A new site called My God’s Facebook is growing rapidly with a membership of over 25,000 already after increasing publicity from February this year. It follows a Facebook-style format and possibilities as a “meeting place for those who believe, and those who do not, and the curious.” I am enthusiastic about all the new ventures of making connections between the Christian Good News and contemporary internet – and this looks like a fascinating and useful addition to the available options. In the comments, those who have participated there might like to comment, others might even add other resources you know of. Let us also pray for these types of sites. Such sites can also become praying virtual communities.
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I have created this chart to help clarify how the Lent and Easter Seasons fit into the year. This period forms a quarter of the year. The forty days of Lent is an approximate tenth or tithe of the year. The fifty days of the Easter Season is approximately a seventh of the year – it forms the great Sunday of the year. It is concluded by the Day of Pentecost – from the Greek word for fifty. Also called Whitsunday – possibly from the French word for eighth Sunday (Whitsunday is the eighth Sunday of the great Season of Easter).
All days in my table are inclusive.
This period effectively of 96 days moves around a certain section of our calendar year by year.
The three days (inclusive) here refers to the “three days” Christ is in the tomb. The Triduum celebration is now more generally a reference to the Maundy Thursday until the Easter Vigil celebration.
The 40 days fast is preparing for the 50 days feast. You can accept the invitation to the 50 days here. Invite others.
Let us pray in silence for grace to keep Lent faithfully.
pause
Almighty and merciful God,
you hate nothing that you have made
and forgive the sins of all who are penitent;
create in us new and contrite hearts,
so that when we turn to you and confess our sins
we may receive your full and perfect forgiveness;
through Jesus Christ our Redeemer
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God now and for ever. Amen.
A reflection on this Ash Wednesday collect/opening prayer is found here
A reading from the gospel according to Matthew Chapter 6 beginning at verse 1.
6:1 “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
2 “So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.
3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,
4 so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
5 “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.
6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
16 “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.
17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face,
18 so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal;
20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.
21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Ash Wednesday – A Service for the Beginning of Lent
A few simple suggestion during Lent
What is Lent – especially translating it to the Southern Hemisphere
Some ideas for Lent:
- Tweet less; Facebook less; blog less
- Pray more; read more; meditate more
- Do less; go to less meetings; have less meetings at church
- spend more time with friends, with family, with those you find difficult
- Go out less; have less/no coffees; drink less/no wine
- Give away the money you save
- Give away the money you save plus (##)%
- visit the sick; write letters; start a journal
Add your reflections on the collect/opening prayer; your thoughts on the gospel reading; your ideas for Lent – in the comments section
“Shrove” is the past tense of the verb “shrive” – “to obtain absolution for oneself by confessing and doing penance”:
God of infinite mercy,
grant that we who know your compassion
may rejoice in your forgiveness
and gladly forgive others
for the sake of Jesus Christ our Saviour
who is alive with with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God now and for ever.
Amen
In French this is Mardi Gras – “fat Tuesday” – the feasting before Lenten fasting. A time of “carnival” [The derivation of the word "carnival" is uncertain. Possibly it originates in the Latin carne vale, meaning "to farewell meat" or even "to say goodbye to the flesh". Others posit that its origin lies in the Italian carne levare, meaning "to remove meat". The Oxford English Dictionary has that "Carnival" is derived from Latin carnem levare (removal of the meat) or carnem laxare (leaving the meat).]
In Northern Springtime, I presume that, in order to have chicks etc. one must leave the eggs with the hen to hatch. One stops eating the eggs during this time – Lent. And can start eating them at Easter time – the origin of Easter eggs. In the quaint manner of liturgical developments, not eating eggs during Lent means one gets rid of all the eggs before Lent! Hence, the development of Pancake Tuesday – of using up all our eggs by eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.
This is the last day of the “Alleluias” until Easter. This day may even involve the burying of the Alleluia.
You can put a badge for Lent on your blog or website – the HTML is provided here.
Ash Wednesday – A Service for the Beginning of Lent
A few simple suggestion during Lent
What is Lent – especially translating it to the Southern Hemisphere
First Sunday in Lent February 21 reflection from the collect/opening prayer
For communities that follow a catechumenal process in which Lent is central:
Lenten preparation (catechumenate) receiving the Lord’s Prayer (catechumenate) receiving the creed (catechumenate) enrolment for baptism (catechumenate)
You can also join the facebook Easter event for which, in Lent, we are preparing. As the first comment there says so well: “The Great Feast after the Great Fast. What a difference an e makes!”
Please add any suggestions for Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, or the start of Lent in the comments.
Today, Bill Warner became the 50,000th follower of Liturgy on Twitter. And if you understand how twitter works: @Liturgy is included in nearly a thousand lists!
I don’t know if there is a “typical” follower of @Liturgy, Bill has had nearly four decades of experience in the computer industry, with the last two decades as a CEO. His service to the community include board directorships in the Association for Corporate Growth, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Cooperación Ortopédica Americano Nicaragüense and the Triangle Community Foundation’s Entrepreneurial Partnership. Liturgy, this site and blog, the twitter site, and the facebook page, are all about making connections between positive, healthy, intelligent spirituality and the various ordinary and extra-ordinary lives we all lead. I was moved and encouraged by a recent comment in the good discussion on the value of the NRSV:
I enjoy your blog immensely. I only started reading it a few months ago, but it has become one of those blogs where every article is a must-read. For a non-liturgical Protestant seeking more liturgical worship, your blog has been a wonderful find. Thank you for providing this excellent resource.
Thanks to all of you for your support and encouragement.
The dark side of the internet
As with any powerful gift (eg. money, sex, power), the internet can be used for great good and for great evil. From time to time I receive stories of marriage failures attributed to the internet, cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking. The internet can be a tragic time-waster. Anonymous trolls can make comments online that they would never dare to make if their identity was known, or face to face – as they roam around the web solely to start fights. The internet can be damagingly addictive. It is an easy place for intellectual property theft. The list can go on.
A new study by UK psychologists has confirmed what probably most of us realise – there is a link between internet abuse and depression. It is unclear whether internet abuse leads to depression, or whether depressed people are more likely to misuse the internet.
What are your suggestions for keeping your internet use healthy, accountable, ethical? What do you see as significant negative issues in the use of the internet? I know many will appreciate collective wisdom, some guidelines, even suggested rules for oneself.
The pope has issued a proclamation challenging priests “to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.”
Internationally there are some Anglican blogging bishops (I try to keep up with these in the links section). Of the 31 bishops in our province, not one blogs as far as I know (the bishop-elect of Dunedin blogs – we shall see if that continues). Of the more than one and a half thousand Anglican priests in this province I’m aware of a couple that blog, and a few more on twitter. The official website of the province has not been updated in more than a year. Maybe there are Roman Catholic blogging bishops and priests in New Zealand. I am not aware of them. There are still parishes and ministry units without even a website – in spite of web-hosting and production being free and easy now, with advice and help provided on this site. Every parish can have a facebook page (and a twitter). Blogging has never been easier using wordpress or blogger. Such things are not, as those in the church often make them appear to be, things that require great planning and debate. These things take less than 10 minutes to set up. Nothing manifests the yawning gap between average young people and average churchgoers more than the unwillingness of most churchgoers to embrace late 20th century communication technology. The church can be so last millennium!
The pope is on youtube (his videos do not appear to be able to be embedded), and has an iPhone and facebook app, pope2you. Let’s urge him to take his own advice and start blogging. If he is reading this: “I’m very happy to swap links with you”. Some suggestions for the name of the papal blog? “Mass communication”? Maybe not “Papal Bull”. (Definitely not “Red Shoe Diaries”!)
Tom Shepherd on a comment on singing in tongues on the facebook Liturgy page drew attention to the above video clip of the well-known SDA minister, Wintley Phipps, highlighting the place of the pentatonic scale. If you missed the pentatonic scale video on the singing in tongues post, it is worth going back and seeing that also (I’d like to think every post here is worth seeing 
)
The image above shows the number of visitors to this site over the last four years. In the last month, the average has been 1,500 visitors a day, with about 250 of those daily being regulars here.
Top stories this year were communion on the moon and the end of the Anglican communion, with more than seven thousand visitors each. About half of those arriving here are looking for specific information. Very popular is information about praying the Liturgy of the Hours. The Virtual Chapel is a top resource. The free online-version of my book Celebrating Eucharist also continues to be ranking near the top of the more than 2,000 pages of this site. There was also high interest in Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Easter resources, and, of course, recently Advent and Christmas. The blog is regularly a top landing page. I am interested that only about 5% of visitors come directly from Twitter (with more than 42,000 followers there, I might have expected a higher proportion) – but it is difficult to tell if once found, if people then go directly to this site. Similarly for facebook – only about 1% of visitors come from facebook.
Over 10,000 messages have been filtered out by the spam filter (sorry if your appropriate, un-anonymous, good comment got caught up in that – see the comments policy).
This site is produced by one person, in my spare time, any costs come out of my pocket, I learn to use all the software, I’m grateful for hints and help from friends – but anything that doesn’t work – is my fault I’m grateful for your enthusiasm and encouragement – that you find the material useful and visit here and place links on your own site and encourage others to visit encourages me to continue putting effort into this site. May God bless us all as we, in the Year of Our Lord 2010, grow in union with God together.
Advent 4 reflection from the collect/opening prayer.
Don’t forget the Online Chapel with lots of resources of prayers and readings and reflections – many changing daily.
The HTML for adding this badge to your blog or website is:
Please do let me know if this is, or is not working – one little letter wrong in the coding and all falls apart 
If you are on Facebook, you can send these badges to your friends there using church stuff
Please also continue adding quality Advent resources and ideas in the comments.
Advent 3 December 13 reflection from the collect/opening prayer (used by BCP TEC and others)
Advent 3 December 13 reflection from the collect/opening prayer (used by CofE Common Worship and others)
Don’t forget the Online Chapel with lots of resources of prayers and readings and reflections – many changing daily.
The HTML for adding this badge to your blog or website is:
Please do let me know if this is, or is not working – one little letter wrong in the coding and all falls apart
If you are on Facebook, you can send these badges to your friends there using church stuff
In the comments below, please continue adding quality Advent resources and ideas.
Advent 2 December 6 reflection from the collect/opening prayer (used by BCP TEC and others)
Advent 2 December 6 reflection from the collect/opening prayer (used by CofE Common Worship and others)
Don’t forget the Online Chapel with lots of resources of prayers and readings and reflections – many changing daily.
The HTML for adding this badge to your blog or website is:
Please do let me know if this is, or is not working – one little letter wrong in the coding and all falls apart
If you are on Facebook, you can send these badges to your friends there using church stuff
In the comments below, please continue adding quality Advent resources and ideas.
If you are hesitant about getting online, starting a blog, organising a parish or group website, setting up a twitter profile – let me encourage you not to hesitate. Any of these are now so simple to set up, free, and easy to run. They need not be time-consuming. You may not know the positive good you are spreading through a ripple effect. I receive many tweets, comments, and emails affirming the value of a cyber-presence. Here is one recent email as an example
You may be interested to learn of the ripple effect of your website. Some time ago I visited it after reading about your “Liturgy of the Notices” on the [...] list. After reading your recommendation I bought Benedictine Daily Prayer and began observing the Liturgy of the Hours. I put a brief note about this on the [...] Facebook page, a site I check into very infrequently. Another member contacted me about this after buying the book, asking for help in navigation, so I sent him the list of page numbers for a couple of offices and he figured it out after that. His life has become so enriched from observing the hours, as has mine, he is now becoming a Benedictine Oblate.
Thank you for all your good work. I’m sure there are many more blessings you’ve spread that you don’t even know about.
So if you have wondered whether to get online – I hope this post is the encouragement you need to give it a go.
One of my followers on twitter, Keith Williams, recently sent me a tweet that a new Bible, the Mosaic Bible, was coming out. Keith is the editor of this Bible.
As soon as it became available I ordered my copy of the Mosaic Bible (it has not yet arrived – hence, clearly, this post is a preview, not a review). I have a good collection of translations, I have studied Hebrew and Koine Greek for my theology degree, and I have a number of study and devotional Bibles. I think the Mosaic Bible will be an interesting, and I hope at times useful, addition to my collection.
The Mosaic Bible (and the adjective refers, possibly surprisingly, certainly confusingly, not to Moses but to a composite picture) is a two column edition of the Living Bible Translation with minimal study tools. In the front of this Bible is a clearly separate section with images, quotes, reading suggestions, reflections, and space for notes linked to the church year. . Another of my followers tweeted me that I am quoted a couple of times and this website referenced in this Bible (some other bloggers received a free review copy – I’m not complaining that I didn’t – does that make my preview and possible future review less biased? Or does my being quoted and referenced lead to bias…?)
We are promised excellent contemporary and historical writings chosen from Christians across the globe such as St. Augustine, Charles Wesley, and Henri Nouwen (and, apparently, Bosco Peters!). There are icons in the margins of the text to indicate which Scripture passages are linked to which writings. There is attractive full-colour art from contemporary and historical artists. I will be interested to see the Greek and Hebrew word studies resources in the back.
Liturgical Year
The liturgical year in the Mosaic Bible assigns some readings and a theme to each of 53 weeks in the year. Weeks are assigned in a fairly normal manner from Advent to Pentecost. But in contemporary lectionaries (RCL; 3 Year Lectionary) from Pentecost to Advent (about half the year) readings are not assigned by “Sunday’s after Pentecost” as in the Mosaic Bible, but by the Sunday’s date (closest to an assigned date). This means there may generally be no correlation between readings suggested in the Mosaic Bible and readings read in a majority of the world’s churches for that Sunday for half the year. Furthermore, these contemporary lectionaries (RCL; 3 Year Lectionary) do not work to or from a “theme” but, especially for the half year I am referring to, provide a smorgasbord of readings to nourish the faithful. Finally, contemporary lectionaries provide a three year cycle. The Mosaic Bible only provides a one year cycle – hence, the chances that the readings of the Mosaic Bible are the same as in church would only about one in six!
I do not understand, however, why the official site states “This is the 20th week of Pentecost (”Creativity”), pg m278“. Sunday September 27 was the 17th Sunday after Pentecost. That was “Proper 21″ in BCP (TEC USA) organisation of the lectionary – so until I have my hands on the actual Bible, I will have to wait and see how this all pans out – but for those of you holding the book, or looking to purchase it in a shop – these might be some of the questions you could be asking. This may be a way that those who have never experienced the Judaio-Christian discipline of lectionary and church year get a taster for it – but it may also be a major leap from this to contemporary practice in these areas. For those familiar with the contemporary lectionary this may feel very Lectionary Lite.
What we in the liturgical, lectionary tradition could find seriously useful is a Bible which indicated when a particular text is read in church within the text such as is done in The Orthodox Study Bible
New Living Translation
The Living Bible was published in 1971. It was a paraphrase of the American Standard Version of 1901 by Kenneth Taylor. It became highly popular in the early 70s. In 1996 a revision, this time based on the original Hebrew and Greek texts, was published as as the New Living Translation. A complete reworking of this translation, still with the same title, but now called the “second edition” was published in 2004. Even further revisions were made in 2007 – but not only has the title New Living Translation been retained, but this later revision is still, extremely confusingly, called the “second edition”. The “second edition” in the Mosaic Bible excludes the deuterocanonical/apocryphal books of the Bible (so cannot be seen to be the Bible for over half of the world’s Christians). Some quick checks of some important translation texts would get a reasonable but not excellent score from me. Isaiah 7:14 has the translation of the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Masoretic in the text (which they state is being used). There is a footnote indicating the alternative – but not as in other (nearby) footnotes where there is honesty about which is the Hebrew and which is the Greek. Verses on atonement have not been skewed through a particular theory of atonement. This is worth comparing with the NIV and ESV. My own standard, after the original texts, is the NRSV – keeping a good eye on its footnotes. (I must acknowledge a natural innate prejudice against our English-language tendency to keep multiplying translations; I question whom it profits, whom it glorifies; I question the motivation and the slanting; a handful of different translations following different methodology and for different purposes might be justified, but in English we are well beyond handsandfeetful!)
Conclusion
In this preview I suggest if you have a number of Bibles and are looking for one that has a different devotional approach, consider seriously adding this to your collection. If, however, you are looking for the ONE Bible that will be your primary Bible for study and devotion – then I think that might be a good topic for a future blog post. Meanwhile I enthusiastically look forward to my (non-free, non-review, LOL) copy arriving.
This is a follow-up to my previous post: social media church
If this is the new world in which we live, how then might church change? How does this affect spirituality?
h/t to my e-friend Lori Deschene who writes:
“It’s easier than ever to reach a large audience, but harder than ever to connect with it.”
Of course it’s hard to connect with an audience that’s consuming so much media on a day-to-day basis.
A few other numbers I found:
- At the rate we’re producing digital content, about 99.93% of it will not be read or used by anyone.
- Jonathan Spira, Chief analyst at business research firm Basex estimates that lost productivity due to multitasking (emails, websites, etc) costs the US economy roughly $650 billion annually.
- According to an IDC survey, people now spend 32.7 hours per week online–equivalent to half the time they spend on all media (70.6 hours). That’s 10 hours a day on average.
- In a study of 18,000 people, Dave N. Greenfield of The Center for Internet Behavior–in conjunction with ABC News–found that 29% of respondents go online to “alter their mood or escape on a regular basis.”
Reid Goldsborough of Information Today suggests we’ve entered a state of “continuous partial attention” in response to information overload. He further explains that as the level of information input increases, our capacity to process and retain that information decreases.
Technological innovation is changing the way people behave – how are we responding? How could we participate and respond?
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