I don't know where the picture was taken. I've seen the gesture many times. It makes me think of embarrassing fake folk music.

In defense of lace - an artform perfected by many women and some men, and a not to be sniffed at contribution to the beauty which is appropriate to the liturgy.
Nice for mantillas.

I can understand your distaste for unmanly clerics, but the lace didn't make them that way, and unfortunately an absence of lace is no guarantee against them.

May I recommend for your consideration the priestly garments of the Old Testament? They contained gold and precious stones. Perhaps they used embroidery to hold the latter in place. Is the idea too fancy for you?

They were adorned with bells to alert the faithful of the priest's approach. They included a linen tunic, pants, belt, and turban, all made of six-ply thread. If those were fine for wholesome men, but wearing a bit of lace in addition to the above ingredients would have made them into mincing dandies, then it is hard for me to tell the difference between this logic of manly vestment and coarse prejudice.

I'll bet that alabaster vase had a manly scent too!

I am no fan of lace, but I understand where it came from and why it was used. There was a mindset at one time, that only the finest, rarest, and most precious items and materials should be used for the liturgy. Lace was one of those expensive and uncommon items, as were gold, jewels, art and other adornments. If the liturgy is heaven on earth, then surely they have even finer and more precious materials in heaven. I get it. Unfortunately, all that has gone to hell in a wheelbarrow, as we say in East TN. Now we have Fr. Swishy clad in a blanket you wouldn't put on a self-respecting horse, surrounded by a host of lay priest and priestess wannabes all waving arms and supplicating to put even the priests of Karnak to shame. I wonder if they had an Egyptian version of, "We Are Called," sung at Karnak?

(Purple or not purple - take your pick.)
Ha!
I, um, don't think that they had either Teva or Birkenstock in Jesus' day. So either one of them would not be, um, 'authentic'. (Actually, I don't like sandals. Shoes are decent and normative in our day.)

Not for men who would have us believe that they are an alter Christus!

Actually, I must admit that there are some styles of lace that are not as representative of decadent manhood as others. Some is, indeed, tasteful and not at all prissy. What really goes beyond believably Christ-like is the sort of fish-net gauze and airy lace that is so highly prized by many of our priests (not to mention their adorers). I can easily see Jesus being highly amused (or not at all amused) at such garb on someone who is supposed to represent him.

One expects such stuff from Romans, though. Now, sadly, even some of our ordinariate clergy can be seen sporting it. It is really utterly foreign to the Anglican ethos and most pre-Reformation practice.

Your point may very well be valid. But, I shant try to reconcile the inconsistencies of my argument at this time. Inconsistencies, charming as they can be, are sometimes the spice of life, and of argumentation. I can easily see our Pantocrator resplendent in cloth of gold and fine embroidery, but not prissy gauze and airy lace. Others, strange as it seems, apparently can.

Actually, we have no realistic notion of what heaven will be like, what people (including Jesus, et al.) will be wearing, what the music will be, or anything else au concret. Is this not so? We know that we will have glorified and incorruptible bodies, but what that will be like we can but pitifully conjecture and imagine. Anything descriptive that we devise here in this world to describe the world to come can be but a vague metaphor. As St Paul saith: 'we see through a glass darkly', and, most often, 'very darkly'. We can, though, be certain that it, like God himself, will be resplendent and beautiful beyond our imagination's power even to suggest or suspect. One aspect seems logical to posit, though: we, being spiritually perfected and incorruptible created human beings, will live in a perfect and incorruptible world created and fit for us in that glorified state, and we will enjoy sharing in the divine Light and all, nay, more, than that implies. That, and that it will have been prepared (made) for us by Jesus himself, consistent with his own words and those of St John: '...and without him there was not anything made that was made'.

And the music which we so much love? What Bach and Palestrina (and, let us not forget, Tallis) wrote for us here will be as the straw of which the Angelic Doctor spoke. We cannot conceive of what will be waiting for us. 'Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man what God hath prepared for them that love him' - St Paul.

Sqeaky voice sez:
"Eye has not seen, ear has not heard...." is St. Paul's? I taut it was fwom David Haas."

I suspect that lace and such may have originated from clerics who were from the nobility, as many of them were in earlier times. Perhaps it was a status symbol, who knows?

This is a digression we could dispense with, as we have 20th/21st century sensibilities.
Kind of a "de gustibus....in the eye of the beholder" issue. YMMV.

interesting ken...

so do u think Jesus could have said his first mass in Latin?!

even if he did, my point is that Jesus gave men the power to bind and unbind, to fashion the church through the process of organic development under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

she is human and divine just like her founder

It wouldn't be a shock if Jesus was at least familiar with Latin and Greek.

He almost certainly knew Greek.

If he knew Latin at all, it would have been a pretty vulgar Latin.

One of my favorite moments in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ is when Jesus responds to Pilate's bad Aramaic with excellent Latin. The musical cue, along with Pilate's somewhat stunned reaction, is beautiful film making (regardless of the historical veracity).

This is the weirdest thread...

Adam

You can't say they (heaven) didn't warn us.

Deacon Fritz -
I wish that I could be in the Netherlands to hear your lecture. Is there any chance that you could publish it here? Or share some of your theses on the subject here? This is a subject that has always fascinated me.

Kathy,

In the first sentence, I presume it was meant to read, "the 'mean' for courage is closer to foolhardiness than to timidity" since foolhardiness and timidity are the vices opposed to courage--but that's really a minor matter.

On the more substantive question, I think there is something of an equivocation here with regard to how things fall short. The "mean" does not imply mediocrity; in fact it implies an excellence poised between two sorts of failure, two ways of "falling short." The excellence of giving God his due in worship can fail (or "fall short") in one of two ways: worshipping God in a slack or half-hearted way on the one hand, or worshipping God in a superstitious way on the other. Superstitious ways of worship might on the face of it seem to praise God more highly because they are more elaborate or ascribe to God the power to do more sorts of things (such as making a past event not to have occurred or committing genocide), but they fail if they give a false picture of God. In other words, in an Aristotelian-Thomist framework, there is a sense in which more is not better. The coward takes no risks, the courageous man takes more risks, and the foolhardy man takes the most risks, but this does not make him the most excellent.

Deacon Fritz -
I would love to have a copy, and as of now am looking forward to it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_p0CgPeyA