Commentary on Advent, Service 5

St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church

Adult Education Seminar

Considering

Peter Rollins’

How (Not) to Speak of God

(Paraclete Press, 2006)

Directed by

Dr. Roger R. Easson

Sunday, November 01, 2009

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

http://peterrollins.net/blog/

This is the website/blog put together for Peter by his publisher. It contains an

amazing archive of his work.  Highly recommended.

http://rollinsbedlam.blogspot.com/

This is a blog I am creating to go with this class.  It contains many interesting videos, interviews with Rollins, and my notes and thinking about this book.

ADVENT

This is a very unusual liturgical drama for Advent given its clearly mystical intent.  Rollins writes: “Advent was a Christmas gathering and thus employed the story of Mary’s pregnancy as a means of understanding the manner by which this truth of God is encountered and nurtured.  In an approach that parallels Mary’s experience of being touched by the power of God and experiencing God growing within her womb before finally giving birth to God (as an external reality) that results in God being nourished as an internal  reality which then radiates  from the individual as that which transforms reality (through the individual’s words and deeds).”

This is what Rollins called the Christ Event in an earlier chapter when he writes: “the faithful attempt to create a space where the Christ Event is encouraged to arrive both in themselves and in others. The religious individual tears out all the idolatrous ideas that have impregnated the womb of his or her being, becoming like Mary, so that the Christ-event can be conceived within him or her—an event whose transformative power is matched only by its impenetrable mystery” [41].

It is here in the Advent drama that we finally get to understand what he was getting at there.

Rollins continues to explain what he means by the Christ Event when he writes: “As this service explores the central message of Christmas, namely the incarnation of the Word, we look at how this Word is incarnated in our lives as we commit to a life of openness, confession and love.  As such the service was dedicated to creating an environment within which we would open ourselves up to the incoming of God, commit to nurturing the work of God in our lives and seed to enable this work to impact the lives of those around us [103].


This really feels more like Good Friday than Advent, what with the ashes and sack cloth. Then again the story of the devil and the priest sounds more like Halloween. So this is a somewhat confusing liturgical piece.  

Cast:

Narrator

Someone 1

Someone 2

Someone 3

Everyone