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.

What Carries Over

“Don’t be distressed if you have inherited faults, and don’t boast if you have inherited virtues, because God will examine the efforts people have made on their old selves.” – Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain

Acknowledging Failure

“If we can’t struggle much, or even not at all, at least let us humbly recognize this and ask for God’s mercy. If this recognition were not for our own benefit, then Christ wouldn’t ask it from us.” – Elder Paisios

Not a Belief System – An Asceticism

“A correct person is not one who says all the right things, but one who lives properly, in accordance with the Gospel.” – Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos

Humility is Speed

The more we humble ourselves in painful repentance, the more rapidly our prayer reaches God. When, though, we lose humility, no ascetic striving will help us. The action in us of pride, criticism of our brethren, self-exalting and hostility towards our neighbor, thrusts us away from the Lord. – unknown

Looking to the Champions

The best medicine in every trial of ours is the greater trials suffered by our fellow men, if only we can call them to mind. – Elder Paisios

How to not put yourself out

If you tire yourself for your neighbor out of pure love, you will find rest in tiredness. But if you love only yourself and are lazy, you will tire yourself just by sitting. – Elder Paisios (Eznepidis) of the Holy Mountain

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.

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