We are changed into the image we reflect

"Purified Lips" by Grace Carol Bomer

The following is the tail end of a post entitled Formal… but here to party by Andrew Mills at his blog Metanoia. I recommend that you take a look at his post in its entirety, but I'm warning you, it starts out differently than you might have guessed, it tears off a few false faces, but it ends up here, with these closing paragraphs...

So what does it mean to be “real”? From the Christian perspective we have to look at what Jesus said. And what Jesus said is telling. The last thing he said to the apostles before ascending into heaven is a powerful clue as to what he thought it meant to be a fully realized human. He said, “By this will all men know that you are mine, and that I was sent by the Father; if you have love for one another.” And likewise, when he was asked the most important law for humans to follow he summed it all up with “Love God, and love each other.”

Some of us see God as angry, powerful, and distant. Some see him as an ooey gooey spirit that hasn’t got a personality, and is there when I want to be thankful, but doesn’t care when I want to be a bit shady. Some see Jesus as a “warrior with a sword in hand and a tattoo down his leg.” I tend to see Jesus as a subversive hippie prophet, teaching Love and “smash the state.”

Some like to think of Jesus in a tuxedo t-shirt. That says, “I’m formal, but I’m here to party.”

But maybe if we’re missing God in our real life, it’s because we’re looking for the wrong things. Maybe we miss God because he’s got dirt under his nails. Maybe we miss him because he’s sitting down and hugging the neck of someone we find repulsive.

Do I miss part of God because he’s sitting down with a conservative business man in a freshly pressed suit?

Do some miss part of God because he’s whispering their name from a moss covered tree in the middle of the woods?

Maybe if we miss him, we miss him because we keep reaching up trying to grasp someone who has come down here among us. You find what you look for. Seek and keep seeking and you will find. But I guarantee you that what you find will surprise you.

— Andrew Mills

That very word which I spoke

Then Jesus cried out, "When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. When he looks at me, he sees the one who sent me. I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness. As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day. For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it. I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say."

John 12:44-50 NIV

God is truth and light. God’s judgment is nothing else than our coming into contact with truth and light. In the day of the Great Judgment all men will appear naked before this penetrating light of truth. The ‘books’ will be opened. What are these ‘books’? They are our hearts. Our hearts will be opened by the penetrating light of God, and what is in these hearts will be revealed. If in those hearts there is love for God, those hearts will rejoice in seeing God’s light. If, on the contrary, there is hatred for God in those hearts, these men will suffer by receiving on their opened hearts this penetrating light of truth which they detested all their life.

So that which will differentiate between one man and another will not be a decision of God, a reward or a punishment from Him, but that which was in each one’s heart; what was there during all our life will be revealed in the Day of Judgment. If there is a reward and a punishment in this revelation – and there really is – it does not come from God but from the love or hate which reigns in our heart. Love has bliss in it, hatred has despair, bitterness, grief, affliction, wickedness, agitation, confusion, darkness, and all the other interior conditions which compose hell (cf. 1 Corinthians 4:6).

In the future life the Christian is not examined if he has renounced the whole world for Christ’s love, or if he has distributed his riches to the poor or if he fasted or kept vigil or prayed, or if he wept and lamented for his sins, or if he has done any other good in this life, but he is examined attentively if he has any similitude with Christ, as a son does with his father.

St. Symeon the New Theologian
The quote of Saint Symeon is from Fr Milovan's excellent blog, Again and Again.

How precious, God, Your love!

Psalms for the 7th Day
35 36 37

Psalm 36:5-9
…Your love, Yahweh,
reaches to the heavens,
Your faithfulness to the clouds;
Your righteousness is like
the mountains of God,
Your judgments like the mighty deep.

Yahweh, protector of man and beast,
how precious, God, Your love!
Hence the sons of men
take shelter in the shadow of Your wings.

They feast on the bounty of Your house,
You give them drink from Your river of pleasure;
yes, with You is the fountain of life,
by Your light we see the light.
Do not stop loving those who know You…

…óti pará Si pighí zo’ís,
en tó photí Sou opsómetha phós…
paráteinon to eleós Sou
tis ghinóskousi Se…

Kαὶ δώσω αὐτῷ τὸν ἀστέρα τὸν πρωϊνόν

I awakened in the dark, the last scenes of a strange dream still ebbing through my mind. I was traveling, and at a stopping point had gone to a temple to worship at vespers. I returned to where I had left my belongings. Where were they? Where was my coat, my blanket? Where was my satchel full of tools? The blanket, I found. The jacket and the satchel were gone and the tools scattered all over the room, tiny nails that I used in my work, strewn in their hundreds all over the floor. Who would help me gather them up, and where would I put them, since my bag was gone?

In my room with uncovered windows, not a hint of light—it was still pre-dawn. I lay there as always when He awakens me, and I began to talk to Him, to thank Him for all that He has done for me. I stopped almost before I began. Something was different. The darkness was warm and calm, His presence filled every minute of space and time. I was enfolded, and it was my turn to listen, His to speak. “My will is your certainty. My good will your protection.” Nothing is more certain than the future, nothing more certain than the past. “I was there at your beginning. I am here with you now. I will be there at your end.”

I started again to thank Him and praise Him, but the smoke of His presence filled the temple, and I was driven back. In the silence He spoke what words cannot repeat. I listened while I recalled the days of old. How I wanted to find Him but did not know what He would be for me when I found Him. How I did not find Him, but He found me. How I wanted to choose Him, how I wanted to dedicate my life to Him. How I did not choose Him, but He chose me. How He said to me, “Not this offering,” pointing at my vegetables, “but This,” pointing at His Lamb.

“You were with Me when I laid the earth’s foundations, and you will be with Me when I close the door on this icy age.” Did I do something to deserve this? Was it my choice, my free will that did this? How was it that in the flow of time I appeared and did something that could raise me out of that flow? “You would not have called to Me, if I had not been calling to you. You will never understand this, never grasp this, until you shed the skin from your eye and see Me as I see you. It is enough that your eye should be single and your body full of light.”

I took pause, selah. The darkness surrounded me, and the silence. My thoughts and deeds, apt for their time, my friends and loved ones I will never see again on earth, my current circumstances provided for, what will happen, who will yet come, all unknown to me but as certain, as apt, as providential as the past, as this moment. He set me on my feet and bade me walk in His ways, shielding me from harm, entrusting me to His commandments. Nothing different will ever happen to me, because on me His day has already dawned, the day without end. Rest in that, my soul, selah.

Grave light began to mix with the darkness. I could see my hand before my face. I reached over and took up my psalm book, opened it randomly to the 57th psalm. Lamenatzéach al tashchét, leDavíd mikhtám, kevarchó mipnéy Sha’úl bam‘aráh… “For the Conductor, a plea to be spared from destruction, by David, a Michtam, when he fled from Saul, in the cave…” Chanéyni, Elohím, chanéyni… “Favor me, O God, favor me…” My eyes could barely make out the letters on the page, and they closed by themselves, my spirit contemplating the rest of the psalm without reading it. Then I rested, and fell back to speaking to the Lord.

So it was He that chose me of His free will, just as He chose to ascend the Cross of His free will, for me. So it was He from the beginning who had me in His sights, not I who was looking for Him. So it was He saved me and called me ‘Brother’ before I came to the place of meeting He had arranged for me, to that holy rendezvous.
“I waited until you noticed the signs I had been sending, and then by the signs I sent you, you understood that I was standing behind your wall. I spoke to you when you believed not in Me, but in the signs. When you believed in the signs, you were ready to hear My voice.”

So it was He who kept me from wandering in the past to the lands from which there is no escape. It was He who kept me out of the prison from which there is no release. When I asked Him to keep me from the sin that kills eternally, because in me is no strength to resist it, He had already placed His seal on my heart, on my arm, to prevent me, and I, not noticing, asked Him for what He already bestowed. “Glory to You, O God. Glory to You, O God. Glory to You, O God.” And the hymn of the 1st Tone started up in my mind,
“Though the tomb was sealed by a stone and soldiers guarded Your pure body, You arose, O Savior, on the third day, giving life unto the world…”

The morning is now full. When dawn really came, and the sun rose a little to the southeast of the mountain and started pouring its light into my room, I took up my psalm book, which I had been clasping to my chest, and prayed parts of several psalms, whatever verses my eyes fell on. I was still held in suspense by what I heard in the pre-dawn darkness, even as I am now. So the future is as certain as the past. It is finished. The words I use to say these things, though, I have said, read or heard before, without knowing what they meant.

High praise, Yahweh, I give You,
for You have helped me up…
Psalm 30:1 Jerusalem Bible

Psalms for the 6th Day
30 31 32 33 34 (English)
35 36 37 38 (Hebrew)

Your mercies, Lord, Your mercies

…are what fill me with dread. You are not a God who is pleased with wickedness. Boasters collapse under Your scrutiny. But I, so great is Your love, may come to Your House, and before Your holy Temple bow down, in reverence to You.

Your love, Father, upholds all the world. You are not a God who like a watchmaker designs and builds a clock, winds it up, and then leaves it to tick out its time moment by moment while You go away to live Your real life.

You hold us and everything that is, suspended as thoughts in Your mind. You never cease thinking of us, You never cease loving us whom You call the apple of Your eye, You never give up on these thoughts of Yours whom You have endowed with freedom.

The whole world is bathed in Your blazing light, yet we still wander through it unseeing as blind men, thinking and doing deeds of darkness, while You follow us with Your eyes, waiting and watching to catch us when we fall.

Your mercies, Lord, Your mercies are so great, and so great your patience, Your long-suffering love, maintaining and renewing the world by the Word of Your command, that we do not notice, Your mercy is too great for us of small mercy.

I cross myself to confess that I am the reason You ascended the Cross of Your own free will, and I bend down to touch the earth before You to acknowledge that I am but dust, but You raise me up, You raise me up and straighten me when I am most afraid.

Come into Your own, Lord, come among us visibly, reveal Your power, grant pardon to us sinners by Your saving Presence, anoint us with the myrrh of gladness, Saviour of fugitives, for to You, to You alone, do we run, O God our God, hope of all the earth.

Glory to the Father, to the Son, and to the Spirit Holy, Triad One in essence, Eternal, YHWH, the only lover of mankind. Glory to You.

Let your light shine

Here is a snippet or teaser of a post entitled Let Your Light Shine that I found on the blog Metanoia…

…if we believe that we are created in God’s image. If we believe that love is better than hate. If we believe that mercy is better than condemnation. If we believe that helping is better than hurting. Where does our logic break down? See, I believe that these things are true. I believe that it is closer to the reality of the “is-ness” of life to say that we should love each other. But often I take a backward leap of faith and I don’t do it. I act in small selfish ways. I take the resources I’ve been blessed with and I squander them and refuse to share with people around me who are hurting. I believe that it is my job to help bring heaven to earth, but then I ignore all the hells on earth (and all too often I help create them).

So I encourage anyone who believes in the chance plus time version of life to continue to look at the logic of the position, but to continue to make that leap of faith to work towards love and justice. Even if you don’t believe in God, when you work for love, you are working for God. And I encourage Christians to follow the logic of your faith. If we believe what we claim to believe then it will change the way we act towards those around us. Christianity can’t just be a social club for people who “get it.” If the Gospel is good news, then it has to be good news for everyone. It should be good news to the person you’ve been hateful to that you are being changed by the Spirit. It should be good news to the downtrodden, the poor, the orphans, the immigrants, that you are being made new.

If Christianity is just about you getting right with God, then you are missing the point. Re-birth is the starting line, not the finish line. Let your light shine.

— Andrew Mills

Personality cult

Not by us, Yahweh, not by us,
by You alone is glory deserved,
by Your love and Your faithfulness.
Psalm 115 Jerusalem Bible

By the very nature of a thing, its meaning, its use or function, is implicit.

God Himself, who is beyond all being and is therefore no thing, still fits into this idea. This is the test of greatness: that the very large can enter the very small, the very high can have commerce with the very low, the beyond being can indwell the being, and the Creator can become a creature. And so, God’s meaning, use or function (though it’s unseemingly to speak thus) is to deserve glory. All that He is (God), all that He does (love), and all that He reveals (faithfulness), makes Him the only One who deserves glory. That is His nature. Our nature is the complementary one: to give glory.

If we grasp this, and then look at the world around us, and especially at ourselves, we are astonished to find that from our perspective, the opposite seems to be true. Somehow, our instincts have been changed. It is we who deserve glory (in our own estimation), even while we are mentally denying it. It is from others, and even from God, that we expect to receive glory. This is so essentially hidden from us that as soon as we do a good deed, or think a good thought, we feel happy and inwardly congratulate ourselves, as we wait for it to be noticed by others. Since God is metaphysical, we just assume that He is up there applauding us, giving us glory. Though we call Him our faithful Friend, our attitude reveals that we actually regard Him as our faithful fan. Even if no one else notices us, at least He does. I am no different. I am just as addicted as you are to this cult of personality.

Last night I was trying to have a Greek bible study with a friend in a coffeehouse. We were reading and learning from the second chapter of Luke’s gospel, the account of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, as yesterday was the feast-day Ypapandí which commemorates it. The wonderful passage which I memorized years ago, “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word…” is one of my favorites. What a pleasure to read it in the original language, and to understand it!

At the next table, two men were standing and apparently trying to finish up some business and make their farewells. One man looked like he was earnestly trying to get away, the other as though he were trying to prolong the encounter. That man kept looking over at us reading Greek aloud and discussing it. Finally, the first man got away, the other graciously walking him to the door… or maybe not so graciously. After the first had left, the second man came back to the table and was fumbling with his stuff and fidgeting with a small high-tech digital camera, apparently looking at previews on the screen.

All at once, he looked over at us and called out, “What are you two doing? Is that Latin you’re reading?” I was facing him, so I responded, “No, it’s biblical Greek. We’re studying the New Testament.” Then a conversation ensued in which this gentleman dialogued with me, mostly, asking some questions about Greek, and then making a connexion with “Greek” by announcing that his art teacher was a young Greek girl, “no, actually she is half Lithuanian,” and that she was also a chanter in the Greek church.

“Oh, you know Martha?” I gasped, surprised. Then, gradually the conversation turned in a direction that I had hardly anticipated. This 55 year old, twice-married, left-handed, very talented graphic artist, who had totally designed his beautiful first home and then lost it in litigation with his ex-wife, and then even had the hard luck of his second wife being deported to Fiji (he didn’t explain why) without his being able to follow her there (because the Fiji government restricts the immigration of white people to keep the nation ethnically native), showed us a couple of photos of Martha on his digital camera, to prove to us that he knew her.

Before I noticed where he was going, our new ‘best friend’ had moved closer to us and was standing at the edge of our table, locating photos of all his best paintings and showing them to us. He also knew my son Andrew and had heard him play at an art exhibit (probably that Martha had managed). “Wait a minute!” he said, “I have a video of Andrew playing! Here, let me show it to you…” he said, as he passed the camera first to me and then my fellow bible student. “Very nice,” I said. “I used to listen to him practicing all night sometimes, as his bedroom was next to mine.”

Then another surprise, for me anyway. Mentioning the Greek church where my son and Martha are both cantors, I realized (too late) that I had just opened another chance for him to do a take-off on his knowledge and experience of the Greek church. “That young priest, he’s so handsome, and his pretty little wife, she’s a beauty really…” he began, as he now boasted of having met our new presbyter Fr Dimos and his presvytera. More than that my poor memory cannot recall but, trying to find some gracious closure to this ‘visit’ I asked him a rather pointed question, “Hey, why aren’t you Orthodox anyway, since you know all these people and all this stuff?”

“When I was eight or nine, I got this nifty little telescope. It was my most prized possession. I even still have it in mint condition in the original box. I was raised Catholic. You know, rosaries and statues and confession and communion and Hail Mary’s a hundred and fifty times. Well, when I used my telescope to see the wonders of the night sky, I realized that if there was a God, I could relate to him better by looking at planets and stars than by going to church. I let my parents know how I felt and they let me off the hook. They were very understanding…”

Now it made sense why all his paintings were close-ups in incredible detail of the lunar disk and surface, some of them augmented by images of fetuses in detached wombs dotted about the night sky like other planets, modern art for sure. I got quiet, realizing that if I said anything more, he would use it as an invitation to explore another facet of his personal universe and reveal it to us. That didn’t stop him. He started on a new, rather opinionated political topic, waiting for me to react.

I looked over at my fellow bible student and then waited for a pause. “What did you say your name was? …oh, that’s right. Well, I hope you won’t take offense, but we were really trying to study the bible tonight. Would you mind if we got back to it?” This was at least a half hour since he first came over to us. Without visibly being taken aback, he graciously withdrew, thanked us for the chat, gathered his things, and left.

“Now, where were we…? Ah yes, νυν απολυεις τον δουλον σου δεσποτα κατα το ρημα σου εν ειρηνη… Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace…”

Apocalypse

I hope now to stir your minds to remember
Things others have taught you
I am merely repeating
That which you were mocked for believing
“What sort of light is cast from devouring hope?”
Not in this dissipated world
But a vision more substantial

Consider the light then given from life
Ever present, now made immanent
Ended in their polluted water
But clean water still carries the life it always did
Filth must forget to survive
Remembering makes for fresh rain
Or better, fire

Everyone is hung up about waiting
But time is an easy thing to waste
There is no time for evil
All the time in the world for good
This is not because what you do does not matter
But because it does
Only death should die!

There is a fire we have not yet known
But will sooner than dawn breaks from night
We call it vengeance in our ignorance
But the maiden knew no hate
Rather burned brightly
The sun still envies the mercy seat
Stepping before us on to the new day

So, be quickened and run
Chase the stars across their crystal spheres
Refresh your brother
Carry your sister
In all things give thanks to your father
Know your neighbor
Open your mouth in faith and love

Spotless, blameless, peaceful even in suffering
Just as with him we can be
Even if it is hard to understand
But you need not twist
Or be crushed by weight beyond your strength
Even a strong man knows to use a lever
So a cross is given to move the world

Keep the memory close at hand
How they were lost to their own trickery
Their hearts slept the watch
What fools the wise who know not the hour
The far country has been brought near
This land stands conquered
And will end before our labors are done

The doors of the house
Built from the wood of the fig tree
They will not stand the four winds
Nor will the clouds of glory be kept out
Great the thunder, mighty the quake
Mountains cast into churning seas
The unapproachable approaches!

Please, lest this be counted for evil
And time be lost for me to speak
Do not settle for your delusions
Refuse the devils at the window
Admit the disease receive the cure
The great physician does not disappoint
And you may yet know what you were made for

— David Dickens, Nothing Hypothetical

Of all David's poems, this has to be one of the best. I invite you to visit his blog at the link after his name. What Walt Whitman said of his own poetry, I can confidently say of David Dickens'…

Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves,
yet needed most, I bring,
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
A book separate, not link’d with the rest
nor felt by the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Book I - Inscriptions, Shut not your doors

A different kind of Chapter 11

Definition: Chapter 11
A bankruptcy option in which a trustee is appointed to reorganize the bankrupt firm. Although the existing claims of security holders are likely to be reduced or replaced with different claims, it is expected that the firm will continue operating.

What was bankrupt?
The old law and religion.

Were the existing claims of the security holders reduced or replaced?
Both. If they continue to grumble and not accept what the appointed Trustee offers them, their claims are reduced. If they fully accept the reorganization of the firm, their claims are replaced with something better.

What firm is it that is expected to keep operating?
The business of the Trustee's Father, the One who said, "My Father continues working, and so do I."

Who is the Trustee?
The God-Man, Jesus Christ.

Here is His version of Chapter 11...

Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of the realities that at present remain unseen. It was for their faith that our ancestors were commended.

It is by faith that we understand that the world was created by One Word from God, so that no apparent cause can account for the things we can see.

It was because of his faith that Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain, and for that he was declared to be righteous when God made acknowledgment of his offerings. Though he is dead, he still speaks by faith.

It was because of his faith that Enoch was taken up and did not have to experience death: he was not to be found because God had taken him. This was because before his assumption it is attested that he had pleased God. Now it is impossible to please God without faith, since anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and rewards those who try to find Him.

It was through his faith that Noah, when he had been warned by God of something that had never been seen before, felt a holy fear and built an ark to save his family. By his faith the world was convicted, and he was able to claim the righteousness which is the reward of faith.

It was by faith that Abraham obeyed the call to set out for a country that was the inheritance given to him and his descendants, and that he set out without knowing where he was going. By faith he arrived, as a foreigner, in the Promised Land, and lived there as if in a strange country, with Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. They lived there in tents while he looked forward to a city founded, designed and built by God.

It was equally by faith that Sarah, in spite of being past the age, was made able to conceive, because she believed that He who made the promise would be faithful to it. Because of this, there came from one man, and one who was already as good as dead himself, more descendants than could be counted, as many as the stars of heaven or the grains of sand on the seashore.

All these died in faith, before receiving any of the things that had been promised, but they saw them in the far distance and welcomed them, recognising that they were only strangers and nomads on earth. People who use such terms about themselves make it quite plain that they are in search of their real homeland. They can hardly have meant the country they came from, since they had the opportunity to go back to it; but in fact they were longing for a better homeland, their heavenly homeland. That is why God is not ashamed to be called their God, since He has founded the city for them.

It was by faith that Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac. He offered to sacrifice his only son even though the promises had been made to him, and he had been told: It is through Isaac that your name will be carried on. He was confident that God had the power even to raise the dead; and so, figuratively speaking, he was given back Isaac from the dead.

It was by faith that this same Isaac gave his blessing to Jacob and Esau for the distant future. By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of Joseph's sons, leaning on the end of his stick as though bowing to pray. It was by faith that, when he was about to die, Joseph recalled the Exodus of the Israelites and made the arrangements for his own burial.

It was by faith that Moses, when he was born, was hidden by his parents for three months; they defied the royal edict when they saw he was such a fine child. It was by faith that, when he grew to manhood, Moses refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter, and chose to be ill-treated in company with God's people rather than to enjoy for a time the pleasures of sin. He considered that the insults offered to the Anointed were something more precious than all the treasures of Egypt, because he had his eyes fixed on the reward. It was by faith that he left Egypt and was not afraid of the king's anger; he held to his purpose like a man who could see the Invisible. It was by faith that he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood to prevent the Destroyer from touching any of the first-born sons of Israel. It was by faith they crossed the Red Sea as easily as dry land, while the Egyptians, trying to do the same, were drowned.

It was through faith that the walls of Jericho fell down when the people had been round them for seven days. It was by faith that Rahab the prostitute welcomed the spies and so was not killed with the unbelievers.

Is there any need to say more? There is not time for me to give an account of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, or of David, Samuel and the prophets. These were men who through faith conquered kingdoms, did what is right and earned the promises. They could keep a lion's mouth shut, put out blazing fires and emerge unscathed from battle. They were weak people who were given strength, to be brave in war and drive back foreign invaders. Some came back to their wives from the dead, by resurrection; and others submitted to torture, refusing release so that they would rise again to a better life. Some had to bear being pilloried and flogged, or even chained up in prison. They were stoned, or sawn in half, or beheaded; they were homeless, and dressed in the skins of sheep and goats; they were penniless and given nothing but ill-treatment. They were too good for the world and they went out to live in deserts and mountains and in caves and ravines. These are all heroes of faith, but they did not receive what was promised, since God had made provision for us to have something better, and they were not to reach perfection except with us.

Hebrews Chapter 11

Miracles aren’t just magic

In the same line of thought as was expressed in my previous post, quoting the Russian bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, I want to post the following, gut-wrenchingly honest homily on the subject of God's miracles in our lives. After all, though God keeps us alive, as far as this earth is concerned, it isn't 'for keeps.' That life 'for keeps' is waiting for those who believe in Jesus in that place which He has gone to prepare for us. This was not written as a ramble of thoughts detached from a real event, but came out of a young man's dealing with the grief of his mother's untimely death. What he writes here is foundational yet simple, so simple that many people miss it, until it catches up with them.

So, in the space between my last post and this one life has taken some strange twists and turns. The most major twist is the subject of this post. My mother died two weeks ago today.

About 7 years ago a doctor told her that she had cancer. Doctors have a way of saying the most vulgar things. They say phrases like, “It is as we feared.” Or they say, “It’s not what we were hoping for.” In this case the doctor used the swear-word, “Ocular Melanoma”. The doctor said that if it spread past her eye that she would have no more than 6 months to live. Again…that was 7 years ago. The cancer spread to her lungs, her liver, and her brain. But she had 7 good years. I never saw my mother “dying.” She lived every day of her life. And up until the last couple of weeks she was able to do whatever she wanted to.

We prayed for miracles. We prayed for healing. And we saw it. We saw it for 7 years. The thing I never considered until recently was the fact that miracles aren’t permanent. And I think that’s why so many people don’t believe that miracles have happened when they do. We expect miracles to be permanent. We want healing that doesn’t end up with us just getting sick again. But miracles aren’t just magic tricks from a god in a box. Miracles are always referred to as “signs.” They point us to something else. People who are healed…even people who are raised from the dead…they get sick and they die. The miracle is not about that person in that situation. The miracle is about a God who is making all things new. It is a glimpse at a future in which the God who created the universe will wipe every tear away, and there will be no more suffering, or pain, or death.

So I can say that my mother was healed miraculously for 7 years. And I can say that on January 5, 2010 at 10:15 in the evening, while family and friends gathered around her singing “Blessed Assurance”, she was healed permanently. The God of the universe reached down and scooped her up in his arms. He wiped her tears away and said, “Well done my good and faithful servant.”

In the weeks leading up to her passing there were a lot of beautiful conversations. Hard, painful conversations, but beautiful as well. All of us will one day face the end of our days on earth. I hope that all of us can live a life with as much purpose, and die a death with as much meaning as Wanda Mills. She is not here, but she is not gone.

It is easy to give in to the sadness and the rage. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. But like Job, we can sit in the ashes of our life when things look the most dark and say, “I will put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, I will not speak again.” A friend once said he was jealous of atheists because as a believer in God we have to see meaning in everything. And I agree with him sometimes, but not this time. I love it that I don’t have to be happy about things that happen like this. But I also trust that there is a God who set the Earth on its foundations. Who dug the oceans and filled them with water. Who hung the stars in the sky. Who set the planets spinning in their orbits. Who orders all of existence so that even the bad things fit into the plan. And who put skin on. Who became flesh and blood so that he could scream along side of us in our pain. A God who can look at us no matter what sort of suffering we are in and say, “me too.” And who lived a perfect life, and died the death we deserved. And who now holds the keys to death and hell.

I am eternally grateful for a God who will say, “[I] will wipe every tear from [your] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away…Look! I am making everything new!”

— Andrew Mills, from his blog Metanoia

You keep me alive

God desires and seeks the salvation of all. And He is always saving all who wish to be saved from drowning in the sea of life and sin. But He does not always save in a boat or a convenient, well-equipped harbor. He promised to save the Holy Apostle Paul and all his fellow-travelers, and He did save them. But the Apostle and his fellow-passengers were not saved in the ship, which was wrecked; they were saved with great difficulty, some by swimming and others on boards and various bits of the ship's wreckage.

— Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov

Though I live surrounded by trouble,
You keep my alive—to my enemies’ fury!
You stretch Your hand out and save me,
Your right hand will do everything for me.
Yahweh, Your love is everlasting,
do not abandon us whom you gave made.
Psalm 138:7-8 Jerusalem Bible

Psalms for the 28th Day
132 133 134 135 136 137 138

Torah Or

Light of Torah—ikon of the Word
before He came.

If I bear witness of Myself, My witness is not true. There is another who bears witness of Me, and I know that the witness which He witnesses of Me is true. You have sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. Yet I do not receive testimony from man, but I say these things that you may be saved. He was the burning and shining lamp, and you were willing for a time to rejoice in his light.

But I have a greater witness than John’s; for the works which the Father has given Me to finish—the very works that I do—bear witness of Me, that the Father has sent Me. And the Father Himself, who sent Me, has testified of Me. You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form. But you do not have His word abiding in you, because whom He sent, Him you do not believe. You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.

I do not receive honor from men. But I know you, that you do not have the love of God in you. I have come in My Father’s name, and you do not receive Me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive. How can you believe, who receive honor from one another, and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God?

Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father; there is one who accuses you—Moses, in whom you trust. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”

John 5:31-47 New KJV (Orthodox Study Bible)

Dreaming of Heaven

No matter where we go, in place or in time, across all cultures, we find that all human beings have one thing in common, without exception. We all have this idea that somehow, things are not as they should be, that there is something flawed about all we do, all we experience, in this world. There is always present this feeling of wanting to be home, but just when we think we’ve found home, it too turns out to be just another way station on the caravan of souls going… somewhere.

This idea, or feeling (because it seems to transcend mere thought and seems to issue from another part of our being, the heart maybe) can almost be described as what defines mankind and sets us off from other creatures. Though there are animals that build and organize, it seems that they always follow the same logic, and their creations never deviate very much from an instinctual standard. Could this idea of ours also be something of the same sort, an instinctual standard that is inseparably part of us, the very thing we were created to do?

In any case, we have this idea, but we cannot fulfill it. We are living in a world that is already perfect, yet somehow we find ourselves unable to be happy here. Some part of us keeps dreaming of heaven.

The one true American fairy tale, The Wizard of Oz, in its film version exceeded the scope and content of the original children’s books, becoming in the process another heavily endowed myth of our dreaming of heaven.

Every religion and philosophy the world over has arisen out of mankind’s dreaming of heaven. It comes even before the discovery of God, and is probably what has pushed us into that search for Him. If there is a heaven, there must be a God. Does that make sense? Well, maybe not to all. Buddhism doesn’t need a God, but in some of its forms, it still wants, looks for, and promises heaven. It’s interesting that a similar experience can provoke at least two different responses.

Once there was a rich and cloistered prince who left the palace and walked through the world. He saw there four things that impressed him: a sick man, a poor man, a beggar and a corpse. All of these are things that he knew were intrinsically wrong, and the books about him say that “he was filled with infinite sorrow.” Ultimately, after much searching and thinking, this man came to the conclusion that none of this was real, and that escape was possible and necessary. This escape, though, was not dreaming of heaven. It was something more like not dreaming at all. Why was this? Because this man considered that what he experienced in the world was itself just a bad dream. He created a path of escape from dreaming. This man was Gautama, called the Buddha.

In another story, there was a poor man who left his workshop and walked through the world. He saw there the brokenness of people, experiencing the rigor and hardship of their lives, joined them in their alternating sorrows and joys, tasted with them the bitterness of their exile from home, their dreaming of heaven. He shared with them this strange, inescapable feeling that things were not right in the world. He was born into a religion that tried its best to give men a system of rules which, if they lived by them, promised to make their lives in this world right, so that they wouldn’t need to dream of heaven. This religion even had a God who gave the rules and tried His best to get the people to follow them. Though they had the rules, and the belief that following them would set the world right, they didn’t follow them just the same. They didn’t, but the poor man did, and by following and fulfilling the rules to the uttermost, he opened a path of escape from dreaming of heaven, by opening a path of entering into heaven. This man was Jesus, called the Christ.

We all have the same experience as these two men, as have all men in all ages and cultures. Every time we think we’ve found home, somewhere to be comfortable, where everything is “as it should be,” something or someone spoils it. In the film The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo, “It’s that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something is wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me.” Morpheus in Greek mythology is the god of dreaming. Dreaming of heaven. The Wachowski brothers sure packed a lot of truth into that first film.

Here, if nowhere else, is the common experience that unites everyone, the knowledge that all is not well with us and with our world. Religions and philosophies offer answers and explanations, hoping to strengthen our dreaming of heaven to the point where maybe the dreaming will be enough for us, and sometimes just trying to get us to not dream at all. But where did the need to dream originate? Who told us that all is not well? And people dream only of things that they have seen and experienced somewhere, even though the dreaming sometimes distorts them beyond recognition.

The answer to all this, does it come from the prince turned enlightened one, or from the carpenter nailed to a tree?

To dream or not to dream, that is the question.

And if we must dream, who will wake us up?

The reward of virtue is to see Your face,
and on waking, to gaze my fill on Your likeness.
Psalm 17:15 Jerusalem Bible

Bad alliances

If you make yourself a friend of the world,
you cannot be God’s friend.

The father of the prodigal son was a pious and God-loving man, because only such a man could have allowed his sons their full freedom and still receive one of them back with love and honor (and unself-conscious forgiveness) after he had abused his freedom and defiled himself.
The boy was ‘brought up right.’

A good marriage and family life does not come about by magic. It begins with mutual faith. It grows and is sustained by mutual faith and faithfulness. And it continues blessed and good right to the end only as long as the first faith and trust is preserved inviolable.

What can destroy it? Wanton breaking of the commandments, adultery, bearing false witness, theft and covetousness—all of which stem from forgetting who is the Lord: “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”

I have passed on to my sons what my dad passed on to me, “If you are looking for a good wife, you don’t go looking for one in bars. You go to church and find one.” Though I did not exactly follow his instructions—he told me this after I was married—I followed a slightly different route, which is maybe even better: Pray to the Lord to send you a wife, and then watch closely whom He sends to you, just as you watch for friends that He sends you, and one of these will be your wife. It goes without saying—or does it?—that you are living a life of discipleship when you make this prayer.

How simple all of life is, especially family life and our circle of relationships, when we follow the commandments! Jesus says, “If you love Me, you will follow my commandments.” That’s what I’m talking about, not some rigorous set of rules whether biblical or self-improvement-minded, neither of which will ever succeed in really making anyone better. “Branch out for a time they may, but when you look for them they will be gone, vanished like their vain hopes.” Christ is at once the source of all righteousness, the way to it, and the achievement of it. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” says Jesus (John 14:6).

Even being raised in a pious family, a son does not become a Christian by magic. As soon as he reaches the age of independent decision, his parents’ faith no longer speaks for him the moment he makes the conscious choice to take the world for his friend, instead of God. Even after making that choice, he can repent, and God our heavenly Father, can and will take him back. But just as the father of the prodigal son did not restrain that son from the choices he made, neither does God, or the parents, restrain him or constrain him. They may advise, they may teach, they certainly must pray for him to turn away from his friendship with the world, but they cannot force him to give it up. He must want a better friendship.

So it is, that a man who has taken the world for his friend no longer thinks of God, except of the punishment that he will receive after everything he does is done and his life is over—if there is a God.

Instead of memories of a youth spent in innocent fun and friendships, he finds memories only of riotous relationships, infidelities, the waste of his virginity and that of one he might have truly loved and been wedded to, and years of profound loss: spoiled friendships, missed opportunities, time and money wasted, and all for what? Now the mercy of God can only drive him to even more miserable states, to where he, like the prodigal son feeding unclean animals (pigs) and not even being given their slop for food, finds himself at another point of decision: To utterly despair, or to return to his Father.

Rather than flee from house to house, or from town to town, to escape his brown girls and their offspring, like John of Puritania this son needs to turn around and start traveling Home, facing East. The road back will look very different than that same road looked when he made the world his friend and followed it to the place of bondage. By making God, in Christ, his Friend, the road will turn into something very, very narrow, but he won’t mind that, because he will hear his Friend going ahead of him, saying, “Follow Me.”

Patriarch Irinej of Serbia, Many Years!

His Holiness Irinej, Archbishop of Pec, Metropolitan of Belgrade and Karlovac and Patriarch of Serbia, was enthroned today at the Cathedral Church in Belgrade.

Christ among us, not an ideology

…the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think that God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.

And let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being "in Christ" or of Christ being "in them," this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts—that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body. And perhaps that explains one or two things. It explains why this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution—a biological or super-biological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 2, What Christians Believe, Chapter 5, The Practical Conclusion

House Church

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

— William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1919)

These lines, written in the aftermath of the Great War (1914-1918) could very well have been written as the prologue to the new age in which we live, an age even closer to the Day than any that have passed before. This is probably when the ‘Church Age’ actually ended, though we didn’t notice it at the time. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, living as they always have on the edge of their seats waiting for the Second Coming, declared that it had come, only it was a ‘spiritual’ event in the heavens, whose manifestation would not yet be revealed for some time—so much for false prophecy!

The Church Age has ended?
Well, this is a statement that will have a multitude of meanings for people. What I mean by it is, the age when the Christian Church was at its pinnacle of earthly power and influence, had definitely come to an end. For sure, in many places, down to this very day, the Church Age has not come to an end, though these are local instances of it, some related to sectarian or ethnic bases. In general, however, the Church Age is over. That’s why we can no longer speak of England or America as ‘Christian nations.’ The underlying culture is ‘Christian,’ but what is now built on that foundation is anything but Christian.

Hence, we have churches struggling to find ways to perpetuate themselves as institutions, to regain relevance for their version of Christianity. Some have morphed into reflections of the world with only a thin overlay of selective ‘Christian’ ideology, by this hoping to claim their share of the demographic pie. Others, more at a grass roots level and intending fidelity to what the Bible actually teaches, have snubbed authority structures, denominational labels and history, and organized themselves as house churches. ‘After all, that’s what the early Christians did.’ They do well to fellowship and worship in an environment at once familiar and spiritual. This is, in fact, an appropriate format for the Christian koinonia for an age like ours, but wait—there is more!

The visible Church, “as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners” (C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters) is the aggregate result of the fundamental reality of the invisible Church, “an ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity). What we see and experience when we ‘go to church’ is going to be the net result of what we, and everyone else, have invested of our ‘real’ lives, individually and in our families, in the following of Jesus, and in the worship of our heavenly Father ‘in spirit and in truth.’ The witness and ministry of the Church rests squarely on the foundation of the families and individuals that effectively constitute—the house church.

For that’s the real truth about the ‘house church’: it is the Christian family. Even in the first few generations of believers, though a larger group met together at someone’s house, the family that occupied that house was the house church. Larger and wealthier families had larger houses, and those would later evolve into the building for worship that early began to be called a ‘church.’

If today we see churches in disarray, worship services that are not reverent and focused not on God but on the people, should we be surprised? The Roman Catholics turned the altar away from ‘facing East’ toward the Deity, and towards the people, returning the altar to the dinner table it started out as. The concept isn’t wrong per se, but in so doing that community demonstrated that it too had fallen into confusion about what worship is, what fellowship is, and sacrificed the one for the other. This, however, is not the mind of Christ or of the Church. We meet the Lord in both places, at the altar, and in dining together. Each is distinct and proves that Christ is indeed among us, whenever and wherever we gather (it goes without saying) in His name.

Tampering with communal worship is one of the first signs that the house church isn’t really happening, though the need for it remains. The Christian family, as has been received by Orthodox Christians, is the house church, the basic building block of the temple of the living God. It is within the family that God’s Kingdom is taught and learned to be put first, the Word of God honored and given the highest place, the virtues of order and self-discipline practiced and handed over (with the rest of tradition) from the older to the younger generation, and brotherly love firmly planted in every soul.

If there are no house churches, then a non-liturgical Christian assembly tries to create one in its communal life, but it is out-scaled and the efforts result in useless rounds of novelty that satisfy no one and do not please God, who seeks only the salvation of our souls.
If there are no house churches, then a liturgical Christian community, the Orthodox for example, can devolve from an extended family of house churches that lives, prays, ministers, witnesses and worships in spirit and truth, into a mere mechanical performance of now meaningless and irrelevant rituals, and the need which the house church satisfies remains unfulfilled.

The family as house church thus divides all Christians into the haves and have-nots. “I tell you, to everyone who has will be given more; but from the man who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Luke 19:26 Jerusalem Bible). It all comes down to ‘what are you doing at home?’

When my family first came to the Orthodox Church (we had been evangelical Episcopalians), we were presented a copy of the book Making God Real in the Orthodox Christian Home by Fr Anthony Coniaris. We didn’t have to buy a copy. The Church just gave it to us as part of our ‘welcome package,’ because the idea of house church had to be impressed on us, as on any new Orthodox, right from the beginning. It was a priority then. What our new brethren and priests didn’t know about us, was that we were already living that way, even as Episcopalians. Daily prayer and bible reading as a family, daily instruction, observing the fasts, including the children in every spiritual activity according to their age and capacity. The book they gave us merely reinforced what we already were doing—being a house church.

“Staying over at our house,” warned one of my sons to his friends, “is like sleeping in a church.”

Yet, being a house church is not living in a religious and sanctimonious environment. Discipline, due respect and proper ceremony have their places, but being a house church is not the same as the game we used to play when I was a child, or that I even used to play with my sons when they were very small—having processions, practicing liturgical gestures, etc. We always knew we were ‘just pretending,’ but that’s how becoming a real Christian usually starts out. Children play at what they want to be when they grow up, and so we, like children raising other children, played at being followers of Jesus, so that in the end that’s what we would be—all of us.

But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.
Matthew 6:33 New King James Version

The sumptuous banquet of the Word

Today is the Sunday of Zacchaeus, just one week before the beginning of Triodion, the Orthodox division of chrónos time in which we make our preparations for the journey to Pascha, to the new paradise of the Tree of Life, the cross on which our Savior Jesus Christ hung as a ripe fruit, beckoning us to eat of it, that we might live forever. “I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world” (John 6:51).

The entrance gate to that new paradise is not permanently locked as was the gate to the old, from whence our first forefathers Adam and Eve were expelled for their transgressions, and we for ours. We have been invited, no, commanded, to open that gate and to enter, to seek Him whom our heart loves (cf. Song of Songs, 1:7), and we have been shown how, in the example of Zacchaeus, a man who though rich had come up short in his accounts with the Master, yet who was called to welcome the Lord into his house.

He entered Jericho and was going through the town when a man whose name was Zacchaeus made his appearance; he was one of the senior tax collectors and a wealthy man. He was anxious to see what kind of man Jesus was, but he was too short and could not see Him for the crowd; so he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to catch a glimpse of Jesus who was to pass that way.

When Jesus reached the spot he looked up and spoke to him,
‘Zacchaeus, come down! Hurry, because I must stay at your house today!’

And he hurried down and welcomed Him joyfully. They all complained when they saw what was happening. ‘He has gone to stay at a sinner’s house,’ they said. But Zacchaeus stood his ground and said to the Lord, ‘Look, Sir, I am going to give half my property to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody I will pay him back four times the amount.’

And Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because this man too is a son of Abraham; for the Son of Man has come to seek out and save what was lost.’

Luke 19:1-10 Jerusalem Bible

How can anyone who hears this true story not feel his spirit leap within him? Another chance to make good on everything that I have ruined, another chance to welcome back joy into my shattered life. Though I have filled my house with every good thing, it has been through pillaging what was not mine. Though I have exploited the poor, defrauded widows and orphans, He has seen hidden inside me the man that He created, and He is giving me another chance. He is letting me serve Him, letting me dine with Him, in my own house which He now has made His. “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man too is a son of Abraham; for the Son of Man has come to seek out and save what was lost.”

And so the Word of God comes to our personal Jericho, and we, having heard of Him, maybe knowing more about Him than we care to admit, run ahead to find a comfortable spot from which to view this parade of His followers, and actually lay our eyes on Him. All we wanted to do was just that—take a look. But what happens to us proves beyond all shadow of a doubt, that His love bestows on us more than we bargained for. Though we thought, ‘I am one of so many, I can hide among the leafy branches above this crowd, and see Him without being noticed,’ He sees us.

The crowd doesn’t see us, no matter what we do, good or bad, whether we try to be visible or invisible. No one ever sees us as we really are. We don’t even see ourselves. Yet we cannot hide from the One who made us, and who is all Eye. Though Jesus had never seen him in this world, He looked up and saw Zacchaeus and called him out by name, just as He calls each of us by name. ‘How do you know me?’ asks another man whom Jesus called by name. For that man, as for Zacchaeus, there was no gradual development into a follower of Christ; it happened in an instant, in a moment of kairós time
(cf. John 1:48).

It always must be this way. Jesus doesn’t wait. He calls us, and we either respond, or not. What must it feel like to be someone who has heard the voice of Jesus, and still turned away?

So Zacchaeus welcomed Jesus Christ into his home, prepared a feast, and dined with the Lord. No one had to tell him what to say or do. “Blessed are you... because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17 NASB), he just said it, and did it. “I am going to give half my property to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody I will pay him back four times the amount.” Zacchaeus returned to his senses, drawn back to reason by the Son of Man, remembered the covenant, came back to the commandments. Why? Because he heard the voice of Jesus say, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man too is a son of Abraham.”

We too are the sons and daughters, not only of Abraham, but of God our heavenly Father, through Christ our heavenly Brother, Friend, Master and Lord, who says to us, “I shall not call you servants any more, because a servant does not know his master’s business; I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have learnt from my Father” (John 15:15 JB) and “You are My friends, if you do what I command you” (John 15:14).

What an opportunity! Jesus calls us by name—even if we don’t know Him, He knows us—to the sumptuous banquet of the Word! With Zacchaeus, let’s return everything that doesn’t belong to us—sin itself—so that we can travel light, as we run the way of His commandments, because He has set us free.

Remember these things

I will show you another work that can establish man firmly on his way from beginning to end. It is to love God with all his heart and intention and to worship Him. God will then give him great strength and joy, and all the works of God will become to him as sweet as honeycomb. So will all labors of the body become light and sweet, along with his meditation, vigil and carrying the Lord's yoke.

However, on account of God's love for man, He unleashes upon him adversities so as not to be conceited, but stand firm in his struggle and proceed further in his growth. Instead of strength he feels languor and feebleness, instead of joy, sadness; instead of sweetness, bitterness. Many similar things befall him who loves God. Nevertheless, he is all the more strengthened in his struggle against them and eventually overcomes them. Once he does so, the Spirit of God stands by him in all things and strengthens him so as never to fear anything evil.

— Abba Anthony

If you were praying...

...for Nancy, who was suffering acutely from her fifth bout with cancer, and who had decided (with her husband’s agreement) to seek relief in assisted suicide, I am reasonably certain that she has passed away. The family's privacy needs must be very extreme, as I haven't found a public death notice, and it was only today that I found out by making some careful personal enquiries, that she may have died last Saturday. May God have mercy on her and her family.

Thank you, brethren, who have been praying for her since I first brought her grievous sickness to our attention. Now, let's just pray for her husband and son to have courage to carry on.

In You, Yahweh, I take shelter…

It is impossible to read the Psalms and not come away with more than you have given. The Lord speaks to us through them to the very details of our lives, answering all our concerns, all our prayers even before we ask Him. He is a good and loving God.

Psalm 71, one of the Psalms appointed for the fourteenth day of the month, always stops me in my tracks, especially when I read the words, “To many I have seemed an enigma…” How true, Lord, how true! This was true when I used to pray this Psalm twenty-five years ago, and it’s still true today, but so is the second half of that verse, “but You are my firm refuge.”

God is faithful. He maintains us in our first call, and in our first love. All we have to do is stay close to Him.


Psalms for the 14th Day
71 72 73 74

Psalm 71

An old man's prayer

In You, Yahweh, I take shelter;

never let me be disgraced.

In Your righteousness rescue me, deliver me,

turn Your ear to me and save me!

Be a sheltering rock for me,

a walled fortress to save me!

For You are my rock, my fortress.

My God, rescue me from the hands of the wicked,

from the clutches of rogue and tyrant!

For You alone are my hope, Lord,

Yahweh, I have trusted You since my youth,

I have relied on You since I was born,

You have been my portion from my mother's womb,

and the constant theme of my praise.

To many I have seemed an enigma,

but You are my firm refuge.

My mouth is full of Your praises,

filled with Your splendour all day long.

Do not reject me, now I am old,

nor desert me, now my strength is failing,

for my enemies are uttering threats,

spies hatching their conspiracy:

‘Hound him down now that God has deserted him,

seize him, there is no one to rescue him!’

God, do not stand aside,

my God, come quickly and help me!

Shame and ruin on those

who attack me;

may insult and disgrace cover those

whose aim is to hurt me!

I promise that, ever hopeful,

I will praise You more and more,

my lips shall proclaim Your righteousness

and power to save, all day long.

I will come in the power of Yahweh

to commemorate Your righteousness, Yours alone.

God, You taught me when I was young,

and I am still proclaiming Your marvels.

Now that I am old and grey,

God, do not desert me;

let me live to tell the rising generation

about Your strength and power,

about Your heavenly righteousness, God.

You have done great things;

who, God, is comparable to You?

You have sent me misery and hardship,

but You will give me life again,

You will pull me up again from the depths of the earth,

prolong my old age, and once more comfort me.

I promise I will thank You on the lyre,

my ever-faithful God,

I will play the harp in Your honour,

Holy One of Israel.

My lips shall sing for joy as I play to You,

and this soul of mine which You have redeemed.

All day long, my tongue

shall be talking of Your righteousness.

Shame and disgrace on those

whose aim is to hurt me!

[Amín!]

Da’at – דעת

Polytheism is man’s guess at God.

It’s not so much the plurality that is the problem, but the fact that it’s man making God in his image.

A manufactured God is still only an idea, and regardless of how beautiful or how true the stories about the gods are, they don’t lead anywhere, they only entertain.

That’s why even a monotheism that is man’s guess at God is no good, cannot raise us to a higher state of being, cannot save us or bestow life to those in the tombs. All it can do is incite us to efface and destroy the evidences of the common lie, that man can and does make up God or gods in our image. If it buries every polytheism or monotheism that is not itself, perhaps it will not be noticed that it too is a lie. Since human freedom results in abuse of freedom, it seeks to eliminate freedom because it has no power to grant true freedom.

Then, we are right to be atheists, if it is these gods or that God that we refuse to believe in. Until the revelation of the true and only God, an honest man must be an atheist. If God does not reveal Himself, we have nothing to go on, only speculation.

When God does reveal Himself, we find that all our ideas about Him fall short. We finally see that we have been wrong all along about Him, except for our guess that He must be.

When God reveals Himself, we discover that He is One after all, because His love, His will, and all His acts are one. When God reveals Himself, we experience that He is more than one because He is among us.

Our guesses about Him no longer must be judged as right or wrong, because now we know they were only stories, only ideas that we had made, without power to help or hinder us, to free or enslave us.

The games we played when we were children are finally over.
The real life has begun, we can now be men, we can think and speak and act, as men.

The Real Life has come, the desired of the ages has arrived.
It is only Jesus.

For no other reason

Commandments.

A new wife willingly submits to her husband in all things as to her lord, and he lays down his life for her in all things, loving her as he loves himself. These are commandments, but why do they do them?
For no other reason, but love.

A son patiently listens to his old father’s advice, given unasked again and again, and continues to abide by his old mother’s household rules, fussy though they seem. This is commandment, but why does he fulfill it?
For no other reason, but love.

I have heard of people—indeed, I have seen them and known them—who go about performing their acts of righteousness without a hint of joy, carrying their burdens as if they were heavy, and bullying others, even trying to impose their unhappy fate on them.

Then, I have met people who, pretending to be amicable and full of joy beneath masks of boastfulness, flaunt their freedom from commandments, and solicit our approval of their immorality by the nice way they greet and treat us.

Last night, I was helping a young married couple move out of their old place to a new townhouse just around the corner. Just as we were loading the last few items into my van, another red vehicle almost identical to mine pulled up in the spot next to us.

A dad who looked about my age hopped out of the driver’s seat, followed by a young couple from the other side, and after a mutual greeting between us, they explained they were moving into the townhouse right next door.

After propping the house door open, the kids started carrying small items in. I assumed this was another young couple, “twenty-somethings,” moving in with the assistance of one of their dads, not an uncommon situation. I’ve done things like this.

The dad waxed very loquacious with me and the mom of the young couple I was helping. “Yeah, I’ve had five kids, and done this moving thing a lot. This is my daughter, one of the five. She’s 23 and all ready to live on her own.”

“Oh, she’s moving in by herself?” we asked. “Well, yeah, but I’m sure her boyfriend will be spending most of his time here,” responded the dad with a little laugh and a mischievous look on his face. Ah, so he knew, he even expected, this. He approved.

This is not going to be a rant about young men and women sleeping together and making love before they are married. This way of “courtship” is now almost universal, even in the case of church-going young adults. It’d be embarrassing to be a 26 year old virgin.

Modern churches, like modern society, being accustomed to a “cart before the horse” mentality—that’s what the automobile age has brought us—little preach or teach biblical morality, or if they do, they practice “safe sex” with their members: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” It’s better for all concerned.

“Cart before the horse” mentality? Yes.

Communion before (or without) confessing the faith: the means to unity, not the fruit of it.

The “Christmas season,” not the 12 days starting with Christmas and ending with Epiphany, the culmination and satisfaction of the 40 days of fasting leading up to it, but the two months starting practically with Hallowe’en: the means to happiness, but not happiness, or even joy, itself.

Living together, with all that it implies, as a sort of “practice run”—though not a dry run—of the idea of marriage: Like the offer of a “no strings attached” trial of a confidently good product such as the Oreck vacuum cleaner.

“No strings attached” means you can return it with no loss to you, not exactly the same as a “money back guarantee,” but in either case, the offer is simply not unconditional or free.

Virginity is a gift that a man brings a woman, and a woman brings a man. It’s a gift that can only be offered once. There’s no taking it back, either. Why is it we’re not troubled by these uncomfortable words? “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one.” (Ephesians 5:31) Don’t we ever wonder what this means?

Back to the dad helping his daughter move into her new place, with her boyfriend’s help. Friendly people, comfortable to be around, affable. Commandments? What are they? What do you say? They’re things that God (whoever or whatever that is) wants us to do or to refrain from doing? Oh, I see, you mean the “thou shalt not’s”.
Give me a break. We’re not 5 year olds!

Commandments.

The positive ones are like invitations from an impossibly wealthy Benefactor to perform a simple task, so that He can reward you.

The negative ones are like lines that you must not, at all costs, cross. It’s the same Benefactor, but now He’s warning you of imminent disaster.

Think of the lines painted on millions of miles of automobile roads all over the planet. Have you ever noticed that no one, but no one, and especially during rush hour, just drives his car meandering all over the highway in total disregard of the lines? What would happen if he did is too terrible to imagine. We have all witnessed terrifying things on the road, a car veers out of its lane—the driver distracted, drunk, or even having a heart attack or stroke—and in no time at all an often fatal pile up of fast-moving vehicles takes place.

If only we could see that the lines we’re commanded not to cross are like that.

Every action has its consequences, yet because we no longer really believe in “cause and effect” we are like drivers who play hop-scotch on highways during rush hour, dodging in and out of traffic to get where they want to be faster than anyone else. We believe in luck, if we believe in anything. Yet, even luck runs out in the end, for everyone who relies on it.

Why do we follow the commandments? Is it to “gain heaven,” or earn our way into a respectable family? Are our good deeds like bargaining chips which we’ll be able to bring to the table of eternity? Can they pile up like the “excess merits of the saints?”

No, as holy prophet Isaiah sings,

Like a young man marrying a virgin,
so will the One who built you wed you,
and as the Bridegroom
rejoices in His Bride,
so will your God rejoice in you.
Isaiah 62:5 Jerusalem Bible

Someone loves us like that, and we in turn have no desire anymore but to return that love.

Commandments? They are our joy, we fulfill them, we follow them because we follow Him who is our Joy, and all for no other reason, but love.

I run the way of Your commandments,
since You have set me free.
Psalm 119:32 JB

Breaking bread together

The Lord’s supper.

If there is one thing that characterizes true Christianity in a way that almost no other faith community has, it’s the priority that the followers of Jesus give to eating together.

If you think of this idea in churchly terms, we have the word “eucharist” that defines for the (numerical) majority of Christians the most important aspect of communal worship. The Orthodox have the Divine Liturgy which includes (as part 2 of 2) the Liturgy of the Gifts (another name for the Eucharist). The Roman Catholics have the mass. The “high church” Protestants (for lack of a better term) have the Holy Communion or Eucharist. Almost all other groups calling themselves “Christian” have some form of “breaking bread with one another” that is ceremonially administered and commemorative of the last supper of Jesus with His disciples, which was a modified Passover seder (by most accounts). Only groups like the Salvation Army and the Quakers do not make much of this, and not because they’re not truly Christian, but just because they spiritualize the concept of communion with Jesus and other believers to the degree where outward signs are abolished.

Still, almost no other faith community puts “feeding together” on such a high level as Christianity. At the same time, many or most Christians somehow lose part of the meaning and experience of this “communion” by restricting it to “the Lord’s table” as enacted as part of church services, not making the connexion that any and every act of dining with others can partake of the same real Presence that is experienced in the services.

I just realised this morning, after talking to my best friend, who is away for an indefinite period of time, on the telephone, how much I miss him, and the first image that came to mind was, how much I miss having breakfast, lunch or dinner with him. Though our friendship has many aspects and a wealth of shared experience, learning together, working together on projects, and witnessing for Christ together, it’s sitting down at table together, just he and I, eating, drinking and fellowshipping, that somehow is the apex of our friendship. When we are dining together, I experience Christ in our midst to an incredible degree. He is always with us, but I experience that Presence most when having supper with my friend. It seems like it's always been this way.

Thinking along these lines, I remembered just last night going to dinner with a mother and daughter after the four of us (yes, the daughter’s husband worked too, but had to go to his “real job” at the plumbing store and missed eating with us) had spent all day moving the young couple into their new townhouse. We are all Christians, and we dined together with Christ and had wonderful fellowship with one another, and then ordered some “take out” to share with the young husband when he returned home from work. To eat together satisfied our tired and hungry frames, but we were fed far more than the sum total of what we ate and drank. As Jesus says, “I have food to eat that you do not know about” (John 4:32), and “My food is to do the will of the One who sent Me, and to complete His work” (John 4:34).

How sad it is to have to eat and drink alone!
If food and drink were all that we required to truly feed us, this would be no problem, but it isn’t. When I have to eat alone, often (though not always, and I’ll explain later) it is a quick food break. I grab a sandwich, a drink and a book, sit down, wolf it down, read a few lines, and then I’m up and off to work or wherever, and my stomach is no longer growling, but it’s almost as if I hadn’t eaten at all.

When I am eating with even one other person and we are fellowshipping together as we eat and drink, I almost forget the food and am fed more by the interaction of our minds and spirits than I am by the food. This is when I am with others who are followers of Jesus, and even when we are not talking directly about Him, our conversation is still in His Presence, and He is among us, and our time together is so full of Him, that we feed on that Bread that He gives by which we live forever. The earthly food, as good as it can be, is just a condiment.

There are times, though, when I do relish eating and drinking alone, but at those times it is intentional, and I really am not alone, and neither do I dine alone, “for He is with me. His rod and His staff comfort me” (cf. Psalm 23). When a dear brother or sister is not with me, the Word of God still is, and the Book goes with me wherever I go, and internal Prayer “prepares a table for me, even in the presence of my enemies,” and so I do not dine alone, but with Him “whom the world cannot grasp” (cf. John 1:5).

To all my brethren and friends in Christ I say, I cannot wait to dine with you in person and in the Presence of our risen and living Lord Jesus, and may He grant it to come to pass, both now in this world and in the life of the world to come.

Christ is born! Glorify Him! He is among us!

Who forgives sin?

To suggest to someone that the Christian faith might work better for them in a life crisis than the religion or philosophy they are perceived to hold does nothing but pit one religion against another. It also underscores the American mentality about religions in general, which is quickly becoming the world mentality: Religion is a commodity or product, and as such, religions can be compared and selected based on ROI (return on investment), versatility, customer service, and even by what’s covered in their (limited) warranties. This is especially evident in the world of media and mega-church embodiments of “Christianity.” There are auto rows, where all the car dealers are lined up in one place. There are also, in some places, church rows. Acres and acres of parking and stadium-like worship centers, some boasting as many as six or eight services on a Sunday. (Luckily, their main product, ecstatic, entertaining “worship” is usually available only one day a week. Their God has apparently turned tables on the biblical division of time. Instead of work six days, rest one, it is work one day, rest six.) See also Commoditized Religion, a poem by Jim Swindle.

It is not what “the Christian faith” has to offer a man who has been publicly caught in a private sin that will do him any good. At this level we’re still comparing apples to oranges, still some kind of home remedy. Buddhism is rarely practiced, even in America, but there are many people who, admiring some of its ideas and imitating some of its practices as a leisure activity, consider themselves “Buddhist.”

Just the other day, having a friendly chat with a cashier at a large book store, a French woman who described herself as a “Buddhist,” I experienced a little of the depth of her painful past, and patiently listened as she blamed her unhappy girlhood as a Catholic on the Christian God. She actually opened up the chat, noticing I was buying a book on linguistics, and proudly announced that she had a favorite new word, “isangelous,” and asked me if I knew what it meant.

“Well,” I said, “it sounds like a Greek word, but I can’t tell for sure from the way you’re pronouncing it.” She offered to write it down, and handed it to me on a slip of paper. “Oui,” I said, switching over into her native French, “c’est un mot grec,” and continuing, I told her it was a Greek word meaning “equal to an angel” much as the word, “isapostolos” means “equal to an apostle,” which is a title, I explained, that the Greek church gives to men and women whose life and work in Christ was comparable to the apostles. Then, switching back and forth between French and English we had a friendly dialogue, talking about what an angel is—pas ces bébés à ailes dans les peintures de la Renaissance, “not those flying babies in the Renaissance paintings!”—even talking about Christ, and as I took my leave with a “bon soir,” she said, “Hope to see you again.”

If being forgiven for sin were simply a matter of feeling good about yourself again, then, yes, probably any religion or philosophical or self-help discipline would work, and some might work better than others. The thing about Buddhism, for example, and the Buddha, is that though it expresses itself as a religion, it is fundamentally not about God (there is none) but about the unending struggle throughout space and time of numberless consciousnesses to extinguish their illusion of separateness. To follow Buddha and be a Buddhist, you accept that theory of “how things are” and you integrate yourself into that, hoping for the best, but knowing that your life is still ultimately your responsibility. Even the Buddha can’t change that.

But being forgiven for sin is not just about feeling good again. It’s about gratitude to our Owner, to the One who made us, whom we acknowledge as our Creator and even more, our Father, because of a new relationship and a new form of being that has been bestowed on us by Someone who is at one and the same time a man and “beyond being.”

Being forgiven for sin is to hear that Someone speak His Word into our torn and ravaged hearts, “Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more.”

Do we do what He says? Can we do it? We try, and yet somehow we fail again. Are we abandoned? Does He leave us in our sins and turn away from us in impatience and disgust? No, He doesn’t. He knows that His work in us, from our point of view, is not the work of an instant, though to Him it is. He worked hard to create us, even harder to redeem us. Do you think after all that, He would turn away from us? No, only we might turn away from Him.

Tell a man who is in bondage to sin not about “the Christian faith,” but about Christ. Tell a woman caught in the act of adultery—or a man caught in it—what the Master says to them, not what you say to them. He is more gracious, more forgiving, more loving than we are. In fact, He is the Only Lover of mankind. The rest of us are just trying to follow Him and do what we see Him doing. Some people said of Him, “How dare he presume to forgive sins! Only God can forgive sin!” True, and we agree with them, but in a different way: No one can forgive like That Man, and that man is Jesus Christ.

All is nothing, except by faith

Last night, the beautiful vesperal liturgy of Theophany was celebrated, followed immediately by the Great Blessing of the Waters. “The waters saw you, O God, the waters saw you and were afraid. The Jordan turned back when it saw the fire of the godhead descending in bodily form and entering it.” The priests chanted, the ikon of the life-giving cross was immersed in the font of water, the Holy Spirit was invoked and petitioned to enter the waters, so that they would become for us life-giving and healing. Afterwards, we lined up to receive our first drink of those blessed waters, and to receive a small bottle of the same to take away with us and use to bless our homes. Outwardly, to some, this might seem like a magical vestige of ancient superstitious belief, but holy water is not magic. Whether or not the Holy Spirit literally enters the waters and in some objective sense remains in them for our healing, the water remains water, and the blessing we receive still comes to us by faith. Either all the waters of the earth have received the Lord of Life and have become blessed till the end of time, or none have. As one of my sons said when a three-year old entering a church with me as we past a holy water font, “Dad, all water is holy water!”

We drink the holy water, and use it to bless ourselves, yet we still fall into sin, sometimes right after drinking it. How little faith we have! We say, ‘What are we to eat? What are we to drink? What are we to wear?’ But it is for the pagans to run after these things, not for us. What we chiefly need to run after is not these things. “Seek after the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness before everything else, and all these other things will be given us as well.” Yet not just in terms of these generalities, even the holy water cannot keep us from wrongful desire or malice towards others or even against ourselves. We suffer the old man in us to continue to afflict us, though himself dead, and we are loathe to let him go. Christ have mercy! We trust You, Lord, but help the little faith we have!

A very dear friend of mine sits today with his son and their dying wife and mother, grieving for the end, because her suffering is acute, unbearable to the point where they have opted for euthanasia—not the ‘good death’ we pray for in every liturgy, but what the world calls ‘good death.’ The poison is to arrive today, and this dying sister wants it to be administered right away. She has made her farewells, and after suffering now for the fifth time the reoccurrence of the fatal disease, having no more will or strength to undergo a doubtful remedy, is ready to depart this life. After today, she will not be in this world anymore. We will look for her, and not find her.

We all know that mercy killing is wrong until we find ourselves in that very small room with ourselves, our loved one, and hopefully Christ. It is no longer ‘the whole world’ that we are among, letting its yeas and nays direct our lives and our opinions. No, we are now cornered, our backs against a wall and facing the enemy in our last battle. Yes, the Lord is with us, but do we know that? Do we believe that? In that tiny room, do we know He is there with us? Will He step in and save the day, and make everything right again?

Yes, but maybe not in the way we wanted, or expected.

Not many of the people among whom I live read my blog or even know about it, so I feel safe to ask you, brethren and friends, to pray for Nancy (her real name) as soon as you read my plea, for God’s will to be done, and for the salvation of her soul, if she surrenders her life this day. There is always time for a miracle, if it is God’s will. We don’t know His purposes, but we do know His faithfulness and His loving-kindness. He is the only lover of mankind, and in this as in all things, we turn to him in our weakness for Him to be our strength.

Christ, who is baptized in the Jordan for our transgression this day,
have mercy on us!

The life of Christ, lived in us

An excellent article by Fr Stephen to which I would direct your attention, Having Then Gifts Differing, contains the following passages which speak strongly to my mind and to some of the thoughts that I have been struggling with for years. What he says here also helps me to understand why I was so disturbed by what was going on in my local church recently. Thankfully, that difficult time has passed, and we're already on the road to recovery. I won't explain any further, but let you read these passages, and hopefully use the link to read Fr Stephen's entire post. Those of you who know me personally, or even those who have shared these troubling times with me, will already know why I am encouraged by these words…

The question, “What is my place in the Church?” seems to me to be a question whose origin is to be found more in the culture of our modern economy and its view of the human than it is to be found anywhere within the pages of Holy Scripture.

…“What good thing must I do to be saved?”

This is not a question (in its original meaning) of “what must I do in order to earn my salvation?” There is no question of merit whatsoever. “What must I do to be saved?” is one of the primary questions asked within the pages of the gospel. Christ directs the rich young ruler to the commandments within the Law. When pressed, He answers the young man more directly, “Sell what you have, give to the poor and come and follow me.” The young man goes away sad. Today the young man might say, “But what will be my role within the Church?”

Our role within the Church is to seek our salvation – to follow Christ.

We may indeed have gifts that differ (how can we not?) but our gifting is not about ourselves but about our service to others. And our service to others is not about ourselves (watching ourselves “do ministry”).

All ministry is simply the act of love – whatever form it takes.
And if it is not love, it is not the ministry which Christ gives.

The failure to seek salvation – always and at all times – is a failure which is a distraction. We are too easily distracted by our “ministry,” when that ministry is about our own “role.”
A Reader “sees” himself reading instead of simply praying to read well for the benefit of others. A priest becomes aware of his “place” within the Church rather than simply doing those things which a priest must do.

Of course, we are fallen creatures and our life within the Church is easily corrupted.

But it will be less corrupted if we do not import into that life the false images created by our economy. For the vision offered by our economic life is itself false: “Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?” (Matt. 6:25). Our existence is not defined by our job titles nor our careers. Nor is our life in the Church defined by our job title – even though the title may sound spiritual.

Our life within the Church is lived towards salvation when it is the life of Christ, lived in us. That life is manifest when it is consistently laid aside for others. It is the shape of love at work within us.

Legion (the movie)

From wikipedia, the plot of the upcoming new film Legion.

“After God loses faith in humanity, the archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) is the only one standing between mankind and the apocalypse. This time using angels as the act of Biblical judgment, God's wrath descends on Earth to exterminate the world's population. In a desperate, last-chance gambit, Michael leads a group of strangers to a small New Mexico diner to protect a young waitress who may be pregnant with Christ in his second coming.”

The links above were put there by wikipedia and whoever wrote the article about the film. Any links below are mine. The image is, I presume, of the archangel Michael, a very good-looking human for being one of the bodiless powers—according to Orthodox concepts maybe a little too human, right down to his mini-tattoos and the frontal hair. I suppose it's only cultural updating that puts an automatic weapon in one hand and—what is it?—a dagger? in the other.

Like the film I once saw some years ago about Noah and the Ark, in which pirates were attacking the ark (actually, it was Lot and his gang, having escaped from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, shown in the film as having taken place before the Great Flood!), the creators of this movie simply don't know their bible. And should we expect them to? Well, yes, if they intended to produce a film worth seeing. Michael the Archangel is the one who said "Who is like God?"—in fact, that's why we name him as we do, "mi ka El" are the words he spoke, confronting Satan who aspired to be like God. No one, in fact, knows what this archangel is really called, or even if it has a name that human lips can utter. Angels are a completely different species, as a matter of fact. They're not of this earth. In this film, Michael is recast really into the role of the fallen angel Lucifer, aka Satan.

As for the abuse of the concept of the Apocalypse, what can we say? This kind of thing is not new, but the topic has made it to Hollywood a lot lately, for example in the flick 2012. I much prefer watching fantasy movies that admit to being fantasies, like District 9, to ones like 2012 (which regretably, I did go and see) or this newest one, Legion. The title of this film signifies to me only one thing, the name of the demons inhabiting the Gerasene demoniac.
I wonder if the producers of this movie recognize the connexion.

The final touch to this whole farce, and a blasphemous one at that, is portraying a poor New Mexico greasy spoon waitress as the possible mother of a second incarnation of Jesus Christ.

Do these authors not know that Jesus Christ came the first time, born of woman, in a place that everyone knows, because He is Messiah ben Joseph, the suffering Servant who was put to death to atone for the sin of the world? Don't they know that He was rejected by the chief priests, pharisees and scribes, and handed over to the Romans to be put to death, because the messiah they wanted was the other one, Messiah ben David, who is not born of woman, who comes from a place no one knows, and who will execute judgment on the nations, and reign in Israel as eternal King?

Having been born once, put to death once, risen from the dead once, and ascended to the right hand of Divine Majesty, He no longer has to be born of woman. He is alive forever, and His second coming is not another incarnation or avatar, as the world calls it, but simply a return, a reappearance, a parousía, in which He will return, as holy and divine scripture declares, in the company of His saints, to execute judgment on the unbelieving world.

Films like this one do much for Hollywood (maybe) but absolutely nothing to help people understand the times we are living in, or the danger involved for those who choose to live in myths rather than the Truth. Film makers like those who produced this film as well as others with similar warped messages, such as the lately released and highly acclaimed Avatar, are predators enriching themselves at the expense of the loss of millions of souls, most of them too young and inexperienced to tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

It is in this direction that the prince of this world has been leading humanity ever since he deceived our first Fore-Mother Eve, and now that his end is approaching, with the scythe of his lies He is harvesting a wide swath of souls.

May the light of Christ that is shed abroad in this dark world by His holy Theophany enlighten those who live in darkness, as the prophet sings (cf. Isaiah 9:2), and may Christ deliver those who are otherwise condemned to die. For He is risen and has emptied Hades once, and taken men as tribute to His Father on high, from whence He shall come with them to judge the living and the dead.

Δοξα Σοι, ο Θεος ημων, δοξα Σοι!
Glory to You, O our God! Glory to You!

Give way to one another

Home.

What is that supposed to mean?
Isn’t it supposed to be a place where you go after a long, hard day in the world, to relax, to restore yourself, to feel welcome in the company of family and friends?
That’s what I’ve always thought it was supposed to be, but that’s not what it has always been.

What we find is that, unless we live alone, home is often none of these things.

Instead, for some, home is a place to throw down your things, dump yourself into a comfortable chair, and try to blot out the memories of the day by immersion in television or a computer game. For some, it’s a place where there may be food laid out on a table, or left sitting on the stove, where you might hear somebody call out, “Supper’s on the table if anybody wants it!”

It may be a place where you’re afraid to come home, because the criticism you encounter there is a 24/7 experience, where you feel disapproved of, pushed around, and in general made to feel less worthy than you’re made to feel even in the world. “Don’t do that! Don’t touch this! Hey, that’s mine, hands off! You’re messing up my kitchen (or bathroom, or livingroom)!”

Sometimes it’s even a place where the people you live with are always on the edge of hinting, by gestures if not by words, “Are you still here? Why aren’t you out on your own already?” It seems like they just can’t wait to get you out. And why? Can being alone really be that much fun? Always an unwanted guest, sometimes even in your own house. That’s what it can be like for some people, even for Christians.

What do we want? What do we expect? Does the golden rule not apply here? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or even its silver equivalent “Do not unto others what you would not want done to you.” As C. S. Lewis says, there’s been no shortage of good advice around since the beginning of human history, yet we never seem to take it. And the golden rule is no mere advice, it’s the words of Jesus Himself.

The holy Apostles teach us to “give way to one another, just as we give way to Christ” (cf. Ephesians 5:21). What do we think this means? It’s not another legalism, though we might want to make it one. It’s a word of encouragement to us, to be humble, welcoming and supportive of others, in whom Christ lives, and for whom Christ died, to love others as we love ourselves—something we can only do if we really do love ourselves, because a friend is another self.

A perfect example of making “home” a reality is shown in the hospitality of Abraham. He and Sarah were camped out at the oak of Mamre. He was sitting in front of the tent.
Out on the horizon of that desolate landscape he saw three figures approaching.
Did he wait for them to come closer?
Did he pick up his blanket, go back into his tent and pull the flap over the opening, pretending to not be at home?
No, he didn’t.

He went running towards the three figures and when close, he bowed before them, much as the Japanese do today, and offered to make them comfortable, to let them rest, refresh themselves, and be fed in his humble home. He called them, “my Lord,” and then made good his offer, with Sarah’s help, to welcome them “home,” be it ever so humble. He never thought of himself, only of his guests.

Even before Christ came in the flesh, here was a man on the lookout for God coming to visit him, and He did, and in a manner that suggested something more than we could have guessed. Even though God is One, He is also Love and therefore must be more than One. Abraham made his guests feel at home, made them feel as though they belonged there, as we sometimes say without really meaning it, “Mi casa es su casa.”

I want where I live to be home, not just for me, but for anyone who knocks at my door.

Home, because the door is never locked.
Home, because anyone can take off their shoes and coat
and sit down anywhere.
Home, because whatever is in the kitchen is to be eaten.
Home, because there’s always a spare pillow, blanket and bed.
Home, because your thoughts
and feelings are as much respected as my own.
Home, because you are safe here, just as I am,
from the world’s guile.
Home, because Jesus lives here with us.
Home, because you know that I want to be with you.

How can we make home a reality for ourselves and for others?
How can we make Christ welcome, since He is in our midst?

Christ is born! Glorify Him!

The Word of God is alive

Lord, I have nothing that I have not received, and I am nothing but what You have made me.
Glory to You, O God, glory to You!

The Word of God is something alive and active…
Hebrews 4:12 Jerusalem Bible

Alive… that means it's actual, being spoken at this very moment, continuously and tirelessly repeated, born again in God's heart every day to be transmitted to living men, and it's always fresh, new for each and every man, personal, meant to illuminate him individually.

This Word is "the true Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world" (John 1:9). There's not a soul on earth that God doesn't speak to.

Do we believe wholeheartedly in His living Word, in that everpresent voice which keeps uttering for each of us the words that can heal?
"Say but the Word…" (Luke 7:7, Matthew 8:8).

Our faith in God's Word is measured by our faith in His love. We don't really believe He speaks to us because we don't really believe He loves us.

What's a saint?
It's someone who believes that God loves him.
"We've come to know and believe in God's love for us" (1 John 4:16).
Anyone who believes God loves him knows that God speaks to him.

God hasn't ceased being revelation any more than He's ceased being love. He enjoys expressing Himself. Since He is love, He must give Himself, share His secrets, communicate with us, and reveal Himself to anyone who wants to listen. His sole delight is to confide in us and give Himself to us.

God's revelation began with Adam in the Garden of Eden. There, too, began the Passion. Don't we say when someone trusts us, that he's put himself in our hands? He would come into the Garden in the cool of the evening and talk to Adam as to a friend. He was starting to manifest Himself and share His thoughts, trying to make us understand Who He is and delivering Himself up to us. And from the outset, He was shunned and rejected. "His own didn't receive Him" (John 1:11). From the beginning, from the first day, Adam interrupted the dialogue, scorned God's confidences and shattered the alliance they gave proof of. From the very start it was man who walked away, man who turned a deaf ear to God's words. The Passion began in Paradise.

But God has never wearied of talking to us. He keeps reopening the conversation, hoping we'll listen. He keeps offering His friendship, however often we spurn Him.

In the desert, He used to visit Moses in his tent and speak to Him "face to face, as a man speaks to his friend" (Exodus 33:11). "At various times in the past and in various different ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets; but in our own time, the last days, He has spoken to us through His Son…" (Hebrews 1:1 JB).

His communications had grown so urgent, He'd given and entrusted His Word to us so completely, and He'd reached out toward man so far that the Word, His utterance, became flesh. The Incarnation was God's crowning prophecy, His supreme attempt to reveal Himself. He had created flesh, and He so ardently wanted it to accept and understand Him, that He became flesh Himself.

He took the Word, which He'd never been able to transmit to us without our garbling or forgetting it, voiced it fully, and made it man.

God doesn't repent His gifts. He placed His Word in our hands and has never taken it back.

Once and for all, He came down to the level of each of us. He became flesh so we could eat Him in His mystery, love Him in our neighbor, and hear and follow Him in the Gospels.

The Gospels are God's message directed to every one of us. We must believe that God inspired the evangelists in such a way that their words were really dictated by Him. Are we truly aware of that when we open our Bible? Yet that's what the charism of scriptural inspiration means. If God is the author, how can He fail to move us directly every time we take up His Book and expose ourselves to His influence?

"…the Advocate, the Holy Spirit,Whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you" (John 14:26 JB). This promise, made shortly before Jesus' death, indicates that the words He spoke once will have to be studied constantly, and that He said all of them while He was in the world precisely so that the Spirit might expound them till the end of the world.

The letters kills. Only the Spirit gives life, because He is alive. When we read a passage in God's Book, we must think of it not as a text to be perused, or an idea to be dissected, but as God Himself coming into our tent to speak to us face to face as a man speaks to his friend.

What must we do to read the Gospels with faith?
To read the Gospels with faith is to believe that everything in them is actually happening now, that they're a book of revelation, a book of discovery, that, far more than history, they are prophecy. They tell us who we are and what we're doing. God continues to live with us. He's always the same, and so are we. What the Gospels relate is still going on today. They show us our life, how God loves us.

— Fr Louis Evely, That Man Is You, pp. 25-42 passim

The beginning of the Good News

Αρχη του ευαγγελιου Ιησου Χριστου Υιου του θεου…

The beginning of the Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is written in the book of the prophet Isaiah: Look, I am going to send My messenger before You; he will prepare Your way. A voice cries in the wilderness: Prepare a way for the Lord, make His paths straight, and so it was that John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. All Judaea and all the people of Jerusalem made their way to him, and as they were baptised by him in the river Jordan they confessed their sins. John wore a garment of camel-skin, and he lived on locusts and wild honey. In the course of his preaching he said, ‘Someone is following me, Someone who is more powerful than I am, and I am not fit to kneel down and undo the straps of His sandals. I have baptised you with water, but He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.’
Mark 1:1-8 Jerusalem Bible

This was the gospel reading for today, the first Sunday of the new year, and hearing it was, for me, like being changed back into a child again. I have always loved this passage and the gospel of Mark because of it. ‘The beginning of the Good News...’ This has always been the rekindling of my heart's fire when it was about to go out. Just to hear these words gives new life to my old bones. I am supremely thankful. God's faithfulness surpasses all things. He is there for me, for us, even now at this moment, to receive us, to accept our repentance, and to lead us into the paths of His Kingdom and His Righteousness even now. It is never too late.

I thank the Lord and rejoice that He has come to rescue His people. Once again we have faithful priests to minister to us—old Father John of short stature, who humbly and meekly but with great joy of spirit calls us, ‘dear fellow Christians and friends,’ and young Father Dimosthenis deep-rooted and broad-spreading like the oak, gently shading us, who exhorts us ‘to give way to Christ, since He is our life.’ Like the apostle Paul and his young co-worker Timothy perhaps—this combination of old and young in tandem seems to be a most effective witness—may our two new presbyters ‘continue bearing fruit in old age’ and ‘make many disciples, and flourish like the palm tree.’

By divine appointment, so it was that the 3rd day of January is also the commemoration of Malachi the prophet, so that the last of the Old Testament prophets is remembered along with the one he prophesied, Know that I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before My Day comes (Malachi 3:23 JB), of whom Jesus said, ‘he, if you will believe Me, is the Elijah who was to return’ (Matthew 11:14), and ‘I tell you solemnly, of all the children born of women, a greater than John the Baptist has never been seen’ (Matthew 11:11).

‘Give way to Christ, since He is our life.’ The message of this gospel is simple, the gospel itself is simple, when we accept it as it is, God's words addressed personally to us, and when believing its truth, we just do what it says. Father Dimosthenis read his homily on the gospel because he is freshly arrived from Kavala, Macedonia (Greece) and he still doesn't trust himself to speak spontaneously. His pronunciation of our English vowels is perfect but he has a heavy Greek accent on the consonants. This, however, doesn't make him hard to understand. In fact, his speech in both Greek and English comes across manfully and clearly, and when he chants the gospels and prayers, the words are amplified rather than obscured. May God grant him many years with us. He is worthy. Axios!

Today I heard some distressing news, however, and that from my dear friend Anna, who is the first Orthodox Christian in Bali, Indonesia. She and her husband, an American, live here with us, but her family and relatives live in Bali. She and her husband devote most of their expendable income to building an Orthodox temple in her hometown in Bali, and the building has gone very far with excellent results. Since the Balinese prefer to worship outdoors, there is no roof on the temple, just very high walls and gateways, all carved in bas-relief with Orthodox ikonography in Balinese style. The distressing news is that even in Bali, a Hindu-majority island, the Islamists are demanding that the cross be taken down and other ikonography on the temple be effaced. This demand has been in force for about two months. The Orthodox have not given in, but there is threat of violence. Please pray for the Balinese Christian Orthodox, and for all the Christians of Indonesia.

Indonesian Orthodox (on the island of Java)
I do not have any photos of the temple in Bali.

Always a good word

You cannot be too gentle, too kind.
Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other.
Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives.
All condemnation is from the devil.
Never condemn each other.
We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves.
When we gaze at our own failings, we see such a swamp that nothing in another can equal it.
That is why we turn away, and make much of the faults of others.
Instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace.
Keep silent, refrain from judgement.
This will raise you above the deadly arrows of slander, insult and outrage and will shield your glowing hearts against all evil.

— Seraphim of Sarov

How I needed to hear this word today! I found myself in the company of thinly veiled belligerence and intentional unkindness wherever I went, well, there were occasional breaks, that's true. But the world turned a harsh face to me, and I longed for the fellowship of my dear friend, who is a citizen with me in the kingdom of peace. So, when I arrived home again after my errands in 'the world' it was a welcome word that I found waiting for me, by our holy father among the saints, Seraphim of Sarov, whose feast-day it is today.

To my son John Seraphim, and to all other Seraphims known and unknown to me, a happy feast day!

To the One

Not by us, Yahweh, not by us,
by You alone is glory deserved,
by Your love and Your faithfulness,
by Your love and Your faithfulness!
Not by us, Yahweh, not by us,
by You alone is glory deserved.

Song based on Psalm 115, Jerusalem Bible


God is working His purpose out
as year succeeds to year:
God is working His purpose out,
and the time is drawing near;
nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God
as waters cover the sea.

All we can do is nothing worth
unless God blesses the deed;
vainly we hope for the harvest tide
till God gives life to the seed;
yet nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God
as waters cover the sea.

A. C. Ainger, 1894
Hymn 538, The Hymnal 1940

μακαριος ο αναγινωσκων και οι ακουοντες τους λογους της προφητειας και τηρουντες τα εν αυτη γεγραμμενα ο γαρ καιρος εγγυς
ΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΨΙΣ ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ 1

Happy the man who reads this prophecy aloud, and happy those who listen to him if they treasure all that it says, because the Time is close.
Revelation 1:3 Jerusalem Bible

Kindred spirits

One asked, "Why, Father, do you find more joy in the psalms than in any other part of divine Scripture? And why, when quietly chanting them, do you say the words as though you were speaking to someone?"

Abba Philemon replied, "My son, God has impressed the power of the psalms on my poor soul as He did on the soul of the prophet David. I cannot be separated from the sweetness of the visions about which they speak. They embrace all scripture."

He confessed these things with great humility, after being much pressed, and then, only for the benefit of the questioner.

— Philokalia, Book 2, "A Discourse on Abba Philemon," p.347.

The wrath of the Lamb

Lo! he comes, with clouds descending,
once for our salvation slain;
thousand thousand saints attending
swell the triumph of his train:
Alleluia! alleluia! alleluia!
Christ the Lord returns to reign.

Every eye shall now behold him,
robed in dreadful majesty;
those who set at naught and sold him,
pierced, and nailed him to the tree,
deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing,
shall the true Messiah see.

In the Western Christian world, the season of Christmas is ushered in by four weeks of Advent, remembering Christ’s second coming, during which the hymn quoted above is sung, certainly from the tone of the hymn, a frightful prospect for “those who set at naught and sold him,” and a far cry from the spirit in which this season begins in the Orthodox world, “Today the Virgin comes to the cave to ineffably give birth to the Word before all worlds. Dance, O universe, upon hearing this…”

Reading the book of Revelation, in Greek, Η Αποκάλυψις του Ιωάννου, I am always struck by this very strange phrase, “the wrath of the Lamb.” If anything could present a more ironic picture, it would be a very, very angry lamb. Almost universally, the lamb is considered an animal of meekness, gentleness and, for children, even cuddliness. Notice I said “almost.” There is something about lambs we don’t know, but the Word of God does, at least about THE Lamb.

When Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Divine Logos came the first time, He was born of woman, in an obscure place, at a time rushed and unnoticed—a census was being taken, was He even counted? Was anyone even there to receive Him? Did anyone know Who He was? Not really. Only His parents, and a handful of shepherds in the area. Only later did some astrologers from Babylon come in search for Him, and a little after that, a jealous and illegitimate worldly authority, Herod, tried to “nip Him in the bud,” by having his soldiers cruelly kill all male children recently born in the area. “Innocent?” he cried, “Not innocent! Guilty! Guilty of the womb! Guilty of the stars! There's room for only one king on this throne! Only Herod, only me!”

It will be a different story when Jesus Christ returns to earth in His second and glorious coming. It will be something like what the hymn relates, those who rejected Him “deeply wailing, shall the true Messiah see.” The book of Revelation, a more reliable source than this hymn, says that they will cry out to the mountains and to rocks, “Fall on us and hide us away from the One who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!” (Revelation 6:16) The ikon that is always on the right side of the royal doors in an ikonostasis shows Christ seated on the throne. That’s who they’re talking about.

The wrath of the Lamb… so that’s why they fear him! That’s why our world is filled with people afflicted with the malady of Christophobia, the fear of Christ. There is a wonderfully well-written article by Srdja Trifkovic at the site Serbianna entitled Battling Christophobia in California and Serbia. I should rather have called it, Battling World Christophobia. Reading this article gave rise to the ramble above. I really latch on to a concept once a keyword has been cut for it, and Christophobia is that word. Read more at the link above, but here are some samples of what Trifkovic writes in his article…

The intention of post-moderns to destroy real people, with their natural loyalties, traditional morality, and inherited cultural preferences, is the same everywhere.

It is Christophobia, the incubator of countless secondary pathologies that are imposed and celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic under the label of diversity.

Western conservatives, he says, are hoping to save the key institution of the West—namely, Christianity—but Christianity did not originate in the West, and therein lies the crux of the matter: “The development of the West since 1054, in opposition to the Orthodox East, was a revolutionary act. The West, at its core, is revolutionary; hence the shouting of our conservatives for history to stop, while intermittently effective in slowing the slide, has proven vain. The West’s defining act was the fundamental innovation of the filioque. The fruit of the schism was apparent in successive heresies and rebellions, which led to the wars of religion that would kill millions and tear Europe apart. Later subversives would translate the revolutionary logic into decidedly unchristian contexts such as the French and Bolshevik revolutions, with monstrous results.”

While the unraveling of Western Christianity has been under way for a thousand years, it gained a new head of steam in our time. With Vatican II, Roman traditionalists were dealt a tremendous blow, and they are still suffering its consequences. Meanwhile, “The more traditionally minded Protestant denominations are now sprinting toward Sodom, while the newer ‘Bible churches,’ holding the line somewhat more effectively on the moral front, show themselves very much of this world in their Dionysian revels featuring ‘Christian’ rock music and self-help philosophies about how to succeed in the world of mammon without really trying. The job of shoring up what remains of traditional Western Christianity is, needless to say, not getting any easier.”

Orthodoxy, on the other hand, does not lend itself to the political realm, precisely because its kingdom is not of this world. It is impossible to turn Orthodoxy into a “movement” in the modern political sense, yet the Orthodox view on most political issues today largely tracks the views of traditional Roman Catholics and Protestants, in spite of their theological and ecclesiological differences: “Even in a decidedly Protestant and “revolutionary” country such as the United States, the Orthodox easily recognize the practical wisdom embodied in a document such as the Constitution and its principle of limited government. They are more than anyone averse to the deification of political figures and of the state that has been the bane of the modern era. But they are by nature ill-adapted to navigating the turbulent waters of modern politics, which grow ever more frenzied and anti-Christian.”

The greater part of the article discusses in more detail political and social issues that are not within the range of either my blog or my mindset. I am and always will be a rather apolitical Orthodox muzhik. What is important to me is God, the Bible, following Jesus, witnessing for Him, and holding wide open the doors of the Church, not arguing or combating the evil one. He has already been defeated by Christ, both in His forty days’ temptation, and in his suffering on the Cross, and since no man can be greater than his Master, I can only hope the same for me, through enduring temptation and dying on the Cross, to enter Paradise with the good thief. But I did find it interesting that there are many in the world who are not of the world, and whose role in the Body of Christ is to unmask false ideologies and defrock false authority.

Knowing that to see the Lamb when He appears will be terror and wrath to the lost, let’s use what time remains to open their eyes to Him Who is, the Holy One, the Eternal, the Only Lover of mankind, the One who says, “Do not be afraid; it is I, the First and the Last; I am the Living One, I became dead and now I am to live for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and Hades” (Revelation 1:17).

Christ is born! Glorify Him!

On stoning thy neighbor

The feast day of proto-martyr Stephen the Deacon is coming up right on the heels of the Nativity of Christ on December 27th, and that made me think of death by stoning, a punishment specified for a number of offenses in the laws of the Torah. Last February I explored the concept during my study of the five books of Moses, which I posted HERE. Today as I was perusing the blog of a Christian brother, I came upon this very good word of Elder Païsios, which I want to reproduce here in its entirety. The Elder is one of two recently reposed saints whose words and acts I follow with the attentive eye of a bird intent on catching a worm. The other is, of course, Elder Porphyrios. I confess, these are my two favorite modern 'desert fathers,' and it's because they lived and taught by word and example the way of following Jesus in the modern world.
Here is what Elder Païsios says...

A Christian must not be fanatic; he must have love for and be sensitive towards all people. Those who inconsiderately toss out comments, even if they are true, can cause harm.

I once met a theologian who was extremely pious, but who had the habit of speaking to the (secular) people around him in a very blunt manner; his method penetrated so deeply that it shook them very severely. He told me once: “During a gathering, I said such and such a thing to a lady.” But the way that he said it, crushed her. “Look”, I said to him, “you may be tossing golden crowns studded with diamonds to other people, but the way that you throw them can smash heads, not only the sensitive ones, but the sound ones also.”

Let’s not stone our fellow-man in a so-called “Christian manner.” The person who – in the presence of others – checks someone for having sinned (or speaks in an impassioned manner about a certain person), is not moved by the Spirit of God; he is moved by another spirit.

The way of the Church is LOVE; it differs from the way of the legalists. The Church sees everything with tolerance and seeks to help each person, whatever he may have done, however sinful he may be.

I have observed a peculiar kind of logic in certain pious people. Their piety is a good thing, and their predisposition for good is also a good thing; however, a certain spiritual discernment and amplitude is required so that their piety is not accompanied by narrow-mindedness or strong-headedness. Someone who is truly in a spiritual state must possess and exemplify spiritual discernment; otherwise he will forever remain attached to the “letter of the Law”, and the letter of the Law can be quite deadly.

A truly humble person never behaves like a teacher; he will listen, and, whenever his opinion is requested, he responds humbly. In other words, he replies like a student. He who believes that he is capable of correcting others is filled with egotism.

A person that begins to do something with a good intention and eventually reaches an extreme point, lacks true discernment. His actions exemplify a latent type of egotism that is hidden beneath this behavior; he is unaware of it, because he does not know himself that well, which is why he goes to extremes.

Lord, have mercy on me, Romanós the sinner!

Back to Normal

Ah, so Google is back to normal. It’s December 26th.

Leading up to and including Christmas Day, the world-class search engine (I use it almost exclusively) had a graphic embellishment of their logo: secular holiday cards, one with a prominent ‘peace symbol’ on it, gradually accumulating. When you would hover your mouse over the logo, you’d get the message ‘happy holidays’ whereas the normal logo gives you the message ‘Google,’ nice and flat.

Surely we’ve noticed how Google likes to put up an embellished logo to celebrate various days. The latest one that sticks in my mind was for the birthday of Zamenhoff, the Polish Jew who created the ‘international language’ Esperanto. Of course, Mahatma Gandhi's birthday, and that of dozens of people who I’ve never even heard of, have been likewise commemorated, as have events and other days of ‘world’ significance, ‘Earth Day’ for example. Surprisingly, some ‘national’ days have also been ‘honored,’ Thanksgiving for example, though in a trivialized manner that completely hides the meaning of the holiday.

Astonishingly, though, the birth day of Jesus Christ cannot be noticed. I’m not speaking of Christmas as a ‘Christian’ holiday, now—just the birth day of Jesus bar Joseph of Nazareth, a Jewish non-seminary-trained, itinerant rabbi of the first century of the ‘Common Era’ (C.E.) whose profound teachings have been widely acknowledged and praised, even by those who don’t accept the Christian interpretation of His life and death. Thus demonstrated, the hypocrisy of the elite who currently think they run things in today’s world is revealed. Every good thing they have at their disposal is directly or indirectly dependent on the universal effect that the life (and death, and resurrection) of Jesus of Nazareth, who is called the Christ, has had on the human world, and yet they cannot even acknowledge His birth day, as they run to do for lesser men.

Ironically, it is by their denial of Him in even such small details, that they acknowledge Who He is. They prove His words to be true.

They hated me for no reason.
John 15:24, Psalm 35:19 quoted by Jesus as referring to Himself

What John the Evangelist wrote in the prologue of his gospel, an overview of the situation that would prevail till the end of time, is also proven right.

The Word [that is, Christ, who is the Word of God]
was the true Light that enlightens all men;
and He was coming into the world.
He was in the world
that had its being through Him,
and the world did not know Him.
John 1:9-10

If Jesus Christ was an ordinary human being, even one of great accomplishments, He would be commemorated by Google and hundreds of other wanna-be’s and hangers-on to the world system. But Jesus is the one thing, the one person that the world just can’t stand. Why is this? Because He is the Light of the world, and that Light enlightens all men (is apparent in their reasoning minds) and reveals their darkness, and they can’t bear to be reminded of it. They don’t want to see it, because then, they would have to turn away from that darkness, from those thoughts, words and deeds of darkness, and turn towards Him, the Light. They’re afraid to become what they are not, what they know not, to lose control and let their Creator make right what they have spoiled in themselves. They’d rather live penned up in a stinking sty, than be released through the open gate of repentance, to join the flock of His pasture.But to all who did accept Him
He gave power to become the children of God,
to all who believe in the name of Him
who was born not out of human stock,
or urge of the flesh,
or will of man,
but of God Himself.
John 1:12-13

Christmas at a Gas Station

This story may have already gone the rounds, but it's new to me.
It's probably just a modern American folk tale, but it speaks truth nonetheless. It came to me from my dear friend Presbytera Candace in Anchorage, Alaska, to whom it was sent by her cousin,
Fr Demetrios Carellas. It's a little long, but a worthy read.
Merry Christmas to all.

The old man sat in his gas station on a cold Christmas Eve. He hadn't been anywhere in years since his wife had passed away. It was just another day to him. He didn't hate Christmas, just couldn't find a reason to celebrate.

He was sitting there looking at the snow that had been falling for the last hour, and wondering what it was all about, when the door opened and a homeless man stepped through. Instead of throwing the man out, Old George - as he was known by his customers - told the man to come and sit by the heater and warm up. "Thank you, but I don't mean to intrude," said the stranger. "I see you're busy, I'll just go."

"Not without something hot in your belly." George said. He turned and opened a wide mouth Thermos and handed it to the stranger. "It ain't much, but it's hot and tasty. Stew... Made it myself. When you're done, there's coffee and it's fresh." Just at that moment, he heard the "ding" of the driveway bell.

"Excuse me, be right back," George said. There in the driveway was an old '53 Chevy. Steam was rolling out of the front. The driver was panicked. "Mister can you help me!" said the driver, with a deep Spanish accent. "My wife is with child and my car is broken." George opened the hood. It was bad. The block looked cracked from the cold, the car was dead. "You ain't going in this thing," George said as he turned away. "But Mister, please help..."

The door of the office closed behind George, as he went inside. He went to the office wall and got the keys to his old truck, and went back outside. He walked around the building, opened the garage, started the truck and drove it around to where the couple was waiting. "Here, take my truck," he said. "She ain't the best thing you ever looked at, but she runs real good." George helped put the woman in the truck and watched as it sped off into the night.

He turned and walked back inside the office. "Glad I gave 'em the truck, their tires were shot too. That 'ol truck has brand new ones." George thought he was talking to the stranger, but the man had gone. The Thermos was on the desk, empty, with a used coffee cup beside it. "Well, at least he got something in his belly," George thought.

George went back outside to see if the old Chevy would start. It cranked slowly, but it started. He pulled it into the garage where the truck had been. He thought he would tinker with it for something to do. Christmas Eve meant no customers. He discovered that the block hadn't cracked, it was just the bottom hose on the radiator. "Well, shoot, I can fix this," he said to himself. So he put a new one on. "Those tires ain't gonna get 'em through the winter either." He took the snow treads off of his wife's old Lincoln. They were like new, and he wasn't going to drive the car anyway.

As he was working, he heard shots being fired. He ran outside, and - beside a police car - an officer lay on the cold ground. Bleeding from the left shoulder, the officer moaned, "Please help me." George helped the officer inside, as he remembered the training he had received in the Army as a medic. He knew the wound needed attention.

"Pressure to stop the bleeding," he thought. The uniform company had been there that morning and had left clean shop towels. He used those and duct tape to bind the wound. "Hey, they say duct tape can fix anythin'," he said, trying to make the policeman feel at ease.

"Something for pain," George thought. All he had was the pills he used for his back. "These ought to work." He put some water in a cup and gave the policeman the pills. "You hang in there, I'm going to get you an ambulance." The phone was dead. "Maybe I can get one of your buddies on that there talk box out in your car." He went out only to find that a bullet had gone into the dashboard --- destroying the two way radio.

He went back in to find the policeman sitting up. "Thanks," said the officer. "You could have left me there. The guy that shot me is still in the area." George sat down beside him, "I would never leave an injured man in the Army and I ain't gonna leave you." George pulled back the bandage to check for bleeding. "Looks worse than what it is. Bullet passed right through 'ya. Good thing it missed the important stuff though. I think with time your gonna be right as rain."

George got up and poured a cup of coffee. "How do you take it?" he asked. "None for me," said the officer. "Oh, yer gonna drink this. Best in the city. Too bad I ain't got no donuts." The officer laughed and winced at the same time.

The front door of the office flew open. In burst a young man with a gun.

"Give me all your cash! Do it now!" the young man yelled. His hand was shaking and George could tell that he had never done anything like this before. "That's the guy that shot me!" exclaimed the officer. "Son, why are you doing this?" asked George, "You need to put the cannon away. Somebody else might get hurt."

The young man was confused. "Shut up old man, or I'll shoot you, too. Now give me the cash!" The cop was reaching for his gun. "Put that thing away," George said to the cop, "we got one too many in here now." He turned his attention to the young man. "Son, it's Christmas Eve. If you need money, well then, here. It ain't much but it's all I got. Now put that pea shooter away."

George pulled $150 out of his pocket and handed it to the young man, reaching for the barrel of the gun at the same time. The young man released his grip on the gun, fell to his knees and began to cry. "I'm not very good at this am I? All I wanted was to buy something for my wife and son," he went on... "I've lost my job, my rent is due, my car got repossessed last week." George handed the gun to the cop. "Son, we all get in a bit of squeeze now and then. The road gets hard sometimes, but we make it through the best we can."

He got the young man to his feet, and sat him down on a chair across from the cop. "Sometimes we do stupid things." George handed the young man a cup of coffee. "Bein' stupid is one of the things that makes us human. Comin' in here with a gun ain't the answer. Now sit there and get warm and we'll sort this thing out." The young man had stopped crying. He looked over to the cop. "Sorry I shot you. It just went off. I'm sorry officer." "Shut up and drink your coffee," the cop said.

George could hear the sounds of sirens outside. A police car and an ambulance skidded to a halt. Two cops came through the door, guns drawn. "Chuck! You ok?" one of the cops asked the wounded officer. "Not bad for a guy who took a bullet. How did you find me?" "GPS locator in the car. Best thing since sliced bread. Who did this?" the other cop asked as he approached the young man. Chuck answered him, "I don't know. The guy ran off into the dark. Just dropped his gun and ran."

George and the young man both looked puzzled at each other. "That guy work here?" the wounded cop continued. "Yep," George said, "just hired him this morning. Boy lost his job." The paramedics came in and loaded Chuck onto the stretcher. The young man leaned over the wounded cop and whispered, "Why?" Chuck just said, "Merry Christmas boy... and you too, George, and thanks for everything."

"Well, looks like you got one doozy of a break there. That ought to solve some of your problems," George said.

George went into the back room and came out with a box. He pulled out a ring box. "Here you go, something for the little woman. I don't think Martha would mind. She said it would come in handy some day." The young man looked inside to see the biggest diamond ring he ever saw. "I can't take this," said the young man. "It means something to you." "And now it means something to you," replied George. "I got my memories. That's all I need."

George reached into the box again. An airplane, a car and a truck appeared next. They were toys that the oil company had left for him to sell. "Here's something for that little man of yours." The young man began to cry again, as he handed back the $150 that the old man had handed him earlier. "And what are you supposed to buy Christmas dinner with? You keep that too," George said. "Now git home to your family."

The young man turned with tears streaming down his face. "I'll be here in the morning for work, if that job offer is still good." "Nope. I'm closed Christmas day," George said. "See ya the day after."

George turned around to find that the stranger had returned. "Where'd you come from? I thought you left?"

"I have been here. I have always been here," said the stranger. "You say you don't celebrate Christmas. Why?"

"Well, after my wife passed away, I just couldn't see what all the bother was. Puttin' up a tree and all seemed a waste of a good pine tree. Bakin' cookies like I used to with Martha just wasn't the same by myself. And besides I was gettin' a little chubby."

The stranger put his hand on George's shoulder. "But you do celebrate the holiday, George. You gave me food and drink and warmed me when I was cold and hungry. The woman with child will bear a son and he will become a great doctor. The policeman you helped will go on to save 19 people from being killed by terrorists. The young man who tried to rob you will make you a rich man and not take any for himself. That is the spirit of the season and you keep it as good as any man."

George was taken aback by all this stranger had said... "And how do you know all this?" asked the old man. "Trust me, George. I have the inside track on this sort of thing. And when your days are done, you will be with Martha again." The stranger moved toward the door. "If you will excuse me, George, I have to go now. I have to go home where there is a big celebration planned."

George watched as the old leather jacket and the torn pants that the stranger was wearing turned into a white robe. A golden light began to fill the room. "You see, George... it's My birthday. Merry Christmas."

George fell to his knees and replied, "Happy Birthday, Lord Jesus!"

Never divided

About half-way through my life as an Orthodox Christian, I remember going to a retreat at my local church where I heard an Orthodox priest say something like, "The Church divided? The Church has never been divided. If you think that the Church has been, or could ever be, divided, you have a problem." Sorry to say, I can't remember who I heard say this. It could have been a visiting presbyter, or it could have been one of our local priests, maybe even my catechist, Fr Michael Courey, who said this. All I remember is the saying, and my reaction when I heard him say it, one of immense relief. In the book, Against False Union, by Dr Alexander Kalomiros, we read the following,

The commotion about union of the churches makes evident the ignorance existing as much among the circles of the simple faithful as among the theologians as to what the Church is.
They understand the catholicity of the Church as a legal cohesion, as an interdependence regulated by some code. For them the Church is an organization with laws and regulations like the organizations of nations. Bishops, like civil servants, are distinguished as superiors and subordinates: patriarchs, archbishops, metropolitans, bishops. For them, one diocese is not something complete, but a piece of a larger whole…

Such a concept of the Church leads directly to the Papacy. If the catholicity of the Church has this kind of meaning, then Orthodoxy is worthy of tears, because up to now she has not been able to discipline herself under a Pope. But this is not the truth of the matter.

The catholic Church which we confess in the Symbol (Creed) of our Faith is not called catholic because it includes all the Christians of the earth, but because within her everyone of the faithful finds all the grace and gift of God. The meaning of catholicity has nothing to do with a universal organization the way the Papists and those who are influenced by the Papist mentality understand it.

Of course, the Church is intended for and extended to the whole world independent of lands, nations, races, and tongues; and it is not an error for one to name her catholic because of this also. But just as humanity becomes an abstract idea, there is a danger of the same thing happening to the Church when we see her as an abstract, universal idea. In order for one to understand humanity well, it is enough for him to know only one man, since the nature of that man is common to all men of the world.

Similarly, in order to understand what the catholic Church of Christ is, it suffices to know well only one local church. And as among men, it is not submission to a hierarchy which unites them but their common nature, so the local churches are not united by the Pope and the Papal hierarchy but by their common nature.

A local Orthodox church regardless of her size or the number of the faithful is by herself alone, independently of all the others, catholic. And this is so because she lacks nothing of the grace and gift of God. All the local churches of the whole world together do not contain anything more in divine grace than that small church with few members.

She has her presbyters and bishop; she has the Holy Mysteries; she has the Body and Blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Within her any worthy soul can taste of the Holy Spirit’s presence. She has all the grace and truth. What is she lacking therefore in order to be catholic? She is the one flock, and the bishop is her shepherd, the image of Christ, the one Shepherd. She is the prefiguring on earth of the one flock with the one Shepherd, of the new Jerusalem. Within her, even in this life, pure hearts taste of the Kingdom of God, the betrothal of the Holy Spirit. Within her they find peace which “passeth all understanding,” the peace which has no relation with the peace of men: “My peace I give unto you.”

One local church is united with all the other local Orthodox churches of the world by the bond of identity. Just as one is the Church of God, the other is the Church of God also, as well as all the others. They are not divided by boundaries of nations nor the political goals of the countries in which they live. They are not even divided by the fact that one might be ignorant of the other’s existence. It is the same Body of Christ which is partaken of by the Greeks, the Negroes of Uganda, the Eskimos of Alaska, and the Russians of Siberia. The same Blood of Christ circulates in their veins. The Holy Spirit enlightens their minds and leads them to the knowledge of the same truth.

There exist, of course, relations of interdependence between the local churches, and there are canons which govern them. This interdependence, though, is not a relation of legal necessity, but a bond of respect and love in complete freedom, the freedom of grace. And the canons are not laws of a code, but wise guides of centuries of experience.

The Church has no need of external bonds in order to be one. It is not a pope, or a patriarch, or an archbishop which unites the Church. The local church is something complete; it is not a piece of a larger whole…

Just for the record, this is the Orthodoxy that I confess as a free follower of Jesus Christ, who is born today. This is the Church that I belong to, the Body of Christ, the Bride of the Bridegroom, who is born today.

Christ is born! Glorify Him!

What shall we offer Him?

Every year I am deeply moved by the hymns of Christ’s Nativity composed by my name day saint, Romanós the Melodist. Somehow in their simplicity of lyric and melody they capture a side of Christmas that escapes the notice of our culture. In the Western world, the famous short hymn Silent Night has a similar effect of reducing everyone who hears it to the level of the simple awe of the shepherds of Bethlehem. Yet, Today the Virgin, maybe because of its poetry and the details so carefully woven together with tender irony, surpasses all other hymns in conveying both what it was like in time, and what it is like in eternity—the Word became man and dwelt among us… full of grace and truth.

Η Παρθένος σήμερον, τον προαιώνιον Λόγον,
εν σπηλαίω έρχεται, αποτεκείν απορρήτως.
Χόρευε, η οικουμένη ακουτισθείσα,
δόξασον, μετά Αγγέλων και των ποιμένων,
βουληθέντα εποφθήναι, Παιδίον νέον,
τον προ αιώνων Θεόν.

Today the Virgin comes to the cave
to ineffably give birth to the Word before all worlds.
Dance, O universe, upon hearing this,
and with the angels and the shepherds glorify Him
who freely willed to become a new Child,
the God before all ages.

Η παρθένος σήμερον, τον υπερούσιον τίκτει
και η γη το σπήλαιον τω απροσίτω προσάγει,
Άγγελοι μετά ποιμένων δοξολογούσι
Μάγοι δε μετά αστέρων οδοιπορούσι,
δι’ ημάς γαρ εγεννήθη Παιδίον νέον
ο προ αιώνων Θεός. [AUDIO]

Today, the Virgin bears the One beyond being,
and the earth offers the cave
to the Unapproachable.
Angels with shepherds glorify Him.
Magi migrate to Him by a star.
For unto us is born a new Child,
the God before all ages.

(Sigh!) The English translations, no matter which ones you look at, don’t really convey the sense of the original, though they come close. Especially the “Dance, O universe” which translates, Χόρευε, η οικουμένη, Chóreve i ikouméni. That’s what it means!

I’ve been thinking about these hymns, and also this prayer which follows, for the last few days…

What shall we offer You, O Christ,
Who for our sakes have appeared on earth as a man?
Every creature made by You offers You thanks:
the Angels offer a hymn; the heavens, a star;
the Wise Men, gifts; the shepherds, their wonder;
the earth, its cave; the wilderness, a manger,
and we offer You a virgin Mother!
O Pre-eternal God, have mercy on us!

And I’ve been thinking about the ikons, as I wrote in my previous post. We know that we’re the living ikons of the Lord Jesus Christ, made in His image, broken by sin but restored by His saving grace. We know that He says things to us like, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes Me,” and “Whatsoever you do to the least of My brethren, that you do unto Me.” So, the meaning of ikons is far more than just the religious pictures you see in an Orthodox home or church. Abba Anthony (one of the Desert Fathers) says, “Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother we have gained God, but if we scandalise our brother, we have sinned against Christ.”

We know that the Bible is the greatest ikon of all, in that it is the verbal ikon of the Word of God, and that it should be treated with all reverence—venerated, honored, read and obeyed as the Source of everything we can possibly know about God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and about His ikonomía, His “plan of salvation,” as the only divine scripture on earth. Just as we don’t casually throw it around, or use it as a place mat or door stop, but rather always give it the place of honor, kissing it and holding it respectfully and lovingly, for His sake Whose Gospel it contains, so we also treat our fellow man. We don’t treat him casually, or as a means to an end, but respect him as one to whom Christ comes, for whom Christ died, and through whom Christ comes to us.

Back to the prayer quoted above, “What shall we offer You, O Christ,
Who for our sakes have appeared on earth as a man?”

Since Christ is now among us, in us as His living ikons, how can we offer, not only what shall we offer, to Him?

This question posed itself to me, as I was thinking of Christmas gifts. The hymns and prayers of Christmas describe various beings (not just humans, but beings) offering gifts to Christ at His becoming a “new Child.” Hypersomatic beings (angels) offered “hymns.” Outer space (the heavens) offered “a star,” (quite possibly a supernova). The educated (wise men) offered “gifts,” (we know what they were—gold, frankincense, and myrrh). The working class (shepherds) offered “wonder”—what else did they have? The planet earth offered a cave (and as at the beginning, so at the end, in a rich man’s unused tomb). The wilderness offered a manger (so that the animals, too, could get a good look at their Creator). And finally, the human race, in the shape of her own willingness to risk everything she had ever known and every happiness she ever hoped for, a young virgin as His Mother.

Where does that leave us, who have come two thousand years too late?

No, it’s never too late. We can give to each other everything that we would give to Christ personally. He is here with us, after all! Yes, it’s presents at Christmas. The more of ourselves, the better. It’s a smile and a hug in loneliness, a kind word in sorrow. It’s a helping hand to one who needs it, to one who needs what you have but don’t need. “If you have two shirts, give one to the poor. If you have food, share it with those who are hungry” (Luke 3:11 NIV). This is another facet of the theology of ikons. This is why ikons have come into existence—because the invisible, incomprehensible, eternal God has freely willed to become… one of us.

Do we sit out on a country hillside at night, enjoying the canopy of stars, looking for and trying to commune with the God of all? Wait! Perhaps He is there, sitting beside us, looking up at the stars too, that He created, because they are beautiful, and waiting…
for us to notice Him.

Christ is born! Glorify Him!

Ikons don't lie

That’s a curious notion. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said that way before, but it’s a statement of a truth that Orthodox Christians take for granted. “Ikons don’t lie,” means something like this: You can depend on an ikon to faithfully represent what is written in the Holy Scriptures, or what we know from the life of the Church in history. Anyone pictured in an ikon has to have existed, not exactly as they are depicted (though often the image is nearer their real appearance than many think). Any thing and any event shown in an ikon has to have existed or taken place. Modern historical critics notwithstanding, we believe what the ikons show us; we accept them as “Gospel truth.”

A limited number of figures in an ikon are known representations of invisibilities. “Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers,” and other “bodiless powers” (cf. Colossian 1:16 JB), or of intangible yet real entities, “that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray” (Revelation 12:9 NIV). The former are depicted as winged men, winged wheels, flames of fire, and the like; the latter is often shown as a dragon (a mythological monster) or as a dark-hued human. We understand what’s going on. We’re not taken in, we know the reality is there but can’t be shown directly, so we accept what’s been handed over to us.

When a person really understands this, that ikons don’t lie, he can begin to explore the writer’s mind and share in his spiritual vision. (The painter of an ikon is called its writer.) Many people are drawn to Orthodoxy at first because of the ikons, attracted to them by the experience of the holiness of beauty. Hopefully they won’t stop there but, following the path indicated by the ikons, soon come to the beauty of holiness. Ikons are there partly to assist in dividing the wheat from the chaff in us, and among us. This is an invisible winnowing, outside the ken of most of mankind, but it has effects.

Why are ikons so important to the Orthodox?
Why are they considered indispensable?
It’s supposed to have something to do with the Incarnation.

If the invisible, eternal God never came among us, He could not have been depicted—hence, the iconoclasm (ikon-breaking) of the Jews who believe in the pre-incarnate God and cannot conceive of Him any other way. If the Eternal had not come and “pitched His tent” among us, we would indeed be transgressors in depicting Him. As such, in Orthodox ikons, the Father is never depicted, “Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the One who is from God; He has seen the Father” (John 6:46 NASB); nor is the Holy Spirit, “The Spirit breatheth where he will; and thou hearest his voice, but thou knowest not whence he cometh, and whither he goeth” (John 3:8 Douay-Rheims). Only the image of a dove, the sign not the appearance of the Holy Spirit, or flames of fire, again a sign of His presence, yet not His face, are shown in the ikons.

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” Jesus answered: “Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”
John 14:8-9 NIV

Jesus Christ, who is the Word of God before all ages (cf. John 1:1), tells us that to see Him is to see the Father. The holy apostles continue in His teaching, writing “He is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15 NIV). All these testimonies are foundational to the Orthodox Christian understanding of ikons. Jesus Christ is the ikon of the Father. We are ikons of Jesus Christ. Whoever honors Jesus Christ, whoever honors the Word of God, honors the Father. Whoever honors human beings, who are ikons of Jesus Christ, honors the Lord. This is the less talked about meaning of ikons.

Why is it less talked about?
Maybe, because it has practical significance. Maybe, because people would rather not admit it.

Why are ikons on my mind today?
It’s because I’m thinking about the theology of giving gifts, yes, the theology of giving each other gifts at Christmas. People say that this is just a Christian version of the gift giving at certain holiday times practiced by almost every culture since time began. I’m not so sure…

Is this the face of true Orthodoxy?

Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev of Moscow and all the Russias (1946- ), the actual First-Amongst-Equals in the Orthodox world. Over half of the entire oikumene lies under his omofor. Here, he is meeting with officers of the RVSN, the Military Strategic Rocket Directorate.

The Patriarch of New Rome was First-Amongst-Equals only because Constantinople was the place where the Christian Emperor resided. Today, the role of the Christian Emperor is not vacant, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin fills that role. Ask the fathers at the Great Lavra on the Mountain! They came out enthusiastically when he visited the Mountain a few years ago. Who’s the actual First-Amongst-Equals? It’s Kirill Mikhailovich Gundyaev, the Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia. Kirill is a robust and intelligent 300-pound (all muscle) Varengoi warrior wielding a sharpened war-axe; Bart is a skinny 90-pound weakling with water on the brain armed with a flit-gun.

The above photograph and text (all of it) has been copied without any changes from the blog of an American member of the Russian Orthodox Church who has a penchant for belittling converts, the Orthodox Church of America, the Greek patriarch of Constantinople, and anyone else that she doesn't care for. This is not the kind of thing we expect during the season leading up to the feast of the Lord's Nativity, but alas, this is what we have, barbaric yawp instead of brotherly love and the greeting of Christ is born! Glorify Him!

Will this world never cease infiltrating the Church and trying to tempt it to follow the road that Christ refused when satan kept offering it to Him for forty days in the wilderness?

Let's pray and hope that the new liberty of the Russian Church in its homeland does not tempt it to fall for what satan perpetually offers—ועתה אם תשתחוה לפני הכל יהיה לך׃—“If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine” (Luke 4:7 KJV).

Why He became man

Like many others, I have not had very much time to blog my thoughts or adventures this month. Christmas is coming. That means a heavier work load at the office that saps the energy normally left over for “free time” activities, and even that “free time” is reduced to near zero because of “seasonal” activities like shopping for and wrapping presents. Perhaps after the Day comes (and for most of the world, goes), I will have time to return to blogging, but not as an end in itself. Meanwhile…

Through a contact in FaceBook, I came upon this excellent article in The New York Times online, Opinions column, by Ross Douthat, which is extremely well-written and reminds me of the logic and style of C. S. Lewis, like what Lewis would write about the subject if he were still alive today. The title of my post reflects what I think is the main point of the article, which is itself entitled…

Heaven and Nature

It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.”
And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.

As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,’ and a piping-hot apocalypse.

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

Korean Greek Orthodoxy

I was very surprised and happy to receive a collection of photographs of Saint Nicholas Korean Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Seoul from my dear friend and brother Heo Seung Pil, known to us as "Phil" (pictured left, taken at the Oregon Coast). How Brock and I met Phil on a flight to Japan and started our friendship is told in the post Passover Flight. Phil's original email was missing his message, but he just resent it, and I want to share what he says...

As promised, I called the Korean Orthodox church and learned that there is a service at 10:00 A.M. every Sunday. So, I visited today and participated in the service, which ran almost two hours. The service was very spiritual and was nothing like any church services I had ever been to. I was awed by the holy mood there and could sense most of the believers were not like other usual Christians. Anyhow, after the service I asked for permission to take some photos of the inside of the church. I hope both of you like the photos. This church was not big, but I like the genuineness, which was something I always find it difficult to grasp in most of the churches I had been to. Some day, if both of you come to Seoul again I will take you there. I prayed for both of you during the service as you would do for me.

It's wonderful to see how the Korean people have taken to Orthodoxy and how they are developing it in their culture. The ikons have inscriptions in Hangul as well as Greek, which is what one would expect, but otherwise one feels that the sanctuary could be in Greece or on Mount Athos itself. It is a very beautiful cathedral.

Click on the images to zoom them. The detail is great!

Man without a cross

I have seen people who fell unwillingly, and I have seen people who would willingly fall, but cannot. And I pitied the latter much more than those who fall daily; because even though impotent, they yearn for the stench.

— John of Sinai, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15, # 22

This, by the way, is my 666th post!

It is for God to be strong

The human condition, my condition… When I can forget myself, all is well, I live for the Other, grace has blinded me to my failures and to my accomplishments, to my sins and to my virtues, to my weakness and to my strength. When I look at myself, all is lost, as I find myself either skillfully descending into sin, or painfully arising from having committed it. I say to myself, “I am so small, so weak, one among so many, with nothing and no one to save me except God, but He is so great, so beyond me, perfect and righteous, maintaining all, why should He even notice me? I am nothing.” Whether slipping into sin or climbing out of it, or even while committing it, thinking of and looking at myself, I say these things, a sick man, paralysed and blind, naked before myself, before all, and like many others I cry “Have mercy on me, a sinner!”

I detest myself, I loathe myself. My only hope, my only desire, is in God, but He is far off, or He looks that way when I am looking at myself, I loom so large in my own eyes, great and sinful, and He appears so small, though my mind shows me that only my distance from Him makes Him appear so, like a distant star. I see myself, and my thoughts of God magnify Him and tear my own flesh in self-deprecation. Even that, I see, is sinful. It seems to me that the problem, the gigantic disconnect with what I know is right and righteous, is that I exist at all. Therefore, I repeat again and again, “I do not exist, I am nothing,” desiring annihilation to end my misery. Just knowing that there is a perfect God seems to be enough, if only I could disappear forever.

The solution to all this is salvation. To look up, to receive my sight, to forget myself, to remember God, to turn away from the wrath that I know I am, to turn to the voice I hear roaring from somewhere behind my back like many waters, to fall down before His feet as though dead, to listen to the First and the Last speaking to me, like waves, like breakers rolling over me, till I am no more, only He, only He is, only Him see, only Him know, only He the I am, and no more I, me and mine.The psalms for the 12th Day speak as they always have, the words of the King that only kings can pray, no one else. We have been recreated a nation of kings and priests to the Most-High, the Only God, and so we are beckoned to enter in. The words envelope us as water envelopes us as we enter, as with trepidation the diseased would enter the healing waters of Bethesda, seeking the angel’s touch, changing us utterly, and arising no longer we look the same, no longer we see the same, anymore unto the ages.

Psalms for the 12th Day
62 63 64 65 66 67

In God alone there is rest for my soul,
from Him comes my safety,
with Him alone for my Rock, my Safety,
my Fortress, I cannot fall.
Psalm 62:1-2

God has spoken once,
twice I have heard this:
It is for God to be strong,
for You, Lord, to be loving;
and You Yourself repay
man as His works deserve.
Psalm 62:11-12

God, You are my God, I am seeking You,
my soul is thirsting for You,
my flesh is longing for You,
a land parched, weary and waterless;
I long to gaze on You in the Sanctuary,
and to see Your power and glory.
Your love is better than life itself,
my lips will recite your praise;
all my life I will bless You,
in Your Name lift up my hands;
my soul will feast most richly,
on my lips a song of joy and, in my mouth, praise.
On my bed I think of You,
I meditate on You all night long,
for You have always helped me.
I sing for joy in the shadow of Your wings;
my soul clings close to You,
Your right hand supports me.
Psalm 63:1-8

All flesh must come to You
with all its sins;
though our faults overpower us,
You blot them out.
Happy the man You choose,
whom You invite to live in Your courts.
Fill us with the good things of Your House,
of Your holy Temple.
Your righteousness repays us with marvels,
God our Saviour,
Hope of all the ends of the earth
and the distant islands.
Psalm 65:3-5

Come and listen, all you who fear God,
while I tell you what He has done for me:
when I uttered my cry to Him
and high praise was on my tongue,
had I been guilty in my heart,
the Lord would never have heard me.
But God not only heard me,
He listened to my prayer.
Psalm 66:16-19

The soil has given its harvest,
God, our God, has blessed us.
May God bless us, and let Him be feared
to the very ends of the earth.
Psalm 67:6-7

Speak My Name

About this image

Speak my name; by such utterance I will not pass away.
Unfaithful to my own existence,
An echo of your voice grasps me from the outer darkness.

Translate your law to that feeble language of my heart.
Lure me from the cliff of non-being,
By entrusting others unavoidable drawing you through me.

Rich poverty, mighty weakness, wise ignorance.
Empty me that I might be full.
Safe-guard my heart with a benevolent eruption.

— David Dickens, Nothing Hypothetical

As I wrote the author, "You are so rich you can and do give it all away, just not always being able to see what you're doing. Grace hides our virtues and our vices from us, unless we stubbornly go looking for them."

The Orthodox Way

True love is like the flame of a candle. However many candles you light from the flame, the initial flame remains unaffected. It doesn’t lessen at all. And every freshly lit candle has as much flame as the others do.

I want whoever is near me to feel that he has room to breathe, not that he is suffocated. I don’t call anyone to me. I don’t hold onto anyone. I don’t chase anyone away. Whoever wants comes, whoever wants stays, whoever wants leaves. I don’t consider anyone a supporter or a follower.

Speak more to God about your children than to your children about God. The soul of the teenager is in a state of an explosion of freedom. This is why it is hard for them to accept counsel. Rather than counseling them continuously and reproaching them again and again, leave the situation to Christ, to the Panagia [Mother of God], and to the Saints, asking that they bring them to reason.

I have made an agreement with God: I will empty my pockets in almsgiving and He will fill them. He has never violated our agreement. Will I violate it? May it never happen!

My heart only has entrances. It doesn’t have exits. Whoever enters remains there. Whatever he may do, I love him the same as I loved him when he first entered into my heart. I pray for him and seek his salvation.

My worst hell is to realize that I have saddened a beloved person.

These quotes, from Elder Epiphanios of Athens, are reproduced here from Fr Stephen's post A Heart Without Exits. When I read them I was instantly struck by their familiarity. These ideas are the same as what I have heard and observed in the Orthodox community. I know that every kind of person of whatever belief system can have the same or similar ideas, but I find such as these particlarly abundant among the Orthodox of all nationalities. Greeks, Russians, Lebanese, Eritreans, Americans—the communities I'm familar with—I know people there who live this way. And I do too, to the best of my ability. For us this is the Orthodox way.

The saying that was truest of all to me is the last one, "My worst hell is to realize that I have saddened a beloved person." And it's a hell that only the grace of Christ can deliver from, because our words and acts cannot ever be taken back by us. Only Jesus can unspeak them for us. Only in Jesus can we have that blessed hope, to be forgiven.

Some thoughts on confession

Ritualized confession—it can be and rarely escapes being somehow a ‘compartment’ with a ‘conductor,’ sort of like an ‘elevator’ with an ‘operator’ taking you up... or maybe down. It all depends on the ‘operator.’

There’s always at least just a little bit of the priest’s ego showing, and his self-consciousness about it, that even the best confessor barely escapes. Father Jim was my best, most real confessor. I haven’t had one like him since he left for a parish in California about five years ago. With him, confession was not a sacrament—a religious exercise—but instead, it was what it is, a mystírion of the Church, a moment of kairós, ‘acceptable time,’ a place where the astrapí, the ‘lightning flash of Divinity’ earths itself in one’s stony heart, to shatter it and transform it into good soil, into humus.

The attitude about confession in Orthodoxy where I live has been: they tell you to do it, then make it too inconvenient for you to try to do it but, if you manage to go around all that and insist on obeying them they treat you like a pest, “Why do you keep coming?” in not so many words.

It hasn’t always been like this, of course, but often that’s how it can be now. Hypocrisy, flagrant and sanctimonious, or call it whatever you like. That’s how it’s been for some time in the episcopalianized Greek Church. The local OCA (American Orthodox) churches generally aren’t like this, but instead, they preserve the relationship of priest and penitent in confession as it used to be and should be... one friend unburdening his or her heart to an intimate and faithful friend. In getting prayed for and being covered by the priest’s cape you feel like two kids playing confession under a big cozy blanket (except it’s real). That’s confession ‘in church’ at its best.

For me, the best confession is the impromptu unburdening of my heart to a Christian brother during prayer or fellowship times, sometimes just me to him, or just him to me, sometimes both of us to each other. I was taught by my preceptors in the Greek Church, one of them being Father Jim (a cradle Greek Orthodox priest, not a convert), that this qualifies as confession, even though it is not ritualized. I believed him then, and I believe him now. That’s why it doesn’t bother me to receive communion without formal confession. My whole life is actually a running round of confessions, some more formal than others, and if a priest insisted on me confessing my sins to him, I’d do it at the drop of my hat, without qualms and hiding nothing. It’s just that many priests hide out like highway bandits when they see you coming and only appear when they can see something valuable in your hands.

Read more about what real confession is from an Orthodox priest here.

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
Revelation 3:20

Give the Word a Voice

Photo from the blog Witnessing Encouragement

People need the word of God. If they won't read it on their own, if they won't come to church and hear it, if they go to churches where the word is not preached and heard and lived, then we must bring the word to them. Perhaps some of them would hear it, if they knew it was there. Just read it, don't just tell them about it. The word is strong, but we are weak. Give the word a voice, your voice.

Take the word of God with you wherever you go. Read it in the street, on the bus or train, in the lunch room or during a break on the loading dock. God gives us so much free time. Why let our minds wander after fantasies. All His word needs is a voice. Read it out loud, give the gift of faith to one who needs it, for faith comes by hearing. One of the Church fathers writes…

Let us allow Christ to speak through us. He desires it more than we do. For He made this instrument and wouldn’t want it to be useless and idle. He always wants to keep it in His hands. Why, then, don’t you make it useful for the Maker’s hand? Why do you allow your soul to be unstrung, relaxed through luxury, and allow the whole harp to be useless to Him? One should keep all its parts completely stretched, well strung and reinforced with spiritual salt. For if Christ sees your soul tuned this way, He will make His music through it. When this has taken place, you will see angels leaping for joy—archangels and the cherubim, too. So then, let us become worthy of His spotless hands. Let us invite Him to strike our hearts.

— John Chrysostom

Isaiah 11:6-9

The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,
and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.
Isaiah 11:6-9 NIV

Perhaps the images below illustrate this passage in some small way. These were sent me by Presbytera Candace, and I have already forwarded an email with them to some of you, but I want to share them here as well. A foretaste of the Millennium?

Norbert Rosing's striking images of a wild polar bear coming upon tethered sled dogs in the wilds of Canada's Hudson Bay.
The photographer was sure that he was going to see the end of his dogs when the polar bear wandered in.
CLICK the images to zoom them!

“I come in peace…”

It's hard to believe that this polar bear only needed to hug someone!
The polar bear returned every night that week to play with the dogs!

Kαιρός - Kairós

Βλέπετε οὖν ἀκριβῶς πῶς περιπατεῖτε, μὴ ὡς ἄσοφοι ἀλλ’ ὡς σοφοί,
έξαγοραζόμενοι τὸν καιρόν, ὅτι αἱ ἡμέραι πονηραί εἰσιν.
ΠΡΟΣ ΕΦΕΣΙΟΥΣ 5:15-16

έξαγοραζόμενοι > exagorazómeni > buying up
τὸν καιρόν > ton kairón > kairós time

Jesus once told a parable.
When an owner came seeking fruit and found none, he said to the gardener, “Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?” The gardener replied, “Let it alone, sir, this year also, till I dig about it and fertilize it. Perhaps it will bear fruit next year.”

Give it more time!
Give it another year!
God keeps giving us another year, and each year that passes brings us closer to that day when we shall appear before Him face to face. Each year brings us closer to the Kingdom, closer to eternity when the patient gardener, the Righteous Judge and Lord of the Universe, will come looking for fruit on our tree. But then there will not be another chance. It will be too late. The end will have come. There will not be another year, another opportunity in which to repent and bear fruit for God. Now is the opportune kairós, or time, for repentance and salvation.

We read in St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians, “Look carefully how you walk, not as unwise men, but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:15-16). The key word in this statement by St. Paul is the word “time”. New Testament writers use two Greek words for “time”: chrónos and kairós.

Chrónos time is chronological time, calendar time, time that moves along moment by moment, day by day, year by year. Most people prepare for death by living the chrónos time. They simply try to stay alive as long as possible, adding as many days as they can by proper dieting, staying in shape, taking vitamins, and letting their doctors stretch out their lives with wonder drugs, and intravenous feedings when they get old and sick. Then they die, and that's all there is to it. Death comes when their chrónos, their chronological calendar time, runs out. All they have to show for living is an accumulation of calendar years. “My, he lived to be 100, isn't that wonderful?” we say. It is not wonderful. Not if all one has to show for all those years is calendar time.

But Kairós time is another kind of time, a special kind of time; time which is crucial; time which determines history; time which must be seized by any person who wants life and death to make a difference for time and eternity. Jesus lived a life of kairós time. He never ignored a single moment or opportunity for doing good, for serving, for healing. He used time to the fullest: teaching, comforting, loving, preaching. Even when He was alone, He spent His time in prayer, communicating with God as to how best to use the time that was left in His life.

Thus, when the time came for Jesus to die, He was ready. Even though He was only 33 years old, each precious moment of His life on earth had been used as God had intended for Him to use it. He had used His time as kairós time, time with a purpose, time for serving God and man, time for preparing for eternity.

The Lord gave us chrónos time, calendar time, that we may turn it into kairós time, salvation time, time filled with opportunities for us to respond to God's gracious invitation to the Kingdom; time for bearing in our lives the fruit of faith, hope and love.

The primary meaning of kairós in the New Testament is: the right time, the ripe time, the proper time, the opportune time for salvation. It is in this sense that St. Paul uses the word kairós in 2 Corinthians 6:2: “Behold, now is the acceptable time [ἰδοὺ νῦν καιρὸς εὐπρόσδεκτος]; behold, now is the day of salvation.”

— Fr Anthony Coniaris, Basic Orthodoxy, pp. 1-3

The passage quoted above from one of Fr Coniaris' many books is an example of the kind of Orthodoxy that I encountered when I first joined myself and my family to the Church. It was a living faith lacking worldly credentials and hiding itself from the pomp and glory of this world. Surely it was just as resplendant with its ancient beauty then as always, but there was an unearthly Source to that beauty, it was a beauty not-made-with-hands.

There are many kinds of Orthodoxy in the world today; this is nothing new. There have always been people vying for recognition, promoting the Church, or even the Gospel itself, out of ambition and self-interest.

The true Orthodoxy, my friends and brethren, is not to be found there, but do not let that kind of Orthodoxy prevent you from entering the Holy of Holies, following behind Jesus, our great and everlasting High Priest. That is where true Orthodoxy is to be found.

True Orthodoxy is as the bible teaches; it is only this.

What you have come to is nothing known to the senses: it is not a blazing fire, or a gloom turning to total darkness, or a storm; or trumpeting thunder or the great voice speaking which made everyone that heard it beg that no more should be said to them. They were appalled at the order that was given: If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned. The whole scene was so terrible that Moses said: I am afraid, and was trembling with fright.

But what you have come to is Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole Church in which everyone is a ‘first-born son’ and citizen of heaven. You have come to God Himself, the supreme Judge, and been placed with the spirits of the saints who have been made perfect; and to Jesus, the Mediator who brings a New Covenant and a Blood for purification which pleads more insistently than Abel's.

Make sure that you never refuse to listen when He speaks.

Hebrews 12:18-25a Jerusalem Bible

True Orthodoxy is true Life. It is always an invitation.
It's that place where you not only are, but always feel, welcome.
There's no place like home.

…But he will rejoice

“When a man is born,” Metropolitan Amphilohije stated in today’s eulogy for Patriarch Pavle, “the entire world rejoices, only he weeps. But our lives must be lived in such a way that when that man dies the entire world will weep but he will rejoice.”

Another glimpse of true Orthodoxy

True Orthodoxy is not about rubrics and regulations, persistent and demanding dogmatics, magnificent buildings or over-the-top liturgical chanting, but "it is the day to day life of the simple believer," one such as the recently reposed patriarch Pavle of Serbia (memory eternal), of whom these anecdotes are told…

…a woman came to call on the patriarch. During their discussion, she happened to glance at the patriarch’s feet and the sight of his shoes shocked her… they were beat-up, torn, and cobbled-together old boots. The woman thought, “It’s shameful to us that our patriarch should go about in such clodhoppers. Surely, someone could get him a new pair of proper shoes?” Just as she was thinking this, the patriarch said, with great glee, “See what great shoes I have! I found them near the dustbins when I went to the Patriarchate. Somebody threw ‘em out, but, they’re real leather. I sewed ‘em a bit… see, they’ll last for a long time yet”.

Another woman came to the Patriarchate, demanding to speak with the patriarch on urgent business. During the audience, she said that the night before she dreamed of the Virgin. According to her, the Mother of God told her to bring money to the patriarch so that he could buy himself new shoes. With these words, the visitor tried to hand the patriarch an envelope with money inside. Patriarch Pavle, without taking the envelope, asked, “What time did you go to bed?” The woman, surprised, replied, “Well… somewhere around eleven”. “You know, I went to bed later, about four o’clock in the morning”, replied the Patriarch, “and I also dreamed of the Virgin and I asked her to tell you to take your money and give it to somebody who really needs it”. He didn’t take the money.

He could not only repair shoes or cobble himself new boots from old women’s shoes, but, if he saw that a priest had a torn cassock or cloak, he said to him, “Bring it to me, I’ll fix it”. He did the preparations before the service, and he cleaned up afterwards, washing the utensils, and hung up his cassock and cowl. He heard the confessions of the faithful and gave them communion. He didn’t eat much, much as the ancient Desert Fathers did.

One day, Patriarch Pavle was flying somewhere on an airplane. Over the sea, the plane shook as it entered a turbulent patch of sky. A young bishop, sitting next to the Patriarch, asked him if he thought that the plane was going to crash. His Holiness calmly replied. “For me, it’s just God’s justice. After all, I’ve eaten so many fish in my life that it’s not surprising if they now eat me”.

Wait a minute! There's more on Fr Milovan's blog, take a look…

Who do we think we are, and whose?

Jesus Christ is the reason for the existence of the Church. We are His bride, hidden in Him from before the beginning of the universe, and revealed to the world when they pierced His side, and we emerged as Eve did from the gash in Adam’s side.

Set your hearts on God’s kingdom first, and on His righteousness, and all these other things will be added as well.

If you make my Word your home, you will be my disciples, says the Lord Jesus Christ, and He adds, Whoever loves me keeps my commandments.

The institutional Church can exist from generation to generation by promoting itself, by tantalizing us with hope of salvation if we dedicate ourselves to participating in churchly activities. It is satisfied with us if we just show up on Sundays, and if some of us lend a hand in running its earthly functions.

In that institutional Church, however, is the actual Church in which live the apostles, the prophets, the martyrs—in brief, the saints—those who follow Jesus and who know Him and are known by Him. They do what He says, not for show, not for authority, not for reputation, not for money—just because He commands them, and they obey.

Only the obedient believe.
If anyone would be my disciple, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me, says the Lord Jesus.

If we promote religion, we can worry about church statistics, and busy ourselves with trying to figure out why the youth, or any segment of the baptised members, are becoming less and less interested in “church,” and we can try to devise ways to stop this emigration of saved souls back to the world. We do this to no avail, because we are ourselves still part of this world to which they are slowly escaping, and we are using the world’s methods, thinking in a worldly way, and haven’t ourselves left this world.

If we promote Jesus Christ and the Gospel, who He really is, the living One who is in our midst, and live in His Word, making our home there, placing all our trust in Him on a moment-by-moment basis, learning of Him and taking on His yoke, then we ourselves have left this world behind and live already by faith in the new world that He has prepared for us. Then our lives become living words, testimonies of the Gospel in our very flesh, so that not only the youth of the Church, but even those we meet outside, are confronted by a new reality that invites them into itself. We become and are a city set on a hill that cannot be hid. We become for the world either the sweet fragrance of salvation or the stench of death, depending on their response to Christ, who lives in us.

The Church exists because it is in Christ and will always exist because He is in our midst. The question really is, who do we think we are, and whose?

Once we give the right answer, we will no longer have to be anxious for anything, because it is not we ourselves, but Christ in us, who does everything.

We will know the truth, and the truth will make us free.
And who doesn’t want that kind of freedom?

But can wolves become sheep?

Another interesting quote from John Chrysostom got me to wondering, "but can wolves become sheep?" Of course I know what he is getting at, and one must not exceed the reasonable limits of metaphor, but is metamorphosis possible for a wolf? Christ sends us out as sheep among wolves, but is it to seek out the "other sheep not of this fold that He shall also bring" or, again speaking metaphorically, can wolves be changed?

And He bids them have not only gentleness as sheep, but also the harmlessness of the dove. For thus shall I best show forth My might, when sheep get the better of wolves, and being in the midst of wolves, and receiving a thousand bites, so far from being consumed, do even work a change on them: a thing far greater and more marvelous than killing them, to alter their spirit, and to reform their mind; and this, being only twelve, while the whole world is filled with the wolves.

— John Chrysostom

Those Wayfarers

Those wayfarers and you called diaspora
Slaves washed in the blood of the Son
Known by the Father in mother’s womb
Souls of light and life sealed by the Spirit

The One is holy, yourselves also be holy
As the flower of your glory will wither
Know now the Lord’s endurance as your own
A precious thing never knowing shame

That you can rejoice in authentic faith
Know this necessary suffering is purposed
So that the fire might make pure gold
And receive the honor of Christ’s return

You keep this the Word of gospel given
Though not having seen with wakened eyes
Find for yourselves that joy inexpressible!
That foreseen end: a salvation full of glory

The fathers sought this affliction out
By prophecy spoken by our brothers
Virgin sisters suffered much in Christ
For glories mothers martyrs confessed

Christ did come at the appointed time
Both afflication and glory made one in Him
So that the stars’ motion from the first dawn
Might be vindicated in these last times

A promise that your purified hearts keep
In fervent love, that incorruptable seed,
Born again in obedience to truth and Spirit
Knowing the Word of God abides forever

Your former appetites offer no real comfort
That fall was in ignorance born in darkness
Now take a sober mind, gird your loins,
The pillar of fire now draws you to holiness

Drive out hate, and with it the spirit of lies
Care not for the wealth or land of others.
As the pure milk of the word passes your lips
So do not bespoil them by speaking evil.

Having tasted that grace of the Father
Set as more incorruptabile than gold,
Keep yourselves blameless without spoil
And prove His impartial justice in mercy.

May He the living stone of this spiritual house
Rejected by men, but chosen by God
Grant to you the holy priesthood that your
Sacrifice in spirit be made acceptable in Him

This is our living hope raised from the dead,
Preserved in Christ Jesus, perfected by the Spirit
Never fading, ever glorious, most radiant!
The Kingdom Triumphant come to pass. Amen.

— David Dickens, Nothing Hypothetical

Into our ship

Let us, then, cry out loudly with Peter's words, "Lord, save us." And if we are willing to receive Christ into our ship; that is, to have Him dwell in our hearts; we shall immediately find ourselves at the land to which we are hastening. What land is that? Clearly, it is the Promised Land, Heaven, the land of the meek, of them that refrain from evil. With them, then, may we also be vouchsafed to enter that land and be heirs of its good things; in Christ Jesus our Lord, to Whom be glory and dominion, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

— John Chrysostom

Of battle lines

I have good reason to thank God every morning when I awake to find a roof over my head, food if I want it, a car that works with gasoline in the tank, and a job to go to. I have good reason to thank Him for giving me a quiet rest in a safe and clean place, for granting me and my family the blessing of good health, and not least of all, a few very faithful friends.

This month I have extra cause to thank Him for surrounding me with such a great cloud of witnesses from whose lips and in whose lives I hear and experience such Truth, as I cannot remember anymore that anything in this world matters, but to follow Jesus.

Quoting some passages from Fr Stephen’s recent blog post In the Shadow of the Grand Inquisitor,

The case for power is always replete with good reasons. The case for forgiveness is weak in the extreme. It is generally the case that those who take the commandments of Christ so seriously that they actually seek to live them inevitably look like fools against those whose knowledge and cynicism wield worldly power.

Our human lives are repeatedly tempted to take up certain
"Christian" goals and implement them. Indeed, the increased organization and efficiency of modern man seems quite capable of eradicating hunger, abuse, neglect and the like. Strangely, the many efforts towards such worldly perfection (in the name of heavenly goods) has left history littered with failed schemes and occasionally vast amounts of carnage.

Christ did not come into the world to make bad men good, but to make dead men live.

It is not a great scheme through a united world, or a united Europe that will succeed in creating paradise on earth. I find it comical (were it no so tragic) that among the earliest accomplishments of the European courts is to banish crucifixes in the schoolrooms of Italian children. How many empty bellies will that feed? The Inquisitor (now in Strasbourg) will tell us it is for the children’s freedom.

The battle lines are not political (they never have been). The removal of one Inquisitor is simply to create a vacancy for the next. Indeed, the Christian response is not a response to the actions of man: it is a response to the actions of God.

[The] answer to the Grand Inquisitor is not a better-honed argument… it is the day to day life of the simple believer:
“Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world”
(1 John 4:4).

The answer of the Church, apart from everything else, is to live the transforming life of the indwelling Christ. Christians will be persecuted in this world. They will take away our crosses, smash our icons and tell us that we are wasting our time. They will tell us many things.

But Christ tells us:
“Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

Genuine love in action

This story was quoted in Fr Milovan's blog, in his comment to the post, LA Times Demonizes Patriarch Pavle.
I remember this incident when it happened. Thank you, Fr Milovan for bringing it back to our attention.

“…When [Patriarch Pavle] was the Bishop of Kosovo, he was brutally and severely beaten by a young Muslim man. So intense was this beating, that the frail Bishop almost died; and was in the Hospital for a few months. Upon his dismissal from the Hospital, the then Bishop Pavle went to the prison where the young man was incarcerated. He told the one who had almost killed him that he felt he needed to go home to his parents; because they needed him!

“Then he called the warden of the prison and demanded the young man’s release. When the warden refused, Bishop Pavle told him, ‘I have nothing against this young man; and I will not speak against him. Therefore, you must release him now!’

“What true Christ-like love, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ — love which bore a very special fruit: the young man was soon Baptized into the Orthodox Faith!…”

Genuine love

I am always amazed how voices from the past, especially the remote past, can yank us out of our smug satisfaction with our own era and vaunted superior set of cultural or spiritual values. We often take the Church Fathers for granted, paying little or no attention to them, but instead run after modern thinkers and writers, though not always doers, of the Christian faith. Book store shelves are bending with the weight of books by Max Lucado, Rick Warren, and T.D. Jakes, but rarely do we find the writings of those whose faithful lives and writings testify to “Christ among us” from the earliest days.
Why? Do we really think that Christianity just appeared in the 21st century? “Do you think the Word of God came out of yourselves? Or that it has come only to you?” asks the holy apostle Paul (1 Cor 14:36 Jerusalem Bible).

This morning, my faithful friend Presbytera Candace sent me another ageless gemstone of the wisdom of the early Church. This resonates in me very strongly, confirming from an ancient “life in Christ” something that I too have experienced and learned about the Lord, even living today near “the end of the ages.” This is a word about love, about who loves us, and why, and is expressed with more brevity and simplicity than this rambling introduction of mine; but this word is true. Like the words of holy and divine Scripture, drawn from them and leading us back to them, the humble teachings of our holy and God-bearing ancestors point us always to Jesus, the Word of God, and leave little of themselves to glory in.

[God disciplines] …not for any interest of His own, but for you and for your benefit alone. For this is genuine love, and love in reality: when we are beloved, though we be of no use to Him Who loves us, not that He may receive, but that He may impart. He chastens, He does everything, He uses all diligence, so that we may become capable of receiving His benefits, [chastising us], “so that we might be partakers of His holiness” (Hebrews 12:10).

— John Chrysostom

As a postscript…
Something about this quote from John Chrysostom reminds me of the following old Dutch hymn (circa 1625), which is traditionally sung in the autumn, around or at (American) Thanksgiving.

We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing:
Sing praises to His Name, He forgets not His own.

Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning:
Lord, Thine be all the glory, The victory is Thine!

We all do extol Thee, Thou Leader triumphant,
And pray that Thou still our Defender wilt be;
Let Thy congregation escape tribulation:
Thy Name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free.

Yes, “He does everything, He uses all diligence, so that we may become capable of receiving His benefits.” Ameen!

Orthodoxy is God-manhood

“God is born on earth, and moreover He is born as a man: perfect God and perfect man – the unique God-man.”

“…another name for Orthodoxy is God-manhood.”

“Why is the God-man the fundamental truth of Orthodoxy? Because He answered all the questions that torture the human spirit: the question of life and death, the question of good and evil, the question of earth and heaven, the question of truth and falsehood, the question of love and hate, the question of justice and injustice. In brief: the question of man and God.”

“Only in Him, in the all-merciful Lord Jesus, does man, tormented by earthly tragedies find the God who can truly give comfort in every misfortune and sorrow, the Defender who can truly defend from every evil, the Savior who can truly save from death and sin, the Teacher Who can truly teach eternal Truth and Justice.”

“In order to acquire spiritual knowledge, a man must first be freed from natural knowledge.”

“The more a man devotes himself to natural knowledge, the more he is seized on by fear and the less he can free himself from it. But if he follows faith, he is immediately freed and “as a Son of God, has the power to make free use of all things….Faith can often ‘bring forth all things out of nothing,’ while knowledge can do nothing, ‘without the help of matter.’ Knowledge has no power over nature, but faith has such power. Armed with faith, men have entered into the fire and quenched the flames being untouched by them. Others have walked on the waters as on dry land. All these things are ‘beyond nature’….He who has faith will ‘lack nothing’….”

Quotations from Man and the God-Man, by Fr Justin Popovich

I am going to get a copy of this book! You can too, by clicking on the title above, which is linked to a webpage where you can buy a copy. As many of you know, I do not promote any book besides the Bible, and a very, very few other books and authors. Fr Justin Popovich is one of them. Great reading with a purpose and effect.

A big thank you to Fr Milovan for bringing this book to my attention at his blog, Again and Again.

Living witnesses

We are living witnesses of Jesus' divinity:
Jesus, who was hanged on the cross.

We are the loud and piercing heralds of this sign that was given.
We confess the power of the Cross that was raised on Golgotha after so many centuries have passed.

From where did this transformation originate?
How did a certain man who was hanged and crucified on a cross in Judaea as a criminal among two thieves conquer the entire world after his death?
How was mankind persuaded to acknowledge as God a man who died on the Cross?
How did mankind follow Him with self-denial, lifting as He did the Cross on its shoulders, ready to ascend eagerly to Golgotha with Him, ready to shed its last drop of blood on His behalf?

How did kings accept Him as the King of kings and the Lord of lords?
How did the nations and peoples decline to worship their own gods in order to offer worship to the crucified Jesus?
Why did they abandon their personal idols in order to honor that which was foreign, and the known to honor the unknown?
How did the cross of dishonor become a most Venerable Cross adorning the crowns of kings and emperors?
What power accomplished all these things?

The power of the Crucified One.
The power of the Son of God, Who descended from heaven.
His divine, almighty power made all these things happen.
His power is the power that conquered the world.

The disciples of the crucified Jesus did not have an army to lead.
They had no weapons.
They possessed neither a bag nor a staff.
Rather, as sheep among wolves, they preached the crucified Jesus, who was a scandal for the Jews and foolishness for the Greeks.
They did not preach with wise rhetoric, but rather with simple, powerful words.

Where, though, did this power come from?

Truly, this was an ineffable power, because with simple commands the fisherman, the tax-collector, and the tent-maker resurrected the dead, cast out demons, repelled death, muzzled philosophers' mouths, sealed orators' lips, defeated kings and rulers, and ruled over Greeks, barbarians, and all peoples.
This was because they preached the Gospel with authority all over the world.

How did the fishermen become Apostles and heralds of the revealed truths?
How did they catch the nations and peoples as fish in a net?

Peter had grown old casting nets on the shores of Tiberias.
How did he become a most-wise and most-eloquent speaker in one day, thus persuading thousands of Jews who had aged in the worship of the Old Law that the external grandeur of their ancient and revered worship was no longer pleasing to God, and that it would be abolished forever?

That all of its mystical services were nothing other than a shadow of the things to come, which were now being revealed?
That the traditions to which they were adhering were commandments of men that opposed God's law?
That He Whom they had condemned, the disregarded man Who breathed His last upon the Cross, is the Great Redeemer Himself, the awaited Messiah Who was pre-announced to them by the prophets?
That they are not the only object of divine providence's wonderful graces, but that all the nations of the earth are invited to share in the delight with them?

How did the fisherman successfully persuade the polytheistic Gentiles to purify themselves, render their thoughts spiritual, detach them from the dead matter they were accustomed to, and return them to the living God?
How did they separate them from the deceptive pleasures of the senses, cleanse them from the passions, and render them wiser than the wise?
How, especially, did they persuade them to worship a man who died on the Cross and transform before their eyes the foolishness of the Cross into heavenly wisdom?
How did the heralds of the Crucified One convince their new followers to denounce their secular interests and live subject to the disdain, humiliation, and derision, to disregard all types of pain and punishment, to resist all temptations, and to endure unto death in a teaching whose rewards are guarded for the next life?

Truly, it is a great mystery.

The foolish things of the world, the weak, the things that are despised, and the things that are not, put to shame the wise, they weaken the powerful, and they abolish the things that are!
He who was crucified on the Cross gave such power to His disciples!
God was hidden in the person of Jesus!
The Son and Word of God, Who contains everything, is contained in a body!
Man becomes a mystic of God's desires!
God's Spirit descends upon men!
Man foresees the future!
The infinite God communicates with finite man, the immaterial with matter, the Creator with creation, the Potter with clay!
God reveals Himself to people, God's Spirit refashions and renews man who has been corrupted by sin.
Man becomes a god; he becomes a communicant of the grace of the Holy Spirit!

In essence, these are truly unfathomable mysteries; their outcome, however, is clear.
We are incapable of understanding how God became man, but we realize that only the God-man was able to accomplish that which is a unique property of God.
We are incapable of understanding how man becomes god, but we realize that without God man could accomplish nothing, especially that which the men of God, that is, the Prophets, the Apostles, and all the Saints, accomplished.
The miracles are truly an enigma, but their power and outcome are obvious.

The Christian Faith is a mystery, but its truth is apparent from its power and effects; because the Christian Faith provides abundant evidence externally and bestows assurance internally.

All the above attest to the divine character of our Savior Jesus Christ, Who provided the great sign sought by the Jews. This sign proclaims most loudly the heavenly descent of the Son of God, Who came to save man in accordance with the will of His eternal Father.

— Nektarios of Pentapolis, Christology,
Part II, Chapter 8, Christ's Divine Nature attested to by the moral rebirth that took place in the world

Nothing so humble as love

Nothing makes a man so humble as love.

We perform the offices of servants to our friends, and are not ashamed; we are even thankful for the opportunity of serving them. We do not spare our property, and often not even our persons; for at times, dangers are also encountered for him that is loved.

No envy, no calumny is there, where there is genuine love. We not only do not slander our friends, but we stop the mouth of slanderers.

All is gentleness and mildness. Not a trace of strife and contention appears. Everything breathes peace.

—John Chrysostom

An argument won’t matter, but a Christian will

“Is the Orthodox faith a set of ideas or a divine reality?”

If it is a set of ideas then we’d better get our arguments together and do it soon.

Christ himself said, “…if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight…” But His kingdom is not of this world – it is not among the things that are passing away. It is that which is coming and it will never pass away. Many accompanying aspects of the Kingdom have come and gone and come and gone (I think of the outward trappings of empire and the like). Those things which have come and gone are of this world and should be of no concern to us.

The ability to remain silent even in the face of an invitation to argue is not weakness, but confidence in the truth.

The faith has never failed because we lacked good arguments and the will to carry them forward. The faith has failed at points because we failed to believe it.

If the Orthodox faith flourishes in this world, at this time, it will be because it flourishes in the lives of those who have embraced it.

We live in a 24/7 news cycle – marked mostly by talking-heads and interminable arguments. Does anyone actually believe that another argument, even when brought by a Christian, will matter?

An argument won’t matter. But a Christian will – precisely because an authentic Christian is so hard to find.

The words above are quoted from Fr Stephen's post I Don't Know About That. If you have never visited Fr Stephen's blog, Glory to God for All Things, I suggest you do it now, and then take a break, read your bible, pray, and thank God that Christians still exist who know these things.

That's what I'm going to do.

Prayers of entreaty and thanks

Born a Slave

I was born into a house of slavery, a slave
How then being freed do I spit on freedom?
Though I have mutilated my flesh
The beast rules me from Gehenna

Holy God, cut off my hands
That I might not be able to wrap my wrists again in chains

Holy Mighty, cut off my feet
That I cannot walk back to that accursed prison cell

Holy Immortal, cut out my tongue
That I will not cry out to my former masters to abduct me

If you must, destroy my body, my life, to save my very soul

Thanks Be

Thanks be to Him who opens doors, maker of life-giving crosses.
Thanks be to Him who manifests in all wisdom, redeems all time.
Thanks unto the One who gives grace in speech having been fulled with salt.
Thanks and again to He who lifted Adam from the dark pit.

Sender of prophets, Illuminer of dreams,
Gift of interpretors.

To Light, to Song, to Faithfulness,
To Grace and Abounding Love.

— David Dickens, Nothing Hypothetical

Three paintings by Orozco: Gods of the Modern World (top), Jesus the Liberator (middle), and Man of Fire (bottom) in the tholos-like dome of the Hospicio Cabanas in Guadalajara, Mexico

Matthew 28:20

The world encounters Orthodox Christianity. People hear about it and become curious, or they see it happening somewhere and maybe they are startled, or even put off. It is not something that one can take in all in an eyeshot, not even really in a panorama, except as one takes in a beautiful photograph or painting. All that can be seen that way is very superficial and almost meaningless, except as beauty has meaning without needing proof.

When they get a little closer to Orthodoxy, they want to hurry up and classify it. They want to ask questions, “Is it Catholic, is it Protestant, is it an Eastern religion, what is it?” but they nearly always want to classify it as a religion. Oddly, sometimes even people within Orthodoxy want to do the same, because they have taken on so many of the world’s expectations of what is needed, what is important. If it can be called a religion, then it can be firmly rejected, or firmly (and fanatically) accepted, and there it is. It’s been identified, pigeonholed, and done. “Yeah, I know what Orthodoxy is.”

But Orthodox Christianity is not a religion, though many of its adherents think of it that way. Orthodoxy is nothing less than the daily proclamation of a profound and powerful mystery—the resurrection of Jesus Christ—and the opening to all mankind, in every place and at every moment of time, the possibility of true brotherhood, and of divine sonship. The life of the Holy Triad is open to us, taking away the purposelessness of life alone in a Godless universe.

Jesus Christ came to pitch His tent among us, not only in His incarnation, but by His life-giving death and resurrection. He is the One who had become dead, and is alive again. He is no mere historical figure to be studied and speculated about. He was, is and is to come, the single most active Person in the history of the human world. He is here now among us.
He is calling us at this very moment, not to religion, but to follow Him.

Who can refuse His call? and why would anyone want to?

ιδου εγω μεθ υμων ειμι
πασας τας ημερας
εως της συντελειας του αιωνος

Behold, I am with you,
every day,
unto the very end of time.
Matthew 28:20

From the ‘Golden-mouthed’

Your Master loved those that hated Him, and called them to Him; and the weaker they were, the greater the care He showed them. And He cried and said, “They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick” (Matthew 9:12). And He deemed publicans and sinners worthy of the same table with Him. And as great as was the dishonor wherewith the Jewish people treated Him, so great was the honor and concern He showed for them—yea, and much greater. Emulate Him.

— John Chrysostom

Yes, just follow Jesus!

Three years in Damascus

I cannot go to Jerusalem to confer with flesh and blood
But spend three years in Damascus eating bitter herbs

The love of my father was still in my heart
In ears were full of my mother’s teaching

This family knew me because they made me
The unmaking returned to them a stranger

O they were proud
O I did excell
In all the teachings
Rhetorics and rules

O lost loves
O forgotten days
Better, I be mute
Than speak against you

But what I received now was not from man
Is it possible for feet to unwalk a road?

I call honors loss; I name fame as dust
There is one consolation I offer my loves

Take no offense at these words, but hear if you have ears
That I am becoming nothing because of Him who is all

— David Dickens, Nothing Hypothetical

“We know...” 1 John 2:3-5

“We know that we have come to know Him if we obey His commands.”

What is the assurance of our knowledge of Him—that we truly are His? Our assurance is our obedience to His commandments. Moshe's Law has been superceded by Mashiach's Law. And does Messiah's law contradict and go against Moshe's? Far be it—no it refines and brings to a point the commandments that the leader of the Exodus inaugurated for all Yisrael. Yet, not only did the Son of Man fulfill all of Moses' commands, He even fulfilled those that He Himself inaugurated at His first appearing. Having appeared in the flesh, the Second Adam (whose composite was that of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin's womb) did all that the first Adam (composed of God's breath and virgin clay) could not and failed to do. We must obey His commands because...

“...The man who says, ‘I know Him,’ but does not do what He commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him...”

So are you a liar? Am I a liar? I claim to know Him. Better to not claim to know Him and disobey, perishing apart, than to claim to know Him and yet still disobey, perishing close and within. Disobedience, then, is the assurance and testimony against us that we are liars, just as obedience is our support and testimony of acceptance. And as lies have no association with truth, so liars are filled with lies and not truth. We are commanded not to be liars, but to be “truthers.”

“...But if anyone obeys His word, God's love is truly made complete in him...”

Yet, obedience does something more. To know the Word, you must obey the word. Doing so brings the completion—God's love perfected. And we know that if something is complete, perfected-love, by the truth, then it cannot be undone. The Lie and lies can never complete love. The Truth, the Lord Christ Jesus and His truth, the Word of God, finishes the love of His God.

— Brock James Smith