Vox clamanti

About the New Year's Day Egyptian Martyrs

2011-01-04T23:05:00.004-05:00

On January 1st, 2011, a bomb went off in the midst of a Coptic Orthodox congregation while they were praying the Divine Liturgy.

21 Christians were martyred. 80 or so were wounded.

There is a lot of anger and distress in many corners of the globe in the wake of this calamity. And I too, though so far distant, have found myself troubled and grieved. My friends, my friends, my Coptic brothers and sisters, I mourn for you.

And yet. And yet.

Here is the answer I needed to hear. The holy "Peace!" spoken to this storm.

In the following video we meet Bishop Mousa (Moses):

From 0:00 to 7:49, we walk with him as he visits some of the many injured men, women, and children. He prays with them, blesses them, and makes them faces (not numbers), people, icons.
From 7:50 to 11:04, he addresses the viewer and speaks words of peace and comfort. God bless him and grant him many years.

-V.

Ariston: Value in Craftmanship, not Labour

2010-06-22T03:10:00.005-04:00

The idea that labor is the "reality" behind value is one of the most profoundly un-Christian and awful ideas of the modern age. Value is found not in the labor, but in craftmanship––excellence, if you will. You want to talk about the sicknesses of modern culture (or post-culture, if we want to follow [Ochlophobist]), but it is impossible to talk about such without recognizing the awful effect of the labor theory of value on human interactions.

Even the idea that it imbues labor with dignity seems suspect to me. Rather, it simply re-doubles the fashion in which human toil––futile as much of it is––is turned into an item manipulable on a ledger.

-Ariston, of The Season of Another Book, commenting here

Simple and profound.

I work in construction, and my work (and my worth) is usually weighed in time, time being a handy way to measure my labour. The money I receive does not take into account how carefully I may have crafted something, nor the research nor the experience that has gone into that crafting. It is strictly a measure of time spent working.

The incentive, naturally, is to do the minimum craftmanship that can possibly be passed off as work, as slowly as will be tolerated. And many of my colleagues have embraced these two tenets wholeheartedly. Doing something well for its own sake will never be rewarded under a model that measures a person by his labour.

Labour itself is not dignified. Dignity and pride are found in work well-done.

Thanks for this, Ariston.

-V.

I Wanna Be "Konvertsy Filth" Too

2010-06-21T12:25:00.004-04:00

Warning: offensive comments to follow

"In like manner [to Mr. Oliver Herbel], Mr [Terry] Mattingly has no Orthodox formation either. This is no small beer. Many of the recent konvertsy are ordained or begin commenting before they have a chance to acquire the Orthodox mindset. It takes nine months for a child to grow in the womb… you can’t rush it. It is the same with faith. It takes at least five to seven years for it to take root after one’s reception. No one should either begin commenting or go to seminary before this process is complete. Note well that the Renovationists rush people through the system, which means that there are many who are distorted permanently by this… just as children born prematurely often have permanent birth defects or handicaps. You can see this not only in Messrs Herbel and Mattingly, but also in Rod Dreher, Stephen Freeman, Joseph Honeycutt, Frederica Matthewes-Green, “Gavriil”, the “Ochlophobist”, Christopher Orr, “John” of Ad Orientem, and Mark Stokoe. Indeed, there are very few ethnic voices on the Orthodox ‘Net writing in English. Yes… all of the meaty stuff is in Russian, Greek, or Serb. Yes… the stuff written in English is mostly pseudo-Proddie drivel. We have a responsibility to get the grounded point of view out there in English… this site is an attempt to do that."

"[quote from Terry Mattingly] [...] This illustrates how the konvertsy filth think… they are in rebellion against the Church"
--- Stan, aka Barbara-Marie Drezhlo, Voices From Russia

If "konvertsy filth" include Fr. Stephen Freeman, whose posts at Glory to God for All Things are often a source of light for me, Fr. Joseph Honeycutt, who is a priest regardless of my non-enjoyment of his blog, Matushka Frederica Mathewes-Green, whose engagement with pop culture always makes for good reading, Mark Stokoe, who has pushed so hard for accountability within the OCA, respected bloggers Christopher Orr of the Orrologion, Gabriel of Of Information and Belief, and John of Ad Orientem, and my favourite blogger, the Ochlophobist, who alerted me to this abominable post, then all I can say is that I want to be konvertsy filth too. It looks like a fun group* of people to hang with.

*Sadly, I am not familiar with Rod Dreher, Fr. Oliver Herbel, or Terry Mattingly. On the basis of their association with the above, looks like I might like them too.

-V.

--------------
Edit: I have since read Ad Orientem's excellent treatment of Stan/Vara's vitriol:

However, [...] there are circumstances where silence is not a moral option. There is a danger of scandal in permitting someone who, in one of those truly delicious ironies in life, has been suspended from the Holy Mysteries by the Russian Church to pass herself off on the web as a reputable source for anything relating to Orthodoxy. I can not imagine what any non-Orthodox inquirer would think if they stumbled on that site. Had I seen it in the early stages of my journey to Orthodoxy, I am fairly sure it would have stopped me cold in my tracks.

So there you have it. Voices From Russia features the bigoted, vitriolic non-Orthodox writings of an American man passing himself off as a Russian, Orthodox woman.
-V.

Big Dairy/Wisconsin vs. Organic "Raw Milk" Farmer

2010-06-21T10:51:00.008-04:00

The State of Wisconsin is persecuting ("prosecuting" by another name) raw milk dairy farmer, Vernon Herschberger.

From The Ochlophobist:

You can buy a pack of carcinogen filled menthol cigs in WI. You can purchase meat that came from animals living in the worst of infection laden environments and processed in facilities that are full of an apocalyptic amount of pathogens (facilities rarely bothered much by regulators until after folks get sick). You can buy 199 proof liquor. You can purchase powdered milk from China that has God knows what in it. But you are not supposed to buy raw milk from Vernon Hershberger. Why? Because Vernon Hershberger is not a corporation who writes the regulations which the government adopts for his industry. He is a threat to such corporations.

See also here, where Ochlophobist revisits the issue.

-V.

Evolution is Good for You

2010-06-21T00:17:00.003-04:00

Or is it?

Starting point for a conversation...

I was recently reading a friend's Facebook page, and someone made the comment that they had found the theory of evolution not to be detrimental to their faith, but affirming.

I am on a similar journey, where I find the notion of theistic evolution, or if you will, Creation through time, Creation as a process, to be more helpful to my faith as a Christian than not. And the converse is true: I find Creationism as argued in the public fora to be distinctly unhelpful.

Where do my blogosphere friends stand on this one?

Inquiring minds want to know...

-V.

How to Fix the Oil Spill

2010-06-06T23:56:00.003-04:00

I don't know how to fix an oil spill. At least, not the technological ins and outs of the business.

But I know enough about spills in general to know the following:

1. You turn off the taps.
2. You minimize the damage.
3. You clean up as soon as possible.

Turning off the taps

They say that only BP (and similar deep sea operators) has the expertise to shut down the well. I have no reason to disbelieve this - they are the only ones with the incentive to create the technology to get down there in the first place.

Back in early May BP began drilling relief wells to shut the well down far below sea bottom. Apparently this process, if successful, will take until August. In the meantime, they have held the world breathless as they have attempted to shut the well off where pipe ends and sea begins, to little avail.

I can't say I can fault the approach here.

Minimizing the damage

Here is where my big question mark comes in.

Are buoys, booms, and skimmers so effective? Why is BP conducting a massive chemical experiment [dispersants] in mid-ocean? Why isn't BP trying alternative methods for taking the oil out of the water? And what on earth happened to using microbes to eat the oil?

This last question really bothers me. I see a proven technique which is not being used, for no apparent reason. Toxic dispersants are being used... Nuclear bombing has been suggested... Why not use microbes?

And why is it that the same ineffective tools and strategies used 30 years ago are still used today? No, actually, I think I know this one. $$ There is no money to be had in researching clean-up.

Cleaning up as soon as possible

Again, I can't fault anyone here. As soon as tar made landfall, dedicated workers and volunteers began picking up tar balls and washing off birds. But their work is a hopeless work of Sisyphus unless the oil stops flowing... unless methods are found to collect (or devour) the oil mid-ocean.

- V.

When it is time to commune ...

2010-06-06T14:26:00.004-04:00

(Nothing heavy today. Just a reaction.)

When my priest comes through the Royal Doors, chalice in hand, he usually says something like this:

I invite all Orthodox to partake of the Holy Eucharist,
Provided they have prepared themselves
Through prayer,
They have fasted if they are able,
And they have confessed as it was needed.

Those visiting from a different parish are also invited to attend,
Provided they have prepared themselves
According to the expectations of their home parish,
According to the rule of their spiritual father.

Today I thought a bit more about this than is my wont. The first bit is your standard (non-ROCOR, non-Serbian) approach to confession, fasting & communion - the expectation of frequent communion with a heavy dollop of mercy for individuals.

The second bit, however, struck me as it has never struck me before. I like the humility there, the humility that says "I won't override your spiritual father".
I won't claim a better knowledge of what is needful for your salvation.
I will respect the paternal relationship you have with your spiritual father.
He will be greater; I will be less.

- V.

Fluoride

2010-06-05T21:53:00.002-04:00

The problem with most counter-cultural anti-establishment researchers and visionaries is that they often sound ... well, loony.

Which is a pity, because the madness of a singular vision can easily be confused for the madness that typifies someone who thinks he is a banana. We rarely stop to see whether the person is a Leonardo or a loon.

It is therefore my pleasure to introduce a respected journalist, Christopher Bryson, who believes that fluoride is a pollutant and that Americans (and Canadians) have been snookered, yet who does not come across as crazy.

- V.

Oil Spill ... and the "Uneasy Evangelical Conscience"

2010-06-04T23:15:00.004-04:00

"I’ve left my hometown lots of times. But never like this.

Sure, I’ve teared up as I’ve left family and friends for a while, knowing I’d see them again the next time around. And, yes, I cried every day for almost a year in the aftermath of a hurricane that almost wiped my hometown off the map. But I’ve never left like this, wondering if I’ll ever see it again, if my children’s children will ever know what Biloxi was."

Finally, a mainstream articulation of Christian ecology.
As E. told me, it's about time.

Russell D. Moore, "Ecological Catastrophe and the Uneasy Evangelical Conscience"

A. "We’ve had an inadequate view of human sin.

Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats. [...]"

B. "We’ve seen the issue of so-called “environmental protection” as someone else’s issue.
[...] we’ve been willing not simply to vote for candidates who will protect unborn human life (as we ought to), but to also in the process adopt their worldviews on every other issue. [...] But perhaps the void is being filled by leftists and liberals and wannabe liberal evangelicals simply because those who ought to know better are off doing something else. [,,.]"

C. "We’ve had an inadequate view of human life and culture.

[...] What’s being threatened is a culture. [...] When the natural environment is used up, unsustainable for future generations, cultures die. [...]"

D. "Finally, we’ve compromised our love.
[...] Pollution kills people. Pollution dislocates families. Pollution defiles the icon of God’s Trinitarian joy, the creation of his theater (Ps. 19; Rom. 1). Will people believe us when we speak about the One who brings life and that abundantly, when they see that we don’t care about that which kills and destroys? [...]"

-V.

2010, and the Oil Spill

2010-06-04T00:36:00.005-04:00

It is hard to believe that 6 months have past since I last set digital foot in the blogosphere.

Will this be a reinvestment of self into the site, or another flash in the pan (some noise, some light, but nothing of duration)? Time will tell, I suppose.

But between you and me, I am avoiding commitment.

The Wound caused by British Petroleum

The tragic. horrific. sickening. grievous. grief-causing arterial bleed in the Caribbean is big news, and doubtless has been covered and re-covered ad nauseum. What can a voice in the wilderness say?

My voice (in case this is your first time here, or in case you forgot) is that of a person who loves God's Creation, who loves the "environment" that uneasily embraces our urban sarcophagi. Don't expect pro-industry blathering here. However... and this is the however I haven't heard many say... However, only some of the fault lies with BP/Haliburton/Transocean. BP and the companies that worked with it and for it are only servants. Shoddy service, no doubt. However, their service, however poorly executed, was done to please and placate their master. Us.

We, and by "we" I mean industrialized society, need oil. We need it badly, that red crude the lifeblood of our luxury. But the easy wells are drained... and now we have only the tricky spots left. Alaska. The deep sea. Canadian tar sands. Middle Eastern war zones.

And so BP and its like go into these places for us, pushing technology to its limits, pushing people to their limits, and sometimes things don't go well. Sometimes there is war, and people die. Sometimes the technology is not enough, and the plundering of the depths becomes rapine.

In our just anger with BP, let us not forget that until this event, BP was a good servant. It provided us what we wanted at a price we could afford. There should be consequences to BP's recklessness, yes, but because BP was our servant, doing what we asked of it, we share in both responsibility and blame.

- V.

What is up

2009-11-29T14:52:00.005-05:00

So life has been busy. Still is.

I am enjoying an unaccustomed hiatus in the middle of a typically frenetic day, and ventured this way to say hi, hello, dobray dyen'.

Clare is now 9 months old, baptized, communed, and about to celebrate the anniversary of one of her namesakes.

Our boy is 2 years 4 months old, and well into his "terrible twos" and the concomitant testing of limits. The limits of parental patience, mostly. [Said drily.]

E. is kept busy with children, house, and struggling to maintain order where entropy is maximal.

And I have diversified from my bit of thorn, thistle, and sweat of my face (cf. Genesis 3), which is general contracting, and have returned to school.

It had come to my attention that I care a lot (or at least rant a lot) about God's Creation, and I decided to do something about it this caring. So I am moving in a direction that will allow me to better involve myself in the creation (or sub-creation, as Tolkien might describe it) of buildings that reflect an "environmentally-friendly" ethos.

These are exciting times, but busy. I think I've already mentioned the busy part.

- V.

The Murder of Dr. George Tiller

2009-06-02T00:22:00.004-04:00

I heard on Sunday that an abortionist had been murdered. “Uh-oh,” thought I. “Here comes the inevitable demonizing of those that condemn the evils of abortion. We’ll all be tarred with the same brush.”

When I had a chance, I read the news story. Until this weekend, I had never heard of Dr. George Tiller. I am not an American, so the unique place he held in popular thought (“Tiller the Killer”, “lightning rod of controversy”, etc.) was unknown to me, though I was well aware that there were those that aborted infants in the third trimester.

Reading his life and death I found myself with several reactions. Too many to process easily. Enough to warrant a post.

Murder

First, let me echo the words of countless others concerned that the evil action of one (murder) may cause a backlash against the many who do not murder.

I do not know with whom the murderer of Tiller affiliates himself. He may call himself a Christian. He may call himself pro-life. I don’t know at this time what he calls himself, or even who he is, although I can safely conclude he is neither Christian nor pro-life.

Christian is as Christian does.
By our fruits are we known.
Christianity is not a noun or a state of being, but the act of repentance.
Murder is incompatible with Christ.

He is also not pro-life. Oh, he may be anti-abortion … that seems safe enough to conclude (I feel no need to invent a conspiracy theory at this time) … but he is not pro-life. Pro-life, by definition, means no killing. None. Not abortion, not capital punishment, not war, and certainly not murder.

Sword

Second, I found myself surprised. Surprised that Dr. Tiller hadn’t been murdered before now. I read of a man who had slaughtered 60,000 or so antenatal infants, and found it amazing that this “lightning rod of controversy” had lived so long.

Why the shock? Simply put, (as Christ said) those who live by the sword die by the sword – an observation, might I add, not an injunction or command. In modern parlance we might say that violence begets violence.

And this is readily observable. Not just with tit-for-tat feuding, as in the Hatfields and the McCoys. In the past 50 years, U.S. imperialism begat Islamic extremism and terrorism which begat American anger (mis)directed at Iraq which has in turn begat an Iraqi insurgency. It is safe to say that the cycle will continue unless some party decides to a bloodless and nonviolent response.

It seems that those who deal in violence most often reap in violence. Blood sown is blood reaped. Sorrow breeds sorrow, and the passions unleashed beget answering passions.

I reiterate: this is not a justification for murder. Following the examples set me by Christ and His Saints, I cannot and will not condone the murder, assassination, killing, or slaughter of anyone, not even a mass murderer like Tiller.

But I can observe patterns, and I can marvel at the miracle of this man’s long life.

Religious hypocrisy

Third, I was troubled, deeply troubled, by a veneer of religiosity that pervaded Dr. Tiller’s life.

He was murdered at church … a church-goer, then. Not just that, but a member in good standing, an usher (a position of responsibility and respectability). He also had a chaplain on staff at his clinic to provide baptisms and funerals for the infants he killed. Balm to solace the heart and numb the conscience of those who had aborted.

I didn’t know Dr. Tiller, and I haven’t the opportunity now, even if I wanted it. I cannot know whether his hypocrisy was deliberate – the work of a minister of evil – or if it was innocent and he was a profoundly deluded and misguided man. Indeed, the point is moot, for he is dead, and his actions and his heart are weighed by Someone infinitely more merciful than I, and more holy, and more just.

Instead, I find myself angered with the spiritual leaders and false shepherds of Reformation Lutheran Church, and their predecessors. They have failed in their duty to condemn the actions of Tiller; they failed to refuse him Communion if he continued to kill; if he was deluded, they failed to save him from his delusion; if he was a minister of evil, they failed to protect their flock. Their responsibility is the souls of their parishioners, of Tiller, his family, and the rest of their spiritual flock, and they have failed all of them.

- V.

Waving Hello from the Scary Valley on the Other Side of the Mountains of Parental Madness

2009-04-25T11:42:00.004-04:00

Christ is risen!
Hristos voskrese!
Christos anesti!

Well, I'm back.

In an attenuated sort of way.

I have discovered that taking care of two children under the age of two is a daily journey into chaos. When little B. was born, I wondered at all the spare time I had when I had no children at all, and I wondered what on earth I did with my time before he came along. I see now that I had no idea, no conception at all.

I had so much free time when I had only one child. What on earth did I do with my time before my daughter was born?

- V.

I'm Taking a Break from this Blog

2009-02-20T19:14:00.004-05:00

... for the best of reasons.

My daughter Clare was born today.

Glory be to God for all things.

Keep her and her mother in your prayers.

Your servant,

- V.

Neil Postman, in his own words

2009-02-19T13:34:00.003-05:00

Neil Postman is a critic of contemporary culture. His is not an Orthodox voice, but one that I think well worth heeding (in the vein of Ivan Illich and Wendell Berry).

Medium: video, from Youtube.

Six questions to ask about technological change:

What problem does the technology solve?
Whose problem is it?
What new problems might be caused by decisively solving an old one?
Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?
What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies and what is being gained and lost by such changes?
What sort of people and institutions acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?

Here is the full lecture:

Medium: printed text, from The Lion & The Cardinal.

Five things to know about technological change:

Culture always pays a price for technology.
There are always winners and losers in technological change.
Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea (or ideas). The medium is the message.
Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.
Media tends to become mythic.

And here is the full lecture:

"I call my talk Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. I base these ideas on my thirty years of studying the history of technological change but I do not think these are academic or esoteric ideas. They are to the sort of things everyone who is concerned with cultural stability and balance should know and I offer them to you in the hope that you will find them useful in thinking about the effects of technology on religious faith.

I

"The first idea is that all technological change is a trade-off... Technology giveth and technology taketh away. This means that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost. Now, this may seem to be a rather obvious idea, but you would be surprised at how many people believe that new technologies are unmixed blessings. You need only think of the enthusiasms with which most people approach their understanding of computers. Ask anyone who knows something about computers to talk about them, and you will find that they will, unabashedly and relentlessly, extol the wonders of computers. You will also find that in most cases they will completely neglect to mention any of the liabilities of computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will be its negative consequences.

"Think of the automobile, which for all of its obvious advantages, has poisoned our air, choked our cities, and degraded the beauty of our natural landscape. Or you might reflect on the paradox of medical technology which brings wondrous cures but is, at the same time, a demonstrable cause of certain diseases and disabilities, and has played a significant role in reducing the diagnostic skills of physicians. It is also well to recall that for all of the intellectual and social benefits provided by the printing press, its costs were equally monumental. The printing press gave the Western world prose, but it made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of communication. It gave us inductive science, but it reduced religious sensibility to a form of fanciful superstition. Printing gave us the modern conception of nationhood, but in so doing turned patriotism into a sordid if not lethal emotion. We might even say that the printing of the Bible in vernacular languages introduced the impression that God was an Englishman or a German or a Frenchman - that is to say, printing reduced God to the dimensions of a local potentate.

"Perhaps the best way I can express this idea is to say that the question, What will a new technology do? is no more important than the question, What will a new technology undo? Indeed, the latter question is more important, precisely because it is asked so infrequently. One might say, then, that a sophisticated perspective on technological change includes one's being skeptical of Utopian and Messianic visions drawn by those who have no sense of history or of the precarious balances on which culture depends. In fact, if it were up to me, I would forbid anyone from talking about the new information technologies unless the person can demonstrate that he or she knows something about the social and psychic effects of the alphabet, the mechanical clock, the printing press, and telegraphy. In other words, knows something about the costs of great technologies.

"Idea Number One, then, is that culture always pays a price for technology.

II

"This leads to the second idea, which is that the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others. There are even some who are not affected at all. Consider again the case of the printing press in the 16th century, of which Martin Luther said it was God's highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward. By placing the word of God on every Christian's kitchen table, the mass-produced book undermined the authority of the Church hierarchy, and hastened the breakup of the Holy Roman See. The Protestants of that time cheered this development. The Catholics were enraged and distraught. Since I am a Jew, had I lived at that time, I probably wouldn't have given a damn one way or another... some gain, some lose, a few remain as they were.

"Let us take as another example, television, although here I should add at once that in the case of television there are very few indeed who are not affected in one way or another. In America, where television has taken hold more deeply than anywhere else, there are many people who find it a blessing, not least those who have achieved high-paying, gratifying careers in television as executives, technicians, directors, newscasters and entertainers. On the other hand, and in the long run, television may bring an end to the careers of school teachers since school was an invention of the printing press and must stand or fall on the issue of how much importance the printed word will have in the future. There is no chance, of course, that television will go away but school teachers who are enthusiastic about its presence always call to my mind an image of some turn-of-the-century blacksmith who not only is singing the praises of the automobile but who also believes that his business will be enhanced by it. We know now that his business was not enhanced by it; it was rendered obsolete by it, as perhaps an intelligent blacksmith would have known.

"The questions, then, that are never far from the mind of a person who is knowledgeable about technological change are these: Who specifically benefits from the development of a new technology? Which groups, what type of person, what kind of industry will be favored? And, of course, which groups of people will thereby be harmed?

"These questions should certainly be on our minds when we think about computer technology. There is no doubt that the computer has been and will continue to be advantageous to large-scale organizations like the military or airline companies or banks or tax collecting institutions. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, bricklayers, dentists, yes, theologians, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more than ever reduced to mere numerical objects. They are being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political institutions.

"In a word, these people are losers in the great computer revolution. The winners, which include among others computer companies, multi-national corporations and the nation state, will, of course, encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology. That is the way of winners, and so in the beginning they told the losers that with personal computers the average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make more logical shopping lists. Then they told them that computers will make it possible to vote at home, shop at home, get all the entertainment they wish at home, and thus make community life unnecessary. And now, of course, the winners speak constantly of the Age of Information, always implying that the more information we have, the better we will be in solving significant problems - not only personal ones but large-scale social problems, as well. But how true is this? If there are children starving in the world - and there are - it is not because of insufficient information. We have known for a long time how to produce enough food to feed every child on the planet. How is it that we let so many of them starve? If there is violence on our streets, it is not because we have insufficient information. If women are abused, if divorce and pornography and mental illness are increasing, none of it has anything to do with insufficient information. I dare say it is because something else is missing, and I don't think I have to tell this audience what it is. Who knows? This age of information may turn out to be a curse if we are blinded by it so that we cannot see truly where our problems lie. That is why it is always necessary for us to ask of those who speak enthusiastically of computer technology, why do you do this? What interests do you represent? To whom are you hoping to give power? From whom will you be withholding power?...

"Since technology favors some people and harms others, these are questions that must always be asked. And so, that there are always winners and losers in technological change is the second idea.

III

"Here is the third. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. These ideas are often hidden from our view because they are of a somewhat abstract nature. But this should not be taken to mean that they do not have practical consequences.

"Perhaps you are familiar with the old adage that says: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may extend that truism: To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data. I do not think we need to take these aphorisms literally. But what they call to our attention is that every technology has a prejudice. Like language itself, it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments. In a culture without writing, human memory is of the greatest importance, as are the proverbs, sayings and songs which contain the accumulated oral wisdom of centuries. That is why Solomon was thought to be the wisest of men. In Kings I we are told he knew 3000 proverbs. But in a culture with writing, such feats of memory are considered a waste of time, and proverbs are merely irrelevant fancies. The writing person favors logical organization and systematic analysis, not proverbs. The telegraphic person values speed, not introspection. The television person values immediacy, not history. And computer people, what shall we say of them? Perhaps we can say that the computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom. Indeed, in the computer age, the concept of wisdom may vanish altogether.

"The third idea, then, is that every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. This idea is the sum and substance of what the great Catholic prophet, Marshall McLuhan meant when he coined the famous sentence, The medium is the message.

IV

"Here is the fourth idea: Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. I can explain this best by an analogy. What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on.

"That is why we must be cautious about technological innovation. The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible. That is also why we must be suspicious of capitalists. Capitalists are by definition not only personal risk takers but, more to the point, cultural risk takers. The most creative and daring of them hope to exploit new technologies to the fullest, and do not much care what traditions are overthrown in the process or whether or not a culture is prepared to function without such traditions. Capitalists are, in a word, radicals....

"I trust you understand that in saying all this, I am making no argument for socialism. I say only that capitalists need to be carefully watched and disciplined. To be sure, they talk of family, marriage, piety, and honor but if allowed to exploit new technology to its fullest economic potential, they may undo the institutions that make such ideas possible....

V

"I come now to the fifth and final idea, which is that media tend to become mythic. I use this word in the sense in which it was used by the French literary critic, Roland Barthes. He used the word myth to refer to a common tendency to think of our technological creations as if they were God-given, as if they were a part of the natural order of things. I have on occasion asked my students if they know when the alphabet was invented. The question astonishes them. It is as if I asked them when clouds and trees were invented. The alphabet, they believe, was not something that was invented. It just is. It is this way with many products of human culture but with none more consistently than technology. Cars, planes, TV, movies, newspapers - they have achieved mythic status because they are perceived as gifts of nature, not as artifacts produced in a specific political and historical context.

"When a technology become mythic, it is always dangerous because it is then accepted as it is, and is therefore not easily susceptible to modification or control. If you should propose to the average American that television broadcasting should not begin until 5 PM and should cease at 11 PM, or propose that there should be no television commercials, he will think the idea ridiculous. But not because he disagrees with your cultural agenda. He will think it ridiculous because he assumes you are proposing that something in nature be changed; as if you are suggesting that the sun should rise at 10 AM instead of at 6....

"Our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God's plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us."

...

HT to Daniel Mitsui of The Lion and the Cardinal, and to the blogger [I can't remember whom!] that pointed me to Neil Postman's lecture.

- V.

Orrologion Must Reads

2009-02-19T08:38:00.004-05:00

I do not have Orthodox "must reads." I don't know enough about the condition of anyone's soul (truth be told, not even mine own) to know the medicine best suited for its healing.

However, if I had to provide a list for someone who insistently demanded it of me, I might start here:

The Orthodox Church by Bishop Kallistos Ware (formerly known as Timothy, now a Metropolitan)
The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware (formerly known as Timothy, now a Metropolitan)
The Way of a Pilgrim by Anonymous (I still like the translation by R.M. French the best)
Way of the Ascetics by Tito Colliander
Father Arseny, 1893–1973: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father by Anonymous, tr.Vera Bouteneff
Saint Silouan the Athonite by Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov - especially the first part of this book which was also published separately as The Monk of Mount Athos: Staretz Silouan, 1866-1938.
Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works by Hieromonk Damascene Christiansen
Eastern Orthodox Theology: A Contemporary Reader, ed. Daniel Clendenin
Great Lent by Fr. Alexander Schmemann
The Orthodox Faith, vols. 1 - 4, by Fr. Thomas Hopko

I thought these books would offer at least some insight into various aspects of Orthodoxy that are important to be aware of. The two books by Ware give a strong overview of the Church, touch on spiritual traditions, patristics, liturgical and historical issues - as well as relations with the West and other Christians. Way of the Ascetics goes further in presenting, simply, the spiritual traditions of the Church and personal ascetic exertion. The Way of a Pilgrim is really sort of a saint's life, as is Father Arseny (which also introduces religious persecution under the Bolsheviks) and Saint Silouan (which introduces Mount Athos). Father Seraphim Rose and Clendenin's Reader are probably the most 'controversial' on this list. First, Clendenin has edited a very good selection of Orthodox writings from a number of sources and 'schools' within Orthodoxy inlcuding Ware, Schmemann, Florovsky, Meyendorff, V. Lossky, Stavropoulos, Nassif, Bulgakov, Ouspensky and T. Weber. Second, Father Seraphim Rose offers a look at the life of an American facing many of the Orthodox religious issues of his day thus raising both his own 'camp's' position, as well as those to the Left and Right of him. Most important is a presentation of a modern American who became Orthodox and a monk, which is simply a statement that conversion is possible and Orthodoxy is not simply Greek or Russian, etc. It also presents a picture of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco. Hopko's Rainbow Series is a very useful presentation of all aspects of Orthodoxy, especially the basic facts of the Liturgy, Orthodox history, her thoughts on various doctrines, etc. A very good primer. Schmemann's Great Lent is him at his best, which to me is as a pastor. He presents the meaning and mind of the most dramatic elements of the Orthodox calendar very well, step by step. I think these books give one a taste for the various wings of the mansion of Orthodoxy; after reading these, one can explore further by reading other books mentioned in these texts or that are similar to them.

Credit: Orrologion.

- V.

Isolations, and the Divorce of Creation from Christianity

2009-02-18T09:08:00.005-05:00

The devil's best weapon is that of isolation.

Isolation from God is first and most obvious - it is the ultimate isolation to which all other isolations point. It is not for nothing that hell has been described as a God-absent sensory deprivation chamber.

There is also the isolation of persons. With individualism and individualistic non-Trinitarian thought, we have lost the sense of salvation as corporate and communal.

The twentieth century has seen the (empty) triumph of many other isolations, the acquisition by our Enemy of many isolating tools:

In feminism (and reactionary machoism), the isolating and putting at enmity of the sexes.
In public school, television, and modern nontraditional music, the isolating of each generation from those that have gone before.
In modernism, the isolating from history (and her lessons) and tradition.
In funeral homes' crematoria and embalming rituals, the isolating from death and the repentance death engenders.
In an officially urban world, the isolating of man from the Created order.

It is this last isolation that I wish to consider.

It is an old tactic that has taken on new dimensions. Hitherto cities were best for the proliferation of leisure and its concomitant vice, but the Created order was still close. Not so today.

Concrete covers the ground, skyscrapers and "light pollution" shut out the sky, globalized agriculture and food distribution centres divorce us from the origins of our food, sewers and garbage trucks hide from us the consequences of our waste. Never before has man been so isolated from the natural, so separated from the Created order. In fact, as Wendell Berry points out, we have created a new word to articulate this separation: the environment, that which is around us. We have lost the sense that we are in it, that we are part of it, and that ultimately we will return to it.

It has been suggested in this blog (not by the authors) that the Created order is not a self-evident good because St. Paul - among others - fails to mention it. Completely aside from the fact that the Bible does not address everything nor was it meant to ...

[The New Testament was collated by the Church, its several parts determined by comparison with the oral tradition of the Church. The Church in turn has become epistle ... she has become the good news of Christ, articulated as she incarnates Him. The Church is the New Testament. Rather than a model where an issue does not exist for God (like cannibalism, say) if it hasn't been addressed in a text two thousand years old, we proclaim the living Body of Christ, which by virtue of its life can and will address all issues that the centuries reveal.]

... I would argue that it would have been utterly redundant for the Bible to have addressed it. If a man in those times chose not to care for his garden or his farm, weeds would have overtaken it, the plants would have withered, and he and his family would have starved. The apostles, evangelists, and epistolists were in the Created order; they had no concept of a people so divorced from their food source that they need a note from God to tell them to stop soiling their food supply or their water supply.

This last is the part that gets me. Christians, no matter their creed or lack thereof, have a responsibility to work for the betterment of Creation. This is not a matter of Left vs. Right, not a matter of hippie granola-crunchers vs. sober suit-wearers, not a matter of The Will of God vs. the sideshows. Even if a person who professes the name of Christ has the nerve to assert that care for God's Creation is a spiritual non-essential, he cannot get past the fact that pollution contaminates our water, our food, & our bodies, and pollution ultimately sickens and kills us.

It is impossible to get past the logic of this. Soil your bedsheets and you will sleep in excrement. Soil your food supply and you will eat the consequences.

- V.
The usual caveat.

On Wanting More Turf Than 7 Feet of Canadian Soil

2009-02-16T23:12:00.011-05:00

I've had Wendell Berry on the mind of late, and a post has been hovering at the back of my mind, waiting for articulation.

One of the things I wanted to mention was our desire to have a bit of land to nurture, to use, to reap. E. and I were discussing Ochlophobist's recent series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12) - a thesis in pictures, really, lauding a way of life that he (and we) finds laudable - and it struck us forcefully that there is a fascinating subculture within Orthodoxy (agrarian postmodern?) that hungers for land. This is a hunger not for the gain that land might bring, but a hunger for the toil and the sweat and the tears that is a Christian engagement with God's Creation. A step back and away from the petroleum-fertilized factory farming of the latter part of the 20th century, a return to sustainable (ie. non-polluting) living, even if on a limited scale, and a re-engagement with God's Creation after the soul-straitening concrete canyons of the Big City.

A recent moment of envious yearning (and joy! - both with him and for him) was reading about Lotar's purchase of a homestead for he, his wife, and his 1.5 children. These things are possible, evidently - I just don't know how to get where I can realize these dreams also.

Andrea Elizabeth articulates some of that bewilderment. She is not in quite the same place that I am in - I still hope for something a little more country, and I get the feeling that she has reached a point of contentment with her place/situation in life. In her words:

While I agree with and admire [Wendell Berry's] ethics, I haven’t been able to become an ardent disciple because I don’t think his particular way of life is completely practical for everyone. I love self-sufficiency, but not everyone is as smart as he is. Did he make most of his livelihood on his farm or by his gifted writing? I’ve talked about how much more fertile and better watered Kentucky is compared to where I live too. Still, I could probably get by with the produce available at our Farmer’s Market. Wait, last time I was there I noticed that most things weren’t local. But if I spent a lot of time studying, I could probably find enough local sources to keep us well-fed. But my attentions are usually diverted elsewhere. I resent the hour and a half I spend at Walmart every week as it is. And my home garden, which I prefer to access rather than going across town to the farmer’s market, I’m self-sufficient that way, got mostly eaten by bugs, or didn’t produce much (for the needs of a family of 8) for other unknown reasons. I intend on getting better at gardening though. It is a healthy sport.

Again, I don't agree with her conclusions, but I sympathize with her frustration. Here is Ochlophobist's response:

This weekend past we spent time with our best friends, on their third attempt at a sustainable farm [the subject of which was the photo-essay mentioned above -- V.]. They have all the skills and the desire to farm, but did not inherit any land, or any significant means, and they have not followed the most common path of niche farming today - to spend a few decades in a lucrative field and then, after accumulating means, running off to the boutique farm. It is likely that this third attempt will be their last, that most of their lives will be spent as serious gardeners, and not as farmers. There is a place for the mourning over lost dreams, but then one must go on and do the hard work in the real here and the real now that God presents to us.

I have written before, and I think honesty requires us of agrarian bents to say it again and again - Wendell Berry inherited the family farm, one that was semi-functional. He had financial means outside of farming, whether or not he needed such. What of those of us who did not inherit such things, and would never have access to such means? These facts are one reason why I must read Berry and Edwards (who wrote Ebenezer) as, first and foremost, eulogists.

But we can learn many important things from these eulogies. We can remember many important things. We are offered in them something of an image of repentance, if we look with our eyes open enough. And we can make our little, sputtering, seemingly inconsequential efforts at the human things. I live in a cheap ranch house on half an acre, but I can double dig a small garden, and I can make things with my hands as time permits, I can cook my own food from as honest of ingredients as I am able to secure. I can read lasting words, sing hymns, sit still. I can attempt to pace my life in a manner that bows as little as possible to the rush of the constant movement of consumption. I can remember that I have failed, and I will fail, and that I am small, that my efforts will matter little but somewhere in that littleness is my salvation, and as God wills the salvation of my children. One can still strive, even in this place, to cultivate the quiet, the slow, to choreograph the movement of one's hands and breath in the dance of activity and stillness in a manner that befits a human life - as best as one is able, in the midst of all those troublesome cares and demands. To borrow my oft put example - even the single mother living in one of those awful bauhuas projects can bake her own bread, and while that may be the only careful human act she has time for, aside from prayer, it is the sort of rebuke of consumenivorism that reveals a clinging to life, and grants a reward, the richness one experiences when coming upon the flower in the desert.

There is also the temptation, the very American temptation, of taking from Berry & Co. a moralist perfectionism. An all or nothing disposition which rots the soul, as it judges any effort which does not achieve a fast and secure perfection to be hell-fodder. There is a lack of pause with this sort of perfectionism, scarce disposition to cover the sins of others, few allowances, a poverty with regard to tenderness of heart. We have to live the life that we are given, and when we read Berry as moralist only, or moralist primarily, most of us end up under a load of impossible moral burdens. I will never get to the farm in KY. I have no way of getting there. I must concern myself with my own home, as Berry exhorts. In much of Berry's literature there is that call to be who you are where you are, in as human a manner possible, but the overt moralism in much of his work provides something of a contradiction in tone at times, and one is best to follow Andrea Elizabeth's reading and take this with a grain of salt. There is not going to be a Wendell Berry movement that changes America. You are not going to take part in some great motion of social change by getting your produce from a local farmer or growing one quarter of your caloric intake. This is not to say that such social movements do not exist and will not push and pull society in this and that way. It is to say that such an agenda betrays Berry and the whole notion of living an honest human life. Movement agendas are destructive abstractions. It is better to simply and quietly go about doing the best things one is able. There will always be the temptation to fight the Dark Lord of Mordor with his own Black Speech. Our focus must be upon the goodness of a row of okra where and when we find it, the goodness of the chicken in the backyard, the goodness of a pig allowed to run about, the goodness of grain and water getting under fingernails. These things are miracles always and only in their instances. As soon as we make of them a rule or a paradigm they are lost to us. God only ever loves this bruised reed, the one here, that you see trampled in front of you. The Society for the Protection of Bruised Reeds (S.P.B.R.) is not the work of angels, but a diversion. The poor in spirit hold up those reeds within their very short reach. And yet that greatest of miracles - the seemingly smallest reach that is the summit of all human affairs, of all human history, that short length from pierced torso to nailed hand, holds the entire universe in its mercied place. Today, right now, this world is kept on its rotational axis for the prayer of a little old nun, chanting O Heavenly King as she presses a cucumber seed into earth with her nub of a finger. There is no other way. [highlighting mine -- V.]]

This is life in the meantime, living without despair, living in prayer and finding God in the here, in the now. This is re-remembering that what is holy in yearning for land is not the ideal of healthy land, sound ecology, the economy of thinking small and local ... what is holy is that baptism of the broken (land, ecology, and the rest of the cosmos) by Orthodox, through prayer, through vigil, through labour offered to God, ascesis in all its forms.

I will continue to yearn, and hope. I don't think this is wrong. But the now cannot, must not be forgotten.

- V.

On the meaning of the title:
When King Harald Hardrada of Norway put in his bid for the Kingdom of Anglo-Saxon England, the holder of the crown - Harold Godwinson of Wessex - retorted that the only English land that he would give Harald was the 6 feet to bury him. Or, as Harald was reputed to be a tall man, 7 feet.

... I would like land, yes, but I would rather that there be more planted in it than just me.

Caveat

2009-02-15T23:43:00.002-05:00

It has come to my attention that many Orthodox writers preface their logismoi [private spiritual opinions, usually wrong-headed] with the words: "The Orthodox Churches teaches that..."

If I am not guilty of that exact phrasing I am certainly guilty of the implication.

I should like to make it very clear that I am not a theologian, I am not clergy, and I am no saint.

When I write, I write as a sinful Orthodox parishioner. Where I accurately convey the voice of the Church, this is the success of the Church; where I drift into heterodox thought, the error is mine alone.

I can't promise not to touch on theological matters, but I will be in future more scrupulous to avoid implying that mine is the voice of the Church.

- V.

On Miracles

2009-02-14T23:33:00.000-05:00

"[I]t has often been said that all events are works of creation. On this view, it is only a concession to popular phraseology to say that one body is attracted toward another in accordance with a law of gravitation; what really ought to be said is that when two bodies are in proximity under certain conditions they come together. Certain phenomena in nature, on this view, are always followed by certain other phenomena, and it is really only this regularity of sequence which is indicated by the assertion that the former phenomena 'cause' the latter; the only real cause is in all cases God. On the basis of this view, there can be no distinction between events wrought by the immediate power of God and those that are not; for on this view all events are so wrought. Against such a view, those who accept our definition of miracle will naturally accept the commonsense notion of cause. God is always the first cause, but there are truly second causes; and they are the means which God uses, in the ordinary course of the world, for the accomplishment of His ends. It is the exclusion of such second causes which makes an event a miracle.

"It is sometimes said that the actuality of miracles would destroy the basis of science. Science, it is said, is founded upon the regularity of sequences; it assumes that if certain conditions within the course of nature are given, certain other conditions will always follow. But if there is to be any intrusion of events which by their very definition are independent of all previous conditions, then, it is said, the regularity of nature upon which science bases itself is broken up. Miracle, in other words, seems to introduce an element of arbitrariness and unaccountability into the course of the world.

"The objection ignores what is really fundamental the Christian conception of miracle. According to the Christian conception, a miracle is wrought by the immediate power of God. It is not wrought by an arbitrary and fantastic despot, but by the very God to whom the regularity of nature itself is due—by the God, moreover, whose character is known through the Bible. Such a God, we may be sure, will not do despite to the reason that He has given to His creatures; His interposition will introduce no disorder into the world that He has made. There is nothing arbitrary about a miracle, according to the Christian conception. It is not an uncaused event, but an event that is caused by the very source of all the order that is in the world. It is dependent altogether upon the least arbitrary and the most firmly fixed of all the things that are—namely upon the character of God.

"The possibility of miracle, then, is indissolubly joined with 'theism.' Once admit the existence of a personal God, Maker and Ruler of the world, and no limits, temporal or otherwise, can be set to the creative power of such a God. Admit that God once created the world, and you cannot deny that He might engage in creation again."

- J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism.

HT: Esteban Vazquez.

- V.

What I Have Found, from the Vantage-Point of a Decade

2009-02-13T23:08:00.000-05:00

Today marks the tenth anniversary of my entrance into the Orthodox Church.

source

It has been an interesting journey, one with falls and detours, but a journey with a destination. A journey with many friends, that great choir of witnesses who pray with us and for us. A journey that is never alone, but always in the midst of relationship. A journey of great richness.

I remember being told that the Church was a temporary fad, and that I would last five years on account of my stubbornness. There was a part of me that feared that this was true.

It is difficult to convey what I have found instead. [Pray forgive me if I am inarticulate when attempting to describe the ineffable.] Once I compared belief systems, totting up contrasts and similitudes. Once I sampled everything like a hummingbird sips at nectar. Once I felt the fear that comes from the attempt of man to hew from Scripture the right theology, the right teaching. Once I did not know myself.

And now?

The Church is the Bride of Christ. She has a mind, a heart; she has been lifted up into the heavenlies and stands orant before the throne of God. She is richness; she is the pleroma for which I hungered without knowing my hunger. She has overwhelmed me with beauty and grace. She has given me theology that can be understood by a child, simple, elegant, all its disciplines interwoven and seamless, and yet it is a theology that can be plumbed for a lifetime without reaching the end of its mysteries. She has given me sacrament - she has rebuked my intellectualization with their earthiness and physicality and overwhelmed me with the grace they bestow. Similarly with the sacramentals, like icons and relics. She has given me liturgy. She has given me the Saints: the Mother of God, my patron saint, my other friends, and the countless others whom I have yet to meet. And the Bride of Christ has given me … me – for I am more fully myself as I am freed from my slavery to my passions, my bondage to sin, and restored from my godless half-self shadow and given life, definition, illumination in union with Christ.

And why is this? Simply because she is the Bride of Christ and she leads me to Him Who is the author and finisher of my faith. Though I am blessed by Creation and tutored by the Law, my salvation started at Christ’s death on the cross, His harrowing of Hell, His resurrection from the tomb, and His ascent to the Father’s right hand. But He has yet to finish it, and he is finishing it, and because of my [continued] baptism with Him through His Passion and Joy, it is already finished.

Because the Church is and has been under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Our God is a God of maximums, and He will use every means and every consolation to teach us, nurture us, and bring us into full union with Him.

I am guided into the Church, guided by the Church, and comforted in my fallen humanity by the gifts He has given her.

And by the Grace of God, one day my journey in the Church will get me to my destination.

- V.

E. Comments on Breastfeeding Hero and Upcoming Birth

2009-02-13T20:23:00.006-05:00

When I checked this morning's news headlines, I came across this. I don't know if it's just the pregnancy hormones, but I felt moved to tears. If I had to choose a hero from Hollywood right now, it would be Salma Hayek.

I also thought I'd ask our readers to remember me, Elizabeth, in your prayers. I am due to give birth any day now, though my official due date is not until March 4th (funny how babies seldom get that memo). I regret that I'm not quite able to post here as often as I'd like, but I'm sure many of you understand how the responsibilities of motherhood often do not mesh with my spending more than a few minutes at a time Online. Thank you in advance for any prayers you might offer on my behalf. We'll keep you posted concerning the details of our next baby's arrival.

Scripture & Sacrament

2009-02-13T00:57:00.000-05:00

On the RC show Journey Home, Marcus Grodi takes a phone call from a man who makes an interesting point. (HT: Whippleshire)

Luke 24:13-35

"[...] which is the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. It really hit me how Christ came along, walked along with them, opened up the Scripture to them, talked to them about Scripture, their hearts were burning about Scripture ... and yet they did not recognize our Lord until the breaking of the bread.

They went back to Jerusalem to the disciples, they told about what happened and how the Lord was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

When I talk to my Protestant friends and all, they are so focused on Scripture (and God bless them, that's great) but I point out to them in this one here how even with Scripture-- even with Christ Himself explaining it to you, yet it was in the Eucharist that they recognized Him."

Our eyes are darkened. When we do see, it is in a glass darkly.

Interpreting Scripture is a perilous task, a walk with precipices upon either side. Without a guide it is all too easy to fall into heresy. Some suggest relying on the Holy Spirit as a guide. Orthodox would agree with this statement wholeheartedly, but not in how it is often interpreted: alone, independently, individually. Here self-deception is made too easy, prelest' all too common. Which we know, for even the disciples' eyes could be closed to the teaching of Christ.

We offer the Church instead, the Church as guide under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit. Her Tradition has been safeguarded by the Holy Spirit, she knows the common errors, the slips that could become falls, she understands the dangers of prelest'. And it is in the Church that eyes are opened, for it is here that the Eucharist is, the Real Presence of Christ. In the Sacraments we meet God, in the Sacraments we are the Church, in the Sacraments the Scriptures are opened to us and we see Christ and we hear His voice.

- V.

Priestly bloggers

2009-02-10T01:08:00.000-05:00

For reasons that escape me, the weekend before last I looked for Orthodox priests who blogged (in English). I found fifteen, and one subdeacon. Who knew that there were so many?

This is not an exhaustive list, as I kept finding more the more I looked. But it is an interesting one. It is also a list to explore - our priests offer a voice of authority in an Internet with none.

Glory to God for All Things - Fr. Stephen Freeman's (OCA) blog is the best out there. He teaches Orthodoxy without apology or diminishment. A source of spiritual food and a must-have for the Orthodox blogroll. (We must remember Fr. Stephen and this ministry in our prayers.)
Second Terrace - Fr. Jonathan Tobias (ACROD) is a poet and a philosopher. His is another of my favourite blogs.

After those personal favourites, here are the rest:

Again and Again - I just found this blog by Fr. Milovan Katanic (Serbian), so I don't know its flavour yet. But he writes on a variety of topics and appears quite Orthodox, and people I like like him.
Koinonia - Fr. Gregory Jensen (Greek) shares this blog with 7 other "members", one of whom is a Fr. James Early (Antiochian) - that said, all the most recent posts are Fr. Gregory's . His posts are dense, meaty. I need to do more reading before I can say any more.
Antioch Abouna - This is another great place to go for Orthodox teaching on or response to a wide variety of topics. Fr. Gregory Stockport (Antiochian) is the author.
Fr. John Whiteford's News, Comments, & Reflections - As advertised, Fr. John Whiteford (ROCA) uses news items as a launching point for his thoughts. Typically conservative and political.
Orthodixie - Fr. Joseph Honeycutt's (Antiochian) blog is a popular stop for many Orthodox. Many of his posts touch on materials covered in his podcast.
Conversi ad Dominum - Apparently, this Latin call to worship is the equivalent to Ad orientem. Fr. John W. Fenton (Western rite) posts on a range of topics, typically derived from life and current events. A fascinating blog in that it is a glimpse into the life of the Western rite.
The Traveling Priest Chronicles - Here is an exceedingly wide range - sermons to snippets of posts, pop culture to theology to politics. Written by Fr. John Chagnon (Antiochian).
Fr. Peter-Michael Preble - Fr. Peter Preble (Romanian) responds to current events and the calendar of the year. He also takes prayer requests.
Writings of a Fr. Costa Christo - Fr. Costa Christo (Greek) posts quotations from the Fathers (and Orthodox theologians) on various topics.
Looking East and West - So far this blog by Fr. Stephen Herney (Western rite) has only 13 posts on a range of topics, all written from an Orthodox Christian perspective. We hope that he will continue his venture.
Devshirme - Fr. Gregory Christakos (Greek) writes on a variety of topics. This blog is more of a traditional diary-like weblog.

And the remainder ...

Ora et Labora - This is the highly respected blog by an anonymous priest. I list the blog down here in part because the priest is anonymous (giving us the interesting question as to how much of an authority is an anonymous priest), and in part because the writer hasn't posted since August, 2008.
Ad orientem - In theory this blog is shared between "John" and Fr. David Thatcher (OCA). But the latter doesn't appear to have posted often, if ever. Instead ...
Fr. David's Blog is found on the parish website. Unfortunately, Fr. David hasn't posted there either since March, 2008.

Happy surfing! and let me know of any others to add to my list.

- V.

The Advertisement Section of the Blog

2009-02-09T00:48:00.001-05:00

There will be a book draw.

Fine print:

[E]ngaging in the task of historical reconstruction is both necessary and unavoidable, and we would all do well to acquire such bibliographical resources as would set our investigation on firmer footing. On the subject of the Pharisees and other Jewish sects in the First Century, one would be hard pressed to find a better and more comprehensive study than the late Anthony J. Saldarini's Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society (1988; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). Quite fortunately you, my gentle snowflakes, as I searched my library for books touching on this important subject, I discovered that I have not one, but two copies of this important work. I have therefore decided to bestow the additional copy upon one of you in the first (and probably the only) ever Week of the Publican and the Pharisee Giveaway at The Voice of Stefan! Following Nick Norelli's sage advice, I only ask you to sign up for the giveaway in the comment section of this post, and perhaps to advertise the giveaway on your own blog, should you have one. [UPDATE: If you choose to announce the giveaway on your own blog, I will enter you name twice into the contest.] I will draw a winner next Friday, February 13 (N. S.), 2009, and send out the undoubtedly coveted prize to the winner's regular US address shortly thereafter. (With profuse apologies to readers outside the US, I am presently unable to ship internationally.) Best wishes to any and all who choose to participate!" [Quoted from this post by Esteban Vazquez.]

When Did We See You?

2009-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

"When did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and come to you?" (Matt. 25:37)
The rest of Steven Robinson's post is over here.

And I love that icon.

- V.

Betrayal by Cube

2009-02-06T00:59:00.002-05:00

I am scandalized and sorrowing.

Orrologion, a blog that is rapidly rising in my esteem, has posted what the author has called the "Orthocube." Maybe it retails by a different name.

It is a Rubik's Cube with icons replacing the traditional blocks of colour.

If it were pictures of my son, pictures of my Aunt Mathilda's black poodle, pictures of classic Renaissance works like Michelangelo's "David" ... my aesthetic sense would be offended, like a bad odour offends my nose, and I would labour the resulting Cube "kitsch", 20th century debunking, the trivialization of culture, or something similarly critical.

But this is terrible. In the comments, one writer (a new convert to Orthodoxy) asks

More pressing than "where would I buy one" is "how would I dispose of one?"

And here he touches on a truth that the creators of this ... thing ... have forgotten. Icons are not team badges or baseball caps; they are not decorative elements à la Footprints. Icons are holy things, as another writer says. Ironic that I should find Fr. Stephen Freeman's post on the need for Orthodox to reclaim the holy after seeing this.

Yet I want to take this one step further.

Icons are holy like so many articles that we use in worship, teaching us thereby the holiness of the God whom we worship. But icons are unique within the history of Orthodox holy things: they are condoned by the Incarnation of Christ, made necessary by the Incarnation of Christ, and hallowed by Christ's gift to us.

They were threatened by the heresy of the iconoclasts, the last in a series of heresies that misunderstood the Incarnation, until they triumphed in the Seventh Ecumenical Council. We celebrate that triumph in the Sunday of Orthodoxy.

They are also unique because their presence in Orthodox Churches was bought not only through the teachings of the confessors (like St. John Damascene), but through the blood of martyrs.

Our fathers among the Saints died in defense (apologia and martyric witness) of Orthodoxy, proclaiming the iconic outworkings of the Incarnation, in order that we could glimpse into Heaven, in order that the Saints would thereby commune with us ...

... in order that modern hands would do this.

This is not reverence, but a betrayal.

Remembering:

St. Theodosia the Martyr (May 29)
Ss. Julian, Marcian, John, James, Alexis, Demeter, Photius, Peter, Leontius,
and Mary the Patrician (Aug 9)
St. Peter the Martyr (Nov 28)
St. Nicetas the Confessor (March 20)
St. Stephen the Younger and his companions (Nov 28)
St. Paul the Martyr (Mar 17)
St. Andrew the Martyr (Oct 17)
St. Thaddeus the Confessor (Dec 29)
St. Emilian the Confessor (Aug 8)
&
St. Theodore the Branded (Dec 27)
all of whom died under the hands of iconoclasts

Remembering also the many other confessors who were tortured, exiled, and otherwise persecuted for the Faith.

- V.

Sourcing Problems in Contemporary Orthodoxy

2009-02-05T00:16:00.009-05:00

There are some major problems in contemporary Orthodoxy. I classify major problems as those that divide Orthodox from Orthodox:

the involvement of Orthodox in the WCC and similar ecumenical gatherings,
jurisdictional pluralism in the New World,
the institution of a revised calendar,
and the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar (complete with Gregorian Easter) by Finland.

In Orrologion I read a post which reprinted a 2005 letter to the Ecumenical Patriarch (EP) from Alexei II of Moscow and All Russia, concerning the situation of the diaspora. The "situation" is one of jurisdictional plurality, compounded by the EP's resistance to recognize the OCA. Patriarch Alexei characterized the problems as stemming from a) the creation of a [Greek] Archdiocese of North and South America under the EP, and b) EP pretentions of universality outside traditional Orthodox countries.

Here is what the Patriarch had to say:

As regards America, from 1794 Orthodoxy on that continent was represented exclusively by the Church of Russia, which by 1918 had brought together some 300,000 Orthodox of different nationalities (Russian, Ukrainians, Serbs, Albanians, Arabs, Aleuts, Indians, Africans, English). The Greek Orthodox were among them, receiving antimensia for their parishes from the Russian bishops. This situation was recognised by all the local Churches, who released clergy for the American parishes into the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Patriarchate of Constantinople followed the same practice. [...] Jurisdictional pluralism in North America began in 1921, when an “Archdiocese of North and South America” was created without the agreement of the Russian Church, which was not informed of the matter.

[...]

Patriarch Meletios IV developed the theory of the subordination of the whole Orthodox diaspora to Constantinople. It is precisely this theory, which is clearly non-canonical, that is quite obviously “hostile to the spirit of the Orthodox Church, to Orthodoxy unity, and to canonical order.” It is itself, in fact, the expression of “an expansionist tendency that is without canonical foundation and is unacceptable on an ecciesiological level.” By claiming a universal spiritual power, it does not correspond to the Orthodox canonical tradition or to the teaching of the Holy Fathers of the Church, and represents a direct challenge to Orthodox unity.

As I read the letter, it was if a light went on. I wondered if the Patriarch Meletios IV mentioned above was the same person that presided when the offensive archdiocese was created - the dates dovetailed, as I remembered them. But then, hadn't I read somewhere that Meletios was involved in the ecumenical movement before it ever became one?

Not knowing where this line of questioning would take me, I began this post with a list of (as I see them) the central problems of contemporary Orthodoxy. I began researching.

1) Patriarch Meletios IV Metaxakis (1921-1923) was indeed the same person who both single-handedly created jurisdictional plurality in North America and who claimed a larger role for the EP than had previously existed (primacy of honour translated as primacy of power). A simple check of the dates confirmed that. The throne at Constantinople had been empty for the three years prior to Meletios' elevation.

2) Astonishingly, Patriarch Meletios IV Metaxakis was also the patriarch who presided over the 1923 synod that saw the adoption of a revised calendar. He resigned his seat in 1923 due to the [violent] protests of the people.

3) And again, as I searched I found Patriarch Meletios - this time as the Patriarch who seized Russian parishes in Finland and brought them under the EP.

4) And yet again, there he was ... Patriarch Meletios, worshipping with Episcopalians (1921), recognizing Anglican orders (1922), holding a synod with an Anglican bishop present (1922), attending Lambeth (1930) ... going further in the direction of ecumenism than any prior Patriarch, paving the way for the controversial presence of Orthodox in the WCC.

As a bonus, I discovered that he tried to become Ecumenical Patriarch in 1912 and he attempted to become Archbishop of Cyprus in 1916. He was also the heads of two other autocephalous Churches: Meletios III Archbishop of Athens (1918-1920) and Meletios II Patriarch of Alexandria (1926-1935) ... and a bishop in a third autocephalous Church: Meletios of Kition in Cyprus (1910-1918). A truly ambitious man.

I am flabbergasted. If I am reading this right, the source of some of the most divisive problems in Orthodoxy is the man Meletios. How can one man sow so much strife? For years my poster child for the "enemy of Orthodoxy" has been Tsar Peter the Great [so-called]. If I read this right (and how could I not?) Meletios has done as much or more wrong to Orthodoxy.

Here is an interesting article that summarizes this man's life, covering the most salient (and scandalous) material, not least of which was his status as a Mason. You will find the same information duplicated at OrthodoxWiki, albeit without the jaundiced eye.

Lord have mercy.

...

If you are like me, you are familiar with the above problems - how controversy has been roiling the people of God for a century - without attaching them to the work of one man. And you, like me, wish to see these ongoing tragedies undone.

I cannot help but feel that we would work immeasurably to the unity and glory of Christ's Church if we repealed the decisions and the actions made by this enemy in our midst, wait 2-3 generations, and then, if the people of God so desire it, convene an Ecumenical Council where the calendar is revisited.

In the meantime, leave Canada to the Ukraine, restore America to Russia and her daughter Church (the OCA), and put Western Europe and Australia under a single Church - perhaps the former to Romania?

I'll leave those details to the hierarchs. But I can't see us going forward until we go back and undo the wrong that has been done.

- V.

Ruminating

2009-02-04T01:09:00.002-05:00

Cows ruminate.

6 + 8 = Ethical Debate

There's been some fuss about a mother of 14 recently. A fuss because she had 8 (octuplets) by in vitro fertilization on top of a previous 6, also by in vitro. Because she is unwed.

I can't say that I agree with Ms. Suleman's initial decision to implant embryos, she unmarried and without a father's support (and as the father of 1.5 children, I have to say that that support is needed). However, I think it wrong for Christians to be making too much of this.

Why?

1) We are called upon to aid the widow and the orphan. She lacks a husband (and a visible means of income) and her children lack a father. There is a need for help, and it the rôle and bounden duty of Christians to come to the aid of our neighbours.

2) Whatever her initial reasoning, Ms. Suleman did the ethical thing. With embryos left over from her IV session, she had the option of discarding them. Christians call this murder - infanticide or feticide - and the "option" the devil's sophistry. But she didn't take the easy route; she chose life instead.

I am concerned that in our all-too-human rush to rebuke Ms. Suleman for her ill-advised actions, we may punish a mother and her children. ... We may lose sight of the persons behind the drama.

Humbling

I've always been fairly confident in my intelligence. [In the Orthodox world we call this pride.] That was before the Internet and the advent of blogging.

To my surprise, there are many lucid thinkers out there, and more than lucid. There are thinkers whose depth and breadth of knowledge are so vast I find myself not so much swimming through the streams of thought as frantically treading water.

I am glad these writers have seen fit to stroll the agora of the Internet, to chat in her cafés. But still, it has been an adventure.

Daunting, exhilarating, stretching ... formational. Humbling.

...

To come: Priestly bloggers.

- V.

Conscious of Beauty

2009-02-03T00:36:00.001-05:00

I found a new blog today. Some interesting themes come up in its last few months of posting, and a couple moments of breath-taking beauty.

Here they are:

Orthodoxy is alive and well in Romania

"... [T]hese people are fleeing the world and living an austere life of solitude and prayer; just like in Egypt of the 400s or Russia of the 1700s."

where I found it

Orthodoxy is alive and well in Missouri

"This is an amazing story of one's heritage coming full circle. Father Moses Barry, a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church, owns a plot of land that was part of a plantation. Moses Barry's ancestors worked on that plantation as slaves. The structure on the property houses his chapel and a small slave museum. Also on his land is the paupers' cemetery in which his ancestors are buried..."

where I found it

Thanks for this, Justin.

-V.

The monk Makarios

2009-02-01T19:38:00.005-05:00

On the feastday of St. Makarios (Macarius) the Great, I inevitably think of my friend Fr. Makarios.

Fr. Makarios was a simple monk of the Orthodox Church. He has since joined the choir invisible but I had the great blessing of meeting him and conversing at great length with him before he died.

A Trappist monk before he was 20, Fr. Makarios had been severely disillusioned by Vatican II; he travelled far from his Catholic roots before finding a home and peace in the Orthodox Church. He was a man who had drunk deep from the well of the Fathers and who had a profound and thorough knowledge of the lives and writings of the Saints. Happily, he had the unmonastic failing of garrulity (his term, not mine), and was more than willing to answer the myriad questions of a new convert to the Faith.

I credit him with introducing me to the mind of the Church, exposing me to Orthdoxy's monastic heart, teaching me the things that don't come up in catechism class. Through him I was exposed to the strange but beautiful asceticisms of the Stylites and the Fools-for-Christ, I learned of the Protecting Veil, I was told of the miracles with which God has blessed His Church, the wonders worked by His Saints. He also told me of the Saints' secret and hidden asceticisms, those that only death revealed. He introduced me to the Edenic "environmentalism" that reveals itself through the lives of the Saints and the ancient traditions of the monasteries.

Through Fr. Makarios, I was shown the heart of Orthodoxy. I stopped thinking of Orthodoxy as a spreadsheet of points that had to be argued or proved in defense against the Protestantism of my youth or the Catholicism with which I had flirted as a young man: through his unteaching I came to see the Orthodox Church as a pearl of great price and unparelleled beauty, as my Mother, holding me to her bosom.

And he told me stories from his life, a bit here, a piece there, to illustrate his points. I won't tell his story at this time - instead, I will tell the part of that story that I witnessed. Because I cannot think of Fr. Makarios without remembering the bees.

Fr. Makarios and the Bees

I and one other had been helping Fr. Makarios in the monastery's candleshop when he was called out. He blessed us to continue his work, and departed. During his absence a batch of honey-encrusted beeswax melted, attracting a small swarm of bees. They filled the small candleshop.

I got to work industriously killing them, keeping count as I went. The other followed suit. I was nearing 100 bees killed with plenty more to go when Fr. Makarios returned.

"V.!" he cried, "What are you doing?"

I got that sinking feeling that is awakened guilt. And I remembered him telling me that in a monastery, Eden is restored and man is no longer at enmity with Creation.

"I'm killing bees," I said.

"Why didn't you ask them to leave?" he asked. He gestured us towards the door, and shooed us out. "Out! Out!"

I couldn't respond to the absurdity of his question, and I was feeling myself in the wrong and out of place, so I meekly complied with his order.

We sat down outside the shop in an embarrassed silence. A couple minutes had gone by, when Fr. Makarios invited us back into the candleshop. A single bee buzzed about the celing where previously there had been many dozens.

"What happened?" I said, incredulous. "Where are the bees?"

"I asked them to leave," said he.

By God's grace, through Fr. Makarios the concept of a harmonious Creation was made real to me; around him Eden was restored.

+

I don't know when Fr. Makarios died, so I remember him today.

Remember Thy servant - schemamonk Makarios - in Thy Kingdom. вечная память. Through the prayers of Thy Saints, revealed and hidden, have mercy on us.

- V.

Home Schooling Under Siege

2009-02-01T00:14:00.007-05:00

I take you to England ... not because most of the readers here live in England, but because this earth of ours is a global village where bad ideas propagate all too swiftly.

Recently, a Baroness of the Realm made the astonishing assertion that increased supervision of home schoolers was necessary because home schooling "could be used as a cover for abuse" (story here).

Under that kind of reasoning, every minute of every day, every facet of every life, should be under government supervision and control. Because, hey, just about anything could be used as a cover for abuse.

Even if a small number of parents were found to be using home schooling as a cover for child abuse, which so far as I know has not happened in Britain, that would not warrant an inquiry into home schooling as such. You might as well investigate all primary schools, or all nurseries, on the basis that some children who attend them are abused. (Peter Hitchens' blog)

But then, this is what small-government conservatives (or paleoconservatives) have been saying for some time: what the left and now the right (with the advent of neoconservatives so-called) want is total dominion. They do not want thinking persons, but obedient (and docile) automatons.

Further commentary on the situation from the same blogger:

The inflamed, all-seeing red eye of political correctness, glaring this way and that from its dark tower, has finally discovered that home schooling is a threat to the Marxoid project, and has launched its first open attack on it.

[...] What the modern left really don't like about homeschooling is that it is independent of the state, and threatens its egalitarian monopoly from below. If it became a mass movement, it would be very dangerous to their project of enforcing equality of outcome, while using the schools to push radical ideas on sex, drugs, morality and politics.

[...] And as long as it was just a matter of a few retired hippies and eccentrics keeping their young at home, which it was until very recently, home schooling didn't matter. But what is happening now is that many parents are taking their children out of state schools because a) they are being horribly bullied in anarchic classrooms and playgrounds and b) they have begun to notice that many of the schools aren't teaching them anything much anyway. - despite years of propaganda, stunts, gimmicks, 'specialist status', absurdly glowing OFSTED reports and allegedly improved (but fiddled) exam results.

If all the plumbers in your area were no good at fixing leaks, and kept flooding your kitchen, you'd teach yourself plumbing and do it yourself. The results couldn't be worse. Why not take the same view with schools? Why not just keep them at home and do a better job yourself? Of course this is impossible for couples who both trudge out to work every day. But one way or another there is now a significant minority of households where this isn't the case, where homeschooling looks like a serious option and may take off. I suspect the left-wing establishment want to nip it, hard, in the bud.

Home schooling is seeing a boom in America right now. The schools don't educate (or, at least, they educate at the pace of the slowest student), the classrooms are a breeding ground for vice and infamy (not least of which is rampant bullying), and for those of a religious turn of mind, the secular antipathy for all things to do with God leaves them feeling beset by evil on every side. And being good parents, they wish to save and protect their children.

Many decide not to gamble with a growing mind, a questing soul, a curious spirit. They choose not to leave their children with the latest social experiments or the Frankensteins who implement them. They choose not to abandon their children to the savagery of an unparented generation. They choose not to leave the spiritual nurturing of their children to Christian rock, barren baptism*, or Sunday school (if that). They fight for the next generation. They fight for the souls of their children, not against flesh and blood, but against an Enemy who wishes destruction upon us all.

And so they home school. Or they take their child to a private academy.

It isn't enough simply to stuff a child's head with facts. Intellectual formation is the learning how to learn, how to question, how to think.

It isn't enough simply to tell a child to suck it up when beaten. Psychological formation is love from two parents and a distinct absence of abuse.

It isn't enough simply to hope God will miraculously raise a child in the Faith when his parents don't give a d@mn (literally and figuratively). Spiritual formation is salvation itself. We canonize those who have been brought up well, and frequently the ones who brought them up.

So in home schooling I see a Christian defense against Satanic attack, and a Christian offense against the gates of Hell. I am not surprised that it is coming under seige.

- V.

* barren baptism: a baptism into a culture as much into a Faith, where salvation is assumed and no further provision is made for the spiritual education of the child.

Angry God? - The Mind of the Church

2009-01-30T00:28:00.001-05:00

My thanks to Fr. Stephen Freeman for his post, Loving an Angry God.

Here are some gems gleaned from that post and its subsequent discussion:

St. Anthony the Great:

God is good, dispassionate, and immutable. Now someone who thinks it reasonable and true to affirm that God does not change, may well ask how, in that case, it is possible to speak of God as rejoicing over those who are good and showing mercy to those who honor Him, and as turning away from the wicked and being angry with sinners. To this it must be answered that God neither rejoices nor grows angry, for to rejoice and to be offended are passions; nor is He won over by the gifts of those who honor Him, for that would mean He is swayed by pleasure. It is not right that the Divinity feel pleasure or displeasure from human conditions. He is good, and He only bestows blessings and never does harm, remaining always the same. We men, on the other hand, if we remain good through resembling God, are united to Him, but if we become evil through not resembling God, we are separated from Him. By living in holiness we cleave to God; but by becoming wicked we make Him our enemy. It is not that He grows angry with us in an arbitrary way, but it is our own sins that prevent God from shining within us and expose us to demons who torture us. And if through prayer and acts of compassion we gain release from our sins, this does not mean that we have won God over and made Him to change, but that through our actions and our turning to the Divinity, we have cured our wickedness and so once more have enjoyment of God’s goodness. Thus to say that God turns away from the wicked is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind.

St. Basil the Great:

But one may say, if God is not responsible for evil things, why is it said in the book of Esaias, ‘I am He that prepared light and Who formed darkness, Who makes peace and Who creates evils’ (45:7).” And again, “There came down evils from the Lord upon the gates of Jerusalem” (Mich. 1:12). And, “Shall there be evil in the city which the Lord hath not wrought?” (Amos 3:6). And in the great Ode of Moses, “Behold, I am and there is no god beside Me. I will slay, and I will make to live; I will smite, and I will heal” (Deut. 32:39). But none of these citations, to him who understands the deeper meaning of the Holy Scriptures, casts any blame on God, as if He were the cause of evils and their creator, for He Who said, “I am the One Who makes light and darkness,” shows Himself as the Creator of the universe, not that He is the creator of any evil…. “He creates evils,” that means, “He fashions them again and brings them to a betterment, so that they leave their evilness, to take on the nature of good.” (Quoted by Fr. Stephen)

St. Luke the Evangelist:

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Luke 6:35 (Quoted by Fr. Stephen)

St. Isaac of Syria:

[A compassionate heart] is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons and all that exists. At the recollection and at the sight of them such a person’s eyes overflow with tears owing to the vehemence of the compassion which grips his heart; as a result of his deep mercy his heart shrinks and cannot bear to hear or look upon any injury or the slightest suffering of anything in creation. This is why he constantly offers up prayer full of tears, even for the irrational animals and for the enemies of truth, even for those that harm him, so that they may be protected and find mercy. He even prays for the reptiles as a result of the great compassion which is poured out beyond measure — after the likeness of God — in his heart. (Quoted by Bill Tickel)

St. Isaac of Syria:

That we should imagine that anger, wrath, jealousy or the such like have anything to do with the divine Nature is something utterly abhorrent for us: no one in their right mind, no one who has any understanding (at all) can possibly come to such madness as to think anything of the sort about God. Nor again can we possibly say that He acts thus out of retribution, even though the Scriptures may on the outer surface posit this. Even to think this of God and to suppose that retribution for evil acts is to be found with Him is abominable. By implying that he makes use of such a great and difficult thing out of retribution we are attributing a weakness to the (divine) Nature. We cannot even believe such a thing can be found in those human beings who live a virtuous and upright life and whose thoughts are entirely in accord with the divine will — let alone (believe it) of God, that He has done something out of retribution for anticipated evil acts in connection with those whose nature He had brought into being with honour and great love. Knowing them and all their conduct, the flow of His grace did not dry up from them: not even after they (started) living amid many evil deeds did He withhold his care for them, even for a moment.

If someone says that He has put up with them here (on earth) in order that his patience may be known — with the idea that He would punish them there mercilessly, such a person thinks in an unspeakably blasphemous way about God, due to his infantile way of thinking: he is removing from God His kindness, goodness and compassion, (all) the things because of which He truly bears with sinners and wicked men. Such a person is attributing to (God) enslavement to passion, (supposing) that He has not consented to their being chastised here, seeing that He has prepared them for a much greater misfortune, in exchange for a short-lived patience. Not only does such a person fail to attribute something praiseworthy to God, but he also calumniates Him.

A right way of thinking about God would be the following: the kind Lord, who in everything He does looks to the ways of assisting rational beings, directs thought concerning judgment to the advantage of those who accept this difficult matter. For it would be most odious and utterly blasphemous to think that hate or resentment exists with God, even against demonic beings; or to imagine any other weakness or passibility, or whatever else might be involved in the course of retribution of good or bad as applying, in a retributive way, to that glorious (divine) Nature. Rather, he acts toward us in ways He knows will be advantageous to us, whether by way of things that cause suffering, or by way of things that cause relief, whether they cause joy or grief, whether they are insignificant or glorious: all are directed towards the single eternal good, whether each receives judgment or something of glory from Him — not by way of retribution, far from it! — but with a view to the advantage that is going to come from these things. (Quoted by William)

St. Maximus the Confessor:

On God’s wrath:
The wrath of God is the painful sensation we experience when we are being trained by Him. Through this painful experience of unsought sufferings God often abases and humbles an intellect conceited about its knowledge and virtue; for such sufferings make it conscious of itself and its own weakness. When the intellect perceives its own weakness it rejects the vain pretensions of the heart.

The wrath of God is the suspension of gifts of grace — a most salutary experience for every self-inflated intellect that boasts of the blessings bestowed by God as if they were its own achievements.

On God's judgment:
By a single infinitely powerful act of will God in his goodness will gather all together, angels and men, the good and the evil. But, although God pervades all things absolutely, not all will participate in Him equally: they will participate in him according to what they are.

All, whether angels or men, who in everything have maintained a natural justice in their disposition, and have made themselves actively receptive to the inner principles of nature in a way that accords with the universal principle of well being, will participate totally in the divine life that irradiates them; for they have submitted their will to God’s will. Those who in all things have failed to maintain a natural justice in their disposition, and have been actively disruptive of the inner principles of nature in a way that conflicts with the universal principle of well-being, will lapse completely from divine life, in accordance to their dedication to what lacks being; for they have opposed their will to God’s will. It is this that separates them from God, for the principle of well-being, vivified by good actions and illumined by divine life, is not operative in their will.

On God’s justice:
God is the sun of justice, as it is written, who shines rays of goodness on simply everyone. The soul develops according to its free will into either wax because of its love for God or into mud because of its love of matter. Thus just as by nature the mud is dried out by the sun and the wax is automatically softened, so also every soul which loves matter and the world and has fixed its mind far from God is hardened as mud according to its free will and by itself advances to its perdition, as did Pharaoh. However, every soul which loves God is softened as wax, and receiving divine impressions and characters it becomes "the dwelling place of God in the Spirit." (Quoted by William)

- V.

Anathema

2009-01-29T00:20:00.000-05:00

I don't agree much with Stephen (his blog is here), but despite our differences (and they are significant) there is that which we may agree upon ...

That there is absolute Truth, and that that Truth is the Lord Jesus Christ. We may disagree as to how that Truth has been revealed: through Scripture as interpreted by the Puritans, or through Tradition as written by the Bride and Body of Christ, the Church. [Fr. Stephen Freeman addresses the concept of the Church as epistle, as Scripture itself.]
That we need to be transformed by that Truth - we need to become like Christ. Again a disagreement as to how: my friend believes that that transformation is effected without his will; Orthodox teach that we participate in that transformation.
That those people who teach otherwise are false shepherds and ear ticklers; that they are heretics preaching a false gospel ... they are leading people away from Truth (the Person of Christ) into error and damnation. And so I am therefore of like mind with Stephen in his criticizing (here and here) of the Emergent Church.

I must confess that I have not paid much attention to the Emergent Church (hereafter EC), regarding it as a Protestant phenomenon and problem. And it does stem from Protestantism, and it is primarily Protestants who are seduced by it. When I have encountered the EC, I have quietly noted that it was far from Orthodoxy, but inevitably disagreed with Protestant reasons (besides the very elementary ones listed above) for dismissing it. But in a more in-depth reading on this movement, I grew very disturbed to find that it touches upon Orthodoxy.

It needs rebuke from an Orthodox standpoint.

A Brief Sketch of the Emergent Church

The EC self-defines as a post-modern church. It does not believe in separations (exclusivity) but in bringing all into one fold (inclusivity). It does not like to condemn sin, unless it be those [orthopractic] sins of omission: failing to care for the poor, the sick, the downtrodden. It speaks of the Love of Christ. It cares about the environment. It likes to borrow spiritual practices to create a pan-spirituality. And it calls itself a "generous orthodoxy", claiming the heritages of disparate and incompatible beliefs.

It likes the mystics: the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, the musings of Thomas Merton; it appropriates Hildegard von Bingen, St. Seraphim Sarovsky, St. Francis of Asissi, Thomas à Kempis, Brother Lawrence, the Desert Fathers. It builds a mosaic image of the Church by bringing together all traditions in a strange amalgam that is everything and yet nothing.

And it is not afraid of image, icon, prayer rope or rosary, the Jesus Prayer, chant, incense, candles, crossing oneself, participating in sacraments ... nor for that matter is it afraid of Buddhist asceticism and prayer, or other pagan innovations.

A Vox Clamanti Response

I know that I am a postmodern. I respond to anecdotes and the experiential ... I am not content with word or text alone. My tastes are wide-ranging and may touch on persons of other beliefs whom I admire (eg. George MacDonald, St. Francis of Asissi, Mother Theresa, C.S. Lewis). And yet there is one frequently-recurring tenet of postmodernism that I reject emphatically: relative truth. My sampling of the world's smorgasbord of thought and experience can only be acceptable insofar as these things pertain to absolute Truth - I may read contemporaries George MacDonald and J.M. Barrie but Barrie's doctrines of childhood, while amusing, have less to do with Truth than MacDonald's expositions of simple godliness.

I am disturbed by the EC's appropriation of things Orthodox. This is not reverence or respect for Orthodoxy, but a fundamental rejection of it. The external trappings of Orthodoxy - the so-called "smells and bells" - are part of a complete package that offers a theological reasoning for all it does. Its traditions do not float independent of its teaching, and very frequently its traditions require discipline, mentoring, and a firm grounding in prayer before they are taught.

The acquisition of these traditions by those who don't believe in or care to learn their undergirding theology is an insult at best and a negation of Orthodoxy at worst. But then, what else can we expect of those who reject Christ (who is Truth) but that they also will reject His Bride?

Roger Oakland, one part of whose 6-part discourse Stephen offers on his blog, makes a serious error in his critique of the EC. It is not a return to Roman Catholicism that he should fear, no matter how much the Emergent Church may use her (or Orthodoxy's) externals. No matter what one may claim about her errors, Rome still believes in an absolute Truth and as such points to Christ. The central problem with the EC is a nihilistic denial of Truth which is a denial of Christ. The Enemy unmasked.

There is another word for this denial of an absolute Truth. It is called syncretism and it is a major heresy. Unlike the syncretism of the WCC-type ecumenists which avoids theology and positive assertions of Truth as the (admitted) source of division, this EC is a new syncretism with a newly-manufactured theology to defend its old - abyss-old - nihilism.

Postscript

Pilate asked rhetorically, "What is truth?" His was the wrong question. He should have asked, "Who is Truth?"

Christ is Truth. The only Truth and the only reality. And He is the Way, the only Way to salvation, and the Church is His body. And He is the Life ... the Life of the baptised Christian, the Life that conquered death and the grave, the Life that creates and recreates the Church every minute of every day, the Life of the eighth day.

...

Analogy 1 It is one thing for men to argue over the shape of the sun. There is, of course, a right answer. Someone will be right, and someone will be wrong. But it is something else entirely for a man to claim that there is no sun (or square and round and ringlike, which amount to the same thing).

Analogy 2 Or, alternatively, this could be compared to a classroom where the question is asked, "What is 2 + 2?" There is one answer, and many wrong ones. But everyone who answers with a number believes that there is a correct answer, and therefore has the opportunity and the reasoning capability, no matter how wrong he might initially be, to correct himself. For the person who answers "blue" or "butterfly", on the other hand, before he can engage the question he must first repent of his decision to treat mathematics like poetry.

...

I had a friend in whom I see the fruition of the EC. In her room she would quietly play Gregorian or Tibetan chant while burning incense or smudging sweetgrass at an altar that combined an icon of the Pantocrator of Sinai, an icon of the Horned God, a statue of Buddha, and an earth goddess idol. She was happy with it, because it reflected her spirituality, but I could never decide whether she was worshipping herself or the Great Deceiver.

- V.

Evolution, Historicity, and Ghost Writing the Bible

2009-01-28T23:55:00.006-05:00

From Orrologion. I have left his post intact.

- V.

----------------------

The Editor's Prophecy

I've got no problem accepting that all of the events in the Old and New Testaments literally, historically happened, 'really'. If one is going to believe that the ever-existing Creator of the Universe decided to not only take on human form, but become a human being consubstantial to us, well then, it isn't hard to believe in all sorts of other things. Same with belief in miracles.

That being said, I think the consensus of the Church over the past 150 years has been that there is no necessity to believe in young earth evolution. This is likely due to the fact that the Genesis and other 'violent' accounts in the OT have been viewed primarily as types and allegories in the East for centuries and centuries prior to Darwin, even if a literal, historical reality to the events was assumed, as well - the 'higher' and 'more spiritual' meaning of these texts was always beyond that of the literal and historical.

The Church has also seemed to accept in a pretty nonplussed way modern critical methodologies and at least some of the results arrived at along this spectrum.

How does one 'square the circle', so to speak, given the fact that so many of our liturgical and patristic texts explicitly or implicitly accept the historicity of the events and persons mentioned and the traditional, single authors (e.g., Moses wrote the Pentateuch, only one Isaiah, Paul wrote Hebrews, etc.)?

I think there is a difference between the historicity of the events described and the reality of the person of the prophet/author describing.

There is also in Orthodoxy - and therefore also in the Church's precursor, Israel - a long history of 'secrecy'. Humility is honored. Saints will feign madness, they will not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Joseph will seem not to know his brothers. There are many examples.

It is my contention that many of the authors of the biblical texts may in fact be compilers and editors. They may also feign their identity leaving themselves either anonymous or pointing to a greater light than themselves, out of humility. St. Xenia of Petersburg wore her husband's clothes and would only respond to her husband's name - she was taking on the ascetic endeavor (podvig) of foolishness-for-Christ's-sake quite literally in her husband's name and on his behalf.

Similarly, sometimes humble, anonymous prophets may have pulled together writings and tales written or told by others (explaining the different 'tones' or 'vocabulary' within a work) to their own prophetic end. What is historical is the editor's prophecy, though the building blocks of that editorial creation may or may not be historically 'true'. What is most important, and this is agreed on by the Fathers, is that the typological and allegorical meanings of the Scriptures are the most important.

Our only question is whether the historical is also 'true' - and, it should be noted, historical is different than literal.

Christ literally spoke of birds of the air and flowers of the field, as to whether he was referring of specific, historical birds and flowers is a different question; Christ literally spoke of a poor man named Lazarus and a rich man, whether these were real historical men that experienced the things Christ mentioned is a different question.

(Many of the arguments against 'fundamentalist' and 'literal' readings of Scripture are in fact arguments for the use of typology and allegory and against assuming the literal reading is historical. Much of the confusion is (purposefully?) due to a conflation of these distinct arguments.)

It seems to me that historicity can be left to science, archaeology, etc. and a case can be made either way. It doesn't really matter in the same way it doesn't matter whether Shakespeare's Macbeth acted, thought and spoke like the historical Macbeth. An editor/prophet is making a different point - just like many of the posts here do not reflect my own thoughts and words though my editorial intent would push one toward a certain way of viewing the world - by using the building blocks available to him. When Macbeth speaks, we do not say Macbeth-S when referring to the character in Shakespeare's Macbeth and Macbeth-H when referring to surviving documents written by the historical man. We simply say 'Macbeth'.

It's not good to constantly be winking at the audience and reminding them that you're really just an actor and not 'really' _______. Neither does a metaphor remain a metaphor if it is explained - that's called a simile.

- Christopher Orr

Hell & Subhumanity in Art

2009-01-28T12:31:00.000-05:00

Two experiences stand out in my mind. I was once asked to accompany a friend to an exhibition on Picasso (I went). And once I ingested (over the course of a morning) a massive tome on Salvadore Dali.

Both were slow descents into Hell.

Kinds of Art

I find that there are four types of art for me.

1. There is the art that is so beautiful that it is a physical pain. I have only felt this with something I have seen in person, never yet in a book or on a screen. In these cases the only thing to do is to walk away, sit down, and then come back. ... I sometimes imagine that the holiness of God is akin to this painful beauty that can only be appropriated in small doses.

2. There is the art that is good and wholesome, that grows on me and becomes increasingly dear, valuable. Like a friend, a fine wine, a well-brewed beer, a Cuban cigar, or a much-read book, I need to adjust to the flavour - roll it on my tongue - before it is revealed. The flavour gives it the depth and richness that makes it worth coming back to.

3. There is the art that is the equivalent of musack - it is a background noise that becomes annoying when it is the focus of attention. When I saw Renoir in person, I was surprised to find that his paintings were to me bland, without sustenance. I moved on.

4. And then there is the art that is wrong. It can be sensed immediately as wrong or even evil (as in the case of Bacon's Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X). In others there may be an initial piquance or cachet (like college dorm Dali prints) that masks the perversion beneath. In my journeys through the massive output of both Dali and Picasso, the flavour soured and the spell quickly lost its charm as their art spoke their hells for them.

Fr. Seraphim

Fr. Seraphim Rose spoke of art like this last category, art that came out of Nihilism, art that came out of the lower depths, art that taught a subhumanity.

And in fact such an image has quite recently been portrayed; it is the image of contemporary painting and sculpture, that which has arisen, for the most part, since the end of the Second World War, as if to give form to the reality produced by the most concentrated era of Nihilism in human history.

The human form, it would seem, has been rediscovered in this art; out of the chaos of total abstraction, identifiable shapes emerge. The result, supposedly, is a new humanism, a return to man that is all the more significant in that - unlike so many of the artistic schools of the 20th century - it is not an artificial contrivance whose substance is hidden behind a cloud of irrationalist jargon, but a spontaneous growth that would seem to have deep roots in the soul of contemporary man. In the work, for example, of Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, Jose Luis Cuevas - to take an international sampling - there seems to be a genuinely contemporary art that, without abandoning the disorder and freedom of abstraction, turns its attention away from mere escape toward a serious human commitment.

But what kind of man is it to which this art has returned? It is certainly not Christian man, man in the image of God, for no modern man can believe in him; nor is it the somewhat diluted man of the old humanism, whom all advanced thinkers regard as discredited and outmoded. It is not even the man disfigured and denatured in the earlier Cubist and Expressionist art of this century; rather, it begins where that art leaves off, and attempts to enter a new realm, to depict a new man.

To the Orthodox Christian observer, concerned not with what the avant-garde finds fashionable or sophisticated, but with truth, little reflection should be required to penetrate to the secret of this art: there is no question of man in it at all; it is an art at once subhuman and demonic. It is not man who is the subject of this art, but some lower creature who has emerged (arrived is Giacometti's word for it) from unknown depths.

The bodies this creature assumes (and in all its metamorphoses it is always the same creature) are not necessarily distorted violently; twisted and dismembered as they are, they are often more realistic than the figures of man in earlier modern art. This creature, it is clear, is not the victim of some violent attack; rather, he was born deformed, he is a genuine mutation. One cannot but notice the likeness between some of these figures and photographs of the deformed children born recently to thousands of women who had taken the drug Thalidomide during pregnancy; and we have doubtless not seen the last of such monstrous coincidences.

Even more revealing than the bodies of these creatures are the faces. It would be too much to say that these faces express hopelessness; that would be to ascribe to them some trace of humanity which they most emphatically lack. They are the faces, rather, of creatures more or less adjusted to the world they know, a world not hostile but entirely alien, not inhuman but a-human. The anguish and rage and despair of earlier Expressionists is here frozen, as it were, and cut off from a world to which they had at least the relation of denial, so as to make a world of their own.

Man, in this art, is no longer even a caricature of himself; he is no longer portrayed in the throes of spiritual death, ravaged by the hideous Nihilism of our century that attacks, not just the body and soul, but the very idea and nature of man. No, all this has passed; the crisis is over; man is dead. The new art celebrates the birth of a new species, the creature of the lower depths, subhumanity.

- Fr. Seraphim Rose.

From here, recently shared in the blogosphere by Daniel Matsui here.

The "Artists" in Question

Alberto Giacometti

Jean Dubuffet

Francis Bacon

Leon Golub

Jose Luis Cuevas

- V.

And the New Patriarch is ...

2009-01-28T00:20:00.003-05:00

His Eminence Metropolitan KIRILL of Smolensk and Kaliningrad.

Image from LA Times.

He will be enthroned on Sunday.

Many God grant him many years and much wisdom.

- V.

Your Creepy Thought of the Day

2009-01-27T11:15:00.000-05:00

... brought to you by the letter Y.

As in why, oh why did I have to read this gem?

We face a choice. We could allow this crisis to start a retreat from globalisation.

As some want, we could close our markets - for capital, financial services, trade and for labour - and reduce the risks of globalisation, but that would reduce global growth, deny us the benefits of global trade, and confine millions to global poverty.
Or we could view the threats and challenges we face today as the difficult birth pangs of a new global order, and our task now as nothing less than making the transition through a new internationalism to the benefits of an expanding global economy, not muddling through as pessimists but making the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting new rules for this new global order. (Found in various places - here is one source.)
- British PM Gordon Brown.

I like the phrases "a new global order" and "a new internationalism" best.

Somewhere out there, there is a man, a woman, a family packing up the house to move permanently to the cottage, the mountains, the bomb shelter. I almost wish I were moving with them.

- V.

A New Patriarch

2009-01-26T18:07:00.003-05:00

The Russian Orthodox Church (or the Moscow Patriarchate) is electing its new patriarch this week.

Patriarch Alexiy II, a hierarch who was widely respected in the Orthodox world, died last month. We pray that the Lord would remember him eternally, and we pray also that his successor would be God-annointed and -appointed. The MP has the largest number of Orthodox of any jurisdiction (165 of 220 million total), and its leadership is not based in a hostile territory, nor it is sweating under scandal - it is uniquely placed to speak the voice of authentic Orthodoxy to the world, without constraint or moral taint. And many Orthodox have come to expect that voice from the MP.

We would like to see that continue. We would like to see a godly man upon the patriarchal throne, a man of humility, but not an innovator or a "modernizer".

The council of bishops has narrowed the options to three men. We do not know the characters of any of the three, only what Reuters and others see fit to print, but God knows, and we pray that His will be done. From Reuters:

[In order, left to right:]
Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk, a 59-year-old head of the church's economic affairs widely regarded as the traditionalists' favoured candidate, polled 32 votes.
[Metropolitan] Kirill [of Smolensk and Kaliningrad], the church's 62-year-old top diplomat who raised hopes of a rapprochement by meeting Pope Benedict in the Vatican in December 2007, won 97 of the 197 valid votes cast.
Belarussian-based Metropolitan Filaret [of Minsk and Slutsk] had 16 ballots. The 73-year-old cleric has good relations with the large Catholic community in Belarus and is also close to President Alexander Lukashenko, accused in the West of crushing democracy.
Voting in the final round could differ dramatically from the first ballot because it will be held in the church's Local Council -- which unlike the Bishop's Council includes laypeople and monks.

[Bulleting, editing, reordering mine.]

- V.

Disaster Strikes Ottawa

2009-01-24T22:05:00.001-05:00

I have friends in Ottawa, the (currently) frigid capital of Canada, and I thought I would take a moment to share their pain with you.

It doesn't appear that their situation is getting much play outside of Ottawa itself - at least, my search for news articles found nothing from outside the city - but the people of Ottawa are experiencing an unnatural disaster. Namely, a bus strike, now in its 46th day.

This is a grim kind of ascesis, an ascesis made abuse because it isn't voluntary.

It seems that bus drivers want more money, or to keep their current scheduling. It seems that the city wants to save money, or to bully the drivers into worse hours. It depends on who is doing the talking. But I don't think many people in Ottawa care anymore what either the bus drivers' union or the city says - they just want their city back.

Let me put this into perspective. Ottawa has frequently been called the coldest capital of the world. I don't know enough to dispute it, but we'll take it as assumed that it is cold. I do know that there was a nasty cold snap a couple weeks ago where the mercury dipped below minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. And then there were a couple snowstorms where a foot of snow fell.

Meanwhile, the poor and the destitute have to walk, or stay at home.

Meet Anna Kraisingerova. She is 59, and she walks 6 hours to and from work, 18 km (11 miles). Happily, her story is now known, and there has been an outpouring of kindness.

But there are those whose stories do not yet have a happy ending.

Meet businessmen who are losing a third of their business.
Meet store owners who have no business.
Meet Burmese Christians who have no Church.

This bus strike is inhumane.

- V.

Also on 40

2009-01-23T23:52:00.004-05:00

Elsewhere in Scripture, we find the number 40 used differently. It highlights the unfolding revelation of God: God revealing Himself to humanity.

Moses fasted 40 days on Mt. Sinai, while meeting God.
Elias fasted 40 days before arriving at Mt. Horeb, where he would meet God.
Jesus Christ fasted 40 days (after His baptism), but before the tempting and the beginning of His ministry ... where humanity met God made flesh.

These incidences - the two pivotal Old Testament moments and Christ's fast in the desert - seem to address the other side of Lent. Not Lent as the suffering before rebirth, before salvation, but Lent as preparation to meet God.

- V.

On Holy Childbearing

2009-01-23T23:11:00.003-05:00

A pregnancy lasts 40 weeks.

I was recently made aware of the resonance (?) between the 40 weeks of pregnancy, the 40 years the Israelites spent in the desert, the 40 days that the flood was upon the earth, and the 40 days of Lent.

Did God arrange pregnancy to resemble these other, or these other to resemble pregnancy?

But look at this:

The flood was "40 days upon the earth" before those that were saved could walk the renewed earth.
Israel suffered 40 years before crossing the Jordan into Canaan.
A woman suffers 40 weeks before the breaking of waters and a child is birthed into new life.
The Church suffers through the (nominal) 40 days of Lent before descending into the tomb with Christ and emerging into Paschal new life.

This connection between pregnancy and salvation (the world's, Israel's or ours) seems to be what St. Paul is driving at when he says a woman may be saved by childbearing. Not that all will - nor will all benefit from Lent. But for the one that correctly appropriates Lent, Lent is salvific. So too with regard to pregnancy and childbearing.

- V.

Put Not Your Trust in Obama

2009-01-20T12:56:00.007-05:00

As I look to the American scene, I see hope bordering on hysteria.

After the darkness of the past eight years, the wars* (and rumours of wars**), the panic-inducing state of endless emergency, the anthrax terrorism, 911's scar upon the American psyche, the ubiquity of evil titans like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden ... after the unending trauma that was Katrina ... after the constant embarrassment of a president who wavered between puppet and buffoon (albeit with a down-home charm) ... and after the recent series of economic body blows pointing to an almost unprecedented economic disaster ... America wants a saviour to rescue her.

But Barack Obama is a man. Despite the resonant timbre to his voice or the polished orations, he is only a man who cannot possibly begin to achieve all that is hoped of him.

The danger lies in our giving a man too much power, whether in our hearts or in reality: investing in him the ability to correct our world's ills, or handing him the power to do as he sees fit to attempt the same. As Whippleshire points out, today is not the inauguration of a president, but the annointing of a god-king, a Caesar.

We need to remember the words of the Psalmist:

Put not your trust in princes,
In sons of man,
In whom there is no salvation.

America does not need a mellifluous orator, breathing words of hope. She needs a bracing slap - a dash of cold water. She doesn't need ear-ticklers, but prophets.

She needs secular prophets like Wendell Berry or Ron Paul.

But she needs Christian prophets most of all:
She needs another St. Elias, prophet to Jezebel, prophet to the Baal-worshippers.
She needs John Prodromos, out in the desert

calling for repentance.

- V.

* Afghanistan, Iraq
** Venezuela, North Korea, Iran

Edit: A similar post [What's Worse than a US President "Everyone" Hates?] can be found at Sentire cum Ecclesia (and duplicated at Orrologion).

Vaccination as a form of religion

2009-01-16T02:58:00.007-05:00

Ochlophobist recently touched on vaccination in response to posts* here.

In the course of the debate which followed, he had a couple things to say. These really need their own post (hence this one).

On vaccination being an utopian idol:

One of our kids' doctors uses the phrase, "for the health of the herd." That is an abstraction which I find demonic. I am not going to partake of a "medicine" which was made from murdered babies for something so abstract as the health of the herd.

I've heard a lot recently about the need to vaccinate in order to provide "herd immunity". If you thought the guilt engendered by the decision not to vaccinate your beloved son was bad, try bearing the guilt for all the now-doomed sick and immune-compromised in society.

I couldn't articulate why it was I didn't think much of the argument, other than that I do not like being manipulated by guilt in general.

But here Ochlophobist strikes to the heart of the matter. "Herd immunity" is an idol, not unlike the Moloch of Palestine and Carthage. Presumably the Phoenicians had good reasons to sacrifice their children - health, welfare, the good of the state - but the fact remains that at bottom, the issue is child sacrifice, infanticide. Here in the 21st century, our issue is that these [anti-viral] vaccinations are "medicines" made from murdered babies.

On the trustworthiness of the medical/pharmaceutical industry:

... my doctors, like the doctors of nearly everyone I know who has made the same decision my wife and I have, tell us we should not believe these extremist things we read on the internet, and not trust them, they are full of misinformation. The amount of information provided, should one just follow the links in the various posts linked to our quoted here, that come from official government sources hostile to the anti-vaccination voices, speaks volumes, in my opinion. But then we get told that one must have a graduate degree in bio-chemistry to understand these things - hogwash. It is not that complicated in terms of the outline of the science [...], and the gravity of the moral aspect is rather uncomplicated. [...] [G]iven any knowledge of the outright lies and perverse misinformation pharmaceutical companies have engaged in since WWII when they took on their role in the military-industrial fascist-capitalist complex, right up to the present, and given that various government agencies are in bed with the pharmaceutical companies, why on earth would I be inclined to believe what they have to say on the matter? It would seem highly imprudent to me to assume what they say to be true.
They assured us that mercury in vaccines would not hurt us, and that the voices against it were unscientific and alarmist,
... until they said that they were pulling it, and that evidence did suggest the toxin was having ill effects on children.
They then assured us that virtually all of the vaccines with mercury were out of circulation,
... until that was shown to be wrong and they said that with certain vaccines, the supplies at hand included a percentage containing mercury that is not exactly knowable, which is as far as they would go after investigators pressed them on continued mercury in vaccines.
I only mention one example with regard to pharmaceuticals and vaccines, but what of the many, many, many examples to be found of pharmaceuticals distorting, falsifying, covering up, politically manipulating, and so forth? Who in their right mind would trust these institutions with regard to anything they say? And it has been quite well documented that the federal government has been the lap dog of these companies so many a time, the same should be said of their "determinations" with regard to public health issues. [Bulleting mine.]

And, as has said elsewhere, the ignorance on the use of aborted fetuses for the production of vaccines is very prevalent in the medical community. When it gets right down to it, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists all place their faith in their own industry. They do not read the product monographs, so this is a blind trust. Kind of like a religion. (I refer you back to the comments about idolatry.)

I am reminded of a conversation E. and I had with our son's paediatrician. She was the head paediatrician for my son's ward, so hers were no Walmart credentials. One of the initial points I made in objection to vaccination was that B. had a high likelihood of serious allergies. We didn't know what exactly, but the very early onset of eczema made it all but inevitable. I said that we did not know if there was anything present in the vaccines to which he might be allergic.

She pooh-poohed our concerns, telling us that we had nothing to worry about, insisting that she would vaccinate her child under our circumstances.

Well, one of the vaccines on B.'s schedule contained attenuated virus propagated in egg yolk. The product monograph warns doctors that the vaccine is contraindicated for children with egg allergies. Now this was exactly the kind of thing that I had suspected might be present - our concern was therefore a valid one and her dismissal insulting in retrospect.

Eggs are not an uncommon allergen either (Canada lists the 9 most common allergies as peanuts, tree nuts, sesame seeds, milk, eggs, seafood, soy, wheat, and sulphites). So her lack of attention to this detail can only be credited to the same reason she didn't know that aborted fetuses were used: she had Faith in vaccination and so she hadn't read the monograph.

- V.

As an addendum, let me note that B. turned out not to be allergic to eggs. From this vantage point, I can say the vaccine likely would not have harmed him. But he was allergic to milk, sulphites, and likely soy. Our worries had validity. Taking the vaccine would have been playing Russian Roulette with the life of our son - never mind that we would have won, Russian Roulette is still a game of chance and the act of an idiot.

* Our related posts are: On Vaccination, "What Ever Happened to Baby WI-38?", and Why are our children so sick?

Telekinesis, or The Unopened Bottle

2009-01-14T00:01:00.006-05:00

I sat at the table, staring intently at an unopened bottle.

My lovely (and very pregnant) wife walked by.

"What are you doing?" E. asked.

"I am staring intently at an unopened bottle."

"Why?"

"So that it will open," I said.

She stood for a minute, watching me as I stared at the bottle. Her bewilderment grew visibly. Finally, she reached across and opened the bottle.

I grinned at her.

"See?" said I, "It works every time."

- V.

Imminent Apocalypse in Evangelical Circles: World Change and Apathy

2009-01-13T02:07:00.005-05:00

Ideas have consequences.

By way of example, modernism, the belief that things can and will get better by dint of modern technology and ingenuity, has paved the way for the slag heap, the tailings ponds, the endless barrels of nuclear waste, the mountains of short-lived computers and cell phones, the forever plastic.

My forays into the problems of pollution and neoconservative bellicosity have brought me into contact with an impenetrable and implacable enemy, an idea. Few ideas have as horrific consequences to the world as the evangelical belief in an imminent Apocalypse: specifically, global war and unchecked polluting of the planet.

[I am not knee-jerk anti-evangelical. Most Orthodox and Catholics also believe that these are the end times, and of that number many belief the Apocalypse to be imminent. I wish I could share the blame here (equal opportunity bashing), but I don't find the same attitudes coming out of the liturgical communities in response to an imminent Apocalypse. They seem to use it as a catalyst for an exploration of interior landscapes and for a trimming of their wicks, here and there a hysterical "the Beast is nigh!", but I don't see the same "if ... then" causality outside evangelical Protestantism that I see in her.]

There are two sides to this, and they usually involve the same people.

The world changers

This group tries to change the world in order to bring about the Apocalypse. Typically not fearing the horrors preceding the Eschaton because of a faith in a Rapture, they hope to speed up God's schedule. Their interpretation of future events is based on a narrow, literal reading of Revelation.

It was Protestant Zionists (like George Eliot) who began to advocate the need to "return" Palestine to the Jews, based on their reading of Scripture. It was evangelical support for Zionism (as well as world guilt) that caused the West to create the state of Israel*, and it is a continued evangelical support for Israel (in part based on a perceived need to sustain this precursor to the Apocalypse, in part based on a misunderstanding of Israel's place in salvation history) that gives the U.S. the mandate to buttress the state of Israel uncritically. Naturally, well-placed American Jews as well as neoconservative government strategists want Israel to continue to have the U.S. behind it, but although political heavyweights their numbers are by no means enough to justify unrelenting Congressional support. It needs the vast numbers of self-identified voting evangelicals to provide this justification.

Now I am beginning to see a new and troubling trend: evangelical support of reckless international belligerence on the grounds that "there will be wars and rumours of wars." Regrettably, this becomes an easily self-fulfilled prophesy. I will never be able to understand the hypocrisy of Christian warmongering, but there you have it. The evangelical voting block threw its weight behind the Republican incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq, supported an Iranian war, and is willing to discuss war with Russia and/or China. What kind of madness is this? It is the madness of those expecting not to live long who yet do not expect to live through the disasters to which their positioning may lead.

Please don't get me wrong. I do not believe evangelicals to be singlehandedly responsible for the continued existence of Israel or for the West's current wars. If evangelicals had that kind of power, abortion would long since be made illegal. But while they may not be able to alter America's culture of death and the unapologetic selfishness that permits abortion, they can certainly cease supporting the annihilation of others. And I suspect that without evangelical support of war there would be insufficient political capital to permit the democratic waging of war.

* Of course, it is the creation and continued existence of Israel that is the primary catalyst for Muslim anger at the West, and their subsequent insurgencies and acts of terror. It is not a "hatred of our freedom" that impels them but an abiding resentment for Western meddling.

The indifferent

This group drives me crazy, probably because I count members of my own family in it. This group fails to act in an ecologically sound manner because the Apocalypse is coming and, hey, the world is passing away in any case.

While the rational Christian, no matter how apocalyptic their mindset, can see that the phrase "end times" is sufficiently vague to allow for considerable liberty of interpretation, there are many Christians who are unwilling to take any action to save or preserve even a small portion of this world on the ground that this world is not going to last anyhow. To me, this is like soiling one's bedsheets or refusing to change soiled bedsheets on the grounds that the cleaning lady will be coming. Uh, when exactly? As someone with an apocalyptic turn of mind, I am willing to believe that the horrors of Revelation will unfold within my lifetime and Christ will return before I die, but I am equally willing to believe that the "end times" will continue another two hundred years before their final resolution.

A Christian ecology needs articulation, where the world is recognized as the qualified good that it is, and treated with the reverence and respect that should be accorded the work of God's hands. Unfortunately, I doubt that Christians will have much impact in this arena while the significant majority of North American Christians are completely apathetic.

- V.

Why are our children so sick?

2009-01-12T01:36:00.003-05:00

One of the blogs that I (intermittently) watch is Barbara Loe Fisher's Vaccine Awakening. Fisher is co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (here and here). She began a grassroots campaign for informed consent after her son experienced vaccine injury (in his case, convulsion, shock, and brain inflammation hours after receiving a DPT shot). While she doesn't critique [antiviral] vaccines on the basis of fetal cell use, she does advocate informed consent across the board, which dovetails with our primary concern (that we not profit from the death of infants*).

However, there is much also to be said about critiquing vaccines from a medical standpoint. Here is a gem from her most recent post:

The argument that more vaccination will equal better health is an argument that is getting harder to make as one in two Americans suffers from chronic disease and America plummets to 39th in infant mortality while 25 percent of all children are suffering with learning disabilities, ADHD, severe allergies, autism, asthma, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disorder, rheumatoid arthritis and other chronic immune and brain disorders. The question that doctors and public health officials fear most is:

WHY IS THE MOST HIGHLY VACCINATED CHILD POPULATION IN THE WORLD SO SICK AND DISABLED?

- V.

*For a longer post on fetal cell-lines, read this.

"What Ever Happened to Baby WI-38?"

2009-01-12T00:04:00.000-05:00

The following is not my work. It is by a blogger who went by the tag of Scrivener. Sadly, Scrivener has left the blogosphere, and his blog is no more.

In the interests of preserving a post of seminal importance to the Orthodox (or other conservative Christian) parent, I have taken the liberty of reproducing this text in full. Should Scrivener object, he is welcome to let me know.

What Ever Happened to Baby WI-38?

My wife and I have opted our children out of certain portions of the recommended vaccination schedule. This has made for some difficult conversations in the doctor’s office, and will likely complicate matters when it comes time to send them to school. But we have our reasons.
Here’s one: several of the most popular vaccines contain human tissue cultures originally obtained from aborted babies.
Unless you’re in the habit of reading vaccine inserts and researching this kind of thing, this will be news to you. It sounds a little too gruesome to be true. You may be inclined to disbelieve me. I wanted to disbelieve it. But though it’s not an article of common knowledge (even among health professionals), it’s quite true, and it’s never been a secret. This is public information and easily verifiable.
In order to produce a live-virus vaccine, one must first cultivate the disease one hopes to immunize against. Some viruses are more easily propogated in a laboratory setting than others. Easier ones are often produced in a cellular culture derived from chicken egg whites. Other viruses more difficult to propogate are only reliably cultivated in actual human tissue cultures.
Vaccines developed by Merck and GlaxoSmithKline for Rubella, Hepatitis-A and Varicella (Chicken Pox) are developed in a culture of human diploid cells taken from the lungs of two babies aborted in the 1960s. In both cases, the abortions were legally performed (in Europe) and the babies were healthy.
One of these was Baby WI-38. What is commonly referred to as the “WI-38 cell culture” was derived from a female fetus aborted at 3 months gestation in 1961. Diploid cells harvested from her lungs have been cultured and reproduced in American laboratories for the past 35 years as a efficacious, human medium for cultivating the infectious agents needed in the manufacture of live-virus vaccines.
In the UK, the MRC-5 cell culture was developed along similar lines, from human diploid cells harvested from the lungs of a male fetus aborted in 1966, also at about three months of development.
As I’ve mentioned, this is public information, available to anyone who cares to know. Here , for instance, is the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control page discussing the issue. And here is another pro-vaccine resource that discusses it in greater depth. On the other side of the aisle, here is a page produced by an anti-abortion group providing information on the vaccination question. And here is a website produced by an anti-vaccination group that describes the questionable ingredients (including human diploid cells) contained in a whole host of common vaccines.
We navigate perilous intersections when our principles cross paths with concern for the health and safety of our children. I know what it’s like to fret over your child's well being. We all want our children to be protected. And certainly there are real health benefits to vaccination. I don’t pretend to judge parents who choose to use these vaccines in hopes of protecting their children from disease. But I wonder if there isn’t a price to pay.
Isn't it curious anti-abortion groups don’t make more noise over this issue? Is it ignorance? Hypocrisy? Resignation? Sure, WI-38 and MRC-5 were only two unborn babies (out of millions aborted every year), and they were not aborted explicitly for the purpose of creating cell lines for use in vaccines. But can we enjoy the “benefits” of abortion without weakening our condemnation of its legal practice? Abortion, in Christian circles, is often referred to as a “holocaust” on a par with the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe. But would you feel comfortable condemning Hitler’s crimes against humanity while at the same time employing the body parts of the first few gas-chamber victims as talismans to ward off danger, no matter how effective?
This isn’t going to change unless we start making an issue of it. Drug companies and vaccine manufacturers will not spend money on research to find better ways of producing these vaccines until they decide it has become financially or politically expedient for them to do so. So research this for yourself. Talk to your doctors and pediatricians about it. Contact your elected representatives. Call or write the vaccine manufacturers to complain (contact information is found on the last link above).
The horrifying truth is that, in our desire to live healthier lives, tens of millions of Americans (and tens of millions of others worldwide) have been injected with leftover bits of medically murdered, unborn babies.
That’s what happened to Baby WI-38.

- V.

When War is Profitable

2009-01-09T21:24:00.003-05:00

Last lines from a recent movie:

While private gunrunners continue to thrive, the world's biggest arms suppliers are the U.S., U.K., Russia, France and China.*

They are also the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

What happens when the brokers of peace are those who quietly profit from war?

Who will be the peacemaker then? And what then is the U.N.?

When Christ said "blessed are the peacemakers" it was not because they would be ideally positioned to fuel war.

...

This one shouldn't have surprised me, but it did.

- V.

* According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2000 the biggest arms exporters were the U.S., Russia, Germany, U.K., and France (source). In 2007, SIPRI records that the biggest arms exporters were the U.S., Russia, Germany, Netherlands, and Ukraine.

Sola Fide and other Reforming Thoughts

2009-01-09T10:45:00.001-05:00

I got to thinking about Ephesians 2:8-9 the other day. These are the verses commonly quoted in defense of the Reformation's Sola Fide.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. (Eph. 2:8-9)

And a passage occurred to me as a refutation to the doctrine of Sola Fide. Not St. James' memorable perfect inversion:

What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble! But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect? [...] For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also. (James 2:14-22, 26)

Not that, but this:

And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 13:13)

Naturally, and somewhat unfortunately, this line of thought led me to the Reformation. Unfortunate, because I must of necessity inflict my thoughts on you, my heretofore faithful reader.

Sola Fide is one of the most famous cries of the Reformers. Here is the complete list, the five pillars of Protestantism, as it were.

Sola Scriptura! [Only Scripture is the standard.]
Solo Christo! [By Christ's work only are we saved.]
Sola Gratia! [Salvation is by [God's] grace alone.]
Sola Fide! [Justification* is by faith alone.]
Soli Deo Gloria! [All is to be done for the glory of God alone.]

*Because justification is by no means a word in popular parlance, I offer the following definition, from The Catholic Encyclopedia:

Justification
(Latin justificatio; Greek dikaiosis.)

A biblio-ecclesiastical term; which denotes the transforming of the sinner from the state of unrighteousness to the state of holiness and sonship of God. Considered as an act (actus justificationis), justification is the work of God alone, presupposing, however, on the part of the adult the process of justification and the cooperation of his free will with God's preventing and helping grace (gratia praeveniens et cooperans). Considered as a state or habit (habitus justificationis), it denotes the continued possession of a quality inherent in the soul, which theologians aptly term sanctifying grace.

Please note that I don't find this much more helpful than you do.

Dictionary.com says that justification [by faith] is "the act of God whereby humankind is made or accounted just, or free from guilt or penalty of sin". This is better.

...

I have noted repeated queries posted on this blog as to the position of Orthodoxy on several tenets central to Protestant theology. This is mildly frustrating, as it is akin to a journalist asking a nomad from the Moroccan hinterland what he thinks of Jennifer Aniston's latest dress. I mean, we aren't talking the same language any more - the obsession of the one isn't even on the radar of the other.

But it goes beyond the bridges of language, distance, and lack of familiarity. The nomad, even if he could understand what an actress was, who Ms. Aniston was, and what role fashion plays in the West, he probably couldn't care less. Why? Because he has to live, find water, and feed his goats.

Similarly, your average Orthodox is rather preoccupied with trying to fast, trying to pray, and trying to give alms as asked him by his Lord. Or maybe just trying to love God and his neighbour. When he wants to learn theology, it generally doesn't touch on the five solas of the Reformation, or how justification differs in the minds of 16th century Protestants and Catholics. Figuring out the nature of God, trying to understand the mystery of the Incarnation ... these are usually enough.

So I don't have much in the way of answers. Here is what I can say, based on my limited knowledge (more experienced theologians are welcome to cut in):

Orthodoxy is most emphatically not the negation (or reassertion) of a series of bullet points. It cannot be understood by comparing it to the priorities of either Protestants or Catholics. It is not defined in contradistinction with any other body. Orthodoxy is, as best as I can say it in a single sentence, the maximalist, poetic response of many nations to the salvation from death, sin, and the devil offered them by Christ their God, and it is the simultaneous repentant running towards God by those who are being saved by Him.
Sola Scriptura? The standard for Orthodox is Holy Tradition, from the oral traditions collated by Moses in the Pentateuch through the unfolding revelation of God to the Jews as found in the rest of the Septuagint, to the unrecorded words and deeds of Christ and His apostles, the Gospels (and Acts) that were written to record some of these words and deeds, and further yet through the letters of St. Paul - last of the apostles - to the letters and then councils of the early Church. This is an unbroken Tradition that continues to this day. St. Vincent of Lerins famously said this of Holy Tradition: "quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus credituni est." True Tradition is what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. ... Holy Writ (and the 7 Councils) get pride of place within this Tradition, but as it is Tradition that has given us the Scriptures, it is not the Bible that interprets Tradition, but Tradition interprets the Bible.
Solo Christo? By Christ are we saved, but we must labour with Christ. Colossians 1:24 speaks of something lacking in the afflictions or suffering of Christ, a horrifying concept to a Reformer, I would think. Hasn't Christ done all the work? Orthodox understand this to mean that we need to participate, to share in the suffering of Christ. This strikes to the heart of the matter ... our salvation is not complete unless we assent to it. (A helpful analogy might be the physician. For healing, it is not enough that we believe in medicine or that we go to a physician, but we must take the treatment he prescribes.)
Sola Gratia? I have heard it said that Orthodox do not ask what is God's grace, but who is God's grace. Answer: Jesus Christ is the Grace of God, period.
Sola Fide? See St. James' letter, above, for a very Orthodox understanding of faith and works. Referencing my quotation from I Corinthians, one might argue that "the greatest of these", love, is the source or wellspring for the works mentioned by St. James.
Soli Deo Gloria? And while "all must be done for the glory of God alone" sounds really good, it also sounds very grandiose, and where matters of theology come into play, may detract from the very earthy and practical commands to love, to give, to serve, etc. My personal opinion.
That addresses the five pillars of Protestantism. As for predestination, double-predestination, etc., these are not doctrines that have ever occurred to Orthodox. Instead, Orthodox tend to see these doctrines as the extreme end of some iffy teachings by a suspect theologian (Augustine of Hippo), and the logical source of atheism. I refer the interested reader to this post and to this speech (credit: Les of Whippleshire).

- V.

Christ is born!

2009-01-07T20:59:00.003-05:00

The day has dawned white and wintry. Bundled Orthodox weave their way through the drifts to an annual appointment with a newborn king. It is a point in time (January 7th, according to the civil calendar) and a point in place (the white, domed church upon the hill) that will take them out of time, out of place, to a cave in Bethlehem about 6 B.C. And because this liturgy is also the gateway to th' eternal, they will be lifted up into the heavens where there is neither time nor place, but the ceaseless singing of the angelic choir. "Holy, Holy, Holy."

Here, in our home, our clothes still lie neatly folded. Illness, pregnancy, and unintentioned vigil have struck here, and we have missed our appointment.

But though we couldn't journey also to the City of David to offer David's Lord our gifts of incense and open, contrite hearts, we may still say with joyfulness:

Christ is born!
Le Christ est né!
Hristos razhdayetsia!

- V.

Beautiful

2009-01-06T20:52:00.001-05:00

... one night last week I was reading on the futon mattress in the older girls' room, with my oldest next to me, who was holding hands with her sister in the crib next to her, which is how they go to sleep. I could hear the distinct sounds of breath from the older two, and feel the littlest one breathing on my chest, the eight lungs in the room remembering God's pneumatic gift to Adam.

From the Ochlophobist.

- E.

Single Issue Voting

2009-01-06T01:08:00.001-05:00

While the frenzy that marked the recent crowning of Obama reached ever higher pinnacles of man-worship, I found myself unhappily canvassing my friends for their pick. "Unhappily", because I felt it wasn't much of a choice (and still don't), but I kept at it regardless ... in hopes that someone could give me a reason to prefer one over the other.

I knew that Obama was a Democrat, and I'm no fan of Democrats. Their social agenda frequently feels like the unofficial and Heaven-damned policies and pleasures of Babylon. And yet, a perusal of the actions of recent Republicans reveals them to be from the same species of person-hating and war-mongering international thuggery that marked Alexandros, Adolf, di Buonaparte, and Iosif. Who knows, maybe Cyrus, Sargon, and Xerxes too.

I wanted a reason - a good reason - to prefer one over the other. Something better than my horror at what Bush Jr. has unleashed on the world and a consequent knee-jerk reaction to McCain, Bush's successor. But time and again, I found my (conservative) friends whole-heartedly embracing McCain. And time and again, I was confounded by their resolve to reduce their decision-making process to a single issue.

Naturally, this single issue refers to abortion.

Abortion is a horror and a travesty. In the year 2000, 857 000 children were legally aborted in the US (source). Like the Carthaginians and the other Baal-worshippers of old, for the sake of insignificant gains in this life Westerners have chosen to sacrifice their children upon the altar of Moloch. It is the ultimate parody of the Gospel: reaping life now in order to suffer at the Last Judgment; laying down another's life for oneself.

And yet, and yet.

... There are more than a single issue at work in the world today, and some of them involve issues and consequences no less horrific than abortion. I mean war. I mean the elimination of freedoms. I mean yet more war. And I mean rendering ourselves up for ridicule (Christian adulation of Sarah Palin jumps to mind) in a world that is increasingly hostile to Christians, where Christianity rarely reflects anything of the Gospel of Christ.

... The [alleged] proponents of pro-life policies (the Republicans) sponsor at the same time some heinously pro-death policies.

Since 2003, between 90 000 and 98 000 Iraqi civilians have been killed (s) - total deaths probably exceed a million (s). And who knows how many will eventually die from the decision to employ depleted uranium in American missiles.
Since 2001, between 9 000 and 27 000 Afghani civilians have been killed (s) - I don't know total deaths.
From 2001-2006 374 people were executed in American jails (s).

I don't know what other American-sponsored deaths have occurred in the years of Republican power (and many of the figures above can and will be debated). The point is that the Republicans have bloody hands. Choosing to vote for them because they oppose abortion sounds good, but it is likely to be no more than a sop to Christian conscience. A Republican government has not been shown to reduce our infant mortality, but it certainly has raised world mortality.

... I see two consequences to single issue voting. Neither of them is the desired outcome of abortion outlawry.

First, this forces Christians to bed down with the proponents of death: the military industrial complex, warmongers, apologists for capital punishment. It forces them to side with Big Pharma, Big Business, Big Agriculture, the enemies to the little man, the individual, the family.

Second, this leads, and I think inevitably, to a cynical manipulation of an often unreasoning body of people who will accept any idiot so long as he (or she) mouths the right words. A chilling but timely reminder: it wasn't atheists or leftist social engineers that elected Hitler to power, but conservative Lutheran Christians.

- V.

And furthermore...

2009-01-05T18:03:00.004-05:00

There is a theology (a Western doctrine) that happens to get under my skin more than any other. I have grown up with it; it was absorbed into me with every moment I lived as a Protestant, and offers to me the strongest proof of atheism that I can imagine.

I was fortunate - at least, I consider myself fortunate - to have met through his books one George MacDonald, a man who could not abide said soul-destroying theology and who lost his job as pastor because of it. I never heard his sermons, but I devoured his fantasy, I ate up whole his romances, and in so doing I absorbed the antidote to the above poison.

Faithful readers to this blog will have noted that I do not like proof-texting or the point-by-point arguing of a thesis. I am much more comfortable dealing with ideas. Here is one other who in similarly dealing with ideas expresses with eloquence how I feel also.

But why do men hate God? They hate Him not only because their deeds are dark while God is light, but also because they consider Him as a menace, as an imminent and eternal danger, as an adversary in court, as an opponent at law, as a public prosecutor and an eternal persecutor. To them, God is no more the almighty physician who came to save them from illness and death, but rather a cruel judge and vengeful inquisitor.

You see, the devil managed to make men believe that God does not really love us, that He really only loves Himself, and that He accepts us only if we behave as He wants us to behave; that He hates us if we do not behave as He ordered us to behave, and is offended by our insubordination to such a degree that we must pay for it by eternal tortures, created by Him for that purpose. Who can love a torturer? Even those who try hard to save themselves from the wrath of God cannot really love Him. They love only themselves, trying to escape God's vengeance and to achieve eternal bliss by managing to please this fearsome and extremely dangerous Creator.

Do you see, then, that Western theology teaches that our real danger and our real enemy is our Creator and God? How can we have faith in someone who we detest? Faith in its deeper essence is a product of love, therefore, it would be our desire that one who threatens us not even exist, especially when this threat is eternal.
- Archbishop Lazar Puhalo.

- V.

Not an Obamaphile

2008-12-31T00:54:00.004-05:00

I cannot guarantee how long or how faithfully I will be able to sample the blogosphere, but in this latest bout of web surfing I found a bleak analysis of the American election over at Whippleshire.

He is not an Obamaphile, clearly. For that matter, neither am I.

Throughout the latter part of this election I have felt the enervation that comes from true pointlessness. What is the point in cheering for a McCain over an Obama? Or vice versa? Neither would have been good for America, and now we will find out exactly how bad it can be with the guy that won.

America's greatness lay in being a republic, not a democracy, not an empire. The republic died years ago, perhaps before the Second World War? Her greatness lay in her constitution, a constitution which has been completely abrogated, dismissed, and otherwise sloughed off. In watching Election 2008 I met and was smitten by the figure of Ron Paul. A Republican, but not a Republican like the imperialists Reagan, Bush, Bush, and McCain. A constitutionalist, and that is something that reaches beyond partisan lines. A man who desired a return to the republic.

But there is little point in crying for what-might-have-been. Instead we need to live with what is and what will be. ... What will be?

From Whippleshire:

It has also been said that peoples go from slavery to great faith, from great faith to freedom, from freedom to prosperity, from prosperity to apathy, from apathy to chaos, from chaos to tyranny, and back to slavery once more. America right now is on the fast track from apathy to chaos and into tyranny.

Let us hope he is wrong.

- V.

Inchoate Musings on Orthopraxy

2008-12-30T17:20:00.004-05:00

As I have mentioned elsewhere (here and here also), orthopraxy is of some importance to me. As a convert to Orthodoxy, I have all the theology, but little knowledge (and less experience) of the practice. And what merit a man if he gain all knowledge but losing his soul for failing to practice it? This is the path of the Devil and his minions. Faith without works is dead, and I will show thee my faith by my works.

And yet there is a core ... there is praxis that is of less import and there is praxis that is the heart of our religion. Modest dress, headscarves, Lent: these things and their like are not the be-all and end-all of Orthodoxy. Granted, as Christ said to the right practice of the Pharisees, that they should have done the weightier matters of the Law (justice, mercy, and faith) while not to have left the other undone.

What evidence can I give as to this core? The Law and the Prophets are summed thus: love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself. The three activities Christ mentions in the Sermon on the Mount are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Elsewhere He identifies action done to the sick, the stranger, the widowed, the orphan, and the imprisoned as being done to Him. And St. James says that pure religion to visit the orphan and the widow in their distress, and keep oneself unspotted from the world.

Over and over, the message is this: it is essential to care for the needy, the hurting, the least among you. And so in Christ's Church the heart of our orthopraxy is still the same - caring for our fellow man, and in our care demonstrating our love for God Himself and by our works showing our faith.

It is interesting to note that there is little in Scripture about mastering a catechism, little about church attendance, little about following a prayer rule. The Church has identified these as valuable, and so they are. But the foundation of our praxis lies in our treatment of our neighbours.

The To-Do List

almsgiving
hospitality
visiting the institutionalized (the old, sick, and the gaoled)
loaning without repayment (a.k.a. giving)
caring for the homeless
remembering the single mother, the man who relies on Salvation Army clothing, and the girl who works at Walmart
caring also for the foreigner and the immigrant

All these things have been said before ... but it is too easy to rely on governmental social aids (like Canada's health care system, like the Children's Aid Society, like food stamps and welfare) to do the work for us. It is too easy to leave the work to large impersonal charities [the conscientious will only give to charities with low overhead and minimal administrative fees], instead of personally, where there is never any overhead and a direct, immediate, and personal relationship is forged. It is too easy to loan money to the poor (whether with interest or no).

And in a world where even the Church sends away the poor, even the Church spends her riches on the temporal, it is left to the individual to care for the hurting, to invest in eternity, to be Christ to them, that they might be Christ to us. Face-to-face, icon of Christ to icon of Christ, a glimpse of eternity, a reflection of the Divine, an acting out of the mystery of the Incarnation, a sharing in the Passion, grace overflowing upon grace in the economy of Heaven.

- V.

Inchoate Musings on Understanding God

2008-12-30T14:47:00.005-05:00

I have been thinking about God, and how I appropriate God. [I want to think that this is a valuable exercise. Most of life is simply lived without reflection and without questioning the presuppositions that undergird it. One's belief in God is the most fundamental presupposition of all; I persuade myself that it cannot be endlessly assumed, but must be challenged.]

It has occurred to me that the God I believe in is, on a quotidian basis, a pagan one. I believe (or profess to believe) in a loving God. But this love I don't understand - it is an alien and foreign love - and so I lapse into a default position of alternating between attempts at bribery (or placation) and anger at or with God when my bribery doesn't work.

To bribe God, to placate God is the faith of the non-believer. It is faith in the pre-Christian malleable and persuadable gods of the pagan pantheons, and has nothing to do with the personal God of Holy Writ.

Anger at or with God is the faith of a thwarted child. It is based upon a relationship, but one ill conceived and distorted. It assumes that love is there, but obviously an inconsistent one.

As I peel back the layers to my private theology, I find a surface declaration in a loving God, a deeper pagan disbelief, a still deeper anger in a God who is not manipulated, and somewhere beneath it all, I find a measure of trust.

When all else has been lost - when little b. was so sick, when my grandfather died, when I fell into Bunyan's Slough of Despond - I have found myself at peace with the Divine, reconciled to the contrariness and irrationality of human existence, no longer troubled by theodicy, but simply dependent and trusting in God and in a love that persists and is sustained despite and in the midst of madness.

But only then. It strikes me that the trouble is taking the childlike faith and trust in God that is with me then and applying it to the rest of my life.

In point of fact, isn't the entire Christian journey, the pilgrimage of each life, a journey through the endless misappropriations and misunderstandings of God into pure faith? Is it not true that this struggle to see God, to have Him revealed, is not just the journey of a people, from Abraham to the Church, but belongs to each one of us?

...

And then I think of certain theologies. Formalized ones that belong to a particular Christian sect or other.

And it seems to me that there is a development.

There is the child's faith, pure, innocent, and untrammeled. But immature. Adamic.
There is the adolescent's faith, ideological, dogmatic, and often strenuously logical. Systematizing the faith with a nascent intellect. Still immature. Scholastic. Calvinistic.
There is the teenager's faith, romantic, emotional, and vaguely mystical. Some forms of Catholicism. Arminian.

But to the adult there is no type, no theology that can be called truly mature. There are only individuals working their way to sanctity, endlessly discovering the depths of God, until they reach a point - a mature faith - which is a faith that is childlike without immaturity. It is a faith tried, tested, and purified.

- V.

[In the above it is understood, but nowhere stated, that Orthodoxy provides a framework (the best framework) to attain this mature faith, but does not assume it. Orthodoxy provides no shorthand for her theology, no easy dogmatics, no fast mysticism. There is simply a carefully delineated but very rocky road that leads to maturity.]

Usury

2008-12-30T00:11:00.004-05:00

I am delighted to see Ochlophobist skewering with his usual eloquence the evil of usury. Check it out.

Here are some gems from the original post and the ensuing discussion:

"The worse thing still is that the virtue of wealth is no longer linked to such things as hard work, the production of goods or other such natural virtues, but rather through "making your money work for you." Which, to be certain, is nothing more that what the Church has always called "usury." It is a rather strange proposition, that money can somehow do work. What this really means is that we are to earn interest with our money by the labor of another. Theft really ..." -Lotar.

"Why, if one wants to be ascetical as an Orthodox living in America, do we not consider the option of following, in an unpronounced manner, the norms of Orthodox piety, while taking upon oneself the suffering associated with the acquisition of some form of voluntary poverty?" -Ochlophobist.

"Why, when speaking of ascesis in an American context, do we not even consider in our rhetoric the option of encouraging Orthodox singles and families to live lives in which they will make little money (or at least less money), and thus dress and act and carry themselves in the manner of Christians who happen to be, say, in the bottom 35% of the American socio-economic scales? Would this not be a better interpretation of Chrysostom's many admonishments concerning money and family life than either trendy ascesis or pseudo-monk ascesis?" -Ochlophobist.

"The most unfortunate aspect of what you have pointed out is how narrowly the word "usury" is now defined. It is sad that folks do not put two and two together to realize that "making money work for you" entails that someone, somewhere is being inhumanely robbed or manipulated." -Joseph Schmidt.

"The value of money is created through labor by the production of goods and services. So, if you are making money without labor (ie, making your money work for you, charging interest, etc.) then you are making money from someone else's labor." -Lotar.

"The Gospel also makes total demands of the human person. [...] While the OT demands 10% of our gain, the NT demands we give all we have away. A NT tithe is the widow’s mites. Very few live up to those demands." -Ochlophobist.

- V.

Small thought, big thought

2008-10-16T07:26:00.005-04:00

My seat over here has been getting cool - nobody has been writing anything in quite some time. En lieu of keeping it warm, and for the purposes of making a happy announcement in what is generally a rather bleak and uncertain time, E. (my lovely wife) and I are expecting a child.

We do not know the sex, and are uncertain if we would be telling you if we did, but it is good news, happy news, and altogether better than hearing me discuss sub-prime markets or the fact that Americans have to choose between McCain and Obama.

The baby is due March 3rd.

In other news, yesterday marks the one-year anniversary of little b.'s coming home from his three-month sojourn in hospital. In many ways, this is more of a birthday for us than his delivery date.

And, of course, October 14th was the Feast of the Pokrov (Protection of the Veil). I can't remember if I mentioned this in an earlier post or not, but when E. went into labour a month early, we hadn't even had her hospital bag packed. We rushed around, grabbing necessaries, and in that time I grabbed up an icon of the Pokrov. The icon stayed with my wife through her labour and delivery, and when b. was born, the icon stayed with him in his crib until he came home, the day after the Feast of the Pokrov.

Our lady the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary had her protecting veil about our son, and by her prayers and supplications we were gifted with the miracle of his coming home.

So I am thankful, very thankful. Words cannot suffice.

God is good.

- V.

Muslims, Natural Law, and the V.c.M.

2008-07-05T14:01:00.005-04:00

In Section B, Article III of the V.c. Manifesto, I speak of Muslims reaping material and spiritual rewards for doing "the Christian thing," making specific reference to non-usurious banking and modest dress. I was later challenged on this, and I thought that rather than continue the dialogue in the Comments section, that I would expand on it in the context of a full post. In other words, here.

First let me establish that my position on Islam as an Orthodox Christian is that it is no more and no less than a Christian heresy. As such, there will be much that is of value (our common heritage and belief) but at no time can Islam be regarded as a source of eternal truth or a place to acquire wisdom - these are what Orthodoxy is for. It may be possible for a good Muslim to find God and thus salvation, but it is not something that I would care to bet on. I trust rather to the mercy of God and His love.

Within this context (ie. that Orthodoxy offers Truth but that heterodoxy and heresy do not), I believe that God blesses the nations and peoples of the world according to their adherence to certain basic principles. We might call this blessing Natural Law... that God has so written it into the fabric of the universe that doing the right thing ends in material and spiritual blessing (I include both because we are psychosomatic beings), but that failing to do the right thing results in personal and social disaster.

Some of this is extremely obvious. Killing the unborn results in a population unable to sustain itself, which in turn leads to the collapse of the society. Cheating my clients results in their refusal either to use my services or to recommend me, which in turn voids my business.

So what are Muslims doing right? What do I feel they will be blessed for ... what indeed is the Law undergirding their massive population growth and meteoric rise amidst the nations?

Abortion. Muslims do not abort their young. Christian nations and many Christians do.
Usury. Muslims take the prohibition against usury seriously. We abandoned this prohibition centuries ago, and indeed our societies are predicated upon it.
Modesty. Muslims attire themselves modestly (the burka is a non-Christian interpolation). Our nations, and the vast majority of Christians do not.
Homosexuality. Tolerated if not embraced by our society, practically non-existent in Muslim circles.

How this engages us ...

A. If we want to find a veil for E. to wear to Church, we search in Muslim stores. The very Muslim-looking hijab we avoid, but it is only in Muslim stores that we can find veils, let alone attractive ones.

B. Modest clothing? An internet search will reveal the following three sources: Indian, Muslim, and Mormon. Forget trying a department store.

C. Meat. It is impossible to get hamburger meat (ground beef) from the national grocery stores without finding old meat in the centre, hidden by the new. Our local Muslim butcher grinds his fresh, and the meat is the highest quality lean beef I have ever had.

[As an interesting aside, a block away from my home stands three shops next to each other: a convenience store owned and operated by an Antiochian Orthodox couple, a small grocery store owned and operated by an evangelical Filipina, and the butchery/ convenience store owned and operated by a couple North African Muslims. The Orthodox couple are rude, complain if they have to change larger bills, and cash work cheques for about a twelfth of the cheque's amount, taking advantage of the most poor. The evangelical Filipina is always surly. Meanwhile, the Muslim butchery treats its customers well, provides high quality meat, and if someone is short on money the owners wave it off ("bring it in next time," they say). How strange it is that the proprietor who best models Christ is the non-Christian. By way of consequence I never frequent my co-religionists' establishment, and rarely the Filipina's. It is the Muslim establishment that I frequent.]

D. Usury. Unfortunately, our bank does not offer interest-free (ie. Islamic or Sharia) banking. But other banks do. In a world where loan-taxes on the poor go to line the pockets of the wealthy, monetary systems that follow a Christian ethic are most attractive, even if they are Muslim monetary systems.

E. The families we see. And perhaps this is the sign and symbol of a changing social fabric as one group is blessed over another... Our parks and playgrounds are full of Muslim families - mom, dad, and numerous children, playing and eating together. The white Anglo-Saxon types are nowhere to be seen. Couples biking together perhaps, but the next generation? Taken care of by the Muslims.

- V.

Two Moments

2008-07-03T20:18:00.003-04:00

A Moment in a Cemetery

Some time ago, not too long after Pascha, I and several others were working together to give our parish cemetery its annual spring cleaning when an older parishioner remarked in scandalized tones that another Orthodox cemetery in town had just interred the cremated remains of someone ... and with the approval of the bishop no less! When I made note that cremation was just as scandalous and unOrthodox as embalming, another practice that crops up in Orthodox circles, I was gently rebuked. Embalming, I was told, is okay ... it is only cremation which is not.

What?

When I had gone apart with a friend, I began a mini-rant on the heterodoxy of embalming. Until I noticed that he wasn't with me, wasn't in agreement. He showed only the mild patience of an older dog for the excitable yipping of a puppy as he discovers his own tail.

Which was discomfiting. I care about things and that strongly. I care about clean water and clean food, I care about traditional social mores, I care about children and family. And I care about Orthodoxy.

It is bewildering to call a brother or a sister "brother" and "sister" in confidence that they hold to the same beliefs, only to discover that the same brother and sister are not aggressively guarding these self-same beliefs from the predations of the Enemy. In fact, they do not care, and from the vantage-point of their apathy find articulated belief alarming.

A Moment in a Mass Grave

Just in time for the 141st anniversary of the formation of the Dominion of Canada, the news media has informed us that Henry Morgentaler is being awarded the Order of Canada. And I have to say that I am just sick over it. No doubt this event is being widely panned throughout the blogosphere and my small contribution therefore redundant in the extreme, but I cannot be silent.

For those not in the know, Dr. Morgentaler was a G.P. who gave up his practice to set up and run Canada's first abortion clinic. Who, when he was arrested, took the case through the courts and through appeals until it reached the Supreme Court and the prohibition against abortion in Canada was struck down. Who, to this day operates an abortion clinic within a block of Parliament Hill and remains the Canadian abortion activist and so an icon of death, a Canadian Kevorkian for the unborn.

Morgentaler, a Polish Jew who emigrated to Canada after the end of World War II, is a man who survived one holocaust at the hands of the Nazis only to import another holocaust into this country. Although a victim of prejudice-spawned mass murder of a minority group, Morgentaler has seen fit to champion a feminist-spawned mass murder of our minors in utero.

Something terrible has happened to this nation that not only is abortion allowed, but its apostle honoured.

They say that fully a third of my generation was aborted. I don't know how true the numbers are, but I do know that Canada is a wasteland - a mass grave - inhabited by the dead whose blood calls out to heaven. Against this society, against their infanticidal mothers, against the "doctors", against Morgentaler.

Lord have mercy.

- V.

Something Beautiful

2008-04-25T12:58:00.004-04:00

In keeping with this most holy season, something beautiful:

May God grant you a sober and prayerful close to Holy Week, and a most blessed Pascha.

- V.

Keeping Hands & Breath Low, and Eyes Upward

2008-04-10T22:31:00.002-04:00

From Ochlophobist:

We live this life between sky and earth; anything which hinders the view of either is a fabrication. When my parents moved to suburban Detroit, and I found myself surrounded by mile after mile after mile of boxes of sameness, I would lie on the asphalt parking lot at the church in front of our parsonage, and stare at the sky, for it is all that I had left, having been taken from hill and field. I had only sky those years, divorced from earth, and therefore from myself. Having learned from this, or rather suffered it, now each place I go I seek a field in order to know the place and myself there. Prairie grass or cotton, one can make something of a life, keeping hands and breath low, and eyes upward. [emphasis mine]

I can't think of anything to improve upon this.

- V.

Is it Orthodox? III

2008-04-10T20:09:00.006-04:00

Is it Orthodox to care for the environment? Perhaps we should instead ask if it is Orthodox to venerate an icon, or if it is Orthodox to combat the Gnostic hatred of matter.

The whole earth is a living icon of the face of God. … I do not worship matter. I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take His abode in matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honoring the matter which wrought my salvation! I honor it, but not as God. Because of this I salute all remaining matter with reverence, because God has filled it with his grace and power. Through it my salvation has come to me.
- St. John Damascene (675-749)

Other quotes from the Fathers:

Creation reveals Him who formed it, and the very work made suggests Him who made and ordered it.
- St. Irenaeus of Lyon (129 –203)

I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that wherever you go the least plant may bring you a clear remembrance of the Creator. … One blade of grass or one speck of dust is enough to occupy your entire mind in beholding the art with which it has been made. … The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, even our brothers, the animals, to whom Thou gavest the earth as their home in common with us. …We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of pain. May we realize that they live, not for us alone, but for themselves and for Thee and that they love the sweetness of life.
- St. Basil the Great (347-407)

Quotes from: A Cloud of Witness: The Deep Ecological Legacy of Christianity, by Frederick Krueger. (Santa Rosa: Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation, 2002, 4th ed.)

- V.

Is it Orthodox? (cont.)

2008-04-08T08:21:00.000-04:00

The only people who appear to care about God's Creation as much as Orthodox ought to are the pagans and the environmentalists.

The pagans worship a false god or goddess that cannot save, cannot lead them into all truth. They discern the [good] form that God has made, but are powerless to receive the grace that God wishes to impart to them through that form. The sacramental and the salvific power of Creation are lost to them, because they do know the God Who created and blessed what they worship. I am minded of St. Paul's words: They worship that which they do not know.

The environmentalists (the followers of environmentalism) worship a barren and lifeless ideology that cannot save them from themselves and the corrupting evils of the heart. In the crucible of their ideology they have discovered a strange alchemy whereby abortion, forced sterilization, and euthanasia are good things, cures to the disease of overpopulation. Their love of environment is unmediated by a love for their fellow man, and so the greatest law, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is lost in stewardship enshrined.

[And in the writing of this post I hear and read of such a worshiper who recently made the following remarks in the wake of the death of some sealers: "The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society recognizes that the deaths of four sealers is a tragedy but Sea Shepherd also recognizes that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups is an even greater tragedy." This is a perfect illustration of the lovelessness of the religion of environmentalism.

Later in the same article another environmentalist is recorded to have advocated assassinating vivisectionists. Vivisection is morally wrong, but murder will not improve the situation any.]

These faiths are graceless and loveless. Only in Orthodoxy do we have an understanding of why it is we must tend this earth that God has made, steward it carefully, work it respectfully, and heal it by our prayers. We know the true function of this Creation, and that is to be the vessel of God's love to us, the means of humbling ourselves for the betterment of lesser beings as icons of Christ's mercy, and the reciprocation and echo of our jubilant voice of praise to God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

- V.

Is it Orthodox to be environmentally-conscious?

2008-04-06T15:09:00.006-04:00

I was recently asked if it was Orthodox to care so much for the environment.

I would boldly and unequivocally state that it is very Orthodox to care for the environment, although unOrthodox to be passionate about environmentalism. The "ism" marks the point when an idea, descriptor, or reality is "deified" to the status of false god. Idolatry ensues.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that we have a better reason to care for the environment (what Orthodox have traditionally called Creation or the cosmos) than anyone else.

In the beginning, when God created, He called what He had created "good." A solid, unambiguous good, just as the first man and the first woman were also created good. Recently I heard it said that one of the hallmarks of the demonic is a hatred of Creation. Our Enemy hates what God has made, what He has called good, and seeks to despoil it, to despoil us.

The Old Order

When Man sinned (first Eve and then Adam), sin entered the world, the cosmos, through Adam, God-appointed steward of Creation. Through no fault of its own, Creation became fallen and corrupt, and it is for this reason that animal is at enmity with animal and man, and even the inanimate movements of nature (earthquake, tornado, lightning, etc.) are at war with both animal and man. And yet, though fallen, Creation is still good - God does not begrudge it its existence, but wills that it be, and continue to be. [Credit Fr. Stephen]

And as countless generations of men and women lived and died, their sins repeated the first sins of our first parents, and Creation groaned under the weight. Until the Advent of Christ, when all Creation rejoiced, and until Pentecost.

The New Order

In the icon of Pentecost, we see the flames of the Holy Spirit descending upon the Apostles, and below them a crowned man who represents the cosmos ... not just "the world", but all of Creation. Through this descent, the Holy Spirit began to restore, through and by the prayers of the God's holy faithful, all Creation to its Edenic, prelapsarian state. This is a process that continues to this day and enjoys its greatest flowering in monasteries and in remote hermitages where holy prayer is constantly lifted to God. Here we see a tsunami rebuked (St. Herman), a bear living in harmony (St. Seraphim), and other supranatural phenomena.

And sometimes there is no monastery or hermitage, just a holy man - whose heart has been made a temple of unceasing prayer - who reveals a fundamental, God-given peace and reconciliation between himself and Creation. Here the Holy Spirit is at work.

However, it is not just in the wonders of the thaumaturges or the monastic gardens that we see the Holy Spirit restoring and healing Creation. The Holy Spirit makes use of the matter that surrounds us to bless, heal, and sanctify the people of God . Where God mediates His grace through physical Creation, we identify this as "sacrament" or "sacramental." Water becomes the laver of regeneration. Bread and wine become the medicine of immortality. Oil becomes sacred chrism or instrument of healing. Pigment and binder become windows into heaven.

And still more things are brought into the Church to celebrate the feasts and to be yet another source of blessing to us. Greens are brought in at Pentecost, eggs at Pascha, flowers on Holy Friday, willows on Palm Sunday, etc.

As the Church year progresses, over and over again the sacramental (and therefore salvific) role of Creation is liturgically taught. We learn from the Church that all of Creation has the potential to become sacrament, by the power of the Holy Spirit through the prayers of the saints. And so the Church reveals to us the true beauty and potency of Eden, where all the cosmos becomes vessel for the Holy Spirit and bestower of God's grace.

The Contest

And so we come to the present, where the age-long demonic hatred of man, of family, of Church, and of Creation is naked and brutally active. In a nation where the blood of the innocents is shed, where God and His bride are mocked and derided, where family are endlessly torn and riven, we should expect to see poison poured into the rivers and perversions of nature sown in our fields. We should expect to see the earth paved over, the heavens obscured by bright lights and concrete monoliths, and the masses enticed away from the God-given and Spirit-blessed countryside and drawn into the desert of the city.

This is a contest where the Evil One will make use of any greed or lust to harm everything that God has proclaimed good.

And here we stand, the people of God, powerful Davids before the empty might of the Goliaths of our age (big industry, materialism, Mammonites, etc.), who rage and roar with demoniac loathing the barren mantras of their masters. And as we are fully present in our lives, it is our calling and our duty to rebuke the evil, to reclaim the good, to sanctify, bless, heal, restore, redeem ... to fix the brokenness around us in all its forms. And I would assert that that would include rejecting plastic, combating the acquisitive spirit of materialism, planting a garden, shunning GE perversions, and returning ourselves to a simpler sustainable future-friendly unselfish manner of living.

- V.

The Vox Clamanti Manifesto

2008-03-30T20:33:00.006-04:00

I have heard it said that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, and as a general principle, I would have to agree. However, at certain times and in certain places a prophetic voice is needed, a voice crying out in the desert, a chiding one that calls a people to change. Sometimes it is needful to curse the darkness.

To put it another way, Solomon wrote that every purpose under Heaven had its proper season. Sometimes one builds, sometimes one tears down. Our purpose and aim is to do both.

A Time to Build

For the sake of our own sanity, we cannot always be railing against the dying of the light. We need, and those who read this blog, need to hear and see beauty. We need to be secondary creators in emulation of our first Creator.

So expect from time to time descriptions of our parish, the natural world around us, and the joys of friendship, parenthood, and marriage. Perhaps also some art works, some art discussion ... perhaps some poetry.

And, where possible, where appropriate, and where we see them, we will offer our solutions to the various issues raised.

A Time to Tear Down

There are, regrettably, many thing that need changing in this world of ours. It is a deeply flawed and hurting world that we have inherited, a world under bombardment not only by our sins, but by our man-made toxins and our mountains of forever garbage. And it is a world where there is little to no repentance for our demon-like hatred of God’s Creation, man and world both, because we have constructed around our misdeeds horrible ideologies to defend them. … Here follow the issues that we have identified (and this section will undoubtedly evolve over time).

A. Environmental Concerns

These issues form an assault on the Creation that God called good. It is a failure to recognize that when the Holy Spirit was poured out on all the cosmos at Pentecost, He began to restore, through and by the prayers of the faithful, all Creation to its Edenic state. It is a failure to realize that all of nature has the potential to become sacrament, to become grace-bestowing, and it is a wanton violation of our role as stewards of a world that is not ours but God’s, lent us for a while. In many cases, our profligacy holds dire consequences to our health and well-being, and the health and well-being of our descendants.

I. Toxins: I have broken these down into four categories, from what I consider the most immediately damaging and dangerous to the least.

Injected toxins – These would include street drugs, some pharmaceuticals, and vaccinations. These are easiest to avoid, most immediately damaging, and affect humans (and sometimes their progeny) alone.
Ingested toxins – These would include unbound chemicals in our plastics, pesticides and heavy metals in our foods, and fluoride, chlorine, and various medications in our water. Where these toxins are carried in our groundwater and our waterways, the responsibility for them is shared, and the consequences involve more than our species alone.
Breathed toxins – These would include cigarette smoke, smog, airborne pesticides, and vapours from household cleaning supplies. These are harder to avoid, and involve, again, a shared responsibility and collective harm.
Absorbed toxins – These would include the plastics, pesticides, and bleaches found in our clothes, as well as skin contact with certain cleaners and varnishes.

II. Genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) are aberrant creations formed in Frankensteinian laboratories in a world-wide experiment to see what happens when the unnatural is tossed into nature. All too frequently these are self-replicating monstrosities.

Completely aside from whether or not these are a mockery and a blasphemy against God’s Creation, we eat many of the products made from these GMO’s, and we do not know what the long term effects will be.

III. Nuclear waste and depleted uranium are persistent and invisible mutagenic pollutants that will remain with us for millennia.

IV. Hormones in our meat, milk, and water have already been shown to have an effect on the hormones of those who consume them. This is another global experiment gone awry.

V. Garbage – our plastics and the throwaway culture that gave them birth – must be combated, reduced, and ultimately eliminated. There is no “away” to “throwaway”. Non -biodegradable garbage stays here in this world, our home, and as such is a present to our descendants that will keep on giving.

VI. Animal torture and the wanton cruelty towards animals, whether as manifestation of sociopathy, as the result of the industrialization of animal husbandry, or as a result of reckless and irreverent experimentation, constitutes a kind of savagery unknown even to the barbarians of yore.

VII. Clear-cut logging, unlike a more selective logging, is a habitat eliminator and the forefather to desertification. I recognize the need for wood for many uses and purposes, but our harvesting of this resource must allow renewal, rebirth, and the harvesting by future generations.

VIII. Power lines I include tentatively, largely because while we know that all electrical systems throw off magnetic fields, we do not know the long-term effects of constant habitation in a powerful magnetic field such as is given off by high-voltage power lines.

B. Social Concerns

These issues invariably are an affront to the human person, a degradation of the image of God, and a complete and utter failure to see God in others. Sadly, many of us participate in them through our self-indulgence and our pride.

I. Abortion: We need to take a tougher stand against this holocaust, this incessant feticide and its byproduct industries. Any vaccination that uses cell-lines derived from human fetuses (read: babies) must be avoided as we would avoid the taint of Nazi gold pulled from Jewish teeth. Likewise fetal stem cell research and any medical “advance” derived from fetal stem cells must be banned, boycotted, and shunned. Lastly, in vitro fertilization must be rethought where human embryos are formed in large number but not implanted in the mother’s womb. Throwing these out, as is customary in most cases, is another form of feticide, and as such constitutes murder.

II. Human trafficking: We as a society agree that human trafficking (the buying and selling of humans for the purposes of slavery) is wrong. However, we lack the moral courage to create an outright ban on prostitution and pornography so as to crush sexual slavery and the traffic in woman and children for sexual purposes. We lack the moral courage to outlaw and criminalize all companies that use forced labour, slavery, and sweatshop labour. We lack the moral courage to place adoption and organ transplants under the microscope to ensure that human exploitation was not involved, and we lack the will to vigorously punish those who engage or who knowingly benefit in such practices.

III. Usury, or interest, is a form of slavery in that it creates bondage through debt. The receivers of interest (the ever-wealthier) effectively enslave, through the medium of the banks, the ever-poorer. Banned by Mosaic Law and the Church, it has enjoyed not a resurrection but a revivification in more recent times.

IV. War, torture, and the use of weapons of mass destruction are similarly great evils. While I might argue that a defensive war is a necessary evil to preserve a nation in the face of military aggression, I fear that we have lost the ability to discern what a defensive war is. It is not a preemptive war, and it is not an offensive invasion of [another] belligerent country.

C. Cultural Concerns

These issues are those that, while not an affront to Creation or the human person, are distractions that interfere with our ability to stop, think, meditate, pray, and simply be, in silence and before God. Monastics would recognize these, I think, as tools of the Enemy to keep us from the knowledge and pursuit of God.

I. Speed: We live in a society that exists at only one speed, and that is breakneck. We need to slow down, we need to stop. We need to escape the tyranny of the ticking clock and the fear of “wasting” time as if it were something wastable. Just as God created us in matter so that we could learn to receive His grace through matter, He created us in time to experience Him in time.

There are many things – all the important things, in fact – which cannot be obtained quickly, or by any measure of time, but only by the measure of living, suffering, praying, loving, and growing. Building a marriage, raising a child, achieving maturity, gaining wisdom, and finding salvation itself are the products of a life, and cannot be measured by time or gained by the “spending” of time. We examine and speak of time as if it were quantitative, when any child could tell you it is qualitative.

II. Silence: St. Gregory Palamas was identified as a saint in part through his defense of hesychasm (silence) as a means to finding and experiencing God. Centuries before him, St. Elias discovered that God was not to be found in the crashing thunder but in the still small voice. And before him the Psalmist wrote of the need to be silent on our beds.

Silence is a precondition for meditation and prayer, and has become an ever-rarer commodity in the face of modern noise. Music pumped over the radio, through headphones, and in the supermarkets, engines roaring throughout the world, there are few places where one can entirely escape the sounds of busy, worldly Man.

III. Advertisement: Our senses and our peace are under constant assault by the omnipresence of signs and their ubiquitous siren call to buy, buy, buy. We are urged to satisfy our inner emptiness through endless consumption. We are titillated and amused, seduced into greed. We are not given the chance to rest, but are barraged and bombarded until we accept the hidden premise that we are consumers, not citizens of a nation nor the distinct people of God.

D. Ideological Concerns

These issues can be divided into two categories: heresies and philosophical ideas. Both, however, derive from the imagination of Man independent of Christ and His Church.

Thoughts may and should be free, but the implementation of these ideas – these pernicious and dangerous follies – have cost us a great deal, and will continue to cost us, unless we replace them with real wisdom and real knowledge.

I. The cult of youth: In the West we worship youth and beauty, and so we do everything in our technological power to promote youth, beauty, and “sexiness”, and to hide what is old and ugly. Our seniors are locked away into old folks’ homes. Our disfigured are urged to undergo plastic surgery. Our young starve themselves into looking more “beautiful”. Wrinkles are botoxed away and faces are lifted, grey hairs dyed, and beards shaved.

There are two even uglier consequences to the cult of youth. First, we hide our dead behind makeup and we attempt to preserve the illusion of life – eternal youth – through embalming, a profound abuse of the body, and a manifest disbelief in the reality of the resurrection of the dead. Second, the logical extension of the worship of youth results in the perversion of baby beauty competitions and prepubescent whore chic (where we display our young as sex objects), and pedophilia (where our young are perceived and treated as sex objects).

II. Modernism teaches, in essence, that things will keep on getting better. Evolutionary theory is a rationalization as to how this reversal of entropy works. What makes modernism so dangerous is that it has given us countless technologies without reckoning their cost. Vinyl must be a good, because it is a new technology – but the production of vinyl involves the incredibly toxic dioxin. Atomic energy must be a good, because it is a new technology – but in the 63 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ushering in of the atomic age, we have yet to find a safe way to handle the waste. Genetic manipulation must be a good, because it is a new technology – but we have produced alien species unknown to this planet with consequences unforeseen and unlooked-for.

It is the recklessness of modernistic technophilic zeal that has given us the heavily polluted world we know today.

III. Calvinism: This is the Christian heresy wherein free will is removed from Man’s finding of salvation. Grace (a pale, limited grace) is bestowed upon the elect, will he nill he, resulting in the saving of just these elect. Calvinism’s bastard child is the Enlightenment, and its grandchild atheism. Where God has been made odious and onerous, there people will flee Him. Doubtless some hardy Germanic types have found Calvinism the intoxicating and heady brew necessary to stir them to great and glorious achievements for the Kingdom of Heaven. However, for many (most?) others, Calvinism does not solve the age-old problem of theodicy but enshrines it. We depart from the question as to why does God allow evil and we conclude with the statement that God wills evil.

IV. Globalization, aside from its resultant dependence on slavery and forced labour, and apart from its systemic replacement of the person of the local merchant and artisan for the faceless and soulless body of the international and unaccountable corporation, is a modernistic movement that is causing massive pollution of the environment through the endless crisscrossing of oceans and continents by exhaust-emitting mega-vehicles. The only solution to globalization is a restoration of the merchant, artisan, and craftsman, the re-empowerment of the small farmer, and the replacement of the ideal of globalization with the ideal of locavore.

V. The Armageddon Complex: In the world at large disregard for the environment seems to stem from selfishness and greed. In the Christian community, however, this disregard originates from what I call the Armageddon Complex. This is the belief that the end of the world is at hand, with its implicit destruction by hail and fire, etc; in the face of this destruction there is no point to cleaning up the world (or to keeping it clean).

We do not know the day nor the hour of Christ’s return. We may suspect He is coming soon, but to fail to care for our home would be a dooming and a damning of our children to live in a toxic cesspool should He not come. In point of fact, ours is the first civilization to fail to provide for, think of, or work towards the betterment of the next generation.

VI. Compulsory public age-graded education: One of the worst (again modernistic) ideas of the 19^th century was the one that remade the education of our young. It concluded that all children learned alike, at the same age and in the same manner, cloistered away from real life and real-world experience. It concluded that apprenticeships were bankrupt, despite being the primary method of disseminating knowledge for millennia. It concluded that all children would do best divorced from the God-created whole spectrum of ages that is the family at the microcosmic level and society at the macrocosmic. And it concluded that the government and its emissaries the education theorists, pedagogues, and teachers would know better how to raise and educate a child than the parents who knew it best.

VII. Right to Paradise: We appear to believe that we have the right to a disease-free paradise where there is peace and plenty for all, along with all the paradisiacal technological gizmos and devices that are the hallmark of the wealthy. Ours is a jubilant and narcissistic expectation that we are owed everything we desire. We have seemingly fallen heir to the world, and we consume and consume its resources without any sense of the other three-quarters (or more) of the world that has none of the advantages we have. We are astonished and indignant when these rights are encroached, when disease makes a comeback, when oil prices rise, when our peace or our prosperity is in any way lessened. We cannot fathom that bacteria and viruses mutate, that peak oil exists, or that there is sin in the world.

Ours are the “rights” of the delusional maniac, unaware of a fallen world. Ours are the “rights” of the locust, devouring everything in its path. We have no right to Paradise, no right to any Utopia. We can only be given Eden through the sacramental life of the Church, the healing of the Holy Spirit, and the prayers of the saints. And we will only fully enter the garden when God makes it anew.

In the meantime, our avaricious society is a blight upon the earth and a gross inequality that time and the wrath of other nations will iron out. We should accustom ourselves to a simple life before it is made simple for us.

- V.,
Writing for V. & E.

Leading Up to Lent

2008-03-25T23:29:00.004-04:00

(Of course, it is Lent now.)

In the weeks leading up to Lent, I found myself wanting to calm my soul a little, to back away from the sorrows and the tragedies against which I have been railing recently ... so too those I haven't yet addressed but which simmer on my back burner regardless.

Calm. A chance for quiet and reflection.

A chance to sit down and hammer out what exactly it is I hope to do here. What Vox clamanti is all about. Why we need to have a voice on the Internet. Because there are certainly many others already speaking.

More to come soon.

In the meantime, may you have a blessed Lent. May you have a chance to escape the tyranny of selfishness and pride. May you find Christ this Lent ... in the fast, in prayer, and in acts of self-emptying kindness.

And pray for me, that I may experience the same.

- V.

A Failure of Good Stewardship

2008-02-16T17:55:00.000-05:00

When future generations look upon ours - if future generations there are - they will marvel at our stupidity. Not short-sighted zeal or misplaced optimism, but downright old-fashioned asinine stupidity.

For only in the past hundred or so years has mankind produced waste that could not be thrown out. [Away, yes. Into our own backyards, or into the backyards of others.] Only in the past few generations have we had, and used, the capability to leave an ecological footprint. And what a footprint we have left, one where time to clean up the mess is measured not in months or years, but in millenia and thousands of millenia.

Consider the following two examples:

1. Nuclear waste. We cannot clean this stuff up. Billed as a "clean" energy source, in that it does not use hydrocarbons like gas, coal or oil, nuclear power plants produce electricity and radioactive waste, waste that will remain radioactive, and dangerous, long after our grandchildren's grandchildren have grown old. And our best solution? Bury it in a mountain.

Completely aside from the dangers inherent in nuclear waste management, the fact is that this waste will persist for generations. Depleted uranium, one of the less radioactive byproducts, has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. Cesium-137, one of the more radioactive byproducts, has a half-life of approximately 30 years. This sounds good, but it still takes 150 years to stabilize 97% of the stuff.

We have created a technological marvel, but have completely failed to create the technology to clean it up. And yet we use it regardless. This, by any definition, is stupidity.

2. Plastics. Long-term readers of this blog know already of my deep antipathy for plastic bags. And so I was quite pleased to read a recent article which called for an end to them. But the problem is not just bags. They are just the most obvious and most unsightly leaving of the plastic industry: bag-festooned trees are, as an urban phenomena, an unfortunate commonplace.

The problem is plastic in general. Again, we have created a technology without creating the means to clean up afterwards. The net result is a global experiment to see how nature copes with something it cannot biodegrade. Incidentally, it is this biodegradability that ensured the economic "success" of plastics, and their ubiquity in modern life - we wanted, and now rely on, something that will not rust, corrode, or rot. In short, we wanted something completely alien to nature.

And we got it. Here is what this alien monstrosity has brought us: the plastic ocean, a soup of ever-crumbling plastic floating in the heart of the Pacific, a soup twice the size of the continental U.S. The cleanup? As possible as sifting the Sahara.

For those interested in more information on the garbage patches where ocean once stood, there is a video you can watch, a blog from a research vessel currently exploring this plastic ocean that you can read, or you can check out Wikipedia.

The problem doesn't end with the near indestructibility of plastic. Unfortunately, our global experiment includes the use of toxins. Recently, bisphenol A and phthalates have both made the news as toxins that exist in our plastics and which are not bound by them [they leach out]. Other known toxins are DEHA and styrene.

I think of the snobbery of the historian or scientist looking at the Roman's use of lead in their water pipes (as an interesting side-note, "plumbing" comes from the Latin word for lead, plumbum). Are we any better? Many modern homes use piping made from PVC, an incredibly persistent plastic that releases dioxin both during manufacture and incineration, a plastic that contains the aforementioned phthalates.

What can we do, if we desire to effect some change? As far as I can see it, we must follow the three R's, whether we are making a personal move away from plastics, or the government wakes to the fact that we are bankrupting our future for present convenience and makes the decision for us. And the three R's are:

Reduce - First and foremost, we must reduce our plastic consumption. We must make it clear to the corporations that if they package something in plastic, we will not buy it. We must opt for products made of wood, metal, glass, etc. Only in the arena of medicine do I see a legitimate need for plastic ... in all other parts of our lives, I see enormous potential for improvement.
Reuse - Where plastic exists already, let us reuse it so as to maximize its lifespan. Eventually, plastic grows brittle and breaks into smaller [non-biodegradable] pieces, but until that happens, let us keep what we have out of the landfills and away from our seas for as long as we humanly can.
Recycle - In creating recycling programs we have bred a feeling of smug complacency about our plastic consumption. The truth is that out of the seven main groups of plastics, generally only two are recycled. And their recycling is just another form of reuse - the plastic doesn't go away, it doesn't biodegrade. It is a sop to our collective conscience and little more. However, where we can, and until that day when we have eliminated this unnatural abomination from our diets, recycling is a good way to reuse certain of our plastics.

The Travesty of the Religious Right

Sadly, there is not much concern for our environment in most conservative Christian circles today. In a baffling move, social conservatives (traditional Christianity is, by definition, socially conservative) have allied themselves with big business, big pharma, big oil, and big agribusiness, not to mention the military-industrial complex. And so they have distanced themselves from the environment, from the need to protect this planet from the worst of man's ravages, for it is axiomatic that the "needs" of large corporations are inimical to the needs of nature.

Somehow, we have left it to the democrats, the liberals, and the otherwise loony left to take up the torch that is ours by right and by religion. How many times have we heard it said that man is a steward of God's Creation? (I have heard it used as a defense for doing what we like with it - which makes as much sense as justifying defecating in the front parlour of our neighbours' home because they asked us to house-sit for them.) This stewardship is ours as heirs of Adam, a sacred charge not to be lightly dismissed. And as recipients of the faith, of true doctrine given us by our forefathers, the Fathers and Apostles, we should be leading the charge, eager to baptize all Creation, eager to restore the Cosmos to the conditions of paradise.

It grieves me that the Church isn't illumining the way for the world ... that it must be the largely non-Christian left that shows us how to care for His Creation (as they show us how to care for the poor, etc.). This was our task, our duty.

I am minded of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In a grim parallel, it wasn't the Pharisee or the scribe, keepers of the Law or of true doctrine, who rescued the injured man, but it was the Samaritan, the man whose religion was faulty, even heretical, who acted as a true servant of God.

Some may think that properly stewarding the environment is not the most important work asked us of our Lord. True, in comparison to saving a brother from the fires of hell, it doesn't seem terribly important. However, the truth is that most of us aren't busy saving our brothers from the fires of hell, so we really don't have a good excuse for our moral laziness and our callous disregard. Do I think that everyone should become an instant enviro-fanatic? I don't think it likely, even if I was arguing for it. A far more practical and beneficial thing would be if we opened our apathetic hearts to the need to do something, to heal our planet in even a small way. We need to be open to acting on behalf of God's Creation, and then perhaps we will see how.

- V.

Elsewhere

2008-02-12T15:48:00.000-05:00

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, we learn that Daniel Matsui has just gotten engaged.

Congratulations, Daniel & Michelle, and may God grant you both many years together. Your joy is our joy.

Also, Maxim from Earl Donald the Bewildered recently commented on a post over at the Ochlophobist's. I can't help but feel that his thoughts on the difference between Republican and Democrat complement mine quite nicely. (Naturally, he is welcome to disagree with me.) Here is a quote:

Can anyone tell me the difference between a Republican moderate and a Democratic moderate? There isn't much, is there? Any differences which still exist between the Parties are now relegated to the fringe; Labor and the much-maligned "Religious Right" are what remains of the soul of the Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively. Both of these groups give themselves, body and soul, to their respective Parties each election, and get nothing in return. In the middle, the real face of the single-party government which rules us emerges; I call it the "Secular Industrialist" Party. The so-called Democratic and Republican Parties are just the left and right legs of this Behemoth; the Democrats are charged with advancing the social interests of the Party, the Republicans, the economic interests. When the Democrats win, the Monster takes a step forward with its Left leg; when the Republicans win, it takes a step with the Right. Note that, no matter what happens, there is never any retrograde motion; no matter how fervent the rhetoric of each Party, when they actually come to power they never actually reverse the actions of their predecessors.

The image of the Behemoth, monstrous and all-powerful, echoes my intuition about the birth of despotism. I like it.

- V.

Hard Words from St. Luke

2008-02-12T15:33:00.000-05:00

Vox clamanti continues to explore the serious side of life...

Gnosticism

First, Vic has expressed some concerns about possible gnostic leanings in my last post (under "Two Thoughts on Evolution"). We take heresy very seriously over here, so after I have consulted with Orthodox authorities, I will be sure to clarify what I have written, and any error will be be corrected. Stay tuned.

Hard Words from St. Luke

I grew up Protestant, where Scripture reading and memorization are a way of life. And I have read through the Gospels multiple times, both before and after my conversion to Orthodoxy. Imagine, then, my astonishment and considerable consternation when I read a passage last Saturday that I have never read before. Not only that, but I encountered it again today on the Internet, exceedingly hard words from the mouth of Christ, as recorded by St. Luke:

"Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, 'Come here at once and take your place at the table'? Would you not rather say to him, 'Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink'? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, 'We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we aught to have done!' " (Lk.17:7-10, NRSV)

It seems to me that we - or at least I - have this attitude that in doing what is right we somehow merit praise. God should be praising us for not cheating, not stealing, not fornicating, not lying, not looking at a woman with lust, etc. In fact, the marriage supper of the Lamb becomes a celebration about us, with Christ beaming at us with pleasure, saying, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." (cf. Mt.25:21, KJV) And divine revelry ensues.

I don't think that we have a very good conception as to how difficult it is to be a "good and faithful" servant (or slave), not if doing all that the Scriptures command (and they command a lot, to a degree the Mosaic Law never reached) is simply what we must do, and not meritorious in the least.

Think of it ... the Saints were they that fulfilled the commands of the Lord. The ones that lived the New Testament life to the full, who trod on asps, spoke with the angels, gave abundantly to the poor, lived free from the passions ... and yet, they only did what they were told to do. They only did what we have been told to do.

Hard words indeed.

- V.

Witnesses, Trees, Brides, and Evolution

2008-02-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

I have been working on a commission that has kept me out of the blogosphere. It isn't done, but my son has decided to alter my schedule.

Let us leave the ridiculous and the inconsequential (my more recent posts) and move back the the meaningful.

...

The Two Witnesses

And I will grant my two witnesses authority to prophesy for one thousand two hundred sixty days, wearing sackcloth. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. And if anyone wants to harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes; anyone who wants to harm them must be killed in this manner. They have authority to shut the sky, so that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have authority over the waters to turn them into blood, and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire. When they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them, and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that is prophetically called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. (Rv.11:3-8)

The Church Fathers wrote that the witnesses at the Eschaton would be Enoch and Elijah, the only two prophets who did not suffer death. At the end of all things, Enoch would prophesy to the Gentiles, and Elijah to the Jews.

As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, "Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead." And the disciples asked him, "Why, then, do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?" He replied, "Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but they did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man is about to suffer at their hands." Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist. (Mt.17:9-13)

Some readers of this text anticipate a return of Elijah in the sense that John the Baptist was a return of the spirit and power of Elijah (Lk.1:16-17) - I think of Michael O'Brien's Father Elijah as an example of this line of thought. However, it seems clear to me that we are looking at a literal return. "Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things."

...

The Tree of Life

The garden of Eden had two trees: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of [eternal] life. The second tree has been revealed to us as the Cross. A couple thoughts.

I suspect that, had there been no Fall, the fruit of this tree would have been Eucharist and Communion for Adam and Eve and their children. (Although the mind boggles at Eucharist and Communion without Crucifixion. Speculative theologians welcome.)
The presence of a tree of [eternal] life argues that immortality is something bestowed on us by the fruits of the tree; it is not natural to Man. Therefore death was present in the Garden, in the animals, in the vegetation. Death was observable to Adam & Eve, and would one day have been experienced by them had they not then eaten of the tree of life. As we know, in the wake of their eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve were barred from eating of the tree of life. [Eternal] death, or hell, is a consequence of the Fall.
The only effective Orthodox argument against evolution that I have heard was one that stated the impossibility of Darwinian evolution in a world without death. If there was death (just not spiritual, or eternal, death), evolution remains something that is not alien to Orthodox theology.

Thanks to E. and Vic from Other Side of the Sun for helping me flesh out these ideas.

...

Church as Bride of Christ

Just as Eve was formed out of the side of Adam to be the bride of Adam, so the Church has been formed out of the side of Christ, that is, out of blood and water, Eucharist and Baptism, to be the bride of the New Adam.

...

Two Thoughts on Evolution

As has been evidenced above, I don't have a problem with evolution. To my mind, it is a perfectly reasonable way to explain the fossil record. Furthermore, I don't have any issues with the idea that Man is descended from apes, with a caveat explored below. I would like to suggest one thing, though, and take issue with another.

First, the suggestion. I don't know that we have had much evolution going on since the time of Adam and Eve. Perhaps a consequence to the Fall is the end of evolution and the beginning of devolution. [Others might here argue that evolution doesn't work too well with the Law of Increasing Entropy. Entropy could be a fancy way of describing the destructive impact of the Fall upon the cosmos. Or, more simply, entropy is a recognition that without God acting to create and maintain, the universe unwinds itself.]

Second, I wish to take issue with the Latin name for man, Homo sapiens. I don't really care what we call the ancestors of Adam & Eve ... they were animals, brutes, like the rest of Creation. However, I see a moment when God takes one (or two) more intelligent brutes from out of all Creation and breathes life and spirit into them. And in that moment God creates a new thing, utterly unique in all the cosmos, something that is both matter and spirit, some one who has both a mortal body and an immortal soul, some one who needs a tree of life in order that the two are never separated. But this new thing, this Man, is not different from the brutes by merit of being wise, or sapient, but through being God-breathed. If there was evolution, then God spoke into the process and created a miracle. I want to replace Homo sapiens with Homo spiritens (or its equivalent - I'm not sure of the Latin).

- V.

Pancake Tuesday

2008-02-06T07:18:00.001-05:00

It is Ash Wednesday, and my Catholic friends begin their Lent today - may it be a fruitful one.

It has come to my attention that the day before Ash Wednesday is not just known as Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras) or Shrove Tuesday, but Pancake Tuesday as well. In honour of information new-found, this post is dedicated to pancakes.

Pancakes

Call them flapjacks, batter cakes, griddlecakes, hot cakes, johnnycakes, or wheat cakes, pancakes are a delight to the senses - the warmth when they come steaming from the pan, the slightly oily rubberiness when they have been refrigerated, the rich aroma of freshly cooked batter, the rush of (syrup) sugar over the tongue, the slightly chewy texture, the taste that says 'this is comfort food'.

Indeed, I suspect that while there is a just prohibition against living by bread alone, I cannot see the fault in living solely on pancakes.

Here is my favourite recipe, courtesy of a friend. The resulting pancakes are a little more crêpe-like than your more typically Western fluffy pancake, less like bread, a trifle chewier, simply heaven. I recommend them either with icing sugar and lemon juice or with maple syrup.

Prisca's Pancakes

1 1/2 cups flour
1 3/4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
2 eggs
3 Tbs. sugar
3 Tbs. oil
1 - 1 1/4 cups water or milk

1. Beat eggs together. Add other wet ingredients.
2. Mix dry ingredients together.
3. Combine wet and dry ingredients. Mix.
4. Pour small amount of batter into a pan, and fry with a little oil.

And here is an ode to pancakes.

- V.

Two Videos

2008-01-23T23:54:00.001-05:00

First, Star Trek meets The Hobbit.

I had a friend (definitely past-tense) who has a great love for fantasy and even greater respect for the monarchs of fantasy: Tolkien, Lewis, and LeGuin. Knowing this, I sent him a link to the following video, anticipating with eagerness his resultant horror and anguish. And yes, his reaction was everything for which I hoped.

I am still laughing.

Second, I stumbled across this piece while surfing the blogosphere. I laughed so hard I think I broke something. Naturally, humour is highly subjective, but I offer it anyway.

Dedicated to the mildly warped...

- V.

Ochlophobist and Art (Part II)

2008-01-23T23:53:00.000-05:00

We resume our examination of Ochlophobist's recent post on art - my previous comments are over here.

When I went to Russia in my late teens, I had an experience in front of an icon of the Theotokos, one written in a traditional style, as I have briefly described here. While visiting a number of monasteries, churches, and "museums" in Russia I saw a number of icons. At that time I had never read or been told anything regarding the theology or aesthetics of traditional Orthodox iconography. Yet it was clear as day to me that there was a distinct difference between those icons which were Italianate and those which were traditional, and I was very much drawn to the traditional, and recognized a gravitas in them which I did not recognize in the Italianate icons. Indeed, I immediately regarded the Italianate as religious kitsch, a regard I hold to this day. Now, as a Protestant I grew up in an religious environment which had images, in our Baptist churches and most Baptist homes there were images of Christ, the Last Supper, hands folded in prayer next to a loaf of bread, and so forth. The aesthetic style of these images was much closer to that of Italianate iconography than it was Orthodox iconography. Now, one might suggest that like many Protestants I was only longing to find or create the NT Church all over again, and therefore would want something that was utterly foreign to my religious conventions as this would seem more "authentic." But this is not the typical paradigm through which virtually all Protestants assimilate and act on the desire to get back to the real NT Church. In almost every example of Protestant aesthetic purification of aesthetics, they either use iconoclasm to minimalize or eradicate prior forms, or they maintain the same artistic styles but change the content of the art. This is exactly what Baptists did. They adopted the artistic style of a given time and changed the content of the art to suit their aesthetic needs. Heck, a great example of this is the Mormons, who adopted 19th century aesthetics forms (painting, sculpture, and even faux-hieroglyphic manuscript writing) and assigned to such ancient pedigree. Thus it seems to me that if I had been very much in tune with the Protestant aesthetic ethos, I would have preferred the Italianate icons to the traditional Orthodox ones. I would have accepted them as a form of changed content (with Mary and Saints and somber Jesus instead of folded hands and laughing Jesus, etc.) in a common, "received" style in order to bring myself closer to the ancient Church. For in Protestant aesthetics, style and form, as it were, is decidedly arbitrary - whatever communicates the token talking points of content in a stylistic manner which is "heard" is the most acceptable. But I saw something in the traditional icons which was worlds apart from any religious art I had ever seen before. These icons spoke of a truth that far transcended my little "Jesus and me" self-evangelistic moment or my lust for didacticism or my religious sentimental inclinations or my need for a socio-religious commercial. The traditional icons were uncomfortable, demanding, and not, in the slightest bit, concerned with my own affectations or "needs." I thought there might be mercy to be found in them, and in one instance I was overwhelmed by such mercy, but it was not the sort of mercy I had encountered before.

Again, I don't want to dissect Ochlophobist's work (dissection being messy, usually involving something dead), but I feel that certain points he makes deserve further comment.

First, there is a clear difference between iconography and Italianate kitsch. "Gravitas" distinguishes icons from the Italianate painting, he says. Yes. Gravitas, sobriety, transcendence, a taste of eternity. In infusing religious art with the principles of realism and humanism, including emotionalism, the earlier qualities of transcendence and the eternal were lost. In essence, religious art became Nestorian, as it emphasized Christ's humanity at the expense of His divinity. And His Apostles and Saints lost their sanctity, as sanctity is not a humanist trait; their most sensational qualities had to emphasized instead.

Second, the aesthetic style of Protestant religious art is very similar to that of Italianate kitsch. Unfortunately, this is all too true. And where Protestant aesthetics is not of the Italianate kitsch variety, it belongs to the images of nature motivational poster variety, which is, if anything, worse. I remember two posters from my childhood: "Moi, je suis le chemin, la vérité, et la vie" ("I am the way, the truth, and the life" in French) on a rainy, rainbow-bannered landscape, and "I know I'm victorious, Lord, but it sure feels like I'm getting stomped" on a picture of a sad-faced dog. Somehow, neither attains to the watered-down respect for the holy that a pair of praying hands has.

Third, a desire to get back to the NT Church results in iconoclasm or the same style with a different content. I have never heard of the Protestant drive to return to the NT Church (or even the primitive Church) resulting in a change in aesthetics. I don't think Protestants are built that way with respect to art - they are, sadly, uneducated as to art or are hostile to it. The intimate nature with which theology interacts with art is completely lost on the average Protestant... maybe even your average liturgical Protestant. A change in theology will not, cannot, result in a change in aesthetics.

Unfortunately, far more common than altered content is outright iconoclasm. At one time in my varied (or is that checkered?) past I was an art teacher in a Christian setting. And time and again I would run into parents who had no understanding for the value of art, save as a historical phenomena, or in rare cases, as a part of Western culture. For these parents, the intersection of image and God, no matter how remotely or tenuously linked, was sacrilege. My freedom to put the sacred into art, or simply to present religious art in class, was not welcome, and my decision to do so resulted in some pitched battles.

[Perhaps at some point in the future I will give my patented five minute defense of religious art against those who attack it on the grounds of the Second Commandment.]

Fourth, iconography transcends the vagaries of art history and societal aesthetic tastes. This transcendence is formed in carefully defined theology, and it is preserved and perfected in Tradition. Because Protestants never had a theology of art, and because Catholics have regrettably lost theirs (save for isolated pockets of conservative Catholics where Italianate kitsch is the tradition), both are left helpless before the whims and the winds of fashion. The new method of "communication", no matter how inarticulate it may be or how imperfectly it speak the colours and the tones of eternal truth, must perforce become the new mode for the masses. In the absence of tradition, the new and the unconventional is a seduction for which there is no defense.

---

We look forward to Ochlophobist's next post on art.

- V.

The Different

2008-01-23T09:20:00.000-05:00

Back in the day, every village ...

had its idiot, imbecile, or moron,
had a man (or several) maimed or crippled from a recent war,
could boast someone with a disfiguring tumour or skin ailment,
etc.

Perhaps this day to which I refer is a largely fictionalized one, and, to be honest, I would rather make a point here than look up 17th or 18th century statistics. The point is that up until fairly recently, every town and village had to get used to a certain degree of difference within people - they had to adjust to a wide spectrum of humanity. In some towns derision might replace the hoped-for kindness and respect, but learning to deal with Others, for better or for worse, was a major part of former times.

Modernity and its technological marvels have allowed us to cure many diseases once incurable, to give the maimed and the crippled the chance at a normalized lifestyle, to hospitalize those who cannot care for themselves. And it is not a bad thing that we can help so many that were otherwise doomed.

However, there are consequences. Firstly, the spectrum of difference has narrowed - what is different is not quite as different. We do not learn to see that God has made man with infinite variety, and so instead we become prescriptive like the inhabitants of Waknuk in The Chrysalids. The minute differences between the normal and the other normal become everything, and magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Elle tell us how we are to look.

Secondly, as the wrinkles of difference are ironed out by the flatiron of technology wizardry, and as the remaining abnormalities are shut up into homes or aborted before they have a chance to live, we lose. We lose on an opportunity for ascesis, for humility, for learning to serve the alien and the stranger in our midst.

- V.

Random Thought

2008-01-19T18:13:00.000-05:00

Is it just me, or does a mid-rant Bill O'Reilly bear an uncanny resemblance to Lewis Prothero from Silver Pictures' V for Vendetta?

Just a thought.

- V.

On the Origins of Antisemitism

2008-01-19T15:52:00.001-05:00

I have given some thought over the years to the question of antisemitism, mostly because it is an irrational belief leading to irrational (and wholly evil) actions, and irrationality bothers me.

Now when I was younger my parents "explained" the theodicy of antisemitism by telling me that the Jews were God's special people, and for this reason the world hates them.

I don't have any real issue with the theory that the world hates God's people - this seems amply borne out by persecutions and martyrdoms from the time of St. Stephen to this present day and hour. And Christ Himself said that the world would hate His followers.

I do take objection to the theology of that explanation. For it is one of the most basic teachings of the Church that we Christians are Israel, the heirs of the promises of the Old Testament, and God's own people. (Only in the heresy of dispensationalism is this teaching overturned.) As such, I cannot accept my parents' simplistic and heretical explanation, and must look outside of it.

One possibility (again relating to theology) is that the Jews brought down a curse upon themselves when certain of them were calling for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. "May His blood be upon us and upon our children," they said.

I have two problems with this interpretation. First, and most importantly, Christ said, "Father God, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Are we seriously going to posit that God is carrying a grudge for an act that He Himself forgave? Secondly, as it has been Christians (or, rather, those bearing the name of Christ) who have done most the persecuting, it leaves us in the awkward position of claiming that God's people - the meek, lamb-like, child-like, loving servants of God - have been required or appointed to act as the tools of the devil in carrying out a curse.

Having exhausted the theological possibilities, let us look at this more rationally; rather than looking to God for reasons why the Jews have been hated, let us look to something a little more human. It appears to me that there are two logical reasons for the genesis of antisemitism, if anything that gives rise to hatred can be called logical.

First, xenophobia. In my estimation, this sin is a perversion of a love of kin. Something good has been turned to something darker, and when xenophobia turns to action, we see the birth of evil. Not only does the fear of the alien explain hatred of the Jews, it explains hatred of Gypsies, of the Irish, of the French, etc.

Second, usury. This shouldn't ever have become an issue, as usury was specifically forbidden in the Old Testament, and was not practiced by the early Church. However, certain Christian rulers needed great amounts of money to finance their wars, Crusades, and explorations. No sane person would lend large sums of money interest-free for such risky ventures: too much risk, no security. Risk is only mitigated if the money is loaned with interest. Not being permitted by the Church to handle usurious transactions with other Christians, these rulers went to the only non-Christians in their midst: the Jews, who were not permitted to do much else but loan money. Naturally, these Jews grew wealthy, as a kind of banking elite. The unfortunate corollary to wealth is that it stirs up envy, and the unfortunate corollary to usury is that it stirs up anger and desperation. The net result is that some that bore the name of Christ grew to hate the Jews for practicing a business that Christians imposed upon them to finance unChristian wars.

Which is as nonsensical as it seems.

- V.

Ochlophobist and Art (Part I)

2008-01-18T22:24:00.000-05:00

Once more, Ochlophobist has impressed me with a brilliant post, this one on art. It comes out of a dialogue involving Daniel Matsui from The Lion and the Cardinal and Arturo from The Sarabite, and is chiefly a reaction to Arturo. Arturo's reasoning frequently gives me headaches, so I appreciated Ochlophobist's response.

There is a lot to process, a lot of meat in his post, but I am not going to examine it piece by piece. Rather I am going to simply react to a couple comments he makes. More in keeping with my patience levels.

1) Classical art is not the model for a Christian art (paragraph 9). Although classical academies today and the preponderance of artists and art critics from the time of the Renaissance to the time of the Impressionists regard and regarded Greco-Roman art as the be-all and end-all of truth and beauty, it is a truth worth noting that the Fathers of the Christian faith did not feel so. Instead, they guided us into our respective iconographies (Western and Eastern) for the sake of adhering to theological truth and beauty, for the sake and purpose of forming the people of God into Saints of God, and to praise God with brush and pen.

As a sidebar, modern art did not come into being until the salons - the guildhalls of the art world - crumbled under the impact of Impressionism, leaving no larger principle to guide them or keep them from deeper error. Hitherto it was classical art that was the larger principle.

2) Catharsis in modern art is akin to the release of orgasm (paragraph 10). In his critique of catharsis in art, Ochlophobist says that catharsis is foreign to Orthodoxy, and then he proceeds to define this catharsis as orgasmic, ecstatic. Elsewhere he goes further and links post-Renaissance art to what he calls pansexualism.

I am not fully with him on this point, mostly because I don't understand the bit about pansexualism. However, I think I get the bit about catharsis. In my art classes we were not urged to paint out our feelings, but I saw a lot of that in the university program I didn't take. There it was de rigeur to work in tar and newspaper clippings. I still remember the "deeply meaningful" exhibition to which a friend of mine invited me, involving tar, dismembered dolls held together by wires, and her own blood. Apparently she had expressed or channelled her inner pain. I wasn't happy for her - I was horrified, as this was manifestly not art, being neither true, beautiful, nor good.

Despite not being trained in cathartic painting, I find that most of the artwork that I have done was a response to strong emotion (passion?) and not disciplined, not work. This I would feel is a great weakness - though I haven't gone so far as to identify it as unOrthodox.

3) Rouault is the one big exception (paragraph 11). I have never chatted with either Ochlophobist or Mr. Mitsui, but I would like to. Having waded through modern art (no matter the precise appellation: modern, post-modern, cubist, etc.), I would have to reject almost all of it. Certainly that which is held up as exemplary - with one exception: Georges Rouault. Unlike Ochlophobist, I do not like Rouault's clowns and whores, but I am moved by his images of Christ, especially Crucifixion, which to me has all the feel of a stained-glass window.

As for the rest? So much trash. I remember admiring Dali at one point in my life. Then I read a 600-page volume of his collected works. The man was an obsessive pervert whose nightmarish images of clocks, horses, and breasts should have had him locked up somewhere. A few years later, and wiser, I visited a Picasso exhibit - under duress - with a friend. He thought it would be cultural, I think. Afterwards, we looked at each other with horror. Picasso was no genius, unless it was a diabolical genius. The man was evil, with every bestial thought made tangible through his "art" - the exhibit left us feeling soiled. Art cannot be art unless it be beautiful, unless it be true, and modern art has failed us in these two regards. And we have failed art, by not demanding better.

4) Arturo claims that a love of medieval iconography comes from a Protestant aesthetic (paragraph 12). This assertion just horrifies me - it insinuates that iconography is sterile, beauty-hating, or iconoclastic. As a sidebar, not all Protestants are iconoclastic or beauty-hating, but then, they usually aren't terribly Protestant either.

5) Baroque/Italianate/modern Catholic folk art are not true, if only because they betray an overt religious eroticism (paragraphs 18, 19). My agreement here is experientially based. When I was in my late teens I was - somewhat understandably - consumed by a love of the erotic, and nowhere was this more manifested than in my artwork and in the artists I most admired and emulated: Klimt, Rossetti, and Bellini. In Bellini's case, it was the clearly erotic, even orgasmic, Ecstasy of St. Theresa, which caught my attention, and which, while wonderfully rendered and beautiful, revealed something perverse and false. Not all Baroque artists (and their descendants) are as obviously untrue, but I can see this tendency to varying degrees.

As for modern Catholic folk art, I would have to make an exception for Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is to my eyes more iconic than erotic.

6) Schoenberg's gravestone is perhaps the best example of a Protestant aesthetic (paragraph 21). Iconoclastic? Beauty-hating? Sterile? Yep. As a broad caricature, this statement works for me.

I will come back to this post - to paragraph 14 in particular - but a small child beckons, and that insistently.

- V.

"Christmas Baba"

2008-01-16T11:43:00.000-05:00

A tale well worth reading, from Fr. Tobias' Second Terrace:

It was hard for her to remember many things, especially what she had for lunch that day, and maybe, once in a while, just where she was going in the hall. Sometimes – maybe it was yesterday? – she didn’t even know which hall she was in.

For years, she had no difficulty remembering the old Christmases with her mother, her father, her grandparents, aunts and uncles, and her ten brothers and sisters. What a big family she had. That was just the way back then. Families had lots of children. They don’t do that anymore.

Memory after memory unveiled scenes of brightness and magic. She and her brothers and sisters, huddled by the window, looking carefully for the first star of the Holy Night. “There, there it is!” she remembered, her own little girl pudgy finger pointing at the joyous glimmer in the cerulean night.

That was the signal for Christmas Eve to begin, and the mystical, magical Holy Supper. How the scenes of those Holy Nights gleamed brightly, like picture slides on a screen, in her mind. Straw tied in bunches and strewn on the table. Candles and wine, honeyed fruit and delicacies prepared just once a year.

She closed her eyes, so she could see and hear. Yes, there was her mother, dipping her finger into the honey, tracing a cross on each forehead. There was her father, with his words of the toast every year, “And above all, my Little Jesus, born this day, bring peace, health and happiness!”

But one day, the picture was not complete. She could not see the other faces – the faces of her aunts and uncles. This time, the carols were not sung. She could not taste the dishes. And she could not remember her brothers and sisters’ names.

She opened her eyes to the harsh fluorescent light of the nursing home where she stayed, where everything was clinical and made to look like a store, where every hall and every room and every meal looked the same.

For the next few times, when she tried to remember, another detail would be lost. More faces would be nameless, more voices fell into silence. The last thing left was the evening star, her finger still pointing, her voice still whispering, “There it is!”
...

The tale is continued over here.

- V.

Artistic Temperament as Disease?

2008-01-15T22:35:00.000-05:00

Over at Daniel Mitsui's blog, he offers us the following quote by G. K. Chesterton:

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being... Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men... There are many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or violence or fear. But the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art....

It need hardly be said that this is the real explanation of the thing which has puzzled so many dilettante critics, the problem of the extreme ordinariness of the behaviour of so many great geniuses in history. Their behaviour was so ordinary that it was not recorded; hence it was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious. Hence people say that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. The modern artistic temperament cannot understand how a man who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote, could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a little town in Warwickshire. The explanation is simple enough; it is that Shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so got rid of the impulse and went about his business. Being an artist did not prevent him from being an ordinary man, any more than being a sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an ordinary man.

Perhaps it is over-bold of me to challenge such an esteemed man of letters as Chesterton, but I must take issue with the above.

Assuming that Chesterton is using a standard definition of "artist", his over-broad strokes leave no place for accepted masters such as Dürer, da Vinci, Cellini, or Michelangelo. Albrecht Dürer was subject to depression, Leonardo da Vinci struggled to complete any of his brilliant concepts, and Benvenuto Cellini, da Vinci, and Michelangelo were all almost certainly homosexual. Geniuses all, but not untroubled.

I suspect Mr. Matsui included this quote not because he is ignorant of art history or because, like Chesterton, he is over-fond of bold generalizations, but because he does not accept the aforementioned masters as such. I know that Mr. Matsui feels that art took a decidedly downward turn at time of the Renaissance*, and here I would agree with him. If, however, he agrees with Chesterton that true artists are untroubled, there I part company, for there is no doubt in my mind that Dürer, da Vinci, et al. were masters of their media, and that even the deeply psychologically troubled Van Gogh from our godless age was unparalleled in his genius.

It seems to me that what we call the "artistic temperament" is nothing more than a soul cracking under inner stresses, stresses formed by the challenge of the human psyche facing the divine - communicating beauty being one of the holiest of acts. It seems to me that without a way to understand the divine (ie. through traditional iconography, Eastern or Western), these stresses are inevitable in all but the most hardy souls. And artists, true artists, are by definition sensitive to their environments.

Perhaps the reason why we see so many shipwrecked artists from the time of the Renaissance to this is that humanism, under which delusional philosophy we still continue to labour, is manifestly a system without codified ways to appropriate and understand the divine.

- V.

* Unfortunately, a cursory search of Mr. Matsui's site was insufficient to provide me with sourcing at this time.

Rejoice with us

2008-01-15T22:09:00.000-05:00

Our son, the sick boy for whom so many prayed last summer, was baptized into the Holy Orthodox Church Saturday. Thus, during the feast of the Nativity, two days before we remembered Christ's circumcision, we took the child given us and brought him into the embrace of the Church to be spiritually circumcised. Having been duly chrismated and communed, our newly-illumined one has now come into the fullness of the Church.

Praise be to God! Slava Bohu!

Remember him, us, and his godparents in your prayers.

- V.

A Recipe for Despotism

2008-01-11T10:09:00.000-05:00

If I had aspirations for dictatorship and possessed a few powerful friends, or if I wished to reduce the free peoples of the greatest nation on the planet to an abject serfdom, here is what I would do:

Taking as my raw medium two parties or philosophies that we will call, for the sake of argument, "liberal" and "conservative" or "asinine" and "elephantine", I would start by refocusing attention on the differences between the parties, highlighting them and making them larger than life. The important thing would be to draw attention away from the similarities between the parties, namely, 1) a singular inability on the part of either to accomplish anything significant for the family or the individual, 2) a singular ability to promote increasing regulation and to consolidate power, and 3) a common philosophy concerning global domination and empire-building. And lest any clear-thinking individual penetrate this obfuscation, I would encourage each party to create a climate of fear within the ranks of those who identify themselves with the distinctives of that party (remembering that there is little real difference between the parties). For the liberal, I would create the bogeyman of climate catastrophe, of an angered Gaia wreaking vengeance upon iniquitous man. And for conservative, I would invoke the spectres of the alien in our midst, whether it be the barbarian hordes creeping across the border or the omnipresent and civilization-destroying worshiper of a foreign deity. Clear thinking would be muddied by emotion and reason co-opted by the effort to convince the other half of the population of the need to fear.

When everyone was good and frightened, I (or someone equally unscrupulous) would step in with the antidote to fear: "protection" by a strong right arm.

Of course, if I had the luxury of time, I would first dull the wits of the masses with mind-numbing entertainments like television, and if possible I would ensure that education was everywhere bastardized (perhaps by focusing on teaching techniques instead of the resultant citizens). Naturally I would be opposed to academies, to home-schooling, and to rebellion against the black box in the corner, and I would try to discourage these by speaking of the need to "socialize" the child.

...

Of course, this was a poorly-disguised allegory for our time.

I don't know that there is an one person or any cabal out there that is using my recipe for despotism. I don't know that a conspiracy theory is necessary to explain the fact that we have been marching inexorably into serfdom, either. The fact remains that this recipe will work independent of active cooks.

In the crucible of civilizational collapse a tyrant will rise.

- V.

A New Year

2008-01-10T02:53:00.000-05:00

... but not really.

The division is an arbitrary one, as all year divisions are; moreover, it is a division without meaning, hallowed by tradition alone.

Better divisions would be in February, when I celebrate how many years I have been Orthodox, or May, when I celebrate how many years I have been married to E., or August, when I celebrate how many years I have been alive, or September, when the rest of the Church marks year divisions. All of these have abundantly richer meaning than two-headed Janus' bacchanal.

As for New Year's Resolutions? Many years ago I resolved not to make New Year's resolutions. And I am delighted to declare that I haven't faltered in that resolve.

- V.

Merry New Calendar Christmas

2007-12-24T20:52:00.000-05:00

In the Orthodox world, there are two calendars in use: "Old Calendar" and "New Calendar". New Calendar folks have adjusted the Church calendar by 13 days to bring it line with the secular, or Western calendar. Old Calendar folks have not ... in some cases this resistance has taken the form of a sectarian ideology and in others this resistance is a relatively painless adherence to tradition. The net result is that Old Calendar folk celebrate the Nativity of Christ on January 7th (although they still call it December 25th) and New Calendar folk celebrate Christ's birth on December 25th.

Our parish is one of those that does not celebrate Nativity tomorrow. [Happily, we are Old Calendar without being Old Calendrist.]

However, I can still take joy in the celebration of those who commemorate Christ's birth tomorrow: to my large Orthodox family out there, to my Catholic friends like Les, to my currently blog-less Protestant friends, and to those who celebrate a holiday they do not understand, I wish you a blessed, peaceful, and joyous feast on the morrow.

Merry Christmas, friends. Christ is born.

- V.

And now, for something completely different

2007-12-20T23:40:00.000-05:00

Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, your parents' generation is far weirder than it has any reason for being?

Have you ever suspected that perhaps your parents were damaged in some way? That their peculiarities stem from some deep-seated trauma, that their psyches were wounded by a terrible event?

I think I found that event, that trauma. It explains everything unexplainable about the generation that came before. And it is truly, wondrously bizarre.

For your viewing pleasure, One Got Fat, a 15 minute video on bicycle safety.

And don't say I didn't warn you.

- V.

Huckabee Shamelessness

2007-12-18T10:39:00.000-05:00

Today I saw an ad by Mike Huckabee.

"Are you about wore [sic] out of all the television commercials you've been seeing? Mostly about politics. I don't blame you. At this time of year sometimes it's nice to pull aside from all of that and just remember that what really matters is a celebration of the birth of Christ, and being with our family and our friends. I hope that you and your family will have a magnificent Christmas season, and on behalf of all of us, God bless and Merry Christmas.

"I'm Mike Huckabee and I approve this message."

Subtitles:
www.mikehuckabee.com

Paid for by Huckabee for President, Inc.
Approved by Mike Huckabee

...

I don't know that it is necessary to point out the blatant hypocrisy in this political ad, but for those who need the guided tour, this is a shameless appeal to the Christian vote. Mike Huckabee in one sympathetic breath criticizes the rest of the presidential candidates for their political commercials, and then proceeds to emphasize that Christmas is about Christ, a statement that warms the heart of any Christian. However, and this is the important part, Huckabee would not be saying any of this if it were not for the fact that he is running for president. This message does not come from him out of the goodness of his heart but out of his presidential campaign, paid for by his campaign organization, and underscored throughout by a reference to his campaign website.

I'm sorry, but this is scandalous.

And I afraid that the Christian community will be as suckered by this cynical ploy as Huckabee thinks they will.

-V.