christianity

The Battle of Hours

ImageI’m fascinated by how no matter how something is phrased, it can be right there in front of you, simple and plain as day, but that doesn’t mean you’ll hear it. I’m not talking about some ‘self-annointed’ gnostic’s personal interpretation of a religious text – I mean something that’s dyed in the wool tradition but still, somehow, eludes the grasp. When people ask, “Why didn’t Christ tell everyone what was coming and what to do about it?” the answer is ‘He did, but that doesn’t mean “everyone” or even many people have heard him.

I seem to have stumbled upon something effective for overcoming sin. I know our fathers have told me this. I can go to my library and come out with armloads of books that will tell me this. I know that it has passed through my ears. But I know I haven’t heard it. Or I’ve forgotten it, which happens too.

 

It seems counterintuitive (and almost cowardly) not to fight sin head on. Not to attack it where it is, or defend against it where it comes. The fathers have told me this lacks humility, that I am already beginning from Death, “in sin did my mother conceive me” – the very context of that fight and defense has itself been corrupted – how then do I presume that I can make a stand? But I have heard them and thought ‘what else can I do?’ I didn’t hear the rest of what they were saying. And I know something about synergy. I am not mystified as to what’s me and what’s God, as though I have not learned the Orthodox thinking in this matter. I don’t presume either to struggle alone, or to wait for God to come and save me. There is no struggle and no salvation that is not both of us fully engaged together – my will, my mind, my emotions, my body, and God’s energies as well.

But the other part of it – I didn’t realize is so effective. Fighting and defending *indirectly*. As I say, it’s counterintuitive (to a man infected with Death). But it seems that praying the hours, that pushing through to sing the liturgical prayers of our people, helps overcome sin, helps not only drive away the evil one, but make a mind for overcoming the world, and also a disposition to overcome the passions. It makes a self less inclined to sin in the body, which is somehow raised through prayer, as though less corruptible, and it makes a soul less inclined to interest in sin, as though the fullness of prayer has filled an aching void that sin always promises to fill but never does, require addict-like returning to the needle of passions.

Now the fathers have said again and again, “pray so that you might not fall into temptation”. They have bled their voice onto the ground before me with admonition and encouragement, and I have not heard them. And I have been proud. I have thought to fight and to defend, to take sin on head on. But this is arrogance, not bravery. And this “indirect”, “counterintuitive” fighting and defense – I think this is what they meant. I think they meant I’m incapable of winning, but if I turn to God not to fight for me, but to fix me, to fix the broken, damaged, savaged by Death corruption in soul and body that has eaten me away, then I will be raised to taste incorruptible life, and Death won’t succeed in owning me, forcing me back to the ‘needle’ of passion-addicted slavery.

I walk away from the Hours, and I don’t care about the ‘needle’. I walk away and am happier, and it lasts, and I want to return to the Hours. And I think that, if I don’t, I will be overcome again. The passions – pride, anger, rage, envy, fear, lust, vengeance – these will come for me and find me broken for them, open for them, unclothed, needing, agonizing, incomplete, with a void they crawl into like roaches into a gap in the wall. The prayers, said with every attempt at fitting attention and devotion, with persistence and sincerity, they place the house on a high rock.

It’s not like the noon witching hour on “church day” when drivers roar out of parking lots and onto roadways with their “how dare you get in front of me, I am important and not to be trifled with!”, and the restaurants and buffets are packed with “I demand service. I will be catered to. How dare you fail me in any way!” No, that would be stupid. I don’t mean walking away feeling so good about yourself that you won’t do bad things – won’t kill someone, but will burn in the acid bath of pride. I mean that if the prayers are fitting and devoted, it seems like God does what he promises, fills up the gap between the man standing saying them in his Death with unworthy lips and the goal to which he aspires. As C.S. Lewis said, God “directs our arrows to himself”, apart from which they could never hit anything except an idol of our deluded imaginations. And God saves through prayer, deifies one a little more, heals a little more the disease, and abides with one a little more when in the dark cave surrounded by the slaver and the enemy and the dire wolf. And it’s stronger. The center is more well, and it holds more easily, to cite Yeats.

For me, it is the ‘discipline’ to say the words in private, to stand in the icon corner and sing the hour without help, without others, without anyone but me and God and the Saints knowing I am there. Which is really not ‘discipline’, but it is discovering and ever rediscovering that comfort is there, healing is there, health and wellness are there, that God abides especially there, in those prayers said “fittingly and with devotion”. The synergy is in going out to meet him. “Keep me this night without sin.” It’s amazing that one could say these words many times and not realize that they are exactly what is happening – I am saying the words, for my part, fittingly and with devotion – and God is keeping me this night without sin. This is the simple prescription. This is what I must do. Not dig in, stand, and fight, which it is my inclination to do at the first sign of trouble. But flee to the ‘altar’, choose good ground there, and call upon the host of Heaven to come to my aid, trusting not even the words of my own imagination, but the time-honoured implements of holy men who have withstood flame and sword and tooth and claw, and are there in prayer with those who honour them.

Lord have mercy on my blindness. Pray for me those who see.

The Rome of Christ and Antichrist

You know, ever since the gnostics there has been an apocalyptic, quasi-occult culture of superstition, pseudo-scholarship, and titillation surrounding the future – what the evangelical fundamentalists like to call “prophesy”. One of their key themes is the re-creation of a “Roman Empire” that will wed the economic and political structures of society into a globally pervasive environment, with people finding it impossible to do business (buy, sell, trade), make a living, and support their families unless they adhere to the system. In other words, it’ll be a pugilistic entity that uses pressure, leverage, and force to compel participation in its system. It’ll starve, bankrupt, or make war on and ultimately (with much suffering wreaked upon the poor) absorb peoples that don’t want any part in it. This empire is essentially the cultural face of antichrist.

restored quadriga atop Brandenburg Gate ►pale-...
Image by quapan via Flickr

For the past 100 years or so, all kinds of entities have been called that “revived Roman empire”. The League of Nations, the UN, the European Union, NAFTA and GATT – all kinds of things. Most of this has involved all kinds of selective information and reasoning, dubious analysis (to onlookers), and again a quasi-occult culture of superstition, pseudo-scholarship, and titillation surrounding the future. The enlightened who “see it” (gnosticism) get together for prophesy conferences and do a brisk trade in tithes, tapes, tabloids, and book sales. Everyone is convinced they need to explain their version of it to you (how else would they make a living?) but it’s really just the same sermon repeated again and again. Daniel and the 7 weeks, etc. etc.

Now of course, we Orthodox don’t think the same way. There have been many antichrists, many romes, and we expect there will be more again, until Christ comes. We have no need to understand all prophesy, as if analysis were understanding, or numerological theories were the same as knowledge. We say the books are sealed, and not yet opened. So we have written in the holy scriptures. But we’re not above some speculation, tho the best speculation is merely recognizing the typologies that we know from the holy gospel. We recognize Pilate. We recognize the Evil One who met us in the desert. We say this emperor, potentate, nation, or false prophet – these are antichrist. Stalin was antichrist. Pol Pot was antichrist. Hitler was antichrist. One might have more contemporary leaders in mind, if they did what those persons did – torture, bomb, and subjugate others, etc. Typology. I’ve no objections to calling any such person antichrist, even if he bleeds red, white, and blue. Perhaps especially then.

But I find it quite compelling that these fundamentalist prophesy gurus (vicarious prophets offering derivative visions of the future) have not pegged the United States as the best example in all of history of a “revived Roman empire”. It’s the seat of international lending and credit institutions and currency exchangers, “food” and chemical conglomerates, energy conglomerates, NGOs (world bank, IMF, etc.), private military-security forces and “intelligence” networks… if ever there were horns coming out of some beast, the metaphor would certainly be the most apt in this case. The US has fundamentally wed political and economic (commerical/corporate) interests, and created a global system into which it compels participation, by subjugation, leverage, and all manner of economic extortion – it is the Walmart of world powers – it is *the* world power – you basically can’t do business, as a people, unless you’re involved with the US system. And if you’re the exception, holding out and giving the US the finger, you get bombed into oblivion and made a client state as we ‘rebuild’. One way or another, you break and yield – if we have to claim there are WMDs hidden somewhere under your house, and fabricate documentation, we’ll do it. If we have to claim you have “ties” to nebulous global organizations that threaten us, we’ll do it, even if you’re fundamentally incompatible with those organizations. If we have to say that you attacked us, not the other way around, that’s in the contingency plans – always has been. Whatever it takes, one way or another, you get the mark. That flag will wave, that dollar will prevail – you’ve got to be in bed w. the leviathan, the behemoth, the enormous, all-consuming world empire that sets the markets, manipulates the rise and fall of governments, and wages war on those who stand against it.

I think one would be hard pressed *not* to say, using the Orthodox ‘hermeneutic’, that this is one of the “Roman Empires”. As I say, I think it’s the best example ever. It’s on a grand scale, compared to all the localized Romes we’ve known. Sure, we think there’s a final Roman Empire, and there’ll be a final antichrist, out of many. Whether this is it, or is just one more, from which once again there will be redemption, God knows. I merely think it’s silly to fill our eyes with flags and love of McDonalds and Oprah and Chevy trucks, and pretend it’s always the other guys. The rest of the world knows. We’re the only ones who go around thinking we do little wrong, that the rest of the world either must be like us, wants to be, or should be, and that it’s OK to profess our friendship with a gun pointed at someone’s head and the other hand taking the food from their children, while we crap under their dinner table. If someone were to ask for an example of what Christ is talking about in the gospels, this is what I’d tell them.

Of course, the fundamentalists are busy trying to figure out how to make their “bibles” fit with President Obama being “the” antichrist. They want to stop just short of his “blackness”, what there is of it. But they’re just not being creative:  he’s a pugilist and a bully, too. He’s continuing, not discontinuing, the extension of the system of global US influence, control, and possession of markets through military, economic, and cultural force that his predecessor was also continuing and extending. Parties change – this underlying global policy does not. It’s too important to leave to the exigencies of a single executive. The duality of parties is like the difference between being bludgeoned or merely beaten – it’s a form of words.

I share more faith with those who used to shout that the US is the “great Satan”, before we set up secret prisons in their countries, and helped get them rounded up and tortured to death by their governments. They at least have a correct analysis of typology, and are doing it in an Orthodox manner. Listen to the rational ones, and they’re saying that the US is trying to dominate the world culturally, economically, and militarily in a global empire of influence and control. In other words, they’re saying, “look, here is Rome”. Remember, all roads lead to it. Or put another way, our “worst” critics are also most accurately describing what we, in our speeches and white papers, declare as our express goals, whenever we talk about “pursuing US interests” – those aren’t your interests or my interests, but those of the entity – the ‘beast’, if you will. It’s as if our biggest problem is with those who don’t cooperate, and our second biggest is with those who say “Look, there is Antichrist!” Let those who have understanding count the number of the “beast”. Hell, a turnip could understand it when it’s this obvious.

It’d be interesting to see those toting around their prophesy pamphlets and Scofield bibles work up a set of “parallels” (their concept), representing Christ’s words about Antichrist and his empire and US economic, industrial, political, and military endeavours over the past 70 years. “Hers” for those of you into ‘inclusive’ bibles and female antichrists. Instead of the manifest destiny bit in the back of their Birch Society minds about “America” being “special” or “chosen” or a “Christian nation” (that one makes me laugh) – just assume for a moment that all of that is made up – foolish blathering – that none of it has been correctly understood (that’s certainly the way almost everyone else on the planet looks at it). Instead, play devil’s advocate and just compare Christ’s words in the gospels with things like the decade of Reagan’s secret wars or, more blatantly, every military and international banking action, and every US trade dispute since the Berlin Wall came down, and its plethora of effects in the world. My favorite quotation right now from the US is “We’re going to open up new markets, one way or another.” Sounds pretty much like that ‘Bible’ to me, if you ignore the notes in the margins, and just listen to the beast talk. 🙂

Incidentally, the Protestants will never understand the Rome of Antichrist until they understand the Rome of Christ, and how it is said (in one of our prophesies) “Two Romes have fallen, a Third stands, a Fourth there shall not be.” Amen.

Also, the fundamentalist “prophesy” sticklers will say I missed one. They say the empire weds political, economic and *religious* aspects of the culture together, and we’re back to that “but we’re a Christian nation” rhetoric. If that’s all we’re missing, I’ve got two words for you: Max Weber. If there was ever a wedding of those three elements, it was right there at the beginning, when the US was founded (and it continues to this day). The US was founded as a “Christian” nation only in this sense that, utilizing Weber’s thesis (“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”) it’s in perfect symmetry as an Antichristian one. Remember, these are their criteria – economic, political, religious- I merely point out that Weber answers that nicely. Give it a read. It’s a required text for any US political science degree. Then grab Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (also required reading, if you do US foreign policy) for his delightful diagrams of the “end times”. That’s the real “prophesy” in use in US foreign policy. What is ‘prophesy’ anyway, but the belief in the inevitability of a thing?

And just to be fair to Walmart, I think it’s one of the “little” beasts. I didn’t want to leave that out. It’s got horns everywhere.

By What Authority?

In the sense in which the West offers it, I don’t recognize any authority “over” me. No president, congress, pastor, leader, boss, block captain, warden, or petty supervisor has authority over me. I accept none. I’m obliged to keep my word, compelled to follow my honor, and committed to adhere to my ethics. But these are comments on my own inclinations, on the authority of character, not of any external force.

Christ the Saviour (Pantokrator), a 6th-centur...
Image via Wikipedia

I used to take a lot of flack for this from the evangelical fundamentalist crowd that talks in terms of overseers, and “the leadership” (as though it were an objective entity that should rightfully rule the world), and that does not distinguish their political inclinations from objective religious obligations – claiming, in their support of corporate structures, that the boss is appointed by God and that the president is “Il Duce” – nothing short of messianic, provided he’s Republican. “You don’t submit to authority,” they would shout.

Right. I don’t recognize an authority to submit to, and wouldn’t if I did – I’d rebel against him and join the opposition. They’ll appeal to the “Bible” (a Protestant contraption made out of clippings and arranged parts from some of the Holy Scriptures we Orthodox authored).

And yes, there are words about authority in there. However, they are several in kind. One is adherence to the Bishop, which the evangelicals certainly are not. Those who think you can think and feel a “church” into existence and then appoint yourself or others to “positions of authority” certainly cannot accept that Christ objectively founded a historical Church in a place and time, laying hands physically on bishops, empowering them to lay hands on others, and so they themselves must adhere to the Church that has never ceased to exist down to our own day. In short, the Protestant cannot accept that rather than inventing the Church, they are required by the only authority to locate and be received into it.

Another type of authority reflected in the holy scriptures is that conditional authority given to rulers, which is limited, not absolute or blanket (not fascist in character) and which is practical and de facto. Remember, Pilate had “authority” to murder Christ. He did not have the right to do it, the divine ordinance or sanction to do it. He merely had the ‘authority’ in the sense that God literally put the power to make it happen in his hands. It’s not so different from the authority of Bishops. Bishops *are* in authority, in the sense that who the bishop is is not a matter of opinion – you don’t create him, you locate him, and adhere to him. With a ruler like Pilate, he’s got the guns and the tanks and the legions – you pretty much can identity who he is. This in no way implies you can’t oppose him, resist him, or even ignore him (things Christ did more than once). Being Pilate doesn’t make you good or right, or make his decisions good or right or the divine intention.

Another kind of authority in the holy scriptures is authority in terms of experience. Obviously the monastics, who have walked long in the desert, fasted fiercely and humbly, and have overcome the Evil One, have experience that may be regarded as authority. If you were consulting an authority on engine overhauls, you would consult an experienced mechanic. He’d speak with some authority. His boss, who might be a corporate geek who has never rolled up his sleeves, has no such authority in that sense. The Orthodox Faith is eminently practical in this way.

We’re basically mechanics of the body and soul, attempting to accomplish our union with God, not create a religious philosophical system to which we can then provide membership or advocacy. As our fathers would say, we don’t have time to argue with your religious philosophies, we’re too busy trying to save ourselves.

So, I know there is a kind of authority in various governmental and industrial (same thing) figures of power – I am usually opposing them, so of course I accept that they exist.

Obviously, I know that there is a kind of authority in the Bishop – I can’t be saved without him – I’d be a fool not to locate him, and be a part of his Church – he is Christ on the earth – to separate myself from him, is to be without Christ.

And finally, I listen to our fathers in the Faith, because they are our authorities – the repositories of the Word of God, which always comes to us as persons. Trying to “cook my own meth”, so to speak (invent and live out my own religious experience) would be a delusional exercise, a kind of inner Protestantism – “personal savior” indeed. I can’t really get by without looking to and seeking the help of those who have gone farther ahead, been proved and made perfect, living and praying for us in their glorified union with God. An example is an authority on what it represents.

This is why our ikons are authorities – they are repositories, in person, of our Faith. When we say “faith” we don’t mean first and foremost “content” in a religious philosophical way, but “history” – experience – what happened, what is happening, and what will happen. That’s the gospel, the Creed, and the means of our salvation – practical, real, tangible, personal, historical, experiential events. We don’t “believe” our Faith so much as live it out.

When we say the words “I believe” in the Creed, it’s not “here follows didactic content” but “here is what happened to us”, “here is what we are responding to”, and “here is how we intend to live”. That too, is authority – the authority of simply being true. A thing that is so has the authority to command our adherence, and when we dispute or disdain it, evading history and experience and reality, we are disdaining that authority.

So, no I recognize no authority in heaven or earth in the sense that Western, Protestant, Republicans do. No such thing. Figment of their imagination. False god – Baal – idol. Illicit authority. But neither do they recognize the authority that layed hands on the apostles and gave them all authority, binding and uniting heaven and earth together as one. If they did, they would join their Church and become their disciples, thereby becoming disciples of Christ who gave them such authority. Not the authority of power – but of truth, reality, and the body of Christ himself. It’s not a Western Protestant, Republican story – it’s the gospel.

I feel completely free to be at once an anarchist (if I like) and an Orthodox Christian. I know some would take exception to that, but then we’ve got all kinds of things that creep into any religious context, including neo-conservative fascism that repudiates the very Faith of the adherent. Someone is bound to think that loyalty to their political system is required of those who follow Christ within it. They no doubt would take exception to Christ having worked on the Sabbath, had they been Jews. I’m OK with someone taking exception. As I said, it’s following Christ, not joining the party of those who trumped up the charges against him. A little more disdain for the significance of one’s government, and a lot more concern with those persecuted by it, would be far more Christian if, by Christian, we mean Orthodox.

The Rules of Religious Blogging

The rules of religious blogging aren’t that different than the rules of blogging in general. So many religious bloggers made their first foray into the medium with religion, and it’s an explosive topic, so it bears some discussion for the layman. The biggest problem is that so many people attribute to their religious views a totality, a monolithic, comprehensive absolutism – quite simply put, a “rightness” – that, in the area of religion, they feel free to ignore the rules of blogging altogether. The results can be disastrous personally, as the blogger falls quickly into pride, defensiveness, and begins to make war on anyone who disagrees. Again, quite simply, the worst tendencies of religious absolutism come out for all to see, leaving the blogger in a seige position, with a taking on all enemies mentality, boxing in all directions, and inviting likewise the audience to participate in the personal moral failures of the blogger – closemindedness, inability to hear, the loss of gentleness and peace, the devolution of spirited debate into personal attacks and enjoyment of other people’s downfall, or plotting enjoyment of their potential defeat. In short, the blogger becomes a monster, the blog a monstrosity, and all we who participate become little monsters hanging on to the mother beast. Gone is any real possibility, though we might kid ourselves, that we will learn something. We become Rush Limbaugh-like, firing missiles from our armored booths, with no felt accountability for where they land.

Prophet Amos, old Russian Orthodox icon
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You might find this intro surprising, coming from me. But I’m not talking about breaking the rules of blogging, merely about ignoring them. It’s one thing to proceed with ignorance and inexperience and end up slamming your first car into a wall. We’d like to avoid that. It’s another thing if you wreck cars for a living as a stuntman, crash test dummy, or safety tester. If you know what you’re doing, are breaking the rules intentionally for a reason, and understand the consequences for you and for others, then maybe it’s appropriate. Maybe. It depends on your purpose and the purpose of your blog and what kind of interaction you want with visitors. I know mine, know what I’m doing and why, and while that doesn’t exempt me from the need to monitor myself, listen to feedback, and possibly adjust, it also means that if I’m breaking the very rules I’m discussing, it may not be hypocrisy at all – it may be quite intentional. My father used to quote Oscar Wilde, “a gentleman never offends anyone unintentionally”. That shouldn’t be an excuse for being intentionally brutal – it doesn’t make it all right – but we must at once be willing to take all offenses we give on ourselves, saying with our fathers, “it is all my fault”, and yet leave the other person their own will, which we cannot presume to own or control. Sometimes what is being offended is pride, or presumption, or arrogance, or unbelief, or some such thing. We must avoid making excuses, tread carefully lest we assume for ourselves the deluded role of ‘hammer of God’ – avoiding hubris, and yet also sometimes be willing to risk pain in order to remove something awful, like a surgeon at work on a tumor. And in that, it’s so easy to become self-righteous and blind.

So anyway, I’m not meaning this to be a comprehensive list of rules. There are plenty of lists out there, if you want to google the rules of blogging. But here are a couple that may be useful:

* Whenever possible, avoid telling a person he’s wrong. Instead, acknowledge right intent, right direction, right in some point, but merely operating with wrong information or incomplete analysis in another area. I’m constantly re-learning this one. It’s something I pull from business blogging, and it’s just as appropriate in a religious setting.

* Always leave something on the table. Don’t attempt to “decimate” someone you’ve decided is an intellectual opponent. If you do, you’re delighting too much in another’s downfall, which is forbidden, is it not? Do you think David mocked Goliath as he slung the stone? We are not that kind of people, if we pretend to be whatever is meant by “christian”. The wrath of God is upon us at such moments. There is always a bigger giant. If you can’t find *any* point of agreement with the other person, let them know that that’s where you’re struggling, and leave it at that. As John Duns Scotus said, ‘unless we can find some single point on which we really and unreservedly agree, we can’t really have a conversation’. That happens to me a lot, because you and I don’t mean the same thing by “christian” or “god” or “Jesus”. There’s always someone assuming for you that you’re in agreement, and who will fight to insist that you agree when you know that you do not. I always end it by saying, “the god that you believe in, I think is fictional, imaginary, and doesn’t exist, so saying we both worship the same God is like saying that you think you’re hearing fairies and I think you’re hearing your own mind – that’s not what “same” really means”. But it’s not really our place to have ecumenical(ist) dialogues and come to ‘agreement’ as we cook our own religious meth, so to speak. Protestants create their religion. The rest of us cannot engage in that kind of thing without ceasing to be what we are. It’s apostasy of attitude and activity that we must avoid, besides mysteriological apostasy.

* Acknowledge the other person’s intellectual and vocational liberty. You can’t be Orthodox without believing in this freedom. Maybe Calvinists have another take and end up struggling with this. You hear fundamentalists say all the time, “the devil is whispering in your ear” or some such thing. It’s really inappropriate for us to make such a judgment. Our fathers warn stringently against that presumption. I find I’m saying, “I understand that a lot of people live that way, think that way, make that choice. It’s not the way I live, think, or not what I’ve decided.” Sometimes the best way to acknowledge liberty is to pair it with your own. The danger for religious bloggers, and those who drop in for a visit, is the same danger you get in religious forums (an infernal venue that I don’t want here) – that is, deciding that there’s only one possible correct answer, and that you’ve got a handle on it such that nothing else need be listened to. It’s the most dangerous to you when you ‘know’ you’re right. The moment you stop challenging your own ‘beliefs’, then you’re not actually thinking anymore, your intellect isn’t actually free, but instead you’re a creature of ‘beliefs’. One of my religious duties is to remove from my mind all ‘beliefs’. I often say that I don’t believe in God, because I don’t have any beliefs. That’s more an intention than a reality. I know if I dig enough, I’ll find beliefs I haven’t eradicated yet. A belief is something you’ve insulated from consideration, scrutiny, from thought – it’s fixed, it cannot any more be considered. You can’t really respond to a belief. The person has chosen to separate themselves from reality, in actual principle, and to decide that nothing can impact their understanding. They are immune even from the God they presume to worship. They aren’t followers of God, but followers of their own mind. It’s the ultimate atheism, the best demonstration of autonomy from the Creator, the height of pride and also, tragically, the best evidence of terrible loneliness, fear – the very seige mentality we’re saying religious bloggers need to avoid. The best thing you can do for them and for you is to keep responding with, “yes, I acknowledge that’s one way of thinking. it’s not mine, or everyone’s, but it’s one way.” Then, unless you’re a hypocrite, you tell yourself the same thing about *your* beliefs, until they start listening again, and you are free of their power. Nothing destroys faith like belief.

* Make friends of your enemies, where possible. The notion that someone is your ‘enemy’ is suspect in the first place, because you’ve reduced the other person to a concept, which is the first stage in villifying them. You’re not really listening, anymore, just fighting. So if it’s possible, read what they write elsewhere, offer respect, agreement where possible, interest – don’t let it all become teeth and claws. Sure, some people are enemies of God, enemies of the truth, etc. But be careful about painting with that brush. Because, again, it reduces the person down to what the person is saying or doing, and that’s heresy if you’re Orthodox, the height of evil, and the reason we stopped regarding the Roman Bishop and his “christians” as Orthodox in the first place, because they did that theological to the Holy Trinity, in the form of the filioque, making heresy into blasphemy. How can you then presume to do it? Might as well join the other camp at that point, because whatever you’re saying to them, you’ve fallen into their primary error, what St. Photius spoke of as ‘the sum of all heresies’, “all the rash impudence that the West has to say”. Be careful, because once you do that, you pave the way for cyber-crusades, internet inquisitions, and blogger burnings at the cyber-stake.

* Know when to cut it off. There are times when it’s clear that all the other person is not interested in doing anything except fighting. At that point, give them the last word if you want, or if their last word is to kick over something that needs to be repaired, then you take the last word, and then cut them off. I don’t mean cut off anyone who disagrees with you and annoys you personally, or people you like, by not “getting it” or by asking uncomfortable questions. I know a couple of bloggers who do that, and most of us don’t have a lot of respect for them. One of them gives a couple of warnings that if you keep asking the same question in a different way, or keep bringing up an issue that the blogger thinks has already been answered adequately, you’re going to get banned. I don’t read that blog anymore, because I can’t respect the venue or the blog manager. True, I didn’t agree with the people who were getting banned, and I thought the person doing the banning had more or less correct ideas, but it’s not a real discussion if you always hand the game to your own team. That’s religion. That’s belief. It’s the equivalent, in a blog, of what belief is doing in the mind. It’s the antithesis of faith. So why bother? Another blogger I’ve spent some time observing, only posts comments that ask questions he likes or that won’t embarrass him, and he uses the approval/disapproval system to control the conversation, so that he always comes out right. Wow. That’s even worse, and almost no one I know respects him, or what he’s doing. A colleague called it a monoblog. 🙂 That’s fine, if it’s going to be that, but then turn off comments rather than make it a sham.

* Have a mission statement. A lot of people don’t get blogging for the same reason they don’t get Twitter. They’re newbies who don’t have the background a lot of us do in virtual communities and online venues. If they just came onto the scene about the time AOL opened it’s doors to the web, they’re newbies. And you’re going to get people who think your web real estate is one thing when it’s another. If it’s a forum, treat it like a forum – don’t censor. If it’s a monoblog, then turn off comments. If you’re primarily promoting yourself and sharing information, then make that clear. Whatever you’re doing, even if someone is an ass, you have to give them a pass if you don’t tell them what defines the turf. This blog, for instance, is neither a forum nor a monoblog. It’s a site of personal confession. I’m open to some feedback, some discussion, some comments, but I’m not interested in cooking our own meth. The people you’ll see me chase off, eventually, if they don’t get it after a while, are the Protestant types who want to ‘dialogue’ and create our own religious viewpoints, as though that’s a legitimate activity. I’m Orthodox. That’s not what Orthodox people do. You can find ones who will. They’re Protestants dressed up in Orthodox clothes. It wouldn’t be a site of personal confession if I was here throwing Holy Orthodoxy over my shoulder, would it? The other behavior I don’t spend a lot of time with (in other words, I usually say “look, I’m not interested in this”) comes from visitors who drop in, fire off a “corrective” based on reading a single post (yeah, you can track how many posts they’ve read, and how long they spent on each page, etc), and aren’t really listening to or looking at what you’re doing or why. They’re taking some statement as a disconnected proposition, the way Protestants do ‘bible verses’ and responding to that. In short, they’re not talking about what I’m saying, they’re focuses only on what I said. They’re not paying attention to what I’ve said, but only to what’s happening in their own mind. I don’t really have a lot of time for that, and I tend to want to toss it in one response. So I reduce it to logic, show the fallacies, and move on. Usually is quite effective. Doesn’t mean I need only flowery love sonnets for what I’m writing – those don’t do much for me, either – I’m not a sage – I’m just a sinner who is thinking out loud, trying to be saved and, as I’ve said elsewhere, wanting to avoid having only the walls of my own mind to respond, for reasons I needn’t repeat in this post. Anyway, somewhere, you need to make it clear what the hell you’re doing, so that there’s some point of reference. In the old days, people used an F.A.Q.

* Above all, don’t go nuclear. I’m not talking about your personal feelings, or about getting too upset. I mean don’t arm your online country with weapons of mass destruction in the first place. Once you escalate to the point that you’re your own nation, you’re not a “christian” anymore – if you ever were in the first place. Nationalism and christianity are incompatible, no matter what your flag waving pastor tells you. Nationalism is heresy to all faiths, because it’s an attack on faith itself. And I’m not only talking about the nationalism that things “charity starts at home” or “American and Israel are special nations” (neo-gnostic nonsense). In principle, we’re talking about any time you carve out an area and say, ‘outsiders will have to give account of their religious background, their legal identity, their statement of faith, etc.’ and ‘if you commit treason, sedition, or even questional activities, you will be stigmatized, ostracized, and eventually ejected, or else bombed by a religious dogpile of “loving” violence’. Loving violence – that’s nuclear. You know, I’ve had people slap my face, punch me, or threaten to hurt me or worse, because their religious group had gone nuclear. To the point that even the ‘leaders’ (cult leaders) sanctioned it. When a religion goes nuclear, I don’t care if it’s Brother Billy and First Baptist, your Victory Fundagelical Megachurch, or the coffee hour folks at your local parish, you’re a cult and your leaders, if they are involved, are cult leaders. When you do that with online religious communities, you’re either acting illicitly *against* your religion (Orthodox people would say acting apart from the Bishop) or your religion isn’t worth blogging about in the first place, because it’s just an argument by force. And that goes whether people set out on online smear campaigns, villify you in one of those “let’s all gang up on one person (and scare any sympathizers into silence)” free for alls, or what have you. It’s all illicit violence. If you’ve gone nuclear, and you have enough humanity left to realize it, do the one needful thing – kill the damned beast, so it doesn’t grow any more. Close down the blog, shut off the forum, end the meetings and the e-mails, or what have you, and go and spend the next months in penance and begging forgiveness. You have killed. Even if you didn’t actually draw blood. You have murdered with your mind, and you are an apostate to your Faith and to all faith of any kind. Repent, and bend your swords into plowshares.

And remember, don’t get some monster dressed up as a Saint in your head. Martin Luther burned the town of Muenster, and all the men, women, children, elderly, and infirm within it. If you’re thinking, “Martin Luther would do this!” then you might as well put in Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Hitler. The religious thing is just window dressing.

* Show it to your Bishop. Or if you’re not Orthodox, then take it to your leader. Make sure they know it exists and where to find it. I’m not necessarily telling you that you can’t speak freely. I’m saying that it’s good to make what you say, where possible, available to your Bishop, so you can get guidance and help with any serious problems you might have, or if you really need someone to rescue you from the monster you’ve become. Sometimes, speaking into the hollow of an oak is necessary. I get it. But that’s not what turns you into a monster, usually. Avoid monstrosity – show the Bishop. That’s what he’s there for.

That’s it. The list could go on and on. I figure these are enough. I mean, if you’ve got these down, hell, you’re better off that in most religious venues, aren’t you? And if you can’t do these things, for goodness sake, it’s not for you to run, launch, or participate in an online venue. Get out of it. No one is appointed to the inquisition. If you’re going to stay in, try slapping something on your sidebar that says, “Be gentle, be kind, be peaceable. Be willing to say that you’re wrong. Be willing to acknowledge the other guy is right. If you can’t do these things, go play golf until you can. It’ll still be here tomorrow.” Here, I use remembrance of the times and seasons. Again, I’ll violate these rules sometimes. Sometimes unintentionally, in which case I’ve got work to do. Sometimes, on purpose, but usually more for dramatic effect. I swear up a storm some days, because I’d rather be genuine than religious and, again, this blog really serves a purpose to which that’s appropriate. But in the comments section, I sometimes do all right, sometimes not. That’s where I try to follow the rules as best I can.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blogger

Update on Haiti: Don’t be discouraged by the reports of overwhelming aid, and too much of one thing at one time. The aid is going to be needed for the long haul. There is no decent running water, and where that’s true, and people have no homes, families are destroyed, and most things are just a pile, it’s going to be an ongoing need to get people to the point they can survive and rebuild. The “overwhelming” part is a testament to how quickly the world responded – quicker than ever before on anything. The duplication – e.g. with so many countries sending field hospitals – demonstrates the need for better international coordination of aid. We still act like nations – we still believe in the made-up construct of nationhood and act in a disjointed way, because of it. At a minimum, we need to act as a federation of nations, with some federal coordination. But that doesn’t mean the ongoing aid is not needed. Please keep helping.

As usual, that was preface, and I don’t intend a discourse on the passion of anger or divine anger or any such thing. It’s preface to personal confession. I experience anger whenever I start something new. It’s a kind of outrage. And I don’t know if it’s the passion of anger or not. I’m not going to try to sort that out here. It’ll take more than a platitude or two. I just know it’s there. When I first decided to work for myself, I felt anger at all the pretences that had been foisted on me by the culture and corporate life, the bondage I had placed in, unknowingly, since infancy – sculpted to become a slave. And I spent the first weeks after expressing that anger, or outrage, or what have you. When battered by ridiculous pagan mantras (no negative energy, no negative energy…) I became outraged and began throwing those shackles off. It felt as if they would handcuff me to something that can’t sustain life, mold me into the output of a philosophical meat grinder – a concept not a human. Nothing more complex than a few mantras. And I railed against it. When I began writing again here, I also felt anger. Anger at the chains put on others, and the chains once clamped on me. And I cried out and am still crying out against them. If my experience here matches the other venues, this will last a while, and then it’ll be done, and I’ll either talk about other things or have nothing more to say for a while, so that it becomes a protest venue, for when raids are made against my sanity and my liberty by the world. I don’t know which it’ll be, of course.You know, we deny that there is such a thing as righteous anger, good anger, or the anger of God – if, by that, we mean anything remotely like human anger. God is not subject to the passions, because God is not subject to death. To deny this is to make God part of the universe – not the creator, but rather himself the created. To deny it is heresy and gnosticism. It is also to turn the scriptures against themselves, a common characteristic of both gnosticism and Protestantism – quoting proof texts that elsewhere are seemingly contradicted. When the Apostle calls anger a passion, how then can the prophets say that God is angry? The apparent disymmetry comes from attempting to treat the scriptures like a book, external and separate from the thinking community that wrote them – external to its liturgy, it’s understanding. And even now, as people convert to Orthodoxy, from other religions or from the culture at large, they bring with them this disymmetry and find it difficult to learn to understand the holy scriptures in an Orthodox manner. As Christ said, “let him who has ears to hear, let him hear”. It is difficult to hear when listening with ears that are alien to the faith of the first man, the faith of our fathers, the faith of all ages. But the Orthodox mind does not attribute anger to God as some higher form of the passion experienced by man, any more than we can think that God forgets or that God grows weary. Genuine Christianity is all of one piece, not a jumble of statements in a book that you can toss onto your kindle and get your head around on a plane. In fact, the more people attempt that, the less they really understand, because they acquire the delusion that they have understood. The books are liturgical, and cannot be understood externally to the liturgy. That’s just the facts.

I believe anger is so often the result of pain. I know from experience that mine is. The Haiti thing tho is the latest example. I think it’s one thing to listen to ongoing interviews on the ground, listen to people pulled from the wreckage, listen to the husbands burying their wives, listen to the overwhelmed doctors and the people trying to find others in the rubble, and the people learning that their loved ones have died. When you listen to that, if you’re human, if you haven’t converted your humanity into ideology, which is genocide on all human beings everywhere for all time – Christ included, you feel… solidarity, symmetry with the suffering, pain. Not pain like theirs, not suffering like theirs. After all, you have a radio, you are driving a car, you are on the way to buy food or to earn money. You take a drink of water or coffee and you have everything they do not have. You cannot feel what they feel. But you don’t feel nothing, either, unless you’ve killed your human soul. You feel pain.

It’s another thing entirely to listen to 40-second clips on TV news punctuating 3-hour rants by a Rush Limbaugh figure on how it’s being politicized, ironically politicizing it just by making that statement. Over and over, building it into an ideological agenda. No pain, no humanity, just ideology. An intellectual meat grinder for quasi-intellectual, half-intelligent armchair philosophers. The Sadducees of our time. The cultural gnostics. There is no Christianity in that. To borrow from Lewis Black, right wing, conservative cultural religion is to Christianity what KFC is to chicken. And it distorts, warps, and finally deprives one of humanity. It eradicates the human soul, substituting for it a set of platitudes, much like Protestantism and gnosticism from which, unrealized perhaps by the listener, it originates. It is the translation of those premises into popular culture.

And it doesn’t let you feel pain, it causes pain. It doesn’t lessen the suffering of the world, it adds to it. And when you feel the pain in your soul that is the shared life with other human beings, and someone comes along and turns on a loudspeaker of droning, caustic, antagonistic vitriol against and pollution of the fundamental connection we share with all of creation, and foremost with all human beings, not only are they attacking the gospel, by which God became a human being, the very meaning of salvation – the Incarnation, they are trying to crumble the underpinnings of your human soul – creating their own earthquake, their own disturbance, to bring down the part of you that makes you a man. And the pain felt by sharing, by connection, by what we Christians can only reach for and describe as love, is drowned out by the pain of blunt trauma to all connections, all sharing, all solidarity, in fact to the very nature and essence of man, which is one thing, summed up in Christ, expressed in the diversity of all. And that pain fills me with outrage. It makes me angry. And I try to overcome the passion. And fathers help me, saints save me, but I don’t know whether what’s left is my sin or something else. St. John Cassian, I completely submit to thy teaching that there is no righteous anger. And I have no recourse but to do as the fathers tell me – namely, when in doubt, attribute sin to myself, and so escape the wrath of God, which is not like my illicit wrath, not a more nobler version, but is justice in the very uncreate energies of an all-consuming God. Consume me so I am not destroyed. Consume me, so that my life is preserved.

We say, among the faithful, that God does not absorb us. But union with God, theosis, to be consumed, is the very preservation of our unique persons, the very protection of diversity, while the God who became man, wedding but not confusing the two natures, joined in on person, joins us to himself. It is not a thing for the armchair theologian. It is a thing to understand by becoming a real part of the community of people whose liturgy expresses through the year the mystery of this union, enacted through the days of the calendar and the fasts and the feasts, and in the life inside the timeless temple that is one with the temple in Heaven, all us with the angels in the one liturgy, with all the Saints, everywhere unceasingly, mystically representing the Cherubim, finding thereby the union with “all mortal flesh”.

That talk radio garbage is an outrage against God and an enmity with all men. But I don’t wish to fight on God’s behalf. I am not a nice man. I am “meaner” than that. The worst thing one can do to one’s enemies is to refuse to strike them, consigning them instead to the judgment of God. Christ withheld his hand, though he could have turned the world inside out and swallowed them in flame bathed in blood. But he went like a lamb. “I am not here to judge. There is one who judges.” How foolish to think this means he was not hear to point out wrong and elevate good. He did precisely that, all the time. No, but real judgment is when God decides what to do with each of us. And that is a “terrifying thing”, is it not? I am angry, but I am trying not to strike, because God will do what is right, and know what is right, and the passions will not be his guide. He is ever free from Death, and has liberated us likewise to his freedom. I wish to go into it. Lord have mercy.

Getting Off the Religious Holodeck

You know, it’s pointless most of the time to explain anything to anyone, if you’re not a Protestant or Roman Catholic (other side of the same coin). The English-speaking West is a thoroughly Protestant environment. Atheists here are basically Protestant in their preconceptions. It’s nearly impossible to get past it. This is one of the reasons I think the Protestant model of evangelism is useless to sell non-Protestantism in a Protestant environment. Complete waste of time – you’re just one more voice selling a different flavor of the same thing.

Google Street View Holodeck
Image by niallkennedy via Flickr

This is not the medium for a full explication of the premises of Protestantism, shared by pagan, atheist, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant alike. The system attempts such a totality that, if you’re born into it, escaping it requires repudiating the very basis for your thought, the very means by which you ask questions in the first place. Even talking about it is largely pointless. When people repeat back to you what you’ve said, it’s not the same thing. There’s a cognitive divide that isn’t getting crossed. It’s like the Truman Show or Dark City or the holodeck on Star Trek or the Matrix; wherever you go, you don’t really get out – you’re still really very much inside the construct.

Still, this is really not here for preaching to the choir or selling to the outsider. It’s here for me. It’s my site of personal confession. It’s public for the very reason that it’s not Protestant. One of the more significant problems with Protestant epistemology is that, as a Protestant, you can pretty much think and say whatever you want, with no real reference point as a corrective except illicit social pressure. I’ve listened to ordinary Protestants pop off with some of the most blatant heresy (to any “christian” confession) and blasphemy, and not only not realize it, but the people around them aren’t equipped to respond. There’s nothing to which to appeal, because hey – it’s just whatever you came to in your own mind while reading your own book in private. The individual is first, which is evidenced by the fact that, as Protestants, you actually choose a’ church’ rather than choose to belong to the Church. The autonomy of the individual is the predicate – it is the starting point, after which everything else is merely an appendage.

When I was younger, I resorted to saying, “I know you don’t realize what you’re saying, and you have nothing outside yourself to check you, but what you’re saying is blasphemy, heresy, and is formally condemned by the one true Church and the ancient Faith. There is a standing anathema against anyone who utters or thinks such a thing. Before you offend Heaven, you might tone it down and realize that there may be a very good reason for it, even if you’re not aware of what that reason is. After all, I venture to guess you’ve only just learned this point.”

So to be public here, about the inner thoughts of my own mind, is to liberate myself from Protestantism, from the bondage of autonomy, whereby there is no anchor, no point of reference, nothing but the endless walls of my own intellect, with no escape or contact with other person. In that sense, the “freedom” and “liberty” of belief of the Protestant is exactly the same kind of prison as the presuppositions we likened to the Truman Show and the Matrix. To confess is also to expose one’s thoughts to the possibility that someone will find horrible flaw with them, and to give yourself the opportunity to be humbled, corrected, and so to be saved. Because without this, when ‘faith’ is only what happens in your own mind apart from everything, you cannot be saved.

Such faith cannot save, it can only condemn. It is faith devoid of humility and, even if it is 100% sound in all its points, is dominated and possessed by the chaos of a completely emancipated interior life – a person so unconnected from the world – from the rest of creation – that he is unconnected to God, or presumes to be since none of us ever falls completely away. In fact, it is very like how the fathers describe Hell. I shudder at that. It’s a kind of religious neurosis that, while it must feel very empowering to the person caught up in it, very like being a soldier on crusade in the army of the ‘lord’, it is really a self-imposed form of mental illness.

So anyway, the premise I am thinking about a little today is absolutism. As an example, I’d prefer to refer to all the non-religious people I meet. I think they’re the best illustration of non-religious Protestantism I can find, because they are almost universally absolutists. Let’s take the vegan and vegetarian thing. A conversation might go like this:

“So you’re a vegan?” Sometimes. “So you eat meat?” Sometimes. “So you don’t think eating meat is wrong?” I didn’t say that. “So you do think it’s wrong.” I haven’t said that, either. “You seem to be inconsistent.” No, I’m just not an absolutist. “But a think is either right or wrong, right?” <laughing> That’s what absolutism is, actually. And you know my answer. “Sometimes?” Right.

Another example – the environment: “So how come you got a smaller car?” Because want to participate as little as possible in the use of fossil fuels – for the environment, and because I don’t want to contribute to war, which it always does. “So why not stop using a car altogether?” I need it for transportation. I live where good mass transit doesn’t exist. “But isn’t it kind of hypocritical to use any at all?” Perhaps. I try to use no more than I need. “But it’s either right or wrong, right?” I don’t think it’s an absolute. I think it’s wrong to waste. I think it’s ultimately wrong to use any at all, of course, but that doesn’t make it unnecessary. I do a lot of wrong things that are necessary. “I think if you believe something, you should take it all the way.” But I live in the world, not in an ideology. “That’s why I don’t believe in anything. Because you can’t live in the world and take anything all the way.”

Those are, unfortunately, the words of every totalitarian system – ‘take it all the way’. Every regime that puts the ‘unrighteous’ and ‘unbelievers’ to death, and deprives them of liberties, and still does in more than half the world (Turkey, China, etc). It’s people who traded “unbelief” for absolute faith – for a crusade. But you see how the atheist, the non-religious person, whatever, is just as absolutist as any fundamentalist anywhere? Neither party can acknowledge that we live in a world where perhaps the only possibilities are degrees of unacceptable behavior, but that doesn’t excuse us from trying to live ethically and morally. In other words, both the non-ideologue and the rabid ideologue want to win – they do not accept a world in which their ideas may be correct but they can’t always have them, can’t always have a choice between good/bad, true/untrue, right/wrong. Sometimes it’s a choice between differing things that contain both good and bad, truth and untruth. The absolutist can never accept this.

One might argue that fundamentalism is like that (which is why I think most of the techno geeks, gamers, corporate lackeys, etc. that I meet are fundamentalists, though they are not religious) – but that Protestantism as a whole deserves a better shake. One could argue that, but I don’t think the argument holds. The fundamentalism is endemic to the system precisely because Protestantism makes the individual’s autonomy the starting point. Once you’ve done that, gravitating toward absolutizing ideology is a natural outcome of absolutizing individual cognition. You get one, necessarily, because you started with the other. In effect, all such thinking is a continuum moving from all-consuming personalism to all-consuming ideology. The confusion between the one and the many, the person and the world, my mind and right and wrong, my perception and normality, subject and object, began with the initial premise. The neurosis, the anti-social psychosis, begins with a failure to distinguish between my mind and reality. There’s no recourse, no point of reference.  You are trapped in the endless twists and turns of your own cognition.

The solution? Well, I’ll tell you mine. First, of course, I don’t participate in religion that has that as its first epistemological rule – whether inherently, or whether it’s someone’s hodgepodge they’ve made out of Orthodoxy. And yes, that happens.  You get people who aren’t satisfied with the Faith without walls, but want to nail it down and turn it into a subjective belief system with the illusion of objectivity, so it becomes a sword. They can’t bear the ideas our fathers teach us, “keep your mind in hell and despair not”, say “all shall be saved and I alone shall be condemned”, and “I don’t know who the sheep are, but I am one of the goats”. They need a clear, absolute set of categories – clear compartments for what’s what – and rather than accepting the fathers’ prescription – they set about doing the opposite: “I’m right” is the starting point – or at least “I see clearly” – or at a minimum “I’m starting with no baggage or false epistemology – I’ll add you, but not start over – I don’t have to redo all the thinking about even how to think – I’m a grown up – I know how the world works – I already know God” – or whatever.  To escape the holodeck, I dump all of that and run after the fathers, though by “run” I mean that occasionally I take a mere stab at half-assed following them, and usually it’s hypocrisy, though for entirely different reasons that any of the above people would recognize. Even our sins are obscure to the heterodox.

The other thing I do is I confess. I confess with my priest. I also confess here. I confess more than my sins – I confess my mind – God preserve it. And in doing so, I think God permits me to hold on to a little sanity, to have a little peace, to retain a little objectivity. The objectivity I find in the fathers is not the objectivity of being sure I’m right in my thinking –  no – they warn repeatedly against that. As Christ did, “beware thinking you stand, so you don’t fall”. They warn against prelest, a sin that’s actually sold on cassettes over the airwaves, and not just in the Protestant religious sector, but also in the Protestantized realms of politics, social issues, etc. We all want so much to be right. No, the objectivity the fathers offer is in recognizing ones own sins, and remembering them. The freedom from illusion is in not thinking that I stand, but knowing that I am fallen. The fathers speak of “removing from the mind all false images” that pretend to be God, all images of the self as righteous, all images that sustain the delusion that righteousness and insight dwell in me.

This is why we pray with ikons, so that we do not fall into idolatry – the most grievous form of which is substituting my own mind for God, and my self-love for my real self-image. “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” Why? Because there is objectivity. There the mind is free of sickness and death. Hell is love. Hell is God’s grace attempting to save the mind bent against it. Hell is the salvific and uncreated energies of God against the rebellious delusions of the autonomous soul. Hell is the antidote to my Protestantism, my first premise that tells me that I see, that I know, that I am right in my basic evaluation of the first things of the world into which I have awakened. Hell is, contrary to the heterodox doctrines to the contrary, the creation of a God who only creates for salvation. All acts of creation are acts of redemption. Anything else is heresy. Don’t be deceived. It is not a just, angry blood deity that we seek to appease, but a relentless, all-consuming fire of love in the three persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So, in a way, this entire blog is my manifesto as someone who is trying to be saved but is caught in a Protestant culture that makes it impossible. As the scriptures say, “confess your sins to one another,” it is a form of the antidote. “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” I am confessing everything, because I don’t own that there is righteousness in any of it. I am exposing my soul to the world because, by doing so, I cannot be held in the prison of autonomy – which is absolutism. Instead, I am freed to be naked before God, because I am naked in my own mind. I break this rule, which is why I’m still here, breaking out of the breaking of it, again and again. Maranatha. Quickly.

This is one of the reasons the blog is anonymous. People influenced by Protestantism often think that by revealing your identity, you’re revealing everything. Not so. By making that the point, you’re retreating into autonomy even more, you’re signing the ideas so to speak – you’re associating them with who you are. No, the goal is to distinguish between what you think and who you are. The most naked person is often the one in the mask of anonymity. The person clothed with the name, the brand placed on one’s ideas, one’s salvation, must struggle to be loose of the interior walls of autonomous perception. To strip down to anonymity (did you know that all our monks divest themselves of their family names, and receive a new Christian name?) – to strip down is to open the walls of the soul to the world, to the possibility of hearing, to the possibility of seeing. And by confessing, again and again, one’s failure, one’s unworthiness, it may be that God will grant a little light. He is the freer of prisons, along with all the Saints, by whose prayers and yours save me.

PS. I’m not talking about ‘accountability’. That’s the lingo of control. Accountability  is there. It’s just not something I need to show an audience. But that said, there are a lot of people who are “accountable”, and the emissions of their minds, mouths, and pens are often abominable, and they are even rewarded for it. One wishes they would seek nakedness as much as accountability, neither one substituting for the other – because, obviously, they have heard their own words and thought it wise to believe them and spread them to others, but precisely because of their accountability, they are also somewhat immunized from correction by the rest of us, to whom they are not actually directly accountable. Accountability without nakedness lends a kind of artificial “authority” to ideas that are sometimes the tortured effect of an inescapable religious holodeck in the mind. Lord have mercy.

Shut your pie hole and help Haiti!

As I listen to people calling in to radio shows, I think, you know, the level of duplicity among right-wing (fascist), Republican (corporate), evangelical (made-up religion), “christians” whenever there’s brutality or disaster elsewhere in the world, is obscene. If it was England, there wouldn’t be a debate. When it’s black people with dreadlocks, we ask all these questions about “whether it’s our responsibility”. One gets a little tired of inbred, toothless, backwoods-drawl “believers” and their nouveau riche suburban counterparts expressing their pride and anger about doing the very thing Christ asked of us – help those who are poor or in distress: “If you see your brother in need and withhold the world’s goods from him, how does the love of God abide in you?”

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Image by Nite_Owl via Flickr

These folks aren’t Christians – the Christian is the pagan, atheist, Buddhist, Muslim, or whatever that pulls someone from the rubble, bandages his wounds, carries him to the hospital, and puts down his own money to feed and care for him (by their prayers save me). The Christian is the Samaritan, the heretic, the alien, the foreigner, the false religious person, not the Judeo-Christian who sits at home bitching about the cost. I wouldn’t want to be standing in the congregation of those whose verbal ejaculations are a mockery of the gospels, because one day the floor is going to fall in, the grave open up, and the Devil take them all.

If you were singing songs of triumph when we bombed villages in Serbia and shot children in Fallujah, but saying “Yeah, it’s not our job to save the Tutsis from massacre by the Hutu in Rwanda – that’s another part of the world, not our business” – then besides being a hypocrite to reason, and an obvious liar therefore, you’ve hardly got a claim to being Christian. You may be Republican. You may be “conservative”. You may “believe in the Bible”. You may “have a personal savior”. But whoever it is, it’s not the historic Christ of the gospels. It’s not Jesus Christ. It’s a figment of your imagination. A fictious person to whom you’ve merely attributed your own attributes, carving out an idol of God in your own image, rather than leaving behind the world you love, as did the Holy Apostles, and following Christ. Christ is helping those in Haiti. You’re just bitching that other people are casting out demons and healing the sick in his name. You fundamentally don’t get it, and your fundamentalism has clouded your judgment.

Almost every religious person I know has let his politics pollute his faith. Among some of my people, it has been the obscenity of rhetorically beating up Muslims (funny, they weren’t bold enough to talk smack before 9/11 – what, did their faith change with the times? – is it “post-9/11 religion”?). They’ve become tools of Dick Cheney’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s bandwagon. They’re not autonomous, which is the kingdom of which Christ spoke, “my power is not of this world”, but appendages of the political and social machine. It’s not everyone, of course. But religion sets up camp in faith all the time, busily appointing itself like storefront preachers, to the “ministry” of translating the premises of the world into the lingo of religious belief. You want to know if I’m guilty of it too? I don’t know, but my faith teaches me to say that I am, whenever anyone accuses me of a failing, and to accuse myself so that the enemy can own nothing in me. So whether I can think of a specific instance or not, I’m guilty. I’ve been religious. And damn every stitch of it, when I have been. Let’s repent together!

In Haiti, thousands are dead, families left fatherless, widows wailing in the streets, orphans looking for their parents, people have lost their homes and have nothing. Remember, you are charged with the words of our father St. James, Patriarch of Jerusalem, Brother of God, “Pure and undefiled religion is this, helping orphans and widows in their affliction, and keeping oneself unstained by the world.” Don’t mouth off about “yeah, but is it really our responsibility?” like you’ve been smoking too much conservative crack and it’s made you too high to hear the gospel – you’re putting shame and judgment on your head, and it’s just adding to the agony of the world. It’s not about you, and it’s not your job to turn everything into an ideology like you long ago did to your faith. It’s not all a belief system. The Samaritan has more faith than you or I, he will judge us in the last day, not vice versa. And if you think otherwise, you’ve been spoon fed too much triumphalist baby food that was just what your pride wanted to hear. Tell your pastor to go to hell and do something to help Haiti. Protest by withholding what you normally put in the offering plate, if he stands up there and tells you it’s not your concern. The Red Cross is the ‘church’ in that moment more than whatever cheesy architecture is wrapping those pews.

There’s plenty of stuff on the web about how to help, and what’s needed, so before anyone says I should light a candle not curse the dark (there’s a nice double entendre there), we just don’t need that extra voice on that side of the delivery truck. But I don’t see a lot of hands helping shove people off the rice sacks that have planted flags in them and are giving the finger to the desperate because they can’t find a “bible verse” to tell them they “have to” show compassion and mercy. So that’s my job. Get off the sacks you freaking false prophets, you cheats and stealers from the poor, you horders of the provisions God gave you to precisely to give away. I’m not “saying it with love” (timidly and in a pretty, Downy-soft, impressionistic manner). I’m just saying it.

Remember, these words, “You didn’t visit me in my distress. You didn’t give me food when I was hungry. You didn’t give me drink when I was dying of thirst. Depart from me, I never knew you.” What do you think is the penalty for stealing from the poor in the sight of God? “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours but theirs.” – St. John Chrysostom

For those interested in helping, I recommend Global Giving (they’re solid – we use them all the time – and you can give any amount using paypal, credit card, or online check) or text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 via your cell phone bill. 100% of your $10 donation passes thru to RedCross for Haiti relief. Your cell carrier keeps nothing.

Text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate. 100% of your $10 donation passes thru to @RedCross for Haiti relief. Your cell carrier keeps nothingText “Haiti” to 90999 to donate. 100% of your $10 donation passes thru to @RedCross for Haiti relief. Your cell carrier keeps nothing..

Worry Free Christian Living

I just got a great chuckle. An ad for a retirement home (that’s the nice phrase we use now), offers “worry-free Christian living”. Hilarious. How exactly does that work – dope? sedation? tying you to your bed? I mean, what kind of people actually believe in “worry-free Christian living”?

Moises y los 10 Mandamientos,Moses and the ten...
Image by oseillo via Flickr

For you evangelical-types, the books say those who have no worries are in the grave. Maybe it’s a funeral home, in disguise. “I’m still worried.” – “That’s all right, dear. We’ll help you achieve a better attitude.”

This is why it’s no good for me sitting in congregational settings, even if it weren’t forbidden. I laugh when people are the most serious about their euphemisms.

“Leadership” (control), “authority” (papism), “my ministry” (my hobby), “God told me…” (I was smoking crack), “man of god” (boy scout Ken doll), “woman of god” (barbie housewife), “prayer warrior” (self-righteous delusional), “prayer circle” (religious masturbation), “biblical” (distortion), “miracle” (magic), “power” (witchcraft), “spirit” (the force), “father” (Charlton Heston), “Christian nation” (fascist super-state), “personal relationship” (customized designer-faith), “we just come before you and just… just… just…” (I have no farking idea who I’m talking to or what I think), “offering” (tax-free donation), “Christian marriage” (awkward shotgun dysfunctional relationship with dubious sex), “God in the schools” (banning disturbing facts), “evolutionist, environmentalist, feminist, gay rights, lobby” (people who are going to burn in hell, if we can’t get the stake legalized), “spiritual warfare” (religious video game in the mind), “Christian music” (artistic drek full of meaningless mantras), “praise God” (what you’re supposed to do, because my time is limited), “bible study” (initiation and intervention), “witnessing” (trolling for vulnerable neurotics), “pastor” (self-appointed prophet), “choir” (people who sing better than you), “youth group” (babysitting squad), “frozen chosen” (people with brains), “stale, dead religion” (no electric guitars), “legalism” (inconvenient ethical rules), “faith” (gambling), “trust” (guesswork), “hope” (hope), “unconditional love” (positive attitude toward both short and long term prospects), “givers” (clients), “vestry” (customer service), “scholarship” (indoctrinated agreement), “research” (google and Strongs concordance)… one could go on indefinitely. Yes, I’ll probably publish the book. 🙂

Anyway, “worry free Christian living” (dropping off your old people at the pound).

And that does it for our religious euphemism roundup for today. Stay tuned if you like. I’m just enjoying myself, but you’re welcome to watch.

The Historicity of the Scriptures

I got a note yesterday from someone who is leaving religion, because they don’t any long believe in the “historicity” of the scriptures.

Bronze ceremonial standard of the Hittites; he...
Image via Wikipedia

I don’t know why people feel compelled to announce this sort of thing. I mean what, are we supposed to keep an empty chair down at the “club”? I don’t even know this person, not really. Maybe it’s to make a clean break. Maybe it’s because we’re all supposed to rush out with “don’t go”. It’s sort of like standing on a ledge, maybe. But invariably these sort of notes are arrogant. This one worried about wounding any “weaker brothers”. It made me sort of chuckle but also wince, like when a TV anchor says something stupid and doesn’t realize it.

The other thing about these sort of notes is that they might as well be multiple choice. They usually contain one of a handful of reasons that we’re all familiar with. I’d really rather get a form letter, like when someone unsubscribes from one of my  mailing lists. “We’re sorry to see you go (or uninstall). Is it a) you’re planning to reinstall, b) service didn’t meet your needs, or c) you found one you like better.” Actually, I shouldn’t joke, there are mega-“churches” who actually do that sort of thing. And you know, if you don’t take them seriously, they send their parking lot security goons out to your house to let the air out of your tires.

This one was “I just can’t believe anymore in the historicity of the scriptures.” Yep, that’s one of the usual five. It’s a real yawner though because, only an idiot casts a blanket aspersion against the historicity of the scriptures. What, you don’t believe there were Hittites? Heck, a lot of people didn’t, until we dug them up. I mean, which part? I had a friend who once said he wasn’t sure there ever was a person called Jesus. I pointed out that there’s better support for the existence of Jesus than for Homer. I mean the documentary evidence kept by his enemies is pretty darned good. No serious scholars say there wasn’t a Jesus. They doubt that he is God, but not that he exists in history. There are nut jobs like Madeleine Murry O’Hare, of course, but come on. She’s like the Shirley McClain of atheism. Not to offer an ad hominem, but she’s not exactly basing her thinking on science. It’s like taking financial advice from Joel Osteen.  My friend relented, of course, and then we could have a more honest discussion. You can’t even be honest about what’s bothering you unless you’re willing to stipulate to the obvious facts. After all, it’s hard to claim religious people live in a fantasy world when they’ve got logic, science, and archeology and you’ve got blithering belief in the absence of something.

So anyway, no great refutation here. I just don’t care. You want to go, “I’ll hold the trap door to hell open for you”, as a Protestant comedian once said. Why be impolite? Blunt, perhaps, but courteous is my approach. We all know someone who doesn’t believe in something, and goes off to grow their beard (all we Orthodox men should have beards if they grow on us), or live on granola, or tour Buddhist shrines, or whatever. Send me a postcard. But it’s not something that needs a lot of drama. “I mean it, I’m going…” Did you ever run away from home, when you were a kid? “Dinner is a 6:30.”

Look, you want to claim that there was no King David, even though there’s better evidence for that than for who built the pyramids, you go ahead. People “believe” or “don’t believe” all sorts of things. If we were Protestants, we might get all bent out of shape and have a prayer circle around you. But if you’ve been involved with genuine Orthodoxy, we’re not really built on a foundation of beliefs anyway. When people ask, “What do you believe,” the best response is that that’s a Protestant question, and we should really refuse to commoditize (commodify?) our Faith in that manner. Protestantism is the religion of mental beliefs, which is one reason everyone goes out and starts their own ‘talk show’, so to speak. You get gazillions of groups in storefronts, precisely because belief is central, belief is everything, belief is the basis for it all.

Orthodoxy is based on history, not belief. We’re not a knowledge-based religion, like Gnosticism and its modern equivalents in Protestantism – we’re historical. For us, the “I’m leaving” spammer got one thing right, it really is important that there was a David. Not that you believe there’s a David – that’s different. Only a neurotic confuses his own belief with whether something is actually there or not. It matters not whether you believe, or even whether you exist (I push you off a building, and your belief ceases to matter much – you’re gone, the world goes on). It matters whether something is real. And since we live in time, live in history, all real things are historical. That’s why we don’t share a theology with the Protestants or Roman Catholics. Time is a creature. Reality is a creature. They’re created. In that sense, we don’t say that God is “real”. We don’t believe in God’s “existence”. You can’t think like that and really be Orthodox.

In fact, Orthodoxy is the religion of unbelievers. Our Faith is really historical. But our doctrine is really antithetical – to everything else. Our theology is negative theology – the via negativa – we deny things – we disbelieve things. If you look at  how our doctrinal statements have been formulated and why, they’re mostly statements that we, like the “I’m leaving” spammer, “don’t believe” – a whole host of things – or that we are “not persuaded” and so don’t intend to convert to something else. It is because I am an unbeliever that I am Orthodox in a sea of neurotic religious speculation. Our councils came about, because it was necessary to rise up and deny things – namely things that religious people had come up with by doing “positive theology” – cooking their own meth, so to speak. All our various statements, which we don’t like making for their own sakes (“Hi, welcome to our church. Here’s our doctrinal statement. We have a great youth program!”), are statements of disbelief or of opposition to belief foisted upon us by others – they’re refutations of the insanity and nuttyness of religion. To quote Vladimir Lossky’s “Mystical Theology” (emphasis is mine):

Unlike gnosticism, in which knowledge for its own sake constitutes the aim of the gnostic, Christian theology is always in the last resort a means: a unity of knowledge subserving an end which transcends all knowledge. This ultimate end is union with God or deification, the theosis of the Greek Fathers… All the development of the dogmatic battles which the Church has waged down the centuries appears to us, if we regard it from the purely spiritual standpoint, as dominated by the constant preoccupation which the Church has had to safeguard, at each moment of her history, for all Christians, the possibility of attaining to the fullness of the mystical union. So the Church struggled against the gnostics in defence of this same idea of deification as the universal end: ‘God became man that men might become gods’. She affirmed, against the Arians, the dogma of the consubstantial Trinity; for it is the Word, the Logos, who opens to us the way to union with the Godhead; and if the incarnate Word has not the same substance with the Father, if He be not truly God, our deification is impossible. The Church condemned the Nestorians that she might overthrow the middle wall of partition, whereby, in the person of the Christ himself, they would have separated God from man. She rose up against the Apollinarians and Monophysites to show that, since the fullness of true human nature has been assumed by the Word, it is our whole humanity that must enter into union with God. She warred with the Monothelites because, apart from the union of the two wills, divine and human, there could be no attaining to deification—’God created man by his will alone, but He cannot save him without the co-operation of the human will.’ The Church emerged triumphant from the iconoclastic controversy, affirming the possibility of the expression through a material medium of the divine realities—symbol and pledge of our sanctification. The main preoccupation, the issue at stake, in the questions which successively arise respecting the Holy Spirit, grace and the Church herself this last the dogmatic question of our own time—is always the possibility the manner or the means of our union with God. All the history of Christian dogma unfolds itself about this mystical centre, guarded by different weapons against its many and diverse assailants in the course of successive ages.

In short, we are an army of unbelievers who wish to be united to God, and defend ourselves against the seduction by which religion would deprive us of it. We are very practical about it. Try to force your religion on us, and separate us from God by means of it, and we declare an anathema against you, and all our people cross their arms, turn their backs, and leave your “belief system” to die in the ashheap of history. We are the people of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and of the seed of David, Jesus Christ. So yeah, if you become ahistorical like the Protestants and create a religion based on a belief system, or you become anti-historical like the “I’m leaving” spammer, and start denying the holocaust or the existence of Assyria (same thing, in principle), or whatever, then you’re right, you’re leaving. You’ve left. Good luck. But let’s not be confused about it – it really doesn’t matter what you “believe” or “don’t believe” in and of itself. What matters is what happened. History doesn’t need our belief to make it so. Once you accept that, you might as well believe you’re Elvis, because the distinction between belief and tangible, historical, scientific reality – the rock under our feet – well, that’s just gone off into lulu land.

Anyway, I still like the form letter idea. Maybe one of the atheist groups should create an online form, and you can fill in (by blind copy) the e-mail addresses of your religious group, and check off the appropriate boxes, before hitting send. I’ve got a belief system or two in my past I wouldn’t mind sending a test form to. 🙂 But come on, because of history? Next you’ll be denying Masada, and that’s just wrong!

Review of Avatar

It’s the connections of things. That’s what it is about Avatar, the James Cameron film. And I don’t mean in a Gaia, goddess, neo-gnostic, pagan kind of way. But it’s something else. The way they interacted with animals – the metaphor of actually plugging in – and what it suggests about how animals are. The way they plugged into the earth and with each other to the trees, not because they’re trees, but because it’s creation – it’s the same as with the animals. It situated them in creation. I really don’t respond other than with delight to the trees being connected as a network. All creation derives its meaning through man. But the fact that they were connected to the network too, that’s the story. The real story of us. That we are situated in creation by the economy of Christ – by God becoming a man, flesh of the womb of the Virgin, Adam’s flesh and Eve’s. Avatar gets it – the network is a network of trees sharing human memories – human souls, as well as their own. It isn’t connectedness that matters, but interconnectedness, of all things.

Birth of an AVATAR on Vimeo by Peter Ammentorp...
Image by marcotruiz via Flickr

This has always been huge for me, but because it’s huge for mankind. When I wrote my first critique of environmentalism, this is what I was aiming at. When I write about the Economy of Christ and a lot of people don’t understand me outside our Faith, and some within don’t, this is what I mean too. The economy is all that is not God – all that is created – there’s nothing that is not God that is not created, including time – including history. And all that is created – all things that are not God – are created with one purpose, the salvation of man. The deification of man. The entire creation is God’s salvific act. The Economy is God’s action toward creation, and is the creation itself. And it culminates in God becoming part of creation, entering creation, entering time and history, taking flesh of our flesh – “plugging in” – but much more than that, by becoming us – the only act that would save. And by becoming us, he took in his body all minerals, plants, all elements, all history, all categories in which all creation participates. By becoming one of us, he summed up all creation, and brought it all together in one. His salvation is salvation of the animals, and of the plants, and of rock and stone, and of all things. Nothing is abandoned, nothing lost, nothing without participation in the glory. All things will be deified. All that is created or ever has been will become God. And by participation in him, by our own deification, we participate in that recapitulation of his.

People often don’t realize what this means. Simply saying that death will end, so we will not eat animals in the kingdom, is greeted with surprise. But saying that all things are being deified – everything – anything conceivable – anything that ever was or will be – that can shock and scare people. But it is our Faith. It is the meaning of existence, the very definition of creation. Creation *is* the Economy of Christ. Creator becoming creation *is* the gospel. And of course, if you ask the priests or the scholars, the decent ones who are not arrogant asses pursuing their own exaltation by trying to pick apart the holiness of this, they will all agree, of course. They will tell the people who don’t know, yes that’s right, of course, didn’t you know that is our faith?

But then to point out that this means that when we look at animals, we see, not in the same depth as we see in man, but still see Christ. We see them being deified. We see that they are not fodder, not machines. And then again, when we look at other living things, all living things, plants, trees, algae, we see deification, we see that which will become God. And then even, finally, in perhaps a wider radius, that which is inanimate matter, though we don’t really know as much about that as our scientific dogma pretends when it talks to us – I prefer to listen to the high level scientists talking to each other – they’re less dogmatic and arrogant about “the facts” that always turn out to be just the bare intelligence of public school science dogmatics and popularizers of Darwinism.

That which is rock and stone and mountain is not, as we may think, “dead” if by “dead” we mean it will be lost, has no value, or can be disregarded as profane or not sacred. All the earth, and all that is beyond it is sacred. The skies, the sun and moon, the mountain, the trees, the earth, and all that lives on it, and we – we are connected to it through Christ our saviour, the saviour of all creation, the deliverer of animals and trees from death, the redeemer of mountains and stars and stones and algae and insects and all that is, not merely all that lives. That, this kind of talk, at least in US circles, scares people of presumably “christian” faith. But theirs is not a “christian” faith, if they deny this.

To deny it is to deny that God became man. It is to say “not really”, “not in fulness”, “not entirely”. It is to deny as surely as the heretics and gnostics of old that Christ is one person with two natures. It is to “protect” Christ by insulating him from creation, and so severing our line to creation too, our ability to plug in, it is to separate and alienate us from creation so that we abuse it and do not consider it in our salvation, it is to set us against it and embrace death, not salvation from death, as the natural norm. It is to make distinction the basis of opposition. It is the heresy of all heresies. It is the language of hell. Francis Schaeffer’s book Pollution and the Death of Man is fantastic on this.

That’s why I put together my earlier essay on the topic – the pagan environmentalists are simply trying to defend the sanctity of creation by suggesting that “god” made it “out of” himself (or herself) – that it is deified in that way. But that’s not the only avenue to take. It’s damned close. We insist that God’s creation is through his energies (energia), which are uncreate, and are God. Not God’s essence but, still God. In that sense, yeah, God could be said to have created the cosmos out of himself, if you can also allow that he created it out of nothing, meaning that there was no pre-existing material that co-existed alongside God – because then, he’s not God at all, which is why the gnostics have to cook up a creative “demiurge” alongside him – where did the demiurge come from? What the pagans are not prepared to accept, partly from the influence of Darwinism corrupting their paganism, and making it pseudo-paganism, is Death, and how it came upon the world. They consider Death *part* of the natural order, not an alien infection upon it. And that’s their undoing. But the sanctity of creation *is* protected in the deification of all creation, as we insist. Paganism is a left turn into theoretical invention to accomplish something, unsuccessfully, which is already accomplished from the outset by the Creator. It’s just that a lot of people passing themselves off as “christian” and representing “christianity” aren’t really offering a Christian understanding of the Economy at all. What the pagans are really running up against is gnostics in “christian” media.

All of creation is sacred. We are saved through water, and through wine, and through bread, and through oil, through fishes and loaves, and through all things that participate in Christ. All things around us, everything that is, is a vehicle of our salvation and co-participant, and to be one with us, and one with God, so that all are one. This is the only Christian faith. Anything that detracts from it is a different “christ” – one who is either not God or not man, not creator or not creation, and then we are all lost, and all is hopeless and despair. It is Christ who joined creation and Creator, deifying the one by the other, in his one person by the two natures. To be of Christ at all is to participate in this joining – this interconnectedness.

Or else they make him creation but not God, and so then we are just men among men trying to be wise, and nothing has the power to connect us to all things or connect us and all things to God. And then creation is futile, because that which was created is not to be redeemed, and creation and redemption are irrevocably torn apart, and the Enemy is right that death is all that will be forever. And no faith is then true. All is nonsense, even disbelief becomes madness, and we are lost to chaos with no ground for our minds, and no ground for our bodies, and no ground for anything.

When I watch the blue movie, as I call it, I see it showing me how we are connected, but not insisting that I fall down and worship a god who did not become man, which cannot make all things one, or worship a god who is just a man, and can therefore give nothing meaning. True, it’s full of religious references, but not offensively. They’ve asked more than preached. And for this, I can live in the film.

And do you know what it means to someone who is alien even from aliens to be connected to all things? “No longer strangers. No longer aliens. Now, we are citizens with the Saints in the Kingdom of God.” For someone who has searched for meaning, for meaning all over, to find in Christ’s Incarnation that all things have been joined, united, put together? And for someone who suffers at the suffering of the world, the cosmos, the “groaning and travail” that is the slaughter, disease, warfare? It is a profound deliverance. Not that Avatar has given me that meaning – this is our Faith and always has been – but that I feel an immense and abiding joy when it is articulated visually.

Anyway, if you’ve seen it, see it again. And again. There’s so much detail, if you look. And do see it on the big screen. You have to be immersed in it, not spectating from outside when, at the end, they are all plugged in to the earth, to the roots of trees, and are seeking a transformation.

Oh, and yeah, if you were expecting the standard review with commentary on special effects, you can get that anywhere, so no.

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Fulfill Our Intention

Magnify, O my soul, her who is more honorable and more glorious than the armies on high. It would be easier for us to keep silence, out of fear, for it is without danger, and it is difficult O Virgin to weave complex hymns harmoniously with love. But O Mother, grant us strength to fulfill our intention. – Apodosis of Nativity, Ode IX.

Originally posted 1/9/2008

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Our Mother

Theotokos - God Bearer - Mother of GodRejoice O Jerusalem. Keep the feast all ye who love Sion. Today, the ancient bonds of Adam’s condemnation hath been loosed. Paradise hath been opened unto us. The serpent hath been destroyed. He who deceived our first Mother of old, hath now seen a Woman become the Mother of the Creator. O the depths of the richness and the wisdom and understanding of God! For, the vessel of sin which brought death upon all flesh, hath become the beginning of salvation for the whole world through the Theotokos. For the all-perfect God hath been born of Her as a babe, and sealeth her Virginity by His birth . . .” – the Glory be, Holy Nativity, Tone 4 (from the All-Night Vigil)

Originally posted 1/9/2009

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9th Ode of the 2nd Canon of Christ's Nativity

Magnify, O my soul, her who is more honorable and more exalted in glory than the heavenly hosts.
I behold a strange and wonderful mystery: the cave a heaven, the Virgin a cherubic throne, and the manger a noble place in which hath lain Christ the uncontained God. Let us, therefore, praise and magnify Him.

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Magnify, O my soul, the God born in flesh from the Virgin.
When the Magi saw a new and strange star appearing suddenly, moving in a wonderful way, and transcending the stars of heaven in brightness, they were guided by it to Christ, the King born on earth in Bethlehem, for our salvation.

Magnify, O my soul, the King born in a cave.
The Magi said, Where is the Child King, the newborn, Whose star hath appeared? For we have verily come to worship Him. And Herod, the contender against God, trembled, and began to roar in folly to kill Christ.

Magnify, O my soul, the God worshipped by the Magi.
Herod ascertained from the Magi about the time of the star by whose guidance they were led to Bethlehem to worship with presents Christ Who guided them, and so they returned to their country, disregarding Herod, the evil murderer of babes, mocking him.

Today the Virgin giveth birth to the Lord inside the cave.
Verily it is easier for us to endure silence since there is no dread danger therefrom for us. But because of our strong desire, O Virgin, and Mother of sameness, to indite well-balanced songs of praise, this becometh indeed onerous to us. Wherefore, grant us power to equal our natural inclination.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: Magnify, O my soul, the might of the indivisible and three-personed Godhead.
O pure one, Mother of the Word that appeareth newly from thee, O closed door, verily, as we behold the dark shadowy symbols pass away, we glorify the light of the truth and bless thy womb as is meet.

Both now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen. Glorify, O my soul, her who hath delivered us from the curse.
The Christ-pleasing people, O Virgin, having deserved to be granted its desire by the coming of God, doth seek now with tears thy help to worship the glory of His enlivening appearance wherein is the renewal of birth; for it is thou who dost distribute grace, O pure one.

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The Gospel Summarized in the Anaphora

With these blessed powers, O Master and Lover of Mankind, we sinners also cry out and say: “Holy are You, truly all-holy!” There is no limit to the majesty of your holiness. You are revered in all your works, for in righteousness and true judgment You have ordered all things for us. When You created man and had fashioned him from the dust of the earth and had honored him as your own image, O God, You set him in the midst of a bountiful paradise, promising him life eternal and the enjoyment of everlasting good things by keeping your commandments.

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But when he disobeyed You, the true God Who had created him, and was led astray by the deceit of the serpent, he was made subject to death through his own transgressions. In your righteous judgment, O God, You exiled him from paradise into this world and returned him to the earth from which he had been taken. But You provided for him the salvation of rebirth which is in your Christ Himself.

For You did not turn Yourself away forever from your creation whom You had made, O Good One, nor did You forget the work of your hands, but You visited him in different ways. Through the tender compassion of your mercy, You sent forth prophets. You performed great works by the Saints who in every generation were well-pleasing to You. You spoke to us through the mouths of your servants the Prophets who foretold to us the salvation which was to come. You gave us the Law to aid us. You appointed angels to guard us. And when the fullness of time had come, You spoke to us through your Son Himself, through whom You had created time.

Being the Brightness of your Glory and the Stamp of your Person, and upholding all things by the power of his Word, your Son did not think of equality with You, Who alone are God and Father, as something to be grasped. And so, although He was God before time began, He appeared on earth and dwelt among us. He was incarnate of a holy virgin and emptied Himself, taking on the form of a servant and being conformed to the body of our lowliness so that He might conform us to the image of his glory. Since sin entered the world through a man and death through sin, so your Only-begotten Son, Who is in your bosom, our God and Father, was well- pleased to be born of a woman, the holy Birth-giver of God and ever- virgin Mary. He was born under the Law, so that He might condemn sin in his own flesh, so that those who died in Adam might be made alive in Him, your Christ.

He lived in this world and gave us commandments for salvation. He released us from the delusions of idolatry and brought us to the knowledge of You, true God and Father. He procured us for Himself as a chosen people, a royal priesthood and a holy nation. Having purified us with water, He sanctified us with the Holy Spirit. He gave Himself as a ransom to death by which we were held captive, having been sold into slavery by sin. He descended into the realm of death through the Cross, that He might fill all things with Himself. He loosed the sorrow of death and rose again from the dead on the third day, for it was not possible that the Author of Life should be conquered by corruption. In this way He made a way to the resurrection of the dead for all flesh. Thus, He became the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep, the first-born of the dead, that He might be first in all ways among all things. Ascending into heaven, He sat at the right hand of your Majesty on High, and He shall come again to reward each person according to his deeds.

— Liturgy of St. Basil, the anaphora

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