NCNYUMC.ORG | Shakespeare

What with all the uproar going on these days about the DaVinci Code, with the Vatican making a fool of itself in its reactionary stance toward the possibility that Jesus had married and produced progeny, whose descendants are alive today in France, and with the incredible advances in the studies of the many Gospels, indeed the whole Bible, which have been unearthed in recent years, right in the middle of all this uproar sits a paperback book called “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, which has some of its contentions ready to knock the socks off anyone who dares to read it.

The authors are Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. This book is one of those researched by Dan Brown for his novel on the DaVinci Code, and is chockablock full of all kinds of conclusions about Jesus and His times that should have brought the earth to a standstill back when it was first presented to the public.

The hardcover version of the book was published in 1983; this paperback version contains even more material than was available then.

Not to delay informing the reader: this book is filled with all kinds of speculations and findings about Jesus and His times. Not the least of the focuses is that concerning Mary Magdalene - she who early and often was portrayed as a prostitute who was brought into salvation by virtue of her relationship with Jesus…which remains murky.

Jesus married Mary Magdalene, or Mary of Migda, from a well to do family, the town being located on the eastern shore of the Galilee Lake. She was closer to Jesus than any of the Disciples, to the occasional chagrin of those guys, not to say jealousy.

The authors see Jesus as wrapped up in the Essene/Sicarii/Zealots movement, even to the point of arranging a fake crucifixion, and getting out of Dodge as soon as possible. There are reports of Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimethea, and others boarding a ship to flee to southern France, and establishing a Jewish/Christian set of communities therein.

In turn, those communities produce people who eventually make their way over most of Europe, including England, establishing families of mostly upper crust types, seeming to get ready for the takeover of most of those territories by Christian descendants of Jesus, and establishing a New Time.

Little or no mention is made of the Resurrection - in fact, given the scarcity of such materials in the Four Gospels, I am surprised that any mention was given.

As the reader may easily already see, there are opinions in this work that will jar long held beliefs. But - as I’ve said elsewhere, if inherited opinions cannot stand the light of day, or the heats from arguments, what point is there in any of it?

For one, I have found the authors to be scrupulous with their integrity and their statements of what they think they have found. As is usual with me, I continue to dig through these kinds of materials and emerge eventually with my faith in God intact, and my commitment to God through Jesus stronger than ever.

But it is absolutely fascinating reading, one that will take many hours to get through, and many more hours processing what has been read, and many more hours to work out approaches to one’s ministries.

I suspect this book is on the prohibited list not only of Roman Catholicism, but also the resurgent fundamentalists and evangelicals of our times. The reason I suspect this is because this approach does not walk around creeds and stuff in stocking feet. It simply says what it finds, and leaves the reader to struggle with it all.

Fascinating reading; fascinating work of the Spirit after you’re through with the reading. The book is published by Dell. I almost caved in here to say that the fundies/evvies/orthos want to tell the publisher and the authors to go to Dell.

Some Speculations

I’m writing this section on a balmy Thursday morning in mid-June, in Mexico, New York, which is my retirement haven, after being blown out of Florida by eight (8!) hurricanes in two years. Our daughters and friends wanted us back north for our own protection, let alone their peace of mind. So here we are.

I found in Florida that the kind of speculation and fun I like to exercise with the Holy Bible and the Christian Church in general that is normal for us northerners draws little but frowns and disapproval in the south. And that is truly sad: for if there is one issue that Jesus constantly presents as a Jewish male, a dedicated man who searches the dimensions of His own soul regularly through the disciplines of prayer and the continual reaching out to those who are broken, outcast, hopelessly sick, the insane, those socially hated, like the Samaritan people of central Israel, it is humor.

Once you get between the lines of the Gospels, you hear the laughter - sometimes quiet chuckles, sometimes outright belly laughs, but always that bubbling sense of being alive in God’s Presence that produces the tastes and smells of the goodness of life even in the worst of conditions.

I spent an eight year stretch while in Florida volunteering twice a week to deliver family life lectures at an United Methodist inner city effort in Tampa to try to provide shelter and counseling for families that had hit bottom. That was fascinating work, and it was encouraging to watch the people absorb the lessons, and make them their own. The issues of Erikson’s Eight Stages Of Ego Development; the issues involved in trying to raise children as a single parent - child discipline and one’s personal disciplines being the keys in this; how to do stepfamily stuff (I was the manuscript editor for the national breakthrough book on stepfamilies by Elizabeth Einstein - “The Stepfamily: Living, Loving And Learning”). It won the top prize from the American Psychological Association the year it was published.

I had also worked out as part of my aborted Ph.D. thesis at Syracuse University a portrait of “How A Marriage Matures, Stagnates Or Breaks”, given initially as a paper to the American Association Of Marriage And Family Therapists years ago. Presenting that paper to the broken families in Tampa was always an exercise in wonder and gratitude because for the first time in their lives, the adults saw something they could put their hands on, and use immediately in their own circumstances.

I also lectured on adolescents and adolescent suicide, which drew wiggly responses from the adolescents in the audiences, but which gave great comfort to their parents who were also present.

In keeping with the first article of this page, I have to affirm that when these lectures were presented there was always a lot of laughter, of liveliness, of mutual sharings going on the audience, sometimes to the point where I had to stop giving information, and let them work out their issues as we waited. To me, this represented the Presence of God, of the Spirit of Jesus animating the relationships there.

The whole thing was worse than preaching in that it took two days for me to recover from any given lecture. The lectures ran about and hour and a half to two hours.

As our time to come north arrived, the Board of Directors of the site came to me and offered me the post of directing the program for the whole institution. I would have had three Ph.D. candidates to assist me, and the charge was to develop a counseling setup and a teaching setup. It was with great reluctance that I had to turn down the offer. Mrs. Halse simply could not get on without my constant presence.

But, they did find another person to do the same tasks, and the whole thing was launched very well. I feel very good about the whole effort and my time there.

What I’m trying to share in this section is my sense of the Presence of the Spirit of Jesus - that which continually is resurrecting in life, and which we celebrate at the holiday called “Easter” - as part of the calendar year. To my eye, mind and spirit, that Spirit of Jesus is as dependable as weather. It is so dependable that I never cease to be astonished when I run into clergy people who have no grasp of that kind of experience, and go about bad mouthing the institution of the church without having anything to offer the institution that will enable the Spirit of Jesus to do its dependable resurrecting among themselves.

As I have found out, much of the institution we call “church” has groans and wounds, to be sure, but it also has more than its share of clergy who have missed the boat when it came to understanding the nature of spiritual pilgrimage to God as being the foundation of their lives and ministries.

This is the part of the church that I have had the most trouble with over the years, because that attitude always seems to draw clergy who are centered in the exercise of power, rather than the exercise of the grace of God which Jesus taught.

Such clergy always seem to be arrogant in the exercise of themselves; they are always aggressive, even belligerent; they have very high opinions of themselves; and they cannot hear the pains and wounds of others very well, if at all.

Once this type of clergy gets installed in the institution, the spirit of the institution suffers, and slowly leaches away over the doorsills, and through gaps in the institution, until at last, no one trusts anyone else, and there is little or no authentic “fellowship” amongst the clergy.

As an example of how the point gets missed, I am in sort of a continuous debate locally in Mexico, New York with Christian men who get together for coffee in the morning during the week.

Many of these folks are Roman Catholic, and it wasn’t long before I was drawn into sharing my views on the issues of Catholic priests and pedophilia, of clergy celibacy, and so on.

My viewpoint about sex and the clergy was straightforward: in Martin Luther’s time, a major issue was clergy excess sexually. When Shakespeare’s wrote that line, “Get thee to a nunnery…” he was reflecting the clergy sexual excess of those days, when a nunnery was viewed as a whorehouse.

So I shared that tidbit with the group, and then went on to note that the Vatican’s response to the excess and its damage morally to the whole church was to institute clergy celibacy. That was 400 years ago. The Counter Reformation.

Now, the Vatican is faced with not only with the clergy pedophilia issues worldwide, but also that about half of its clergy worldwide are gay. Let alone those who are heterosexual.

So I said to this little group, celibacy hasn’t worked either, so that leaves marriage among clergy; it leaves gay relationships among clergy (which have been going on since Hector was a pup), and, if desired by the clergy in question, that leaves a non-coercive celibacy possibility, relieving the institution of having to spend all that time, effort and money necessary to operate a spy system.

The last piece I read on this issue noted that among Catholic laity in America, over 80% are in favor of married clergy. But apparently, this means nothing to the Vatican, which with its new Pope, Benedict XV, has firmly turned its back on reasonable and informed possibilities to consider, and is trying to clamp down on the clergy who get involved in such matters.

One problem they have is that the American seminaries are crowded with gay students aiming to become priests of the church. Over half of all priests in the church are gay. So one becomes leery of statements about cleaning out the seminaries and the priesthood of such sexual expressions.

In Ireland, six of the eight national seminaries there are closed, and the other two are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. This arrives out of the national disgust with the pedophile priests who have been practicing their wares for years without let or criticism.

To make matters worse, the priesthood as it is constituted is emptying out. In the Central New York area, for one example, the maximum number of Catholic priests who were in pulpits was 366 just a few years ago. This year, the number is less than 100, and some of those are ill, or retired, or on the edge of retirement. That means closure of churches, which is painfully happening.

There was mixed reaction amongst the Catholic men. One went so far as to say that we can’t fool around with dogma; others were uncomfortable, but acknowledged the truth of what I was saying. All shared an inner misery of the spirit that the church had allowed itself to get into such a mess in the first place. Their love for the church remained intact, although battered.

In our own United Methodist Church, the issue largely is the usual marriage breakups and strains that go mostly unnoticed until a lot of damage has been done, making it more difficult to repair. Along with this is the matter of the loneliness of the clergy of our church.

That is, the virtual absence of an authentic sense of Christian fellowship among the clergy, and this in turn, points to the matter of the emotional distance between the pastors and the leadership. Not all that much is being done about this issue.

When I pursue the question of why this inattention to such an obvious wound, I’m left with silence, and more silence. From here, it looks as if some of the leadership is just not ready to listen to criticism and worries, and feel threatened by same.

Too, since there are no easy answers to the question, that means that to try to tackle the matter is to get into endless work, much anxiety and spent energy, all without any guarantees that anything workable will emerge from all the effort.

But of all the recommendations that spring to, none are more threatening than those involved the issue of the disciplines of prayer life. I don’t know why this should be the case, except that the leaders in question have never tried it for themselves, and thus are in no way amenable to looking at the possibilities of inaugurating a rather large effort among the clergy.

In the military, it has long since been found that the reason why a soldier will risk death and/or mutilation in combat to rescue a “mate”, or “buddy”, or “friend” has nothing to do with politics, or even war itself. Rather, the reason is because the two had deliberately built a relationship with one another, a practice the American Department of Defense has had in place since the discoveries of American prisoners of war betraying one another while in captivity by the North Korean and Chinese armies.

It is but a short step to ask the question, ”Are we, as United Methodist clergy, not at war?” War with the fundamentalists and their friends; war with the national government; war with ignorance and exploitation; war with myopic visions of the possibilities of the grace in God in our lives; war with those who think war the only way to live; war with those who deliberately choose scapegoats from the gay people;
war with those who would eliminate science from the educational curricula of children; war with those who refuse to treat women as equals, with all the rights involved; war with those who wish to return African American people to their previous slave status; and so on and on and on.

My point is direct and simple: if we are at war, why aren’t we in a such trusting relationship with one another that when one of us falls wounded, there will always be someone there instantly to minister to the wounds involved?

And the answer is likewise direct and simple: because there is no trust amongst us.

It is to ponder, and to pray.

Frank A. Halse, Jr. (ret)
15 Kimberly Lane
Apt. A2D
Mexico, New York