And now I'm ordained

On Sunday I was ordained to the ministry of word and sacrament. A host of people were involved: Billy and Dan came from my home church in Covington; Nibs and Caroline and Suzette from the church here at Oakhurst; Lou from Memorial Drive; Cousin Cheryl from Fellowship; Joe from Twain's aka Good Shepherd; and driving from Birmingham in atrocious traffic - Shannon to sing and Cary to preach. It was a good commission. In the service I was especially proud of paraphrasing the last few verses of Psalm 100 to make a reference to Bakhtin's discussion of time and space: human cosmogony conforming to hierarchal space in the middle ages, and to leveled out time in the Renaissance. That is: the house in which humanity finds itself is hierarchal, everyone has his or her place with no hope of going up or down - except in so far as they are subject to fortune or live in destiny; when the Renaissance comes, this hierarchal spatial home is exploded and out of its ashes is built a cosmogony built on time, a home where humans move up and down in freedom [albeit limited freedom understood as autonomy; whereas the medieval freedom might be understood as living in one's space modeling the virtue of contentment], but where people experience themselves as not moving up and down but back and forward. Hence time is a leveler: anyone can light anywhere, regardless of birth. So I wrote that God "our Creator, Judge and Defender is steadfast in goodness and mercy, the same throughout all time and in all places." How many people will have spotted Bakhtin's reference to Pico della Mirandola? A whiff of neoplatonism perhaps. But it is the remnant of my desire to create a carnivalesque worship service. There was no grotesque and no visceral laughter - well maybe a little, as I stepped on Billy's lines as he was asking me the 9 questions: "whoever in our company be dined, must answer me these questions nine."
Afterwards a group of us went to Twain's. We drank pints and ate fish and chips. Shannon called our friend Karl who recounted ribald tales of ordinations past and various legends, which refreshed us with their grotequeness and laughter. It turned out to be a carnivalesque evening after all: what with the feasting, the ribaldry, the grotesquery and laughter.