fathers

Of course, my friend wrote me back to protest that her background was not Greco-Roman but Cossack. Ah, but of course! Must I assume that all who speak English have the same background as myself? Her immediate family background is Roman Catholic and Orthodox. I turned back to unraveling my story to see what had gone wrong in the passed-down narrative that made so many of us want to escape. A million things must have crossed my mind as to how we are products of so many people. Where did the line between the Irish fathers and the Roman Catholic fathers and later the Reformers merge in my story? Does it matter? I think they left a dysfunctionality in us from the theological wars. I saw some very interesting things that I will now have to sort out. More from my notes to this friend:

There was domination later of Rome who made us shed our story and take theirs instead. My other “fathers” were physically related, as I am the 10th gr-granddaughter of famous Reformers in New England. I think they maybe missed the trail of the story, having focused on Reforming the church in captivity. This could explain a lot of my desire to bolt and run.

Suddenly I had an epiphany about the family of God and couldn’t wait to tell my friend. The following are the rest of my notes. (I told you they were pretty raw and ragged!):

Say, I’m reading up on Christianity in Britain and seeing some things. You know, in the natural, you obey your parents–not somebody else’s parents. You even obey them over your aunts and uncles. In the spirit realm, I should think that would also be the norm.

Was reading about St. Patrick, St. Columba and St. Aidan, and realizing that they are really the spiritual fathers over the area my people are from …

So Britain was Christianized before Rome got hold of them and turned Sts. Paddy and Columba into Roman Catholic saints. But here is the interesting part…once Rome exerted pressure over England (not so much over Ireland at this time), then it was like someone else’s father telling people what to do. Do you see the implications? But…once that happened and there were other believers coming out of that, the thread of Rome did somewhat merge with Britain’s.

So…now Rome had put a ripple in the family storyline and brought in stories not of the tree, thereby inventing a family “genealogy” not their own. The children were not merely adopted, but they were stolen from rightful fathers. …

Now of course, we have to love people of other lines. They have their own valid stories to tell. And of course, as families you receive others into your home and you receive their stories, but they aren’t YOUR story. …

So, I love St. Francis and he’s affected my “tree” through the ripple that Rome has left. He’s part of my story, but he’s not properly my “father”. See where I’d coming from?

Anyway, I believe as I read along that even the Germans had Irish monks as “fathers”– but this is not a national/social/racial pride deal for the Irish. Likely, some of the “Irish” monks were really from Gaul.
I’m anxious to learn more about the other church histories where my people came from to get the full idea of how the natural progression should have been. I believe that had Basil the Great not existed and had all the popes not existed, I would yet be talking about Jesus Christ.

But had Patrick or Columba not existed, who knows? This has interesting implications. Certainly had the Apostles not existed we would neither of us be talking about Christ. Our areas of the world have something to do with which Apostle(s) we “descend” from. …

Psa 68:6a God setteth the solitary in families:

One organized church I know of that really comes close to what I think I see of the early church is the Orthodox Church. There are some other disqualifiers, which I won’t go into just now for the sake of brevity. I decided to visit the local OC one day and found out that the major difficulty for me was culture shock and the inability to keep track of who was doing what next. I met a few people who managed to overcome this. It does raise the question of how a small ethnic body can live so long in a new country and fail to reach out to the prevailing culture. On the other hand, it stands to reason that they will preserve the ways they know because it has been handed down to them since old. The beauty of being Greek and Orthodox is that there can be no question of who their spiritual fathers are. Their story is an unbroken line, unlike the story of much of Europe and other parts of the world. But it is significant, because the Lord says He sets the solitary in families – not church meeting halls.

Much is made in some places of Apostolic Succession, and though I believe these people when they say they have an unbroken line of bishops, I cannot find a biblical mandate for this as a litmus test of true church-worthiness. One would think the rest of us are all bastards, but I think it better to say that some of us do not know who our fathers in the faith were. Yet we cannot say we have no fathers going back to the beginning, for we would not be having these conversations if a line of people had not begotten us in the spirit. I will even go so far as to say that if we each knew our successive line of spiritual begottenness, we would find that we all trace back to one or more of the Apostles. I was hoping my years of genealogy research would not go to waste, and apparently they haven’t. Such a thought would not have crossed my mind had I not been keenly aware that all families in the earth are old, though a few smug individuals think they have the pre-eminence in old families.

Only recently while learning more about the Northumbria Community did I give a lot of thought to the early church in Europe before most of it became Roman Catholic. Finding names for the European churches becomes tricky, as they were autonomous, stretching from Turkey to Ireland. Some refer to this broad collection as the “Celtic Church”, though not all were Celts. There is some basis for this name, given that the Irish churches evangelized huge parts of the world. I think of the term “Celtic Church” as a loose descriptor more than anything else. I’ve done a lot of research on the Web and my impression is that the name is up for grabs by a lot of people who make it what they want. I know of one Celtic site run by people who are essentially Calvinist Reformers — I don’t know why they weren’t satisfied being Baptists or Presbyterians. I found another with a fascination for knights and ladies (what has this to do with the Body of Christ?) and many other strange forms of church.

Nevertheless, I had to take the Northumbria Community’s research into their Celtic past seriously. They have done a lot of footwork, thus saving me the headache. They are located in the north of England, in the area connected with well-known saints like Patrick, Columba, and Aidan. Many confuse St. Patrick and the Celtic Church with a strictly Irish Church. This thinking is too limited, in my opinion. Since the topic I’m addressing can be very complicated, I will attempt to use my own heritage to illustrate the connection between culture and the narrative of our organic spiritual lives.

I bought the book, Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northumbria Community, to see what these people had to offer. I found myself strangely unable to identify as completely with their founding saints as they did. I wondered why and then realized that part of the reason is that I’m not living in the actual land of these people as they are. My family has undergone the resulting culture shifts of living in the New World. Their story is partly my story but not entirely. I discussed these findings with a friend and will share here some of my notes (I said they might be a bit raw/rough and they are…) In fact, I was trying to discover God’s design in the way we come about our faith organically.

I first began by debating the possibility that our traditional church meeting styles, which so many simple churchers detest, might actually have been indigenous to part of Europe even though it was imposed on the whole by Constantine. Perhaps it naturally works better some places than others. The Romans had their meeting halls and the Vikings had their mead-halls. How could the idea of meeting in halls instead of houses be totally foreign to all? I wrote to a friend:

The truth is, we ARE descendants of much Greco-Roman culture. Those were the first Gentiles that Peter and Paul went to. As I was thinking of my own background, it’s Viking/Celtic/Germanic…what could I use from that culture? There was NO Viking church culture originally, as I know it. all my Viking ancestors (and believe me, I’ve traced them) were all pagan Odin worshipers until they became French and then English. I can, at best, only borrow the culture of my mother’s forbears in Scotland and Early England. That would loosely be the “Celtic” church which is much like Orthodoxy only in smaller groups. K– and I talked about the Celtic monastic communities that St. Patrick was a part of. Well, it’s something to think about.

What I discovered, to my great surprise, is that although I am not very Irish by most people’s estimation, I probably owe more to St. Patrick than many of the Irish. My father’s family name traces back to a tiny hamlet in York (lines have been redrawn to put it in Lancashire). It is fairly near Northumbria. Part of my mother’s family hails from the Scottish Lowlands — we are from Scott of Buccleuch. Although they were Scots, they were originally Irish who later pushed into southern Scotland long after Patrick evangelized the Emerald Isle. In fact, he set up operations in northeast Ireland, within what was probably their homeland. More emissaries left Ireland for Iona and the North of England. Later they turned to the the south of England. Clearly, some of my ancestors were Christianized before the coming of Roman Catholicism to the isles. My people were in the right places at just the right times to include these as spiritual fathers: Patrick, Aidan, Cuthbert, Columba.

DNA studies have revealed that English populations share nearly identical DNA as Ireland. It is essentially Celt; the Germanic has been far overblown. I see it now. My fathers are not the fathers of Roman Catholicism at that point in time. They were the saints of the Irish church whose spiritual roots derive from the Desert Fathers of Egypt. (Alexandria, here I come.) Even my father’s family from Germany was likely evangelized by Irish church emmissaries (some of whom weren’t actually Irish). I have obviously found my earliest European “fathers” of the faith. Easier than I thought. I told my friend:

We don’t all have exactly the same line of “fathers” in the faith, though they all tie back somewhere to the beginning. The Lord sets the solitary in families because it is families who share their experiences….musing here.

[Continued]

1 Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth!
2 I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
3 things that we have heard and known,
that our fathers have told us.
4 We will not hide them from their children,
but tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might,
and the wonders that he has done. [Psalm 78, ESV]

Recently, I told a friend that I have come to appreciate the story of the Passion as the central part of an intentional service. Being raised in a Protestant background, I have sat through my share of lectures, lectures, lectures. There is nothing that compares with the narrative passed down of the Lord’s Passion and what that means to us. It is the opening chapter of the story of the Church, to which has been added stories of saints through the ages. There is only one Church in heaven and earth, comprised of all the saints who have ever lived. This is where community and persons meet — our stories added to theirs.

But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels,
To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, [Heb.
12:22-23]

The institutional churches usually limit their concentration to either the community story (e.g., Roman Catholic) or the personal one (e.g., Evangelical “personal testimony”). Why can’t we have both? I think we can have both just as surely as we can have intentional worship and organic spiritual life. They are all the heritage of the Church. The Church does not know its own heritage so it wanders like an orphan in the wilderness. It’s time to wake up and know that we come from spiritual fathers whose story belongs to us and to whom we add our own story.

We share the passion of Christ; His story is our story. Paul viewed his own suffering as a continuation of the suffering of Christ, that the Church might be built up:

Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church: [Col. 1:24]

Jesus also said:

The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master. [Luke 6:40]

The way of our testimony is the way of Christ. We are his witnesses on earth that we know Him and are known of Him. And further, Paul tells us:

For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread. [1 Cor. 10:17)

Put these together. It begins to make sense. Our tearing is the sufferings that fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ…for his Body’s sake, which is the Church. We are added to the bread that is Him… A friend of mine reminded me of Amish friendship bread where one person makes a starter out of which come multitudinous loaves of bread when passed around. (Remember when Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes?) My first thought was something my aunt taught me years ago about the reason wine is to be preferred over grape juice for communion. Wine has spirits that continually reproduce much like the yeast in Amish bread. It represents the eternal life of Christ.

The point is that we, as members of the Body, have stories to add to the parables and dark sayings of old — things that the Lord has done for us that will not be added to the record until we tell of them. Like yeast and spirits, one person’s testimony is the starter for another. The individual story must be understood in the context of the starter story. The narrative is preserved and treasured in the community life, but it is developed in the personal life. We must have experiences that speak to our hearts alone but we must also have a story to share with those who have no story.

In the next post, we will look at the how-to of passing down the story and we will examine our spiritual roots. (They may not be what we think.)