Opinions – Page 3 – orthopraxy.com

Anonymity & Christian Tradition

I love the anonymity the web provides. And sometimes I confess a perverse sort of pleasure in how some of the most abusive and presumptuous critics are discomfitted by it and scream for more controls, more exposure, less privacy, etc. All in the name of an honesty and accountability they don’t actually model except in quickly offering up their ‘papers’ to anyone who asks – which is more a lazyness and surrender of soul than anything truly decent and honest.

In the religious realm, especially: One has to dismiss the rantings of people who never met an ad hominem they didn’t like – people who’ve never heard of an ad hominem in the first place. People who care not about truth but credentials. People who don’t like dissent, don’t like questions or speculation they can’t attribute to an authority figure, people who want to carry books with the rules spelled out and the authors’ names next to the rules. It’s part of the fundamentalist impulse.

Truly, there are only two reasons that the identity of the author matters:

One reason is so you can accept or dismiss the ideas based on the identity. It’s dishonest, it’s a logical fallacy, and it’s a form of worshipping heroes on the one hand (idolatry) and dismissing those we don’t like or strangers on the other (pride and inhospitality). It is to follow persons, not the truth. The assumption is that the ‘right’ people are usually correct, and the ‘wrong’ people usually aren’t. But it has always been the case that good people with good credentials have offered up swill in place of truth – and our very tradition depends upon the words and deeds of the ‘wrong’ people. Uneducated people, tax collectors, Samaritans, women, and Gentiles. Speaking of the “right” people:

“If I, Paul, or an Angel, or anyone comes to you claiming to be Christ, and preaches any other gospel than the one you have received…”

The other reason is so that those who express ideas we don’t like can be punished for them. I’ve been called a “coward” by people who were angry with my ideas. Such claims imply that there’s actually something to be afraid of, and that the person making the claim actually has it in mind. In other words, he’s validating the reason he wants the information – to punish the offender. Why not just come out and say, “If I find out who you are, I’ll do x to you.” The critic relies on dishonesty, chiding the anonymous writer for being afraid, but withholding acknowledgement on what presumably fearful thing he has in mind.

“The owner of the vineyard sent servants to the keepers of the vineyard, to speak to them, but they did not listen and killed them instead.”

I’ve seen priests act like this. I’ve seen people talk of virtue and honesty and dignity and then act like this. Truly it is said, “there will come a time when your own brethren will deliver you up, and think they do a service to God.”

On the one hand, the zealots will persecute others in the name of Christ, always seeking justification in the fact that it’s “those people” – it’s not the correct people – it’s not us. To any such “correct” people reading this, I am with all the incorrect people. I am with the wrong people who are dangerous and a threat to the world you want to create. I am with the people who are making it worse. Do to me what you would do to them. But don’t expect me to hand my head to you on a platter.

On the other hand, the effeminate weaklings who follow names and approved leaders are just as bad. Those who cannot listen to anything without checking the speaker’s credentials – “he’s part of the such and such school” – “he’s one of so and so’s disciples” – “he used to be one of those people”. For these wishy washy relativists, an idea is not actually true in itself – truth is a subjective thing that depends on who says it. They have committed the fundamental theological and anthropological heresy and fallacy of conflating subject and object, person with operation, who I am with what I do. In the tortured confusion of their own minds, they cannot but be led about by whoever is holding up the golden calf as easily as whoever is wearing the mitre.

Personally, I like to point out to those who lecture the anonymous about responsibility and integrity (usually the mouthiest are US citizens – always lecturing the world on how they should live), that their own political, social, and cultural traditions are rife with elegant anonymity – indeed depend on it entirely. From Publius to Samuel Clemens. Of course it’s not necessary to cite religious examples, as these are more interested in asserting their own culture than in following Christ. Christ for them is the Christ of culture. He is not the Christ who could have said:

“Tell no one who I am.”

To those who talk about where they stand religiously, and cite nebulous principles that they interpret against the moral status of the anonymous, I like to mention the many anonymous saints who left anonymous works, did anonymous deeds, and wrote ikons anonymously, and toiled and gave and lived anonymously. If they look closely, they will find some of them in their scriptures. Indeed, the books of scripture are quite often written anonymously. In fact, the entire monastic tradition is like this – the monks give up their family names when they receive orders. It is so obvious that, failing to take stock of the fundamental liberty within their own tradition, the advocates of exposure want dossiers and ID checks and tracking systems and all the apparatus of the worship of the modern state. They have sold their birthright for the pottage of contemporary personalism and tacit depersonalization. For them, persons and ideas have become inseparable. They would make good officers of the state.

“Welcome strangers, for some have entertained angels unawares.”

In any case, originally this site was anonymous by default, because I never saw a reason to add my name. When I found people making such a big deal about it, and listened to them, and looked at my suffering brethren and how others are wrongfully persecuted or simply dismissed, I decided out of solidarity to refuse to add my name. And when I took stock of how the clamour for putting not ideas in the dock but personalities is a clamour for crucifixion, a clamour for illicit trial, I found that I would not add my voice to those who cried out:

“Tell us plainly who you are. Who do you say that you are?”

Instead, I decided to let them squirm, and do with their ignorance what they like, since they do so very little good with what they know.

“Then neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”

If you don’t like my ideas, don’t read them. But you don’t own them, visitor. Nor do you own me. Nor anyone else. Nor is your inconvenience at doing something fundamentally illogical at best (ad hominem) if not illicit, a claim on my activity. And if you are merely curious, then the answer to your question is that I have decided not to comment upon it. I don’t answer the merely curious.

For those of you out there who are considering writing anonymously, I encourage you to be accountable to your Confessor. Tell him about the place you write. Go to confession. Live in such a way that your life can change and is subject to ideas other than your own. And then be free. Perhaps your pride will want to put your name on everything, and anonymity will help you overcome it. Whatever you decide, some of the others of us are holding the line, and hope that makes it easier for you.

Orthodox Fast at Thanksgiving

At Thanksgiving, we’re always greeted with rationalizations, prevarication, and even abuses of Scripture to justify breaking the Fast, and right in the middle of the Fast, too, which makes about as much sense as having a dance contest in the middle of a funeral.

Last year, I spoke to this – it’s just not an Orthodox thing to do. Get permission from some lax Bishop all you want – it’s not right, and we all know it, or should.

This year, I’d like to address the question underlying it all – a question that rarely but occasionally gets articulated in any actual way: “Can I be deified without fasting?” It’s rare that we’re as candid as that, especially when our intent is to violate the fast with a feast, and dress it up in cultural capitulation, blood and soil, patriotism and imperialism, or slavery to Protestant ‘bible’ hermeneutics. It is a Protestant and American holiday after all. In other countries, the Orthodox diaspora have their own national festivals to ignore. But it does get asked, on occasion, much to the chagrin of those who now have to dredge up references to “it’s better to love…” or “fasting without compassion is…”. Yeah, we know all that. And the implication of all of those statements is that it’s not one or the other, but both. The moment you claim it’s one or the other, you’re reading and talking like a Protestant, not an Orthodox. We dont’ do “either/or” – we do “both/and”. Let’s answer the question:

question: “Can I be deified without fasting?”
answer: Why would you be?

I mean, after all, it’s not like you’re being burned at the stake right now, and there’s no time to fast. It’s not like you’re starving to death and the great question is whether to eat a fish or not. You live in a Willy Wonka land of ubiquitous food. The lion’s share of all commercial entities surrounding you have some connection with processing, selling, delivering, or preparing food. A certain percentage of your neighbors are actually off giving food away. Nothing gets so much attention to the local panhandlers as a cardboard sign, “will work for food”. The nation is a temple to food. Gorging is the national pasttime. Even at other passtimes, they’re just not the same without food – sports and hotdogs, movies and popcorn, cubicles and office candy. For the religious, the Sunday buffet. For the non-religious, the Sunday brunch. If the population of the US were livestock, it would all make sense – the engine of the economy is largely driven by cramming as much feed into each individual as humanly possible. Yuppy fashion revolves around tasting the latest – steel cut, hand-rolled, fire-roasted, whatever – bad food dressed in the language of delicate exclusivity. More food is consumed in the US than in the rest of the world combined. There are whole groups of people who live off the food that’s thrown away, the piles of extra crackers, baskets of bread, garnishes and day-old donuts. And you ask, “Can I be saved without fasting?” Why would you be. You’d be just like everyone else. You’d be just going along on the great cultural mud-slide of consumption. Your concern is less salvation than salivation. Deification would be an afterthought – something to play at, philosophically, after your belly were full.

So, I think the clear answer is “No. You can’t be deified without fasting.” And even if someone could, that someone would not be you. In fact, in the context of cultural, there’s nothing so characteristically Orthodox as keeping Fast. We’ve (in many quarters) shaved our men’s faces, bared our women’s luxuriant hair, coated ourselves with makeup and colognes, installed benches from the Protestant meeting halls, hooked up amplifiers to our mediaeval organs, and whitewashed the walls where once the saints surrounded us. We’ve added security guards, parking attendants, paid choirs and singles groups. The number of our committees exceeds the number of attendees at vigils, most of which we’ve transformed into morning Easter and Christmas services, replete with the fashion parades and “come to our church” flyers that we’ve seen the local religionists doing all these years. And for all of that ridiculous capitulation, all of that religious prostitution, all of that whoring after the gods of of the dominant culture, there is one thing left that’s a dividing line between those who believe and those who don’t. Keeping the Fast.

It’s not for nothing that St. Seraphim said, “He who does not fast does not really believe in God, whatever else he may pretend.”

Can I be deified without fasting? There is no deification without the transformation of the body that fasting obtains.

For those with Protestant and Roman Catholic backgrounds, or who were educated in the religious environment in the US culture in general, it seems obvious that salvation is an internal thing, is salvation of the mind, or of the soul. At best, the body, in this attittude, is unimportant.

But this is heresy to the Orthodox. We *are* our bodies. Our bodies *are* us. And there is no salvation apart from deification of the body. And no deification, therefore, apart from the ascetic undertaking of the body. All of the fathers speak of all ordinary Orthodox people transforming the body through ascetic feats. To deny this, or sweep it under the rug, is to deny Orthodoxy itself and, if you’re doing that, why are you concerned about deification in the first place. Have your idols, and ask no further questions. But to even speak of deification, which is what all Orthodox tongues mean by “salvation”, we are talking of what our fathers have experienced, what the Saints have experienced, what Christ himself underwent for our sake, and what the Church has continually said we must undergo with him – the very crucifixion of our bodies, of which fasting is a preparation, a type, and a means.

And lest we wrap our idols with the purple of “thanksgiving”, there is no thanksgiving without mourning, no feasting without fasting, and no proper execution of either apart from the life of Christ, the life of the Church, her calendar, her history, and her movement. All such thanksgiving is a false thanksgiving, and is not honored by God. Sure, the heterodox may in ignorance of the truth achieve salvation before I do, and their many prayers offered incorrectly may be heard while mine are ignored, but we who are Orthodox have no excuse for throwing off what we have received as if to return to ignorance, when we have been enlightened. It is like the man who, as Kahlil Gibran describes, cultivates a limp, so that others may excuse him from work. If we cultivate pretense in order to excuse us from the Fast, how we can claim that thansgiving draws us to the feast?

The feast belongs to those who have fasted. Those who have not, don’t know what a feast is. There is no distinction in their minds. As St. Paul said of those who all speak and make sounds at once, or who babble prayers of gibberish, there is no way to experience prayer for them, because they can’t distinguish one thing from another. So it is with those who “feast” only and do not fast – they don’t really ever feast, either. They can’t know the significance of one activity from another, and therefore all activity is inaccessible to them. Lethargy of body results in lethargy of soul, and the dimming of both.

Our thanksgiving is not of one kind. Now is the time of preparation for the glorious Incarnation of God. Now we are in darkness. Now we are at the end of the history of man. Now we are on the verge of destruction. Now we are lean and the spirit which was given to us has gone out of us, and we are on our last leg in the world. But at such a moment, at such a dry time, at such a lean and hungry time, the God is about to be born and our hope not only renewed but the salvation of God, the deification from on high, to be among us.

At such a time, while we take stock of where our sins have brought us, what Death has done to us, and how without God we are, how we have run after so many idols, have ignored God’s commands, have broken his laws, have disdained his saints and prophets, is now the time that we become gluttons again and proclaim it a holiday? Those who are sensitive at all to what we are doing, as Orthodox, cannot do so. Now is the lean time, the Nativity Fast, the Little Lent, and we shun celebrations and cover ourselves with the ashes of sorrow, until the bright day when God comes to save us.

How will we know that day, if it is like any other day, even if it comes among us? If we’ve already been celebrating and feasting, how will we know any distinction when God is born? You see, we blather on about how Christmas starts earlier and earlier, and yet we have broken the Fast and started too early. We mumble about how Christmas has lost its meaning, and yet we have taken its meaning away in our own awareness, because we were acting as if any given day is a celebration. When Christmas arrives, therefore, are you and I really having Christmas at all? Is the Incarnation really real for us, when we haven’t felt the need for it? When we haven’t known any sorrow, is there any significance in joy? When we haven’t felt our lack, is there any meaning to fullness?

The Orthodox are fasting. We don’t expect the heterodox to do it. We don’t expect the nationalists to do it. We don’t expect the atheists to do it. And they will all be saved before I might – that’s the Orthodox attitude. But precisely because that’s our attitude, we do not stand distant from our own means of salvation – the Fast, the Church, the calendar, the life of Christ we live through every year. We don’t fill our bellies with the attitude that such things don’t matter. At that point, we cease to be asking Orthodox questions at all, and nothing we think or say about the Faith matters. We have ceased to affirm our own existence as bodily creatures and, in the court of logic, we’ve therefore removed the ground of our own assertions. To deny we exist is to deny that we have any thoughts at all, or anything to say. Therefore, listen: be Orthodox. Keep the Fast. Hold the line. Stand strong. It is not so great a thing to not be a weakling. It is only our normal lives, our confession of Faith. It is the love of Christ’s body. It is to say the same thing we say when we stand and say the Creed. For the one who doesn’t fast, all Creeds are gibberish, and Christ’s body and our salvation is inaccessible.

On Friends Parting Ways

I’ve noticed that most of the people around me don’t have friendships that end. In fact, they seem to think it strange that someone might. Sometimes they say, “that doesn’t happen to me.” But I listen to them, and I observe that in fact relationships do sort of stop happening for them – they just seem to dwindle to an occasional phone call, a carbon copied joke in e-mail, and then silence.

In fact, what I see is in some sense they’re both correct and incorrect. They’re correct, because of the meaning of those two words – friendship and end.

It’s fair to say their friendships don’t end, because they simply resort to inactivity, and ending is an action. Somehow, this is thought to be better. If they see the person, they exchange the “what are you doing now?” which is very similar to the small talk they made when they first met and the “let’s get together some time”, which they don’t actually mean to do. But, somehow, they’ve escaped the scandal, the shame, or the reality of it ending. They’ve substituted for that an unreality of simple inaction and a preserved fiction that I’m still “cool with” that person.

Likewise, it’s fair to say their friendships don’t end, because the meaning of ‘friend’ is so fluid for them, that at any given moment of thought, someone might be or might not be considered a friend. I notice, too, this goes with a level of patronization that keeps either party from really telling the other what he’s thinking. There are rules about how honest you can be. In other words, the ‘friendship’ or ‘non-friendship’ seems to depend on distance rather than closeness. I notice they don’t have non-friends, though – they have people they “know” but don’t usually ever say “he and I aren’t friends” – it’s considered impolite and absolute and drastic. In other words, friendship seems to be a moving target, a social fiction, and a matter of epistemological boundaries. In fact, if you reach across the boundary, and suggest that it’s about all the opposites of those things, you’re seen as seeking a “lover”, a “gay relationship”, or some bizarre form of family or religious bond.

Friendship doesn’t end with the people I see, because they don’t really end relationships, and they aren’t sure what we mean when say friendship in any categorical or definitive way.

My friendships do end. Either I end them, or the other person does. As drastic and extreme, as socially ill-adapted as that will make me seem to the people around me, I actually like that it happens. Not the pain involved, of course. But I’m not all about avoiding pain. People die, people go away, people become someone else. It’s part of living in history. I like it because it comes from being involved in friendship so much, from being involved with the persons involved. It comes from all the things the people around me say “don’t happen to” them. It comes from a mutual search for truth, a mutual attempt at progress, a mutual affinity for penetrating social barriers and finding the scalding naked person underneath and from remaining staunchly loyal to what we each love in the other person. Hell, it comes from loving the other person.

That’s the other thing: people seem just as appalled by the reasons that friendships end. It may be becaused of irreconcilable ideologies, or incompatible assumptions about the world or about relationships, or conflicting goals. People around me seem to assume these are always a bad thing. Or at least a shameful thing to admit in polite company. I don’t think that way. I may be trying to disarm the world, and my friend to arm it, and we realize we just can’t be together. I may be trying to uplift the poor, and my friend to protect the rich. I may be trying to find the meaning in life, and my friend actively working for a nihilist worldview – a world where meaning is out of fashion. Not that my friend is always the bad guy, if we differ. It may be that I have a violent temper, and he’s a peacemaker. Or it may be less clearly moral – it may be that I like to challenge people, and he likes to comfort them, and we can’t seem to each be active at the same time, and we each need to be.

Sometimes, it’s just lethargy vs. action. Perhaps I’m insisting on changing the world, making war on the world, searching for (and actually finding) the truth, and perhaps my friend just wants to “hang out” and finds all that activity to be a distraction, a burden by proxy, or actually “wrong”. We may not judge one another, but we may find that, except for a few laughs over a few things, we’re actually incompatible.

Either way, for reasons like this, and for other reasons, I find, in my experience, that friendships end. Deep, meaningful friendships the moreso. In fact, the kind that cross from a mere acquaintance into what I would call friendship seem almost guaranteed to have a lifespan, and so I now have begun preparing for them to end, the same way I prepare for the people I love to die one day. It’s much like a death. Seven swans and they all, one by one, fly away.

Sometimes it is more drastic, like a betrayal. This can happen, really, only when deep trust has developed. You see the conundrum. People who don’t develop deep, trusting relationships – what I’d call friendships – don’t have friendships that end. People who prefer social fictions to true endings, let even those relationships wither rather than end. I prefer a clean cut.

I know people who, to avoid this, remain entirely within themselves. They don’t trust. They don’t connect in any substantive way. And of course it goes back to the old adage… “to have loved and lost”. I think it’s worth it. Not worth “the risk” – I’ve given up thinking of it as a risk, and committed to thinking of it as a certainty – again, like death.

Invariably, when you say things like these, someone asks, “Yeah, but is it Christian?” So often, in our culture, religion is thought to be about some hypothetical “ought” rather than an ongoing and involved “is”. I don’t know about that. I tend to be suspicious of religious philosophy – it hasn’t done much but lop off heads and burn people at the stake. When I look at our monastics, they do neither – they deal with the smelly feet of the reality of the world, so to speak. They deal with the leprosy of life. They acknowledge Death.

That’s it, you know. To not allow for friendships that end is to try to deny the reality of Death, and to live in a hypothetical ought that is too pure even for the Son of God. But to live with Death, to acknowledge it and live anyway – not to ‘give in’ to it, but to work to overcome it from within – that’s Christian, in my view. That means loving enough that you always lose something. It’s not only always worth it; it’s necessary for our salvation, I think.

To my friend, who you and I have parted ways, pray for me so that I can be saved by your prayers. And forgive me my frailties and failings. They are more than you ever knew. I’m happy that we each cared enough about something that we didn’t just “hang around”. Go with God.

Why meat, wine, and oil?

This weekend I was asked why we fast from meat, fish, eggs, dairy, alcohol, and oil. The person wanted a neat explanation. There isn’t one.

My own understanding will differ from some and we Orthodox are OK with that. We’re not OK with not keeping the rule, but we’re OK with different understandings of why the rule might be in place, especially since there is more than one reason we fast [I already talked about that in another post].

As I see it, we fast from those things which are traditionally or ceremonially regarded as feast foods. By definition and practice, a fast is not a feast, and vice versa. After all, we don’t only fast from foods, but from parties, from spectacles and shows, etc. Whatever event it may be, the death of Our Lord, the darkness of the world and preparation for His Incarnation, his temptation in the wilderness, and ours, the answer can be simple: Our Lord is in such a condition; shall we be celebrating, or covering our heads with sackcloth and ashes, and keeping vigil? For us, there is no union with God, apart from sorrow, grief, dryness. The notion of only happy times, of continual gratification, is foreign to Orthodoxy. We don’t consider it Christian at all, but fundamentally pagan and anti-Christian. God is a burning fire. We have always known it, and said it, and meant it, and we have always fasted, since the first man in the Garden.

Fasting and feasting alternate along a timeline – they are inherently time based, historical activities. And we are a people of holy history, and that is another key point. In becoming Orthodox, one steps into the line of that history, with continuity, not with opposition or resistance. We are always either fasting or feasting, because we are the people of God, created by Him and redeemed by Him, and always following His life, and our calendar, through the Incarnation. We are a people of the calendar, a people of time, a people of history, because we are people of the Incarnation, of the Timeless entering Time, of God becoming man, and living a historical life among us, eating with us, fasting with us, and teaching us to live accordingly.

First, meat. Meat is traditionally a feast food. You’ve heard the phrase “to kill the fatted calf”. Meat, milk, cheese, eggs, among the Orthodox are a way of celebration. Keep in mind that we are always feasting and fasting, have always been, since time immemorial – since the beginning. People forget, when they ask these questions, that we are not a Protestant religion, that began at a certain time among men, which is based on some particular philosophical stance. We are the religion of the first man, since God made him according to that religion, and we are in accord with our history. Ours is not a belief system, but an asceticism. Ours is not a religious philosophy, but an orthopraxis. The supremacy of doctrine over activity is a late, Western mediaeval, heterodox notion that has nothing to do with us. We reject it – it is heresy. In fact, we have always feasted and fasted since before there were any written doctrines, before there were any scriptures, before there were books, before anyone tried to explain anything. If anything, our way, our tradition, our history is the important thing, and any discussion afterward must be in accordance with it, since it came after. History dictates that, as an inviolable law – that there is a before and an after – an order built into our very condition and context and Orthodox people, as indeed all people are rightly designed to be Orthodox, and were from the beginning, from Adam.

So meat… – we did not try to transform that into a philosophical explanation. When it was necessary to clarify, we clarified, but we are not religionists constructing a positive religious philosophy. As Vladimir Lossky points out, we make statements when they are necessary to protect the faithful, to preserve for them the possibility of salvation. The statements are not “here is how we have built this philosophical construct” but “this is what we say, and this is what we do” – “this is our orthopraxy”. We have always treated meat as something especially regarded for feasting. So when we fast, it is quite normal for us to regard it as inappropriate. As evidence that we were not building a philosophy of meat, we did not regard shellfish the same way. Crabs and mussels and clams were ubiquitous – you picked them up off the ground like leaves. You don’t see this today, because of overfishing, ecological alteration, and climate change. But shellfish was never regarded as a special food, a feast food, because it was as common as grass, and so inappropriate to a feast. It would be a Protestant in the US having ramen noodles at Thanksgiving. The Orthodox always knew how to use food to celebrate. And because we always did, we always knew, almost automatically, what was inappropriate for a feast. Remember, we are either fasting or feasting at all times.

What about oil and wine? (by which we mean alcohol, though in some places, where beer is a ubiquitous part of daily life, served at ever meal, that has been accepted, within normal moderation – though going out drinking is still ridiculously inappropriate as the activity of a fast, just as a party is). Oil has always been a special food. We have always spoken of it among ourselves (listen to the Scriptures being read in our Churches) as special, as significant, as rich, as reserved, as often holy. We annoint with it, ceremonially was our faces with it or cover our heads in it. It is understood, like meat, to be the fat of the land, a richness, a feast food. The same is true of wine. The examples are everywhere, and the reasons obvious. Christ, after all, fasted from wine. If being Christian means anything at all, according to the minimum definition thrown about in the wide open culture, it at least contains the idea of imitating Christ. Again, as an illustration that we did not make a philosophy of wine or of oil: some Orthodox fast from all oil, because they piously see it as the same thing, and some fast only from olive oil (that at least is forbidden during fasts), but find corn oil acceptable, because corn oil where they live is as common as dung, and included in every meal, since they can remember. In South Korea, where Orthodoxy has existed for 100 years, the Metropolitan has given a general economia for sesame oil (it is to Koreans what corn oil is to people in the US). Again, in some Germanic Orthodox churches, beer (as a daily dinner food) is acceptable.

Neither those who would point fingers and say, “you’re in violation – you’re using canola oil!” nor those who would say, “ah, who cares about oil anymore when chocolate and coffee are the happy foods of our time – we should ban those!” are allowed to rule us in this. The Church has been gentle, though in gluttony it is easy to see the fast as extreme. But that is to have already stepped outside the Faith to occupy some presumably automonous plateau of evaluation, and is heretical in principle. We have always fasted with gravity, with somberness, with seriousness, with sorrow, with work, with effort – there is absolutely nothing there that was decided by philosophical principle and simply ‘implemented’. This is how Orthodox people behave.

We have not become like the heterodox, who make personal inclination or attitude the beginning place – and choose what to “give up” for a fast – that is to miss the point – the fast changes your personal inclinations and attitudes, not the other way around. One might as well decide to drape oneself with robes, if one is so inclined, and proclaim onself a bishop. Indeed, some heterodox do. This is all of one piece.

Certainly, if pious people wish to fast from chocolate and coffee, along with what the Church requires, there is nothing wrong with that. There is something deeply heterodox about substituting that decision for what the Church requires. And even the decision to add to it may only be made, in Orthodox praxis, with the Church, in consultation with one’s father confessor. The moment it becomes disconnected from the life and mysteries of the Church, the good thing is now a heterodox thing, and becomes bad. It was not for Adam to decide, on his own, from which fruit to abstain in the Garden. As it was with our father, so it is with us, his children.

Certainly, if pious people understand the prohibition on oil to mean all oil, a dry fast (there is great tradition behind that), let them keep it, if that is how their bishop and their father confessor roll. If they eat corn oil, and that does not conflict in their understanding, with the prohibition on oil, or with the advice of their father confessor and bishop, then who can judge otherwise for them? To do so, is to oppose the Church. God forbid.

As [looking up priest’s name] has said, I feel it’s all right to have non-dairy creamer in my coffee, and to have coffee, but I’m not comfortable with vegan bacon. Still, personally, I’ll eat a Boca Burger during the fast. It’s basically our falafel. There are areas here where one cannot make absolute statements on an item by item basis, and one cannot create a general philosophy that explains external reasons for what we fast from – reasons external to our history and tradition.

We have fixed the basic requirement, when clarification became necessary, at meat, fish, dairy, eggs, oil, and wine – just as the Apostle St. Peter had fixed the minimum for avoiding “pagan food” at rejecting at least the drinking of blood and eating strangled things. Our way in this is not a philosophy, nor because it is tradition is it optional in the way the heterodox speak of tradition (“well, it’s tradition, but we don’t keep it”). Phooey on that; it’s just a lie. An Orthodox person who says this has told you a lie, whether he realizes it, or has simply believed the lie himself and is repeating it like a monkey repeats an action it sees. We are not monkeys. In essence, I can just as easily say that there is no “why” for this food vs. that food. We fast – this is what fasting is and has always been – we kept the tradition w/o words until the words were needed, and then we kept the tradition with words, and because the words changed little, the tradition changed less after the words. When you ask for “why”, you are hypothesizing a different kind of “religion” than that. You are asking that we give it a Western mediaeval philosophical pedigree. This we cannot, need not, should not do.

Personally, I think that there are more than one reason for the same thing. It’s not the Orthodox way to say that one word has only one meaning, nor that there is one law to all truths, one premise to all realities. Reality is not based on premises – reality is reality – reality yields premises, and many of them. The West has it backwards. They try to divide 2 by 6 to get 3.

Among the effects then, if not reasons, I think it’s a true statement, as the monks have discussed, that the rich foods tend to inspire the passions, most especially blood-filled meats do. This isn’t hard to fathom on a practical level when you consider that the US consumes the bulk of the world’s meat, and is also the most violent and warlike civilization in history. Sorry if you don’t like that, but it is the only people to have utilized a nuclear weapon on another civilization. On civilians populations. Intentionally. Twice. The cultural obsession with meat in the United States, in my view, is no coincidence.

I also think that fasting from meat is an abstinence from death, a sign of paradise that was and paradise that is to come. The lion will lie down with the lamb and a little boy will lead them. There will be no more suffering, no more tears, no more death. Yes, you’ll all be non-meat-eaters in Heaven. Even Protestants would have to cook up some new ad campaign to keep their books from adding up to that truth. In fact, the monks, who eat only fish on special feasts, and no meat the rest of the time, are themselves as sign of the coming world, of paradise, and I think that’s one reason. But again, this cannot be, is not, and never has been a philosophical principle, with any absolute weight, or any precise 1:1 correlation with our practice. After all, we fast from milk, which does not require the death of the animal. Though, we fast from eggs also, and I think it’s telling that we fast from reproductive products. This has significance as well, in my view, for paradise and for our history. I simply refuse to make a philosophy of food out of it, nor does the Church teach it as a doctrine. I think it’s true, but I would only comment on the significance I see, and not offer it as an absolute rule, or the “why” of it all. Again, remember, we are not forbidden, most of us, mussels and crabs during the fast, though most of us would understand it to miss the point entirely if we went out for Alaskan King Crab and Maine Lobster during Lent. It’s not really appropriate, and we know better. Some Orthodox, quite piously see all fish, including shellfish, as included in the prohibition on fish, and that’s pious – nothing wrong with that at all.

The Church is gentle. The Church does not pronounce absolutes – cannot do so – because we are not a religious philosophy. Philosophers are the ones who make categorical statements, inviolable ones. We are alive in time and history, the Spirit with and in us, and always have been, since our first breath, and will be always now and ever unto Ages of Ages. Amen.

Praying with Hypoglycemia

First, I don’t make excuses. I’m Orthodox. I believe that my own sin is responsible for the death at work in my body, and therefore for any illness I have and its results. I am responsible. It is my fault. That is the Orthodox mind. I brought death into this world. I am Adam. I did this. All the suffering, all the pain – it’s me – I caused it. I crucified Christ.

Second, it’s a significant challenge to keep it from creating more sin and more death.

The effects are most pronounced before and especially after liturgy. I’m referring to hypoglycemia – low blood sugar. My hypoglycemia is fairly pronounced. The technical part is that I have trouble metabolizing sugar in food. I need protein to help me do so. Lacking that, I need complex carbs (they don’t break down into sugars as quickly as junk carbs) to sustain me until I can get protein. Lacking those, I burn and burn on foods and beverages containing simple sugars. The effects are that, if I don’t have sufficient protein, often enough, I become either lethargic, isolated, and depressed, or I become cranky, perhaps even explosive, impatient and offensive.

Often enough, I get my choice. From midnight Sunday morning until after liturgy is a fast. And this means that after liturgy, before I’ve had protein, or if I’m only having carbs, especially simple ones laden with sugar, I get to choose between avoiding contact with people, keeping to myself, trying to sit alone, being fairly unresponsive, seemingly antisocial, or else to engage, but with that engagement causing me enough pain that I can tend to lash out in a hostile or antisocial way. It’s a lovely choice. I’m not complaining. It’s my fault. But I do recognize the challenge.

Platitudes don’t work. It’s a chemical thing. It’s bonded to my person. It’s death. The easy answers might as well ask me not to die, and not have sinned. The easy answers are themselves signs of death, for their lack of truthfully taking stock of what death is and does and where it comes from. Yes, I know about economia. I have an economia, for dairy during fasts. Not for violating abstinence. And this is sufficient, in my opinion. Economia is not mean to free us from challenges, but to remove barriers to our salvation. Sometimes the lack of challenge is the barrier. So I’m not seeking further economia of that kind.

Living with this means being misunderstood almost all the time. And trying to explain it to someone is just as much a cross, because then the moment you say something unconventional, challenge authority, disagree with what people consider obvious, engage in dissidence, or display unusual behavior, people think (and say, often enough) “ah, well know he has problems.” People refer to the illness to explain anything they can’t otherwise explain. And now you might as well not have engaged them – you have no credibility anyway. Further engagement remains superficial, disappointing, if not demoralizing. It’s usually not worth it, to engage or to explain.

The point is that once you discuss being ill, you no longer even have the credibility to discuss being ill. So you accept alienation, as the normal course of your life. You breathe in the deep Christian tradition of alienation, the great precedents, and you buckle down and endure. You live a life enduring, letting the waves of human reaction wash over you, and strip away flesh and soul, but you go on living anyway. That’s the way you live.

You sit alone a lot, and try to keep from doing harm. You engage on occasion, but cautiously, and sometimes when you can’t disengage and need to, you invent excuses, unless someone’s standing in your face going on and on, oblivious, and then you usually just burst at some point and let the chips fall where they may.

You wait for the moment to try to get some protein in you – some soymilk, some hummus, something to calm you, soothe you, rescue you from the inferno in your soul, and from the acid bath of human contact while you endure. You hold out, hold on, pray if you have the heart, and you hope you don’t ruin yet another potential relationship. But you’re ok if you do; there was barely a chance anyway.

And most of all, you do what it takes to be Orthodox. You keep the Faith. You hold on. The end is coming. Life is a speeding car. You wait to be redeemed, and you accept suffering. You pray that God will let you live, even on the coattails of all those going before. You don’t seek advice – no one understands. You don’t seek help – there is no fixing it. You only get from one day to the next. And for God’s sake, you don’t listen to lectures from people who tell you how it’s supposed to be, how it’s all supposed to work, and what it all means. We live in a culture of little moralisms, of platitudes, of religious fortune cookie catchphrases. You withdraw – you don’t let people explain to you your place in the world. “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” Listening only makes it worse.

And if you tell anyone any of this, you do it with no intention of seeking or getting their approval, with no interest in their pity or their assessment of you, and with no hand held out for answers or for some ‘message’. If you say anything, you say it into the void. But you say it, because maybe they’ll understand more for the next person, for the one near them that they don’t understand, and they’ll make the only viable choice other than simply remaining aloof – they’ll choose to live with him, live with who he is, how he is, what he is, and how he lives.

That’s all any of us can do, really. I’m sick and I live with you. I don’t apologize, and I don’t ask you to apologize for not getting it. And likewise, if you want to help, live with me, live with the next guy, live with each other. Live with those you don’t understand, with the stranger, the outcast, the isolated, the unusual, the different, the deviant,the dissident. That’s the meaning of peace. That’s the Christian way to live on the earth. And for some of us, it’s living with the normal people, differently, but as truly as we can.

I’ve not much more to say on this. It’s a bitter choice – not whether to offend, but how to offend, by withdrawing or through engaging. It’s a ludicrous illustration of the absurdity of death and of sin. I have thanked God for my illness. I’ve thank him that he’s allowed me to see the meaning of death in this way. It has saved me. All things truly are for our salvation. God be praised. God have mercy. God heal me, through sickness if need be. Save me by any means. Only do not let me fall away into nothing, into oblivion, save my dust, and reconstitute me a man, and I will serve Thee.

The Faith of Saintly Augustine

I read a recent comment on a blog discussion about St. Augustine. We all know that St. Augustine published things that, in hindsight, have proved unfortunate in how they have been received and used by the heterodox. That, of course, says nothing about how they have been understood by the Orthodox, or were, at least until the last hundred years or so (specifically since Orthodoxy’s supposed renewed contact with the West, by which we must mean, to be factual, it’s widespread Westernization – as illustrated by the very question at hand).

The comment tells us that we have mistakenly asked the question of whether St. Augustine is a saint. The commenter certainly has that much right. How dare anyone presume against mother Church in such a way. But if that punch is pulled, what comes next is a slap as the commenter tells us that the correct question is whether St. Augustine should have been sainted in the first place. Actually, I’ve put words in the writer’s mouth – he said it’s whether St. Augustine should have been considered a saint in the first place. But since that actually makes no sense, as if there is some hypothetical place from which the Church’s activity can be evaluated externally to herself, so we are left with the implicit question which actually then must contain a heterodox approach to ‘saintness’ – namely that a saint is someone the Church ‘makes’ as saint by proxy, by mere act of authority, and that’s a heterodox view. We’ll come back to this.

The problem with the whole question of should this person be a saint or not, is first that it presumes that individuals are up to these questions, that there’s a question at all – an implied hypothetical choice (hypotheticals don’t exist), and that such questions are ultimate ahistorical – that they’re philosophical in character and can be philosophically resolved. I’m saying that they’re inherently impious questions, since they presume against the Faith we have received, they contain presuppositions, in other words, that are anti-Orthodox and heretical. The Fathers have always spoken of questions that can have no answers, since the questions themselves are improper – and have (in St. Irenaeus, for example) considered them gnostic in that, instead of having the result the answerer intends – that of resolving a supposed issue, they result in a ‘raised consiciousness’ – change of consciousness – a movement away from a mind that is Orthodox to one that is dialectical, indeed pagan by default, protestant by proxy.

The appropriate question, in direct contradistinction to the cited statement, is not whether St. Augustine should have been considered a saint, but whether in fact he is a saint and, more to the point, how it is Orthodox people determine who to venerate. If the answer is not that we consult our church’s calendar (e.g. June 15th), our ikons, our venerations, and our fathers among the Saints, then we are not Orthodox. We are not being Orthodox. The one who led me into the Faith once counseled me that there are many counterfeit communities out there, masquerading as Orthodoxy, some perhaps even within the widely accepted affiliations. He advised that mutual recognition is not adequate to determine or recognize Orthodoxy. In fact Orthodoxy is Orthodoxy – it either is or isn’t, and if you take away anything from it though it has everything else, it isn’t Orthodoxy. We don’t get to decide whether we’ll venerate the Theotokos or whether we’ll fast, or whether we’ll use these scriptures but not others. There is an Orthodox way, and there’s everything else.

And among the things to watch out for, he counseled, is communities that add their own ‘saints’ to be venerated, or most especially take away saints that are venerated. If they remove names, my mentor said, run away – they aren’t being Orthodox. And I hold to this, despite all the wise guys on the web. There’s another problem with asking these impious questions. It is Orthodox, by default, to consider all other men saints. Do we not cross ourselves whenever we pass a cemetary? And why? Because we do not know but that a Saint’s body may repose there. Do we not cross ourselves in remembrance of any of our dead? And why? Because they may be saints.

But moreso, the fathers tell us to consider all men righteous compared to ourselves. There is something so very inappropriate about asking whether it’s really right to consider so and so a saint, or pious, or righteous. It is not for us to judge saints, but rather the saints will judge us. It is the great cloud of witnesses, deified, translated, transfigured, who properly witnesses our behavior, not for us, kicking around on the internet, or expressing our personal opinions at coffee hour or conferences, to question theirs.

Likewise, by default, we Orthodox do not presume to judge the piety of another at all. So if someone says, this man is pious, or that man is pious, who on earth is so arrogant that they will dare to become a doubt-caster. What kind of self-righteous pawn of Satan would accuse the saints. That’s what Satan does, you know. Do we really want to join in?

The point is all of this speculation is the very example of the worst of which St. Augustine has been accused. He always said he was offering speculation. Now those who would detract from him do likewise, justifying it because they are ‘fixing’ Orthodoxy. They are the epitome of what they condemn. Those who have dug a pit have fallen into it. It has become popular, with good reason, to attack Augustinism, and the gnostic heterodoxy or heterodoxization or gnosticization of Augustinists – more correctly to defend against their attack on the Church.

But in terms of our own thinking, it is an error to impute an analysis of Augustinists and Augustinism to St. Augustine, or demand that the Church somehow respond for how the words of one of its own have been used. After all, we might as well ask whether Christ should have been considered Lord, since he likewise, if not prototypically said things that Christians have used to attack Orthodoxy and undermine the continuity of the Church’s message. Indeed, such an analysis is already popular among those who rail against religion, against what they understand to be Christianity, and against who they understand to be Christians.

It is not saying too much to say that as you speak of St. Augustine, so you are speaking of Christ. Indeed, as much as you have done it to the least of his Saints, as much as you have persecuted the lesser of his holy ones, so you have persecuted Christ, and so you have railed against principalities and powers in ignorance. You judge those who will judge angels, and in the name of one who is their King. What folly.

We are not bound to take an erroneous use of one our own’s words and turn them about as a criticism of the Church, for that is what asking such a question does. In fact, that critical method is inherently gnostic and would be right at home on any third century gnostic’s sermon roster. Indeed, the anti-Augustines are practicing Augstinism in their anti-Augustinism. They have conflated person and operation. They have turned the Faith on its head, and committed treason against it. Lord have mercy.

The Orthodox way is to insist on understanding, indeed to persist in understanding, anything written or said by one of the Saints in an Orthodox manner, wherever even remotely possible. After all. St. Gregory Palamas draws heavily on De Trinitate, a book that makes me more than cringe in my futile understanding of it, for his own 150 Chapters and some of his sermons; St. Gregory sees what I don’t. To complain that one’s mind cannot handle this is not a claim on the truth of the Orthodox way, but is rather to confess one’s own sin, one’s own frailty, one’s own weakness – and when it’s a denial of that very principle, one’s own heterodoxy. That some faint and lose heart should not mean that the rest of us put a microphone in their hands and agree to collaborate on their failed persistence. The fathers, including St. Photius the great, champion of Orthodoxy against Augustinism, always treated St. Augustine’s word with reverence. Who, says St. Photius, dares to impute any impious teaching to this man, for in doing so you would impute it to the Church.

Some have said it is because the fathers were ignorant – they didn’t have all of St. Augustine’s writings, and if they did surely they would have railed against them. That is a heresy folded into a heresy. First, we know those from of old who claim to be wiser and better informed than the fathers, to have the knowledge, the insight, and the analysis they didn’t have. They are our enemies of old, the gnostics. Out with you, counterfeiters – show your colors! You have shown them. We know these words, and the fathers also have condemned them already, before you ever grew your first beard hair. St. Irenaeus catalogs this in his encylopedia of gnosticism, against heresies, as a sure sign of gnosticism. We also know this hypothetical chatter – “surely if…” – the fathers have condemned this also – St. Maximus tells us that hypotheticals don’t exist. These are vain imaginings of those who try to step outside of history and play God. The impiety. If the fathers had what you have, you say, they would think and speak as you do, you say.

The worst of these crimes is pride. Immense, boundless pride. It is not for the fathers to learn how to think and speak from you, in some hypothetical world of philosophy; it is for you to learn how to think and speak from them. More correctly, to think and speak as they did. And they have proclaimed Augustine saint, and pious, and righteous, and a champion of the Faith. Who are you? Truly St. Photius is right – you speak against the Church, against the Faith, against the possibility of Faith. You substitute for the Faith your own speculations, your own puffed up self image, and your own philosophy. It is the ultimate act of Protestantism – we need to carry you around with us now, as a new kind of pope, a new bible, to keep us correct. You have assaulted the Church to divide it with the very cleaver of dialectic you condemn, pitting saint against saint, father against father, apostle against apostle. You are Marcion. Repent. Your correctness exceeds that of God himself.

To hell with that kind of correctness. I’m with St. Augustine, and St. Photius, and St. Maximus, and St. Irenaeus, and all the desert fathers who call us to account for our pride, before I am with any religion or Church constructed on paper or in a blog, picking piecemeal through the Faith like litter, building a homonculus religion out of personally preferred parts. But that’s just it – I’m not important – Christ is with St. Augustine – that’s important. But you do take serious risks in trying to divide any of us as you do: if you persist in this way, then whatever Faith you are asking me to subscribe to, I reject on my life. I’m am of the Faith of St. Augustine, and must be, if I wish to be of the Faith of Christ. I’ll tell you where Augustinism thrives – it is never so pronounced among the heterodox as it is among the Orthodox who strive to outdo them in their intellects. Better right now to embrace them all as brothers than to speak againt one of our heroes in this way. Better to call everyone pious, and every impiety piety, than to attack Christ in this way. In a world of absurdity, let Christ be true, though every man of us be made a liar.

That’s where I come down on it. Some of you will not appreciate it. That’s fine. The beatings will continue. And the persecuted Saints will endure it. And Christ will wreak his retribution at the right hour. Add me to your list, if you want. I am not more worthy than my Master, or than any of these. I tell you, if St. Augustine is persecuted, put me down as one of his. Let the cock crow, I will not deny him. The Holy Spirit has come. Burn my eyes out, if you wish. Better me, this one, stupid blogger, than so worthy a hero among the Saints. But I will call to your mind the desert, and those who speak from it, warning us of this pride. Be very careful. Touch not the annointed of God. Do not despise his messengers, among whom is St. Augustine. Read the parable of the vineyard. Do you not see what you are doing? Repent. The Kingdom of God is near. Seek the prayers of St. Augustine, and ask his forgiveness, as I ask yours for offending you. I don’t know what else to do. And if I have a son, I will name him Augustine, just as Bishop Augustinos of Florina (Church of Greece) bears his name, because we need to defend our own, not join the heretics in twisting his words, which is only our own twisted understanding.

Lord unbend our minds. St. Augustine save us. I know that you are a saint, and that i am not, and that is more troubling to me than how someone has trifled with words you have written.

Friend, declare with us all and the infallible 5th Ecumenical Council that you “hold fast to the decrees of the four Councils, and in every way follow the holy Fathers, Athanasius, Hilary, Basil, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, Theophilus, John (Chrysostom) of Constantinople, Cyril, Augustine…” Declare yourself among them, rather than seeking to drive a wedge among their names where none exists except in the vanity of your mind. Seek to understand them as they rightly understand each other. Do not speak against the whole church. Don’t you realize it? When you speak against any of the Ecumenical Councils, you speak against the whole church, or separate yourself from it, for we are the Church of the Seven Councils, and none of us can hold the True Faith or be saved who deny them, as St. Athanasius has said. To stand on Sunday and say the Ecumenical Creed means nothing unless you mean all that they mean in the Ecumenical Councils – it is from the Councils that the Creed is our Credo.

Do you not see what you have said and what you have done? Do you not see what you are doing?

To various among your other points:

For a photo of the beautiful St. Augustine Greek Orthodox Church in Vienna, go [here]. Our commenter implies that he cannot find any ancient churches dedicated to the saint, but this is to confuse Orthodoxy with antiquarianism. We Orthodox do not impute some greater degree of spirit to the ancient Church than to the recent. We are not antiquarians but the preservers of the living Faith.

The 6th Ecumenical Counsel, which is infallible, speaks of “most excellent and blessed Augustine”. The Council of Constantinople 1166: refers to “Saint Augustine”. In challenging the sainthood of St. Augustine, one is challenging very specific things, and not some vague inclinations, and most specifically not the knowledge level of these ancients (ironic, since presumably we are venerating the ancient). What is challenged is more significant and serious than the wisdom of the ancients or of the moderns, but perhaps the very Spirit of God.

See also St. Augustine’s “Retractions” which, at the end of his life, lay out things he wished he’d said differently and which show the development of his thought and, most specifically, not only that the format of his writing was speculative, but that humility won out in him, and piety, overall.

For a traditional Greek Icon of St. Augustine, labelled “Saint Augustine”, see the cover of Fr. Seraphim Rose’s book, “The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church”. Our commenter has also written scandalous things about Fr. Seraphim, a saintly man, after Fr. Seraphim refused to collaborate with him in attacking St. Augustine, but this is beside the point. There’s no need to go past the cover, by the standards the critic claims are so telling. And none anyway, if the icon is insufficient for you. An excellent discussion, including a letter by Fr. Seraphim is [here].

Some key points: The Orthodox do not regard the term “blessed” as truly distinct from “saint” or to show a rank or order among saints, but merely as distinguishing a different type of saint or perhaps a different reason for veneration. Also, the Orthodox do not regard someone a saint or not a saint solely on the basis of his thought, otherwise there are many saints that we would reject as such, but often on the basis of his piety, or his pious Christlike actions. So the basis of argument is, as ever, superfluouss. Lastly, there is a distinction between a saint and a father, but this is not a dialectical or categorical distinction, but in a positive way it is a distinction of how we respond to a saint, not a distinction in the saint himself and, in a negative way, it is merely an academic distinction (that is to say: a convention for academic communication). The tendency to confuse academic communication with religious attitude is itself a sign of “Augustinism”.

The charge often laid against the Orthodox, by which I mean those of us who, with the Church, as the Orthodox, without making war on the Church, venerate St. Augustine in peace, is that we are not anti-ecumenistic enough. This is a silly assumption, and an ad hominem.

It is not only quite possible to be deeply Orthodox and venerate St. Augustine, it is required. What the purveyors of ad hominem and guilt by association and begging the question have done, is redefine what it means to be ‘anti-ecumenistic’ by equating it with being anti-St. Augustine. Therefore, if you defend the saint, you may be Orthodox, but not really – you’re a member of the party that doesn’t get it and is destroying Orthodoxy – you occupy the unofficial category of being insufficiently severe. They don’t dare claim you’re not Orthodox (they do in some places, where they don’t “recognize” the rest of the Orthodox) – not too loudly, because removing the authority of the Church, which keeps St. Augustine on the calendar and the walls of our churches, and in the names of churches and bishops, and so on, would remove their own claim to be authoritative. They need us, like parasites. It’s kind of icky. But now of course, they can beg the question, saying that the Orthodox don’t venerate St. Augustine, because you and I are insufficiently Orthodox. Our commitment is suspect. We’re of an unofficially wrong attitude, though we have rejected none of the Church’s doctrines and only presumed to love her champions. And all pious men are champions of the Faith, because all piety is Orthodoxy, just as all those who attack the Church are impious, and so heretical, though every doctrine they allow is correct.

This division of piety from correctness, this opposition of the two, is so fundamentalist – evangelical – protestant that it boggles the imagination how any Orthodox person could go down such a mental trail. Not really, since they are displaying the very Augustinism they presume to critique, while St. Augustine himself is so catholic that he could never sit with such a mind, nor could any of the saints. Again, it’s kind of icky.

If their were a Byzantine or Russian form of quasi catholic protestantism, they’d fit right in. Fundamentally, they don’t believe in the Church. As one writer points out, they live in a time in which their trust has often been betrayed, and this is the extreme reaction. But brethren, it is necessary, first of all, that we hold the catholic Faith. Let us, though there are a great many other reasons, if for no other reason, hold fast to St. Augustine in order to hold fast to that. To do otherwise separates us from the piety and mind and authority and wisdom and Faith of the Church. If you reject her saints, you are not her child. Who is it who does not love the friends of God, who can be a friend of Christ? Repent. Convert. Leave off your heresy. And those who persuade you to be antagonists against Christ, depart from them.

Personally, and I’ve no wish to proselytize, I prefer the OCA, where you will find both ecumenists and traditionalists and everyone else living in relative harmony, but no faction is allowed to take over and build a private army of co-religionists. I would rather pray with ecumenists, and St. Augustine, and you my militant saint-hating brethren, than join anyone in moral and emotional schism. God defend the Church, at the gates of Hell, and all of us, and St. Augustine.

Some other nice material: [here] and [here]. The entry in the Prologue is on [June 15th].

Sightings

A church sign at a mega-church on the way to work reads “The World is Yours”. Instantly I remembered where I’d heard that before. On the mount, when Christ was being tempted. “I will give you the cities of the world…” What was the response again? “Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.” Someone should put that on the sign across the street. 🙂

Flipping channels last night ran across one of those CSI programs. Common scenario – they were shaking down a religious person with a shady past. Not an Orthodox Jew or a Fundamentalist Mormon in this case, but a Buddhist. The writers’ version of a shady past? He had vandalized a nuclear power plant in his youth. The detectives were pulling out every slur in the books, “I need to check your aura” said the ‘tough lady’ as she scanned him for traces of something. The acceptable slurs are always people of anti-statist religious movements (monks have been causing the world some embarrassment in Myanmar) and anti-statist political movements (e.g. anti-nuclear activists, anti-WTO activists, etc.). If he’d been a black man and they’d said, “Dance, boy!” as they shot at the ground, there’d be blood in the streets. Whenever anyone is unjustly treated, or persecuted for faith, we are all unjustly treated and all persecuted for our Faith. May the Judgment come swiftly, and vindication.

Why Wait? You can Have Your Beastie Now.

I find this interesting, when we throw off the rules of thinking we’ve been taught by evangelicalism in the culture, and we don’t try to titillate ourselves with numerological and symbolic esoterica, which is a form of demonism and conjuring demons, and we just think about what’s being said, there’s a lot there.

I’m not claiming that the Secretary of the Treasury, or anyone in or running for public office, is the little Beast mentioned in the Apocalypse. There are many antichrists, many beasts great and small, and many end times. But just taken as a sociological critique of culture, the parallels are brilliant, really. A first century understanding of economic centralization and control made possible only by identity consolidation of a kind not really likely except in a fear-based atmosphere of “rampant” identity theft.

The current attempt to nationalize the US economy and set up an all-powerful economic czar:

“Decisions by the Secretary (of Treasury) pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” – Section 8 of the president’s proposal

“If a financial institution has business operations in the United States, hires people in the United States, if they are clogged with illiquid assets, they have the same impact on the American people as any other institution. That’s a distinction without a difference to the American people. The key here is protecting the system.” – Sec. Treasury Paulson

These unreviewable powers to include:

ability of the Treasury to seize any financial institution without judicial oversight and without an appeal by the institution;
ability to spend up to $700 billion at a time, with no limit on how many times that $700 threshold is reached; and to reload as often as needed from a taxpayer funded account called the RTC.

The attempt, recorded in the Apocalypse, to globalize the economy and set up an all-powerful economic czar:

He causes all people, small and great, rich and poor, free and not free, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell, except someone who had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Here is wisdom. Let the one who has understanding count the number of the beast: it is the number of a man.

Sweet, isn’t it?

One point for some literalism of some sort for the Orthodox: something defiling your forehead or your right hand prevents you making the sign of the cross in the normal way. Not that I profess understanding here. But it’s interesting.

On another note, it’s interesting to watch how these things come about. The Republicans try to bully and strong arm everyone into a sense of conformity and all marching in the same direction, and the Democrats act like little bitches trying to include their porkish personalization and demands, but there’s really only limp wristed questioning of whether or not this is what we’re going to do. It’s just like the war. And to those who were offended by the b-word just now, you’re about to be made into that by this particular economic empire, so get used to it.

Who's YOUR Bishop?

Fear-based relationships are the hallmark of corporate life. “So and so is flying in. Clean up your area, dress extra nice, be on your toes, be careful.”

Walk the corridors of a corporate complex, be self-assured, chin up, eye contact, confidently winsome, brisk and purposeful but calm and relaxed, and impeccably but effortlessly arranged, and men will turn in their shoulders and hug the wall to give you room, duck their heads, and make eager but cautious greetings. There are all kinds of evidences of fear dominating workplaces. Fear is everywhere – it’s a cultural commodity – perhaps the cultural commodity.

But it has no place in the Church or among the Orthodox. The idea of being cautious lest you annoy some clergyman, careful lest someone learn your true thoughts or ideas and turn on you, or hinting that you might “tell” (“Who’s your bishop? I might need to have a talk with him”) – as though our clergymen were some sort of easily manipulated HR Directors – these are beneath Christians and beneath contempt.

Afraid to ask questions, afraid to be say what you mean, afraid of what someone is thinking of you? That’s the world – not the kingdom, nor the life of heaven. It is not the way of angels.

There are among us timid ones, those who have not yet acquired as much of their liberty in this area as they have coming. We all have our weaknesses, do we not? But these depend on the rest of us to repudiate fear-based relationships, refuse to let fear govern our conduct or our society. They depend on us to make a smooth path through the thorns by standing strongly, holding the line, and refusing to give in to the temptation offered by the Evil One, the whispered gospel of anxiety, the psychosis of religious phobias, and the witchcraft of angry dominance that demands terror as homage.

Fear is the hallmark of power-based leadership. But true power neither requires fear, not experiences it.

If you must be afraid, it’s better to fear God than men. But where fear reigns, love is cast out. It’s an exorcism of Faith, and the triumph of the religion of the world. It’s the religion of corporations and the contagion of a culture of antagonism. Be healed, be unafraid, be saved. Ours is freedom – let no one rob you of your liberty.

Christ on the Tree

Someone asks how we speak in our hymnography of Christ being crucified on the tree, and do not confine our language to describing specifically the cross. One answer is that, for us, the matter is intensely important. In other words, there is significance in that it was wood and that it was a tree. By a tree man fell and by a tree man was lifted up. By a tree man was deceived, and by it he was illumined and given sight. The serpent was lifted up on a pole, and the nation was healed, foretelling the one who, lifted up did cast down and defeat the serpent, healing all men. The deification of all creation requires the participation of all creation in Christ’s incarnation – and vice versa. The tree is one such thing. The gnostic – modern or otherwise, can never accept this. For him, material must be secondary, irrelevant, or even disruptive to salvation. For the Orthodox, there is no salvation without matter. As St. John of Damascus has said, I will not cease to venerate the matter through which my salvation has been effected.

And so water, and so oil, and so many other things are means of salvation for us. When we see one kind of material, we do not see it as disconnected from all other things of that kind, or indeed from any thing or anyone, but related, connected, indeed redeemed, recapitulated, and communicated, joined to us, because all matter is joined to Our Lord. He in His Incarnation and in his very flesh summed up and redeemed all matter, and now all things groan waiting for our redemption, that finally all things may be complete in us.

Deconstruction and Proof Texts

From a comment posted to another blog:

Indeed: How could we Orthodox base our authority on the scriptures, when we wrote the scriptures? Rather, the reverse is true. The scriptures derive such authority as they have from us. Indeed, were it not so, the Ecumenical Councils would have no meaning, for in them we articulated the canons of the scriptures. But in reality, the scriptures are the icon of Christ, and so we’re not concerned so much with ‘authority’ in some quasi-Roman-Catholic sense, but with the Incarnation, with the Scriptures as revelation of the Incarnate One. For us, the Scriptures are in this sense an interactive call to theosis, to deification, to union with God. This is their purpose and their significance to us, as indeed are all things in Holy Orthodoxy, but a means to that one end. For us the question is not “what is true?” as much as “how may I be deified?”, because Orthodoxy is not a belief system – it’s an asceticism.

How could we Orthodox base our authority on the scriptures, when we wrote the scriptures? Rather, the reverse is true.

On your last point, concerning those who do not follow Orthodox epistemology nonetheless trying to cobble together proof texts from our writings to refute that very epistemology, it is indeed parasitical. Pure invention would be better suited to their underlying assumptions – why don’t they write their own books? The question is a historical one, as much as an ecclesiological and epistemological one. Fundamentally, they consider themselves the heirs of the apostles and so of holy writ, and attribute therefore to their own tribe and mentality those holy men who had no such notions as they hold, and then position them to try to reconcile them or admit confusion.

We are debating with people who first begin with the notion that the Church is something general and non-specific, and then proceed to claim historical continuity with it’s fathers and texts. Their history, and indeed historiographical method is bunko. If that falls through their fingers, nothing they say now about doctrine or theory matters at all. Theirs is, at it’s heart, the error of the literary deconstructionist. It’s as if one of us wrote an epic poem, and they think they know better than the author what it means. We write books, and they take those texts and presume to tell us what we mean. And we say,

Orthodoxy is not a belief system – it’s an asceticism.

No, we also have the original author’s letters, and his disciple’s letters, and the continuity of discussion (e.g. the liturgy) in which they lived and breathed, the very tradition into which they were writing and the language of metaphors and references and history they were speaking – the grammar of their faith, and we have their prayers, and their lives, and their disciples prayers and lives, and their mentors’ prayers and lives and letters and books, and we have the decisions of the councils in which they participated, and the succession in which they participated, and even the languages in which they wrote and spoke and prayed, and indeed the very physical churches in which they served and prayed and did works, and their childrens’ childrens’ children unto ages that they sired in the faith, and the testimonies of holy men to the meaning and significance of their teachings in their lives, and miracles, appearances, visions, visitations, healings, and answered prayers following the veneration of these men, which follow upon and proceed because of this understanding of their thinking, and our homes are filled with their icons, and their names upon our calendars and our lips – indeed our children are given their names and keep their name days as the days of their new birth, and indeed Bishops are tonsured in their names, and Churches consecrated in their names, and monastic brotherhoods proceed in their names and go ahead before us into glorification and return to us with answered prayers and signs and wonders bidding us follow still, so that we see the line of our people stretching back to Him who made us and ahead to those who live in his uncreated Energies, deified and divinized.

But here they offer, “yes, but we know what the writings really mean”, which is nothing else than what the gnostics of old offered up against the Orthodox: that they were wiser than the apostles, and possessed the higher intuition, the illumined insight, the greater connection to the spiritual thread of God, and had no need of the Incarnate Christ in whom all these fathers subsist, since the secrets of their minds are superior. This is the character of those who offer us the ulterior wisdom of their own minds, and bid us look away from the path of light to their own ‘enlightenment’.

But we are the elder brother. They cannot speak of Christ or Christianity or fathers or Church or scripture except by us.

But we are the elder brother. They cannot speak of Christ or Christianity or fathers or Church or scripture except by us. Ours is the language and history of heaven come to earth, and so it’s nonsense for us to reverse this order – or rather it’s Babel, the attempt of earth to attain heaven, as if to own it and possess it and situate it within our own religious framework and assumptions and culture. God forbid. And God save us by the prayers of the fathers who led and lead us still, who are not dead, and not silent, and not impotent, but continue to save us, and speak to us, and teach us, as we listen to their voices and receive grace through them, drowning out the distortions of their false followers who presume to tear them away from this unbroken tradition – what you call our epistemology, which is really much more – and so to sever us as well.

How can we listen to the heterodox prattle about writings and teachings when, regardless of all else, they are not of us, not of those whose writings they handle so roughly? As the one who led me said, “If they say they follow the Apostles and the Saints, then let them join their Church.”

Key excerpts from the [Original Comment Source]:

You believe that the Pope, the Apostles and the Bible are somehow “infallible.” I believe that the prophets, Apostles, and saints of all ages, up until this exact minute, have experienced revelation, which is glorification.

I follow the Orthodox Church, whose authority is based not upon Scripture or Liturgy per se, but upon real revelation, which is direct, noetic experience of the divine.

Without glorification, Christianity becomes a “religion.” A set of rules and maxims which are dictated to man by mere men.

The [scriptures are] written by those who are inspired by their experiences of glorification to write words that lead (in the context of the Church and individual spiritual fatherhood) others to the selfsame experience of God.

The Rush to Qualification and the Danger of Orthodoxy

You’re coming within earshot in the middle of this conversation…

Gregory: … well, one hopes we’re actually making progress in theosis, otherwise what are we doing?

Basil: Sure, but how do you measure that? I mean it’s not like notches on your belt.

Gregory: No, but the fathers do speak of increments to enlightenment, though I think those are helpful ways of discussing it, where it’s actually quite fluid.

Basil: Enlightenment? I don’t know that I’m comfortable with that word.

Gregory: That’s the word they use. fairly frequently, from ancient times. It’s used that way in the scriptures.

Basil: But I think you have to qualify that – explain what you mean. Otherwise, it’s dangerous. People might misunderstand.

Gregory: I think if you have to immediately qualify something, you can’t really hear it. Its meaning gets systematized, defined, lost amid all the qualifications. I prefer to listen to the fathers than perhaps misunderstand because I qualified them

Basil: Sure, for you and I, that’s fine. But you have to be careful about talking about these things around people who can get easily misled.

Gregory: But that’s just it, I think we’re the ones likely to be easily misled, thinking we understand something better than people who can hear it without qualifications.

Don’t worry: This conversation didn’t actually happen, nor does it mirror a recent one in which I’ve changed the names or the topic. It’s just an amalgam of discussions I’ve been in (often involuntarily) or witnessed (and from which I’ve quietly walked away – like a ticking package).

We like our religion as white meat. Pretty, and well-behaved. It sits up straight; it doesn’t chew with its mouth open, and it doesn’t smell.

I think, though, it’s illustrative of two approaches to understanding. One tries to hear, and one tries to explain. One tries to understand, and one tries to make it understandable to the public. One is looking to learn from the fathers, even if they’re speaking about radical things that challenge our understanding of what the basic questions are, and the other is looking for how to “balance” the fathers, so our basic questions remain answered to our satisfaction.

I fully expect someone will wish to “balance” this post as well, kind of illustrating my point. The rush to qualification precludes us really hearing anything – the intent of the author, the reality to which they’re speaking… what we end up with is the Protestant impulse to classify things, immediately upon hearing or encountering them, as “true” or “false”, “right” or “wrong”, “extreme” or “balanced” (whatever that means). We like our religion as white meat, pretty, and well-behaved. It sits up straight; it doesn’t chew with its mouth open, and it doesn’t smell. Like a dutiful son, it’s got one hand in our cultural mother’s lap. In other words, it’s Protestant.

Who of us presumes to “balance” the fathers who attained enlightenment and achieved theosis? It is they who would “balance” us, if we even presumed that “balance” is a Christian objective.

But that’s not the true religion we Orthodox have received. Not at all. Our religion, very often, quite literally doesn’t bathe. Our Faith has stubble – a bit more than stubble, actually, if we keep it whole. It isn’t a neatly-defined set of categories. We don’t carry around “study bibles”, with glossaries in the back (despite recent Quixotic attempts to adapt them to us). We have messy religion. Not Anglican-messy – I don’t mean that (and no offense meant to you Anglicans, but you couldn’t exactly get offended unless you already know what we’re talking about. Here we don’t buy the: “We can say the N word, but you can’t!” reasoning.). But we have religion that says repeatedly, “you’re not able to understand, no matter what you do, and you may have to live with that.”

The rush to qualify is the rush to make truth safe, even before it can be understood. To make it fit the pre-existing conception of the puzzle – the mental picture on someone’s cognitive box. And as such, it means we can never learn again, not really. We can never sit at the feet of the holy fathers and learn, because we are not willing to go back and question the shape and structure of the puzzle, once we started filling in the pieces. The rush to qualification blinds us, so that our initial assumptions become unaccountable absolutes, and we are no longer subjecting our own thoughts to the rigours of Christian thought and the pedagogy of Christian ‘thinkers’, but now are the makers of our own Faith. Again, Protestantism.

Our religion, very often, quite literally doesn’t bathe. Our Faith has stubble.

The rush to qualification is a Protestant impulse as surely as the rush to fragmentation and, indeed, they are causes of one another. The attempt to nail down a definition of all religious understanding and experience, a thoroughly Protestant approach, to afford a unified theory of Faith (Sound Roman Catholic? That’s where it came from.), is ironically the very creator of factions that, by that same Protestant impulse (defining the “church” and the “faith” by acceptance of definitions of other doctrines) spawns tens of thousands of denominations. In other words, the rush to qualification is the genus of denominationalism. It is the beginning of the crumbling of that authentically catholic understanding of Christendom that we begin with when we read the fathers in the first place, and from which Christendom fell (read Western Christianity), when it proclaimed itself sole arbiter fide.

As to the particular form of qualification we’re calling “the rush to balance” – who of us presumes to “balance” the fathers who attained enlightenment and achieved theosis? It is they who would “balance” us, if we even presumed that “balance” is a Christian objective, which we don’t. Yes, I’m aware of various proof texts that one may like to cite when trying to fashion Christianity into an expression of the culture – into Christendom, but we’re Orthodox, not Episcopalians (OK, you can fault me for that one). That’s just the thing, you see, arranging a bunch of texts so they say what we want them to say is itself a form of qualification, definition – it too can, if we haven’t really listened first, mitigate actually hearing the fathers teach. And hearing the fathers teach is NOT a safe thing. Not at all.

Talk about unsafe… union with God, becoming God, theosis, deification… what we Orthodox mean when we say the word “salvation”… that’s not a safe thing at all.

This is why the one ‘qualification’ that is commended to us by the fathers themselves, is having a guide in our Father Confessor, one who imitates the fathers and follows in their path, so that in reproducing in ourselves the teachings of the fathers, we find we are reproducing the behavior of those who follow them. That’s not safe, either. If you’re an amateur logician, like me, you’re already seeing how this could be subjective, how it could go astray – how, frankly, it’s a fallible source of knowledge and understanding, and even a dangerously reproductive one. Yup. Indeed. Let me say again, yes, you’ve got it. It’s not safe.

It comes down to whether you believe, like the heterodox, that reason can take you all the way (or that you need a religious component, too, but you really mean religious reason – that scripture, tradition, and faith produce an ever evolving succession of agreed statements or more religious philosophy), or whether you believe that the Holy Trinity must work with you in synergy to save your mind, and it can’t all be nailed down, even in trying to define what constitutes a “mystery” (wow – if you succeeded, you’d fail, because they wouldn’t be mysteries anymore). You can’t prove synergy in a logician’s “laboratory” – you can only demonstrate the need for it. Nor can you get by with a “leap of faith”, as you might hear from Rome (might as well give your credit card number over the phone). It’s an activity, though, and one that’s embarked upon as a path into the fullness of Orthodox experience, and not as reducing all these questions to matters of religious philosophy. We are an asceticism, not a belief system.

The attempt to nail down a definition of all religious understanding and experience, to afford a unified theory of Faith, is ironically the very creator of tens of thousands of denominations.

It is certainly true that any one father does not speak alone, but speaks within the consensus patrum. And if you wanted to call that the fathers “balancing themselves”, it’s hard to object. Though, personally, I think you’re reducing patristics then to a discussion of emphases and feelings and missing the point. Once you’ve got an entirely pliable discussion of emphases, you can pretty much mold what you want, and we’re just as easily back to fashioning the puzzle each according to our own cognitive maps, whether priest, layman, or monk. Flesh is something – there is a form to it – an Orthodox attitude, if you will – it’s neither in the glossary and the index, on the one hand, nor in the ever-mutable amalgam on the other. We’ve seen that argument play itself out on the field of Western religion, and it’s not our argument. Our thinking has a body. But the point being, it’s not a safe body. As C.S. Lewis would say, Aslan is not a tame lion.

Talk about unsafe… union with God, becoming God, theosis, deification… what we Orthodox mean when we say the word “salvation”… that’s not a safe thing at all. God is a consuming fire, we have said – by which we mean that we don’t know him – not from without, and we cannot define or explain him – his essence is incompatible with any understanding, but that union is possible in the unsafest of ways. It is as if to say, in great danger and mortal threat lies your union with the one you don’t know. How do you qualify that? Some will try, but they’ll really only be qualifying words, and not the thing itself, which cannot be grasped, understood, dissected, defined, or nailed down. It cannot be carried under the arm or explained in a podcast or a blog post or a meeting with a dynamic guest speaker. It is beyond safety, beyond qualification, cannot be balanced, since no other thing can be compared to it or set beside it. Welcome to the entirely dangerous world of the Orthodox Faith.

The creation groans and is in travail. The demons believe and tremble. Angels long to look. The mountains quake. And God walks around in our midst. It’s a dangerous place, a place that’s difficult to qualify and looks much different when you don’t.

Altogether on the Dirge

The other day I drove by a sign announcing the upcoming topic at a United Methodist Church: “This Wednesday…. TEAMWORK!” Wow. Thanks for that – it makes an ideal example. That’s the epitome of religion – translating the standards, values, and assumptions of the dominant culture into liturgical contexts (in this case in the form of corporate soft skills training). Otherwise known as idolatry, which is the importing of the gods of the world (e.g. Canaan or the various organs of the United States) into the altars of “churches”.

I like this better, though, than the subtlety with which it’s carried in the rest of the time, under a cloth, as it were. Might as well just be open about it. One would like to say it shows balls; unfortunately, what it really displays is completely giving up – a total loss of uniquely Christian content – the mix of rubble (of Christendom) and detritus (of the world) that comprises the interests of churchgoers. It’s post-Christian Christianity. It’s Postianity. Altogether now on the dirge…

Knights of the Desert

Increasingly, I find dissidence and social resistance are considered, among the religious, to be either un-Christian, or somehow an unpleasant aspect of Christianity that is best swept under the rug along with keeping the fasts. Actually, fasting and resistance to the world, in fact open warfare with the world, are related. The very purpose of asceticism is to save us – from the world and unto God. So often, you’ll find those who don’t do one (e.g. fasting or resisting the world) don’t appreciate the other. I’ll be called judgmental for that, but I really don’t care – I only care, at this point, if it’s true. But what is true religion? To relieve the poor and keep oneself unstained by the world. Increasingly, I’m thinking that all of orthopraxy (or orthopraxis for you misguided sticklers) is summed up in that statement.

The other day someone asked a personal question at coffee hour – namely, why I tendered my resignation at a particular company. I explained that I’m not a big fan of corporations and what they’ve done to the culture, the world of work, and people. I find they tend to create a climate of fear and compliance that’s antithetical to what I value. My boss tried to make me afraid and, when faced with an invitation to fear, I tend to break it. So I broke it; I handed in my resignation. You should have seen how people stiffened. You’d have thought I smacked the Bishop. Literally.

So what’s so radical about this? Before you go nitpicking it, I’m not an idiot – this is just one of many examples I could cite, across the interactions of many different kinds of people in many different religious environments. I’m not taking it personally, nor is it about anything personal. Not really. What I’m talking about is the perception that true religion is Mitt Romney, or at least religion should allow for it.

But I see genuine religion quite differently. I see it as much more similar to the placing of a Crusade on laymen-knights who have before them both an ascetic quest in the desert and a moral and ethical battle in the cities of the world. [Just to be clear, ethics is a science, based on those principles necessary to the survival first of the individual and, second, of the species. Morality is a revelation, something that requires a personal source and standard, a person or persons that are of the same image as the species or, more to the point, vice versa.]

Placed on us is not a commission to go forth and blend in, or go forth and adopt the world’s way of life, or go forth and invest your primary energies and essence into the world. Ours is a commission to go forth and do battle, call people out of the world while remaining within it (live in the desert in your own backyard), and defend the downtrodden, the exploited, the weak, and the oppressed. Religion (the kind I would criticize) is simply the translation of the world’s principles into liturgical language. True religion, the kind that is focused on relieving the poor and keeping oneself unstained by the world, is an ascetic warfare on the world and an ascetic conquest of the self, by which in both cases, we overcome the Evil One. True religion is not a sigh of frustration and defeat but a horn of challenge. As C.S. Lewis has said, Christianity is not defense but attack. We defend the weak, but we attack the dragon.

One of the most basic forms of attack, that helps us solidify our sense of resistance and rejection of the world (imo), is boycotting. You can boycott fear in a workplace (like I did), or you can do it in defense of others.

Recently, I was at a restaurant and the manager was yelling furiously at an employee, taunting and threatening him. I walked to the cashier, canceled our order, and explained that I won’t do business with someone who abuses workers, tries to make them afraid, and attacks their dignity. The manager came up and apologized for doing it in public, and I explained that it’s even worse to do it in private, where he’s free from accountability. I cut them off for six months, because it is the duty of Christians to defend the weak, the poor, and the dignity of work and of mankind, and to resist evil and work toward its downfall.

Some months later, I was in a supermarket, and the manager was pacing the front of the store, screaming over a cell phone at an employee who wasn’t coming to work, telling her she was fired. I stepped to the counter and informed the clerk, in the full hearing of all, that the behavior was illegal and immoral. The manager had not only violated the rights of this worker, but had tried to use shame and fear as weapons, and to exude toughness and volatility in the midst of a culture that is already overflowing with it and awash in the resultant blood and violence.

A while back, Yahoo was handed a request by the Chinese government for information that would identify dissidents contributing to internet discussion that was critical of China’s government or form of government (i.e. corruption, abuse of power, exploitation, and a history of genocide, torture, and untold agony). Without the slightest fuss, Yahoo offered up these people, who were then taken from their families (where they were breadwinners) and imprisoned for the best years of their lives. Google, so you know, was given the same request and not only completely refused, but moved their data servers offshore, where they could not even be seized by force. Google’s stated attitude (on this and other repeated occasions), is that there are some things you just don’t do. A common slogan at Google, posted around facilities, used in boardrooms, and guiding the decisions of decision-makers is “Don’t be evil.” That’s not the kind of organization Google wishes to be.

Frankly, I sent a gmail invite to every yahoo user in my contact list, suggesting they upgrade to a provider with better features and superior intangible benefits. I realize it’s a greed-based grabbing culture, and people flock to Walmart (one could write books on the evil giant) for a few dollars and change, helping sentence its workers, and all employees of companies who follow their model, to low wages, laughable insurance and benefits and, essentially, a shorter lifespan and poorer health, inadequate medical prevention and care, and all the attendant ills of chronic poverty. For a few dollars, we don’t care if we deal with the Devil himself. But we should.

You start talking boycotts, and the apostles of the dominant culture in our midst will pull out every “bible” verse about compliance and meekness they can lay hands on, not caring if it really adds up to the Christian worldview or just a bundle of proof texts that help prop up the world with religious stakes and servants. Expedience rules, just as it does at the checkout counter. Why would we expect any other kind of behavior from those in the line? It’s quite predictable. They’ll conjure up shibboleths of evangelical radio or left-wing newsletters, but in fact they’ll never talk of St. John Chrysostom and scores of other Saints who publicly denounced illicit behavior and worked diligently and openly to have it stopped. This will either have escaped their notice or be dismissed as the very proof-text piffle they’re offering at the outset.

Amazingly, you’ll even hear that boycotts is ‘participation in the world’ instead of resistance to it! You’ll hear it in the car on the way to Walmart, ironically, but that’s what’ll be said. In the end, the lines are drawn not between those who attend our churches and those who don’t, but rather between those who worship at the altars of the world and those who smash them, because they’re altars of human sacrifice. You’ll hear all kinds of “but we should be tolerant” until you realize they’re chewing on human bones.

The question is the same question Google asked, to our shame: What kind of people do we choose to be? The Walmarts of the world would dress up expediency as virtue: “Do something for your family, save money at Walmart.” If you haven’t heard the ad their running, you should. They ask you to look only at the surface, think only of instant gratification, consider only the end and ignore the means. The very basis of the conversation is anti-Christian.

Pretty it up, dress it up in a cassock, and lay it on the altar, but it’s still excrement with the stench and stain of the world. And we’re still facing the question of whether, as more and more people are gobbled up, pressed down, turned into means to an end that all good men must reject, we will get up off our lard asses and fight back, for ourselves and for them. For the very dignity of being human beings, made in God’s image, and for the sanctity of even the basic quest for goodness. If we can’t save the world, and deliver it from The World – the dominant culture – the world system – the evil artifice and Babel of principalities and powers, can we at least get up the gumption to get off the sofa and chuck a spear at it? And refuse to eat its dead.

That’s what it is. Eating the dead. And when the apostle said to at least stay away from blood and from strangled things, I see in that exhortation a command to correct, admonish, and resist the world’s edifice that it builds on the backs of the poor, the minds of all men, and the souls of the weak. It is hard to be a knight in the desert. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Remember the 80/20 rule, and hold the line. And I for one will be made stronger and more likely to stand, because you’re standing.

The Marxist Menace (is it us?)

We inherit so much from the dominant culture – it’s in the way we talk, think, behave, are afraid to behave… I work with someone who has serious problems with common swear words – heck and darn are all right, but not the words for which these are euphemisms. She’s likely unaware of the origin of so many of the ordinary idioms in use in casual conversation. If you’ve tended to add the word “action” to some of your nouns, in slangy speech, welcome to the porn industry. Far more significant, in my view, is the inheritance from anti-human sentiments like Socialism. I think it was Ludvig von Mises that pointed out how many of our ordinary concepts in casual conersation are predicated on socialist ideas.

One key legacy of socialism is how we perceive conflict as almost inherent to any set of distinctions. Distinction = opposition – that’s the insane formula. It’s not new, of course. Dr. Joseph Farrell, in his monumental God, History, and Dialectic, quite effectively traces this assumption throughout human history (from gnosticism to the Great Schism and into modern philosophy). Socialism gives it to us (as part of the same revolutionary tradition that gave us the French Revolution and the Terror, and the Revolutions of 1848 – see James Billington: Fire in the Minds of Men) as class conflict – conflict wherever anyone is distinct from anyone else. This is where we get deconstruction in literary criticism , for instance. Indeed, the implicit, oft concealed ideal in this framework is a non-specific human amalgum, a monist proletariat of one-ness but, since this is impossible (logically as well as historically) – however much you claim we’re moving toward it as a new spiritual age or utopia – it yields a perpetual source of agitation (and revolutionary fervor) in the meantime.

And what has this to do with Orthodoxy? Well, quite frankly, Orthodox people are just as good at bringing in the idol of Baal and setting it on the table during coffee hour as your local masonic lodge. In other words, we can be quite religious. Religion is the importation of the world system and its assumptions, all dressed up in religious garb – it’s the attempt to make the world compatible with the Faith.

And where do we do this with socialism? Well, how, really, does the pseudo-issue of cradle vs. convert, ethnic vs. anglo-saxon, (perhaps even traditionalist vs. modernist) differ from the social conflict approach in your average university gender or racial studies program? How does it differ from the rantings in The Socialist Worker? Different content, but same methodology. Same assumptions.

And, frankly, we have NO BUSINESS indulging in it or indulging it. We have no business legitimating the social order and presuming to reify its methodologies in the guise of Orthodox “issues”, mimicking the lost with our own version of class consciousness. We are the people who have no Jew nor Greek. We are those who venerate Saints baptized as infants and Saints baptized as adults. And the moment we start ranting in the blogosphere, or the parish hall, or (God forbid) from the pulpit, about this group or that group, reified in terms of divisive conflicts, we’ve become a social club. A religious expression of the world order. Might as well pin on some lapel badges, wear berets, and go marching over to the “other” Orthodox Church to stage a protest. Might as well create pamphlets about it. What piffle. And yes, the fathers warn us about piffle.

We are not of this world. We do not follow after the philosophers of this world, or the intellectual systems it raises up against the Church, which will prevail against it, though the final battle take place at the gates of Hell itself. Marxism. Socialism. Deconstructive conflict-theory. It doesn’t belong in the temple and among the pieties of the faithful.

So when you hear “the converts are messing it up” or “the ethnics just don’t get it” or someone rolls their eyes over the “cradles”, besides sounding like a bunch of ridiculous kids factionalizing into “geeks”, “jocks”, and “stoners”, we’re repudiating the Faith, denying the Incarnation, and embracing the world – and not just the world, the failed, detritus of their philosophical cast-offs. The trash of the world. The children of God shouldn’t play with the trash.