Earth Days

It was a busy weekend, but that's normal for Earth Day. Although our merry band pioneered (pun intentional) the Good Turn, its adoption by the District and Council is a mixed blessing. The powers that be decreed that the Good Turn should take place on the weekend of Earth Day, so we went down to Milagra Ridge between South San Francisco and Linda Mar to remove Scotch broom. There were fewer of us than I had hoped, but I assume the absent contributed to Earth Day elsewhere. Scotch broom has vivid yellow flowers and is much prettier than the bane of my early service project days, ice plant, but it grows quickly and the native animals and insects do not recognize Scotch broom as a suitable habitat. The natural enemy of Scotch broom, sheep (Scottish or otherwise), are not a good solution, since they would eat much more than the Scotch broom. I remember when I first saw Scotch broom in its native Caledonian habitat - it took a moment to remember that in these lands it was not a weed to be exterminated. The sheep, with their heavy wool coats and tendency to block the road, were a much greater threat to humanity.

The ridge was steep, although not forbiddingly so, and covered in both Scotch broom and poison oak. Certain members of our party, being more sensitive to poison oak, were not eager to charge into the thicket, much less rig a hammock and nap there. I'm not terribly sensitive to poison oak, so I was not greatly worried, but the GGNRA volunteers had magic outerwear called TYVEK suits. These suits reminded of hazmat suits without helmets, but they were made of paper, albeit a sturdy kind. The clearing took more energy than I had anticipated, but the results of our labor were satisfyingly visible.

After we had finished our share of weeding, we hiked to the cliff edge and ate lunch. We could see Linda Mar, the controversial golf course, and Pacifica in the distance. The tunnel through the hill below us was not yet open, but its presence prompted much conversation. Our return to the city ended a simple outing, but one that has inspired the attendees.

On Sunday, I went to church, where one of our own, rather than the absent pastor, preached the Word. Apparently I am more comfortable than she with Atonement theology, but the ability to disagree is a wonderful feature of my home church. The one thing that really bothered me, however, and this is not the fault of the church per se, since the words were Bob Marley's, was the reference to "the Daughter" in the communion hymn. I have no problem with emphasizing the maternal qualities of the Godhead - it serves as a reminder that God "the Father" is way of describing God's behavior so that our finite minds can grasp it - nor do I object to the nurturing, maternal qualities of Jesus, who, after all, compared himself to a mother hen, and the Holy Ghost always seems too abstract (for lack of a better term) to cause gender-bending chaos, but I cannot understand why anyone would describe Jesus as "Daughter." Provocation? Perhaps I am looking at this through a prescriptivist lens, when it is meant as a stimulation to discussion.

After church, I went downtown for a concert at Notre Dame des Victoires (I had forgotten about the plural article). I stopped at the church, but not to pray - I could not see the crowd thronging into the church for the concert. As it turned out, the concert was in the school auditorium, not the church proper. I had never been inside NDV before, and never before had I realized how cramped the facilities were for jocks (I was a bookish child and would have been fine).

Credo and Quechua

Recently, I went to a talk at St Dom's on changes in the English translation of the Mass (I always did wonder why the Catholic CHurch, which should know its Latin backwards and forward, translated the first word of the Creed "We believe"). All the talk of why the Creed uses "we" or "I" and how Christian know what they know made me think, and not just about the Creed itself. On Memorial Day, I took a road trip with a friend and a priest, a man of Quechua descent specializing in indigenous theology.

Now, Quechua is a tongue with both clusivity and evidentiality. Clusivity is a recurring linguistic feature of this blog; it's the difference between we = you and I (inclusive) and we = I, but not you. Inclusivity (and, I suspect, a desire to separate the Church from the "personal Jesus" Evangelicals) was the goal of the inaccurate translation of "credo" as "we believe". It seems to me that if the Nicene Fathers had intended the first person plural they would have used it.

They certainly chose to use it in the phrase "crucifixus etiam pro nobis" "He was crucified for our sake" (a benefactive!), but how is it rendered in Quechua? It happens that I don't read Quechua well enough to tell which form "muchurqa" is (the Creed is never a fair comprehension st, since one already knows what it says) - I know more about the verb forms than the pronominal ones. It could go either way - inclusive to indicate that God's plan of salvation is for all, or exclusive to indicate the authority of the Catholic church. If I want to know, I suppose I'll have to find a Quechua grammar and dictionary. I did find this link:
http://www.yoyita.com/Quechua/Rosario/Inini_credo.php

The other interesting feature is evidentiality, the mandatory marking of how you know what you know. These epistomological endings, I expect, would have an impact on the composition of the Creed - one of the reasons the Pirahã of the Amazon have not been converted is an unwillingness to belive in more than second-hand information. Some languages have more flexibility than others in evidentiality, and I believe that Quechua is on the harder end. I wonder what Aquinas looks like in Quechua!

The Third (Phrase About the Son of) Man

This morning, I attended church at Saint James Episcopal for the first time in quite some time. My absence on previous Sabbaths had not been out of sloth, but for various unavoidable causes; it seemed wise, nonetheless, during the life changes, that I assure the congregation that my absence in the next few months did not imply any lack of devotion to the institution.

I was listening to the service, I reached a revelation about something that has irked me for a long time, and irked me more than the sudden onset of scratchy throat this morning right before the first hymn began. The church at which I grew up, Saint Mary the Virgin Episcopal, which is neither Catholic nor attached to its neighboring building, Saint Vincent de Paul, used the following text during Eucharist: "Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again". My current church, on the other hand (in addition to many other modifications of the liturgy), uses this: "Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ is with us all". I have been meaning for years to ask one of the clergy about this change, but I always forget; now, however, I think that I understand.

It seems to me that the change in the third phrase stems from the ignorance of the masses of grammatical distinction that are subtle yet useful and an attendant miscomprehension of the intended theology of this part of the liturgy. The first phrase is indisputable among Christians (unless you happen to be some sort of neo-Docetist
- http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05070c.htm ),
but the difficulty arises (pun intended) in the English speakers' comprehension of the second phrase: "Christ is risen". Modern English congregants doubtless consider this a simple past, even if the phrase uses the dreaded passive. A speaker of Romance tongue, however, might analyze this phrase differently by distinguishing between "Christ has risen" and "Christ is risen". The former is the description of a past action without any necessary inference about the present, but the latter is the description of a present state dependent on a past action. The distinction between these two concepts largely determines the choice of "avoir" ("to have") or "etre" ("to be") as the complementary verb with a composite perfect in French; even in Latin, where the form of the two concepts is identical, a careful writer who wishes to make the distinction would use distinct "primary sequence" or "secondary sequence" for the verbal forms which follow in the subordinate clause.

Since "Christ is risen" is a description of a present state dependent on a past action, the tripartite temporal symmetry of the statement remains, and past, present, and future each recieve a sentence which they can call their own. "Christ is risen" is a statement about the present, not the past; the risen Christ has present power. The elimination within the English language of the distinction between the "avoir" and "etre" forms has prevented the less grammatically aware congregants from understanding this distinction, and the text comes to lack a Christological statement about the present. I cannot fault anybody for finding this lack unsatisfactory, especially on this day of Pentecost, because the essence of the Christian faith, as I see it, is the not the hope of future salvation, but the presence of Christ in this world right now through the members of his body. The replacement of "Christ is risen" with "Christ is with us all" places the weight of two-thirds of the tripartite division of time (present and future) upon one-third of the weakened tricolon; that one-third, moreover, deprives the statement of its element of future hope, and introduces a participatory element that the first two sentences, as well as the original third, lack. The orignal statement was explicitly and solely Christ-centered, and the results of the statement for believers implicit.