A question I started to ponder when I came across this video (via Facebook): This is a very attractive vision – people being accepted for who they are, and being celebrated for the same – which surely has something to do with what Jesus was wanting to show. Yes, I know, we need to talk about the reality of sin, and yes, we need to have a mind to only offering up to God the very best of which we are capable, and yes, we need to make sure that what we do is genuinely worshipful and centred on God and not just about celebrating the fluff found in our navels… but even so. I suspect that this is what (some) ‘happy clappy’ worship captures, and to that extent it is holy, and of God. A place of acceptance and peace which is in stark contradistinction to the surrounding culture; a sign of the Kingdom. I wonder whether the intellectual and sacramental has started to obscure the simply joyful, rather than being a servant of it. Which is a way of saying – our cynicism is a sin. Mea culpa.
Elizaphanian
“I come not from Heaven, but from Essex.”
Well strictly speaking, cheese was part of the milk and honey diet of the neophytes (newly baptised) – as newborns they too were weaned – hence the blessing of cheese in Hippolytus Ap. Trad. 6 ‘In the same way if anyone offers cheese and olives let him say thus: Sanctify this milk which is congealed, and congeal us with your love’… so, if we’re going back to proper adult catechesis,as per Cyril of
Jerusalem, and taking the sacramental life seriously, yes why not.
Well, of course, “blessed are the cheesemakers”…