Tag Archives: Christianity

Someone is Stealing the Saints’ Parts of Europe

Of Ireland, at least, where a rash of thefts of saintly body parts has the police baffled.

The only thing creepier is imaging who might be buying them from the thieves, if the dean’s hypothesis is correct:

The latest in a series of such thefts involved the removal of the preserved heart of St. Laurence O’Toole, Dublin’s 12th-century patron saint, from the city’s historic Christ Church Cathedral. As there was no sign of forced entry to the cathedral itself, the dean of Christ Church, Dermot Dunne, initially believed the thief had probably hidden in the building when it closed on Friday evening, taken the artifact overnight and simply walked out the next morning.

“Maybe someone stole it to order; it certainly seems plausible,” Dean Dunne said Monday in an interview at Christ Church. “Or maybe a religious fanatic wants the relic and paid somebody to steal it.”

I know that (alleged) bits of Gautama Buddha are preserved in South Asia, but no one goes into keeping body parts like Catholic and Orthodox Christians. It’s all quite magickal.

The custom was well-advanced by the mid-fourth century, as Julian, the last Pagan emperor, was quite grossed out by it and often referred to Christian churches as charnel houses.

Aside from the Egyptians, most Pagan cultures of his day considered corpses to be polluting, full of miasma, and something to be gotten rid of — burned, buried, or sealed away in a sarcophagus (a word that literally means “flesh-eater,” since they were usually carved from limestone). And even the Egyptians did not stack mummies in their temples.

The last time I thought about saints’ relics was a couple of years ago when a priest was giving me and some colleagues a tour of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City.

We had walked around into the apse, and while a certain Italian Catholic lawyer (scholars of new religions will know who I mean) dropped to his knees in adoration of the Sacrament, I was studying two reliquaries holding (alleged) bone fragments of Mary Magdalene.

Each one had a tiny bone fragment smaller than the nail of my little finger, encased in a glass capsule that was in turn decorated and encircled with gold. These inner cases, smaller than a lipstick tube, were then held in a larger, glass-walled box affixed to a wall. At least I remember there being two small capsules, although this website page speaks of one (larger?) reliquary.

There are more relics in the altar.

Irreverently, all that I could think of was some monk long ago sitting at a chopping block with a big knife or cleaver.

Behind him is the abbot, telling someone, “Brother Anthony’s knife skills are superb. You should watch him dice an onion or cut up a chicken. We will have plenty of relics to distribute to the faithful this way, and they will show their gratitude with generous gifts.”

Meanwhile, what are they doing with the heart of St. Laurence O’Toole?

Learning about Pagans for the Purpose of Converting Them

Last month, I answered some questions from a reporter for a Christian news site.

He had such response that now he is on the Pagan beat. So I give you “A Peek at Modern Paganism, Part One” and “Part Two.”

Soon — wait for it — you meet that reliable figure, the ex-Pagan who found Jesus.

(Sorry, but there is a long history of fraud about that. One example here: John Todd. I mentioned Todd to the reporter, Mark Hensch, but Christian reporters rarely seem to investigate the claims of ex-Pagans on the lecture trail. Todd was brought down by Christian journalists, it’s true, but he is just one example of the type.)

Understanding such multiplicity, says former Santeria-high-priest-turned-evangelical-Christian-author John Ramirez, is vital to befriending and ministering to pagans. Christians need grace, compassion and mercy, he said, to connect with their pagan peers.

Interestingly, the next expert quoted is James Beverley, a Canadian whom I know slightly from academic study of new religious movements, in which he is active. But here he has his theologian hat on:

“Witchcraft ultimately fails in the mythic and legendary nature of its gods and goddesses,” Beverley writes in Nelson’s Illustrated Guide to Religions’ chapter on Wicca. “The Roman, Celtic, Nordic and Greek deities dwell only in the followers’ imaginations. The lack of historical trustworthiness concerning Artemis or Zeus or Diana or Isis is in direct contrast the historical nature of the Gospel accounts of Jesus Christ.”

Bottom line: be strong in your faith, learn to appreciate nature, and you can get close to the Pagans.

 

World Religions versus the Blue Bra Revolution

Washington Post writer Sally Quinn looks at photos of Egyptian soldiers beating an abaya-shrouded Muslim woman, and a light bulb goes on for her about major religions:

Why would men, particularly under the guise of religious belief, want to keep women down? Because they understand that women’s sexuality is something that they cannot live without, it is something that renders them powerless. Women can have babies, women can breastfeed, women are the lifegivers.

Sounds like much of the Pagan discourse beginning in the 1970s, if not earlier! Read more about her hoped-for “blue bra revolution.”

In related news, Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority is nervous.

For decades Copts have suffered attacks by Islamists who view them as “kafir”—Arabic for nonbelievers. But there is now a sense among Middle East experts that they have become more vulnerable since the revolution.

This year, mobs have looted and attacked Coptic churches, homes and shops throughout Egypt. Churches have been burned down, and one Copt had his ear cut off by a Muslim cleric invoking Islamic law.

Strong gains by Islamist parties in the recent elections have further raised fears among the Christian minority that they won’t have a place in the new Egypt.

An acquaintance of mine is married to an Egyptian Christian woman. Her parents recently came for what he said is a month-long visit — I see them around town with their daughter now and then. I am starting to wonder if they actually plan to go home or to seek asylum. Maybe they are weighing their options.

Last Yuletide News Bits

Re-purposed Santa figure, Pueblo, Colorado

• This is your brain. This is your brain on Christmas.

• “How the Lawyers Stole Winter”  — are we raising kids who can’t cope? No, it’s not Yule-related, directly. Indirectly, yes, I would argue. You have to embrace all of the wheel.

• No matter how “imagistic” it may be, Iraqi Christians are afraid to celebrate Midnight Mass. The current bunch of Islamists may succeed after 1,400 years of effort in chasing the last Arab Christians out of the Middle East. Expect them all in North America soon. (I have already met Egyptian Christians in a tiny town near me.)

• I was watching a re-run show hosted by travel writer Burt Wolf in which he reported that Christmas trees were promoted by 16th-century German Protestants who considered images of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the saints to be idolatrous and who wanted to replace them with something else. That is counter-intuitive enough that it might be right, and it matches what was going on elsewhere, such as England in the time of the boy king Edward VI. In that case, the Christmas tree does not qualify as a “Pagan survival,” at least not directly.

• And don’t forget Krampus coming to town.

Why I Feel Sorry for Christians at Christmas

So here it is, two days before Christmas, birthday of Christ the Savior, etc., and I am feeling sorry for the Christian clergy, at least some of them.

Along with Easter, this is their big religious holiday. The Incarnation of God—in their theology. And they have to beg people to put down the presents and turn off the flat-screen television and come to church.

“You don’t even have to get dressed up for the Savior of Humankind,” they cry. “You can come in your jammies!”

Forget the “War on Christmas,” that is a big concession right there. White flag, don’t shoot! We know the prezzies are more important, but can’t you just tie your bathrobe and come to church for a little while?

True, some of the Anglicans and Catholics and those Orthodox who observe December 25 try a little harder. And a good Midnight Mass on December 24th appeals to the “imagistic” rather than the “doctrinal” mode of religiosity. You remember it with your body, with all your senses—the darkness, the candles, the music, the physical presence of other worshipers.

(But the talky-talk Protestants and the “we don’t really commit to anything” Unitarians can’t go there.)

Or this:

We have a 4:00 p.m. Pajama Mass on Christmas Eve. It’s a service dedicated to and directed by children from the congregation and from the community. We have a very cool combination of the very elderly, who don’t like to be out late, and the very young.

Because church is mainly for the very young and the very old?

The other thought haunting some Christians is the whole “Pagan customs at Christmas” issue. A reporter for a Christian news site interviewed me just the other day about that.

What I did not tell him was this: Your whole ritual calendar is a mess. If we contemporary Pagans know anything, it’s calendars.

Consider that if Jesus was born when shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by night, he was born during lambing season—in the spring. His execution and resurrection also occur in the spring, during and after the Jewish festival of Passover (Pesach)—and its history includes the Jews in Egypt daubing lambs’ blood on their doors. There is this whole sheep thing going on.

So to avoid the spring-spring clash, the birthday is moved to the winter solstice—and I don’t care if the Christians copied Pagans or the other way around, really.

Mapping Jesus’ life on the annual cycle makes for an odd calendrical cycle. He is anticipated during Advent (late November-December), born at Christmas, shown forth at Epiphany (Jan. 6 in the West), killed on Good Friday, and resurrected on Easter Sunday. Then he hangs around for forty days, only to vanish on Ascension. After that, his disciples experience mystical illumination on Pentecost—celebrated a few days later.

And that is it—nothing for the next six months except various saints’ days, etc.—if you are in a liturgical church. For the talky-talk Protestants, there is not even that—in fact, not much after Easter.

Even in my Christian boyhood this arrangement struck me as poor planning. Why cram all the good stuff into less than half of the year?

The I-word: Idolatry

Two years ago at the American Academy of Religion, we had a Pagan Studies session with “idolatry” in the title. Sessions are described by posters on easels outside the meeting rooms, and I heard a few snickers from people passing in the corridor.

Inside the room, people were talking about statues, etc., as windows on the divine. One paper compared the ritual treatment, dressing, and so on of a Madonna in a Spanish village with a goddess image in Glastonbury.

At the  Get Religion blog, which examines the journalistic treatment of religion, there was some discomfort with the way a reporter in India wrote of an “idol” of Jesus that had been vandalized. To me it seemed that the word was used merely in a technical sense, but to the blogger it seemed defamatory: “For a Western audience calling a statue of Jesus an idol is thoughtless or a deliberately provocative statement — both have meanings bellow the surface.”

But I doubt if the original article was meant to provoke, merely to describe.

Meanwhile, here is a review of a new novel with this premise: “This is a sprawaling and subversively funny satire centered around two down-on-their-luck entrepreneurs who stumble upon the idea of reviving for-profit idolatry. Selling statues of household gods to the masses, and building a neo-pagan religion around it.”

I think that this has already been done, guys. Have you looked at the Sacred Source catalog lately? “Fair-trade statuary featuring ancient deities” — looks like they are avoiding the I-word too.

(I have blogged on related topics before. See “The Street of the Idol-Makers” and “Casual Labor at the New Age Trade Show.“)

Now there is a somewhat more sophisticated, more nuanced way in which the monothesists use “idolatry.” It is when they accuse people of putting lesser goals ahead of the Ultimate Goal, as they see it.

Here is Catholic blogger Elizabeth Scalia writing at First Things:

But I wonder if it is not the first and greatest sin named by Yahweh and given to Moses, that is most at fault: the sin of idolatry. We have loved ourselves so well; we have denied ourselves nothing and placed too much of what we love between ourselves and God; we have cherished mere things or other people; over-identified with ideas or ideologies and made an afterthought of God, who will not be mocked.

You can find essentially the same rhetoric from Muslims, merely substituting “Allah” for where Scalia, a few paragraphs down, writes “the Triune God.”

Here “idolatry” is not about whether material things can embody a divine presence, but it has become a metaphor for misplaced philosophical or spiritual priorities. I have less quarrel with that. But I still mistrust the implied devaluation of “the material”—not in the sense of a $4,000 wristwatch, but in the sense of the Earth around us.

Those Wacky Christians

• The devil makes them do that homosexual stuff. Oops, the bishops are showing me the door. Maybe they know something.

• From the “Let’s Return to the Pure Days of the Early Church” files, when even the shit of saints was sacred.

• Scheduling sex and saying “just” a lot. But not in the sense of “just do it.”

Aiiee, the Dominionist Burning Times Are Upon Us!

Kenaz Filan brings a little perspective: “In my experience to date (well over 20 years of same), every Pagan fraudster and exploitation-artist I have encountered has used ‘Christian persecution’ as a shield.”

And there is this:

“The prose is execrable: if the English language were Ed Hubbard’s dog, he’d be sharing a prison cell with Michael Vick.”

The snark is strong with this one. Read it all.

No, Not That Horned God

Celebrate your Christian faith with a touch of that ol’ Pagan mystique: the “Holy Shed.” The "holy shed" antler cross

That is “shed” in the sense of naturally shed deer or elk antlers, which some people like to collect for decor projects or for sale to be powdered for Asian men who have not yet discovered Viagra.

And here I grew up with the perception that Christianity stopped at the edge of town. With your cast-resin antler cross, it does not have to!

Christians’ Persecution Perplex

So there was some kind of big evangelical Xian pep rally in Houston, headlined by Gov., Perry of Texas, a possible presidential candidate, which is why that it is getting media attention.

Jason Pitzl-Waters watches it nervously from the minority-religious-rights perspective. Kallisti works it into a post on polytheism: “Powerful images and vengeful gods.”

The thundering irony is that the evangelicals see themselves as a persecuted minority in America, although they are willing to admit that Muslims are even more disliked.

The blogger linked, Bradley R.E. Wright, notes,

Similarly, somewhere along the line we evangelical Christians have gotten it into our heads that our neighbors, peers, and most Americans don’t like us, and that they like us less every year. I’ve heard this idea stated in sermons and everyday conversation; I’ve read it in books and articles.

There’s a problem, though. It doesn’t appear to be true. Social scientists have repeatedly surveyed views of various religions and movements, and Americans consistently hold evangelical Christians in reasonably high regard. Furthermore, social science research indicates that it’s almost certain that our erroneous belief that others dislike us is actually harming our faith. (emphasis added)

Why this need to feel like victims? Is it a hankering for the good old days of the 2nd century C.E. when they were persecuted (although not as much as they think)?

The Christians’ big mistake was when they stopped being at all “countercultural” and snuggled up to the emperor Constantine, who then used his power to intervene in their squabbles (see Council of Arles, Council of Nicaea.)

Jesus had little to do with kings, but things sure did change after that.

Soon there was no turning back. The Catholics adopted the imperial table of organization: Pope = emperor. College of Cardinals = Senate. Big church = city hall (basilica, lit. “royal tribunal chamber.”) In the Eastern Roman Empire, the Orthodox prelates generally were equally cozy with kings, right up through the  end of Czarist Russia in 1917.

(Muslims, of course, did not even go through much of a countercultural period, since Mohammed led armies, negotiated treaties, etc. Yet they have a martyr complex too.)

On the principle that cornered animals are dangerous, this self-image of being a persecuted minority not only “harms their faith” but is indeed a potential seedbed of trouble for non-Christians.