Take care also, that no mouse

An Instruction to priests before the divine and
holy service. By our Father among the Saints,
Basil the Great, Archbishop of Caesarea in
Cappadocia, how it behooves a priest to serve
with a deacon.

Give heed to thyself, O priest,
to all that thou wouldst teach.
Guard the ministry which thou
hast received, that thou mayest fulfill
it. For not to an earthly ministry
art thou committed, but a
heavenly; not a human service, but
an angelic one. Haste thou to present
thyself before the Lord not as
an husbandman who is ashamed,
but as one who rightly divideth the
word of His truth. Never stand at
the assembly while bearing enmity
toward anyone, lest thou drive the
Comforter away. On the day of the
assembly quarrel not, neither argue,
but rather pray and read in
private until the hour of the service.
Guard thyself from evil
thoughts, insofar as thou art able.
Moreover, stand with fear before
the holy altar, without looking
around at anyone else, and do not
abbreviate thy prayers with haste.
Make no distinction of persons,
but rather look to the King Who is
present before thee, lest, being a
respecter of persons, thou givest
the Holy Body where it ought not
to be given. Make thyself worthy
of the rules concerning priests,
and do not serve together with
such as reject those rules. Watch
therefore, how thou standest; how
thou ministerest; how and to
whom thou givest [Communion];
and how thou keepest [the Holy
Gifts.] Take care that thou not forget
the Lord’s command: Give not
that which is holy to the dogs. Do
not be seized by fear of men; do
not betray the Son of God into the
hands of the unworthy. Be not intimidated
by the mighty of the
earth, nor even by him that
weareth a royal diadem; be not
afraid in such an hour. Watch how
thou givest the Gifts to them that
wish to receive Them in their
homes. See thou, I have nothing.
See that thou not give [the Gifts] to
such as are forbidden by the divine
canons [to receive Them] for they
are reckoned as pagans, and woe
to those who give them [Communion]
before their conversion.
Take care also, that no mouse or
any such thing touch the Divine
Mysteries. Do not by negligence
let them get wet or mouldy, nor
may they be handled by those not
in holy orders. Keep these rules
and others like them, and thou
wilt save thyself and those in thy
charge. (From the Sluzhebnik of the 5th
year of the Patriarchate of Joseph).

... among some of the great Greek and Latin Fathers, men, like him, steeped in the Greek and Roman cultural inheritance, there were those who, like him, observing the mast and its sail-yard, pondered the matter deeper. They saw that the ship, the mast, the voyagings, the odysseys and argosies, the perils and ordeals that were part and parcel of the classical tradition, could and should be taken as typic of the Church's voyaging. They had a perception of the vessel of the ecclesia, her heavy scend in the troughs of the world-waters, drenched with inboard seas, to starboard Scylla, to larb'rd Charybdis, lured by persistent Siren calls, but secure because to the transomed stauros of the mast was made fast the Incarnate Word.

All this: the barque, the tall mast, the hoisted yard, the ordeals of the voyage, has in various ways filtered down through the centuries. It could not very well be otherwise for, after all, there is but one voyager's yarn to tell.

True, many, I suppose most, of the formative theologians and pastoral figures in the Church appear to have had a decided disinclination to admit or at least to employ the foreshadowings and analogies other than those found in the sacred Hebrew deposits.

But in the long run and certainly for us today it is impossible not to see the validity and rightness of Gregory of Nazianzus, of Basil of Caesarea, of Gregory of Nyssa, of Clement of Alexandria, of Ambrose of Milan and of various other less known figures in perceiving that much in the Odysseus saga (and other classical deposits) had correspondences in the voyaging of the Christian soul and in the argosy of the Son of God.

... saw, none the less, amidships the image of the same salvific Wood. And not the yarded mast only, but the planking and timbers composing the vessel, so of the chief timber, the Keel.

- David Jones, An Introduction to The Ancient Mariner in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings

What would the church's practices have to look like?

What if the church unwittingly adopts the same liturgical practices as the market and the mall? Will it then really be a site of counter-formation? What would the church's practices have to look like if they're going to form us as the kind of people who desire something entirely different - who desire the kingdom? What would be the shape of an alternative pedagogy of desire?

Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate, it is the rituals and practices of the mall - the liturgies of mall and market - that shape our imaginations and how we orient ourselves to the world. Embedded in them is a common set of assumptions about the shape of human flourishing, which becomes and implicit telos, or goal, of our own desires and actions. That is, the visions of the good life embedded in these practices become surreptitiously embedded in us through our participation in the rituals and rhythms of these institutions. These quasi-liturgies effect an education of desire, a pedagogy of the heart. But if the church is complicit with this sort of formation, where could we look for an alternative education of desire.

James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (2009)
p 25

Edwin Muir

I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two day's journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time.

Many of us will have sympathy for such a feeling of being out of sync....

The Transfiguration

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those entangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
It might have held forever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.

But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted, unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice. In our own time,
Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.
Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified,
Christ the discrucified, his death undone,
His agony unmade, his cross dismantled -
Glad to be so – and the tormented wood
Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner or young Eden,
And Judas damned take his long journey backward
From darkness into light and be a child
Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal
Be quite undone and never more be done.