on which we differ make for lively intercourse. Disagreements can be enlightening and widen the view!

Review: The heartfelt, riveting DVD production, ‘Beverly Lewis The Shunning’–book excerpt included

The DVD Releases website, found here, says of the movie: Katie Lapp (Danielle Panabaker) has always struggled with the rules that define her sheltered Amish community, but when a wealthy outsider (Sherry Stringfield) begins asking questions about her family, Katie begins to wonder about her origins. What connection does this woman have to her life…and how will the unraveling secrets challenge Katie’s faith? Beverly Lewis’ The Shunning is a powerful, personal journey of discovery based on the famous novel by the New York Times bestselling author.

Variety posts this lineup, in part: Filmed in North Carolina by Believe Pictures and Lightworks Pictures. Executive producers, Brian Bird, Michael Landon Jr., Maura Dunbar; co-executive producer, Cindy Bond; producers, Mitchell Galin, Carey Nelson Burch; director, Michael Landon Jr.; writer, Chris Easterly…

In this heartfelt and even riveting DVD, Beverly Lewis’ The Shunning, this writer found it a pretty movie with vistas of the Amish country and community located in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Written by The New York Times bestselling author and popular writer of Christian books, Beverly Lewis, this sorry tale of a 20 year old woman’s need to leave her family, friends, but mostly Amish religious community can’t help in its drama and story to move the movie viewer. The DVD runs 88 minutes and is from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment .

Director of Photography: Christo Bakalov shot pretty and scenic footage of the Amish community, and in his restrained way let the actors play their parts without a lot of fast cuts and special cinematography of effects and methods. This made for a statement of plainness and prettiness (in the better sense) contributing in picture and color to the genuine simplicity and affection of the scenes and thespian portrayal of emotion. This is not so easy to be simple and restrained, yet effective, with a film camera.

The review itself starts here:

This writer suspended his judgments to become engaged in the unfolding tale of a tragic journey where the protagonist Katie Lapp, so well and believably played with lovely appeal by Danielle Panabaker must go into the world. Could she not work out and find herself in her community, too? Must she have left her religious community and enter our contemporary society? I wondered, how she must have been shocked on leaving the religious life, a life in which she grew up, was rooted, and deeply involved with in every aspect of living.

DVD released to public September 13, 2011

As a Benedictine Oblate, I felt a sense of great loss for her and her religious community. Nonetheless, as a DVD portraying so well through the direction of Michael Landon, Jr. the Amish community, its people’s lives, and their relationships, there is the key question of faith. Was her faith failing before the revelation of being an adopted child? Was it the appearance of her birth mother, Laura (Sherry Stringfield), that upset her so much? Did her failures and sins in behavior demonstrate a woman failing in her faith and religious practice, as the community understood her role and behavior to be required? These big questions of living are well wrought in love and even compassion, but a kind of toughness of character that speaks of how ones sins without contrition, confession, and amendment of ways can lead to evil and ill situations. But then you as a viewer may think she did the right thing, leaving her community because she was shunned for her actions and failures in faith and behavior. You as a viewer will be entertained by this DVD Beverly Lewis’ The Shunning. You will be engaged, and moved, and likely not able to avoid the emotion of the story and excellent acting by the cast, especially the role of the young woman’s mother, actress Sandra Van Natta.

This is a review of high praise, for it is the kind of movie this writer enjoys, and though some may say this is a woman’s film, it is certainly a Christian movie—a faith movie about an American religious community that can be called a kind of utopia.

Her sins: She likes to play a guitar, and plays forbidden music. Writer Beverly Lewis when talking with me spoke of her sympathies for the young woman, and though did not overtly declare she (Beverly Lewis) was happy she left the religious community, that message was clear. Miss Lewis spoke of having known Amish who did the same, and Miss Lewis indicated she thought them justified and right in doing so. Apparently, to Beverly Lewis, Shunning is a terrible thing the Amish do to those who are falling outside their acceptable participation in the community’s religious life, as judged by The Bishop and community.

Let me note that this is a movie that is a heart breaker. A compassionate and kind old woman who is a widow listens to the young Katie tell her stories. This is a sympathetic scene, repeated in its exploration of motivation and loves a number of times, and so genuine and touching in its actress’ work showing relationship and Christian character. Katie Lapp (Danielle Panabaker) is wonderful and so warm, patient in her ethos of not quite being a mother, but more as a special friend of grandmotherly years to the young woman. A young woman who in one scene had just abandoned her betrothed at the altar—he a Bishop, too. Her confessor as well. Burgess Jenkins plays the role of a somewhat reserved and a little stiff character with dignity and respect. He is believable as the older widower seeking the young bride who can help with house and children.

A man who led the religious community as both spiritual leader and man who must make life decisions as a wise man in the Amish religious community. This writer will tell you, he must judge her behavior and sin. But enough said about this series of responsibilities of his and the terrible decision he makes for the woman who abandoned him at the altar. The movie is played and directed with a light touch to help bring the viewer along with the serious themes and situations shown.

For me, this movie was spellbinding at times. But it is my kind of movie. I love love stories, even this kind where love seems lost, is sought through trauma, and the need to find oneself as a young person leads to abandonment of one’s previous life. Let me ask another question: Is all that change and conflict, transformation of life and seeking really motivated in all its parts by love and not sin? Good question, this writer thinks.

There is sorrow. What is Christian life without sorrow?

Author Beverly Lewis spends some time and the DVD plays it well regarding the development of the young Katie Lapp, who is boy crazy over one young man Daniel (David Topp), earlier in her life. She cannot forget him when it comes to her decision not to marry The Bishop. It is because of his sin in tempting her to play the illegal music, which he teaches her, and also because he dies young, that she cannot forget him. Again, is this a bonding in love, or might we say they were both by their behavior bad and rebelling against the community, if not engaged in sin which he was seducing her to practice? The sin of denying her religion and faith, the sin of secret meetings, the sin even of seduction that never happens but young love that seems so real that the viewer must ask, was it, is it—it appeared genuine love between the two.

There is no doubt she has questions without answers that lead to doubt. She has difficulties with religious obedience, the cultural and familial practices of respect—especially for her father. This is no feminist film, by the way. But the Amish life is not the secular world of the 21st century that is the hallmarked world of outside living in today’s American society in town. There is no doubt, she sins and her faith is tested. It is found short, and she has no desire to go on with “the life” in religious community, let alone her family life where she was raised with love and care. Finding out she was adopted proves too much for her. It is more than shock, perhaps it is the action that leads to her critical need to leave her family and community.

The theme of the adoption, the birth mother played by XXXX, and the mystery surrounding this suddenly discovered truth is a fascinating issue of family and relational kind investigated by the DVD movie. That alone is worth the price of admission, and some may find they cry when watching the former television show from the Hallmark channel.

This well ordered life of the Amish, lived in God’s view, holds in this story version–DVD released September 12, 2011—plays in the show throughout its length so much intimate conversation. Before leaving, as an example of some of the wisdom and intimacy of conversation, she goes to find in the world something of living life—answers she seeks. She is told by the old wise woman that she will find what she has here (in the Amish Community) what she lives out there. The old woman doesn’t chide the young woman, or say, but you will be missing the Amish Christian life and way.

There is Christian hope, and this viewer wishes her such hope in her life. This remains, even in conflict and transformation, in character and tragedy relationship in the light of God in Christ. This couldn’t be better. You will enjoy this movie, and be moved to the heart by the film, Beverly Lewis’ The Shunning.

An amalgam of original research, writing, compilation of documents and statements about Christ Church, Savannah, GA property dispute

Worldwide, Anglicans who were upper class women of England mostly 100 years ago, are today as average an African Black woman of about 21, poor, with one child. It is a very different world for Anglicans than 100 years ago. (A Facebook posting.)

The Episcopal Church is a mainline Anglican Christian church found mainly in the United States, but also in Honduras, Taiwan, Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, the British Virgin Islands and parts of Europe. The Episcopal Church is the Province of the Anglican Communion in the United States and most other territories where it has a presence (excluding Europe). The Episcopal Church describes itself as being “Protestant, Yet Catholic”. In 2009, the Episcopal Church had a baptized membership of 2,175,616 both inside and outside the U.S. In the United States, it had a baptized membership of 2,006,343, making it the nation’s fifteenth largest denomination. (Episcopal Church Facebook.)

The Anglican Church in North America unites some 100,000 Anglicans in nearly 1,000 congregations across the United States and Canada. The Anglican Church is a Province-in-formation in the global Anglican Communion committed to reaching North America with the transforming love of Jesus Christ. The Most Rev. Robert Duncan is the Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America and Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh. (Anglican Church in North America Facebook.)

In this article-interview that covers the property dispute between the Episcopal Church and Christ Church, Savannah regarding the breakaway Christ Church leaving that Communion and joining the Anglican Church in North America, this writer had the privilege of talking with a number of key people. Included in this group of people with whom the writer spoke was The Reverend Jim Elliott, an attorney who is Chancellor of the Diocese of Georgia (Episcopal Church). Reverend Jim is the lead attorney in the case before the State of Georgia Supreme Court asking for the Episcopal Church Communion’s property back. The breakaway Communion and the two Christ Church, Savannah claimants have a conflict of belief, so Christ Church, Savannah who holds the property says.

This email was sent to Reverend Jim Elliott in the course of our conversation by phone and conversation by email:

Dear Reverend Chancellor:

Here from my notes of a conversation with Archbishop Duncan are a few of the theological arguments for Christ Church, Savannah leaving the Episcopal Church Communion. I spoke with him while he was in London just this week for about 15 minutes. During this appointment by phone,

Figure 2 Robert Duncan, Presiding Bishop, Anglican Communion in North America w/his wife

when he arrived in his office after a trip from another place in the city by underground, the conversation focused on theological matters. Because he had a meeting with the Primate of the Southeast Asia part of the Anglican Communion, we were unable to get to the property issue questions involved in the Georgia Supreme Court case. That was too bad, for it meets my needs and purposes for the article. Perhaps to your mind the last attribution to him in this list of notes and quotes is relevant to property issues.

The theological issues in brief:

Quote:

If you wanted to understand at the very root the theological issues are, they all surround the English reformation that the Holy Scriptures were the ultimate of the faith. The Bible is determinative of what the faith says, or what the order of the Church Christian morality would say. Everything really hangs on that affirmation of the reformation. That was reiterated in the Chicago Quadrilateral.

From notes, not a quote:

The Episcopal Church has in the areas of Christology, is Jesus what he says he is. Is Jesus the Son of God? Is there any other way to go? The answer is no. The Episcopal Church has increasingly answered those questions in a different way. Towards universalism or there is a multifaith way towards salvation. That is at the heart of the Christological issue.

Again, a paraphrase from notes:

The morality issues of marriage, chasteness, same sex (marriages)– The Episcopal Church is giving different answers (from us). You can see how this has all tied back to the scripture as understanding.

Notes on a statement by the Archbishop re Property Rights and Issues (?):

In that case, it’s true for Pittsburgh, San Jouquin, we didn’t leave anything. The Episcopal Church is claiming when the Church changes the parishes or diocese have to change. The Saints did not change. We would claim you can’t change from the faith once delivered. We’re thankful for their courage.

Your comment to these individually or as a group is welcomed and hoped for, and if you want to frame it as a Property Issue, do so—even in the negative to say these are not relevant to the case before the Georgia Supreme Court, or that they do not bear witness to the dispute at hand either in a legal or any other sense. I encouraged this so I will have a clear statement for the published piece regarding the position of the Episcopal Church as seen both by you as attorney in the case and for The Diocese of Georgia.

With thanks for your consideration, and early response,

I am yours sincerely,

Peter

Peter Menkin

In a lengthy and complete reply, The Reverend Jim Elliott wrote an almost 900 word statement regarding the Diocese of Georgia arguments and position about the property dispute. In so doing, he reveals some of the attitudes and some of the bitterness in this legal fight for property. He does not believe that theology has much if anything to do with the issue of who owns the property, and who is the legitimate historic Christ Church of Savannah, Georgia.

The Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop said “No,” to making a remark or statement on this case of dispute through her spokeswoman. The Diocese of Georgia’s Bishop chose to make no remark or statement regarding the issue, so its spokesman said. They did make available a written commentary on the case, some of which is quoted in this article. It is expected that the Georgia Supreme Court will rule on the matter by the end of 2011. An inquiry to the Court indicated there was no statement on the case available at this time.

The New York Times reports in November, 2010, in an article titled, “A Church is Divided, and Headed for Court,” by Ellen Goodman, December 5, 2007:

In November, the Diocese of Georgia filed a lawsuit to keep control of Christ Church’s assets, which include a $3 million historic building and an endowment estimated at $2 million to $3 million.

Its claim is based on a church law, adopted in the 1970s, called the Dennis Canon, which says that all parishes hold their property in trust for the diocese. But Christ Church, which was established in 1733, asserts that it has firm legal footing to keep control of its building and property because it existed before the Episcopal denomination, which was established in the United States in 1789.

“That would make the case a pure property case rather than a religious liberty case,” Mr. Witte said. “They will have to argue that their church is closer to the values of the late 18th century” than the Episcopal Church is today.

And that, he added, is “an argument that hasn’t been tested in federal courts.”

Churches of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia

A video showing the 70 churches, 3 chapels and convent in the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia, which encompasses the lower two-thirds of the state.

… (more info)

(less info)

Here is The Reverend Jim Elliott’s statement in its full text:

I am a Priest in The Episcopal Church and a practicing lawyer. I have practiced law in Georgia for twenty-six years and have been the Chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia since 2004. In our Diocese, the Chancellor is appointed by the Bishop and confirmed by our annual Diocesan Convention, which is the elected governing body of the Diocese.
I am counsel to the Diocese and Christ Church Episcopal in their suit against the former rector and former members of the vestry (the local church’s governing board) who left The Episcopal Church and who remain in possession of my clients’ property.
Christ Church Episcopal is the Mother Church of Georgia. Christ Church Episcopal remains a faithful Parish in The Episcopal Church and we want them restored to their rightful church home.
The suit that we filed on behalf of the Parish and the Diocese is to recover the property. The suit is not and indeed cannot be about theological disagreements. The United States Constitution prohibits our courts from adjudicating theological disagreements.

The group currently in possession of The Episcopal Church’s historic church building in Savannah is no longer part of The Episcopal Church. That group of individuals left The Episcopal Church and joined another church which is not nor has it ever been a part of The Episcopal Church. They have since apparently affiliated themselves with a different group which is not nor has it ever been a part of The Episcopal Church. They are not Episcopalians.
That group left The Episcopal Church and joined the Church of Uganda, taking our property with them in violation of the rules of the Church and Georgia law.
Their clergy and members of the church’s governing board all took an oath promising to uphold and follow the rules of The Episcopal Church but they have refused to do so.
We have had to resort to the courts to regain the property in which faithful Episcopalians have worshiped for generations.
The Chatham County Superior Court and the Georgia Court of Appeals have upheld longstanding legal precedent in our state and have confirmed that Christ Church Episcopal and the Diocese of Georgia are entitled to possession of the property that the departing group of individuals took with them when they decided to join a different church.

The law in Georgia has held for over 200 years that churches such as ours and many other non-congregational churches hold their property subject to the rules and mode of government of the church. That was the law when Christ Church became a parish in the Diocese of Georgia in 1823 and it is still the law today.

Churches such as The Episcopal Church (which has an elected representative form of government) and many other denominations require that the church’s property be held for the benefit of those who remain part of the denomination. Georgia law and the rules of such churches do not permit removal of property to another church or denomination.
The Georgia Court of Appeals’ ruling upholds the longstanding rule that churches such as ours have a Constitutional right to govern themselves as they choose without fear that their property will be taken away from those who wish to remain part of the church.
Congregational churches govern themselves differently and have local control over their property by virtue of the way they choose to govern themselves. The Court of Appeals’ ruling in our case does not change that.
However, the Court of Appeals has said that all of our property should be returned to us and that the group that left the Church has no right to it. The decision of the Georgia Court of Appeals has been appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court.
The individuals in possession of the Church’s property argue that our Supreme Court should cast aside longstanding Georgia law purportedly in the name of “religious liberty”. They ask the Court to ignore generations-old rules of the Church and the promises made by church members and clergy to uphold and follow those rules. They ask the Court to tell churches that they are no longer free to govern themselves as they choose. They ask the Court to rule that a group of local church members can deprive faithful Episcopalians and the Episcopal Church of their property. They ask the Court to deprive Christ Church Episcopal of its religious liberty because a group of people decided they wanted to join another church.
The individuals that left The Episcopal Church are certainly free leave and join another church but they may not take with them a church which was built as a Parish of The Episcopal Church and consecrated and set aside for divine worship in The Episcopal Church. They may not deprive faithful Episcopalians of property which may only be used for the mission and ministry of The Episcopal Church.
The Supreme Court of Georgia heard oral argument in May and we expect a decision before the end of 2011. Regardless of the outcome, we will remain what we as Episcopalians have always been. We will remain faithful witnesses in word and in deed to the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Diocese of Georgia says this is its theological premise:

Our Beliefs
We believe first and foremost that we can best come to know God, our creator, through a relationship with his son, Jesus Christ. The clearest statements of what we believe are to be found in The Apostle’s Creed and The Nicene Creed. These 2,000-year-old creeds (short statements of faith) are held to be true by billions of people around the world today. Beyond that, the best place to learn what Episcopalians believe is the Bible, which is the source of our theology, and the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). The BCP is not only the guide to our conduct of worship, but it is also articulates our theology.

Life of the breakaway Parish continues its appeal to friends and Parishioners to come to the aid of their cause, give money to the defense of their position as owners of the historic property. This YouTube shows their Rector Marc Robertson in that appeal.

Christ Church Savannah: Gospel Defense Fund

INTERVIEW WITH THE REVEREND MARC ROBERTSON

In its websites remarks of welcome, the Parish statement reads: Christ Church, the Mother Church of Georgia, has been an Anglican house of worship since 1733. We seek to know Christ by being a Bible-based congregation, we seek to grow in Christ by being a family-focused community of faith, and we seek to go in the name of Christ by being a mission-minded parish.

In a world of confusion and unbelief, Christ Church stands for the historic Christian faith. It is our joy and privilege to join God in His mission to expand His kingdom and raise up faithful servant-leaders to minister to the last, the least, and the lost of this world. We invite you to join us in this profound mission. If you live in Savannah, you are welcomed to be a part of this Christian family. If you are planning to visit Savannah, please join us for worship – we look forward to seeing you. – Marc Robertson, Rector

The Church website reports of the Rector:

Marc was born in Gadsden, Alabama, where he grew up in the Episcopal Church. He received his B.A. degree from the College of William and Mary, with theological studies at St. Mary’s Divinity School in St. Andrews, Scotland. He holds masters degrees from Westminster Theological Seminary and St. Luke’s School of Theology (Sewanee, TN), and a doctorate (D. Min.) from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. Marc has been rector at Christ Church since January of 1992. He and his wife Alice, and their two sons, Jon and Matt, live with a number of animals (mainly dogs) at his home south of the parish.

Email Marc, or call (912) 232-4131 x 102

Mexican Presbyterian Church splits with Presbyterian Church USA over Gay Clergy issue–139 year relationship ends

The PC(USA) is so “inclusive,” aren’t we? We are getting more “inclusive” by the day, which is why Christians around the world are pointing out that we have left the holy catholic church. I hope those of you who have brought this upon us are proud of all your accomplishments. I blame you for this, and for all the others to come.

–The Reverend Walter Taylor, Oak Island Presbyterian

Reverend Walter Taylor said this in a comment on the article published by The Presbyterian Outlook Today titled, “Mexican Presbyterian Church Votes to End 139-year old relationship with PC(USA).”

The National Presbyterian Church of Mexico (INPN) in response to a decision earlier 2011 by the Presbyterian Church in the USA ended their relationship with the Americans. PC(USA) decided to ordain gay and lesbian clergy—allowing them to be sexually active while serving congregations and the Church. There are two million members of the INPN. The vote held August 19 by its general assembly was 116 to 22. There are 2.3 members of the PC(USA) Church.

In a story published in The Presbyterian Outlook August 10, 2011 national writer Leslie Scanlon for the publication reports about the Mexican Presbyterian Church:

Before the assembly began, however, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction with the PC(USA) and its decision earlier this year to approve Amendment 10-A, which removed from the denomination’s Book of Order a requirement that those being ordained practice fidelity if they are married or chastity if they are single.

Presbyteries and sessions now will examine candidates for ordination or installation, with the standard being that a candidate’s “manner of life should be a demonstration of the Christian gospel in the church and in the world.” The new language also states that “governing bodies shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates.”

On Aug. 16, several representatives of the PC(USA) – including Gradye Parsons, the denomination’s stated clerk, and Hunter Farrell, director of World Mission – went to Mexico to meet with 11 leaders of the Mexican church and to discuss the Mexicans’ unhappiness and theological disagreement with the decision on 10-A.

“The discussion was frank and honest,” Farrell wrote in an e-mail following that meeting. “The disappointment of the Mexican church was expressed.”

Scanlon says the PC(USA) wants to continue working with the Mexican Church, anyway.

For the record: Jack Haberer is Editor/Publisher of Presbyterian Outlook whose purpose is to aid discussion of Church activities and ideas, and is funded by The Presbyterian Outlook Foundation, a religious and charitable organization with that purpose.

Review: More than you ever wanted to know about the movie ‘Courageous’

For a Church gathering, there are many areas of discussion, thought, and even Christian conversation the movie Courageous plays to and is good play as a movie to see. One of these areas comes to the science-vs.-faith discussion, for its worldview is Christian, and its means of portraying character and ways to live is based on religious moral tenants, mostly derived from the Old and New Testament. One area of worldview is the Christian demand that Christians see the world as it is, for its reality and for what is going on in their lives and life.

To this end the question of sociology and its science, the area of economic and other areas of modern ways of worldview, for how they form human lives plays a part. Is the cause of the fall of fatherhood, the rise of family disintegration and the declining if disappearing middle class the result of a poor economy? Is it the result of societal pressures, and norms, reacting to changes in the culture and society? This writer wants to explore the film’s worldview and emphasize the area of cultural and social sensibility portrayed in the religious community of this movie Courageous. Let us also look briefly at what kind of courage it takes for an individual, and a community, let alone a nation, to deal with decaying situations that are not only material, but moral, spiritual, and even value driven. Certainly, these are areas of the human heart, as is courage of men an area of the male heart. So the film says.

Finally, as a note in this introduction, let us if only briefly consider that many of the people and their values, though Biblically and religiously motivated, are colored by the class values of the American middle class. For this is a movie that the middle class, those who were middle class, and those who want to be or live its way of life in value see the world.

In the film “Courageous,” released September 2011, there are artistic artifices that caught this writer’s attention. The primary one portrayed by cultural and social sensibility, of even religious community, was reliance on the myth of the American middle class. Is there much of a middle class in America anymore, and significantly does story of the film in its fiction really make for a way of life that is both desirous to emulate as shown in the film; and is it even something relevant to the way American’s live today in the present economic and social realities? For this writer, the movies dramatic framework is a picture of the last phenomenon of the missing, not shrinking so much, middle class and its portrayal of a good life. Shall we call this an economic matter, rather than glance at the artistic vision that shows a 1950s way of wanting life to be in its post-World War II affluence.

The magazine, The Atlantic, explores this issue of the existence of an American middle class in their September 2011 issue, “Can the Middle Class be Saved?” by Don Peck. Maybe the film Courageous, an action adventure movie produced by the work of a Southern Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia (filmed in Albany, Georgia, too), with the help of friends and benefactors. They are responsible in great part for financing the million dollar production, could also hold a similar cry, “Can the Middle Class be Saved?” In this support by this large group of Churches, businesses, and people, we see an American dream. Nay, an American promise.

But more so, the movie about the father’s role in a family, and the promise to be a good father within the sight of God as part of a religious community, speaks to the moral shortcomings of American society today. After all, though a cultural property with a social statement, the film is really one founded in religious, Christian sensibility. The film wants and plans to emulate American cultural promise, not counter-cultural statement. The film admires and says the religious life is the middle class life, both in material style and in value sense. The middle class is here and now for this movie about American men and fatherhood. In short, the middle class exists and its American Christianity, for which it fights to engage and make model of its religious and Church community world, is attainable.

But for The Atlantic piece, it says America is more Plutocracy today (21st Century), than anything else. It is akin in the present national sense of eras, in the real America of today in the here and now America to two eras of the American past: The Gilded Age, and the Roaring Twenties.

What has this to do with the movie? It shows a kind of disconnect between what is in America today, and what has been and continues to be a cultural and economic American dream of a real middle class. It more than hints a middle class life is necessary to relationship with God, or at least the desired means of relationship.

Nonetheless, this movie is not a true propaganda film, nor does it spellbind the viewer to succumb to a sense that this is a Christian education film. The movie is a true moral story. That is a great strength; Courageous speaks to America today in these ways best.

The film speaks to the serious and real moral failings of the society today, portraying a positive sense of possibility, and offering male sensibilities of how to live one’s life in the family, and in society. Even the title speaks this message: Courage.

Though the film depicts physical courage by men in action it does not solely rely on this as the measure of manhood and courage. Testosterone alone is not what courage and bravery are about. An example of courage, military in kind albeit, is demonstrated by a recent winner of the Medal of Honor. For this is an honor given for bravery, honor, and a moral strength of courage in the face of fear and death in sacrifice for others. That’s the idea.

Here is The Los Angeles Times reporting on the American winner of a recent, and rarely received Medal of Honor:

A Marine sergeant will receive the Medal of Honor for bravery in Afghanistan from President Obama on Sept. 15, the White House announced Friday.
Dakota Meyer, 23, a scout-sniper from Columbia, Ky., fought through fire from enemy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades to help rescue and evacuate more than 15 wounded Afghan soldiers and recover the bodies of four American service personnel. The incident occurred Sept. 8, 2009, in a remote mountainous village during an hours-long firefight with Taliban fighters.
Meyer’s heroism is detailed in the book “The Wrong War” by Bing West, former Marine and former assistant secretary of Defense. West said that Meyer dominated the battlefield by fearlessly pumping rifle and machine-gun rounds into enemy positions during the rescue attempt. At the time, Meyer was a corporal, the most junior advisor in the firefight. Meyer is now part of the inactive ready reserve of the Marine Corps Reserve.