Born blind

We are born blind, we never had eyes, we have never seen light, nor known it, nor experienced it, we have no idea even of what it is, just what others have told us. But did they have eyes? Were they born with sight? Or do they speak of what they imagine but never see?

This is how it is, for us, for every human being who has ever walked the earth, but One. We are born blind. We hear the world around us, but cannot see it. We know it’s there, we bump into it, sometimes hurting ourselves, until we learn how to navigate through the darkness.

Darkness? Our world doesn’t look dark to us. It’s light, it’s beautiful, there’s so much in it to see and experience. Yes, but all that you say we are seeing, all of it, my brothers, is dark and featureless, as shallow yet as deep as a starless night, and yet you say you see.

Let me, one blind man who does not see but feels, tell you that as wonderful as it would be for a man born blind to be granted the faculty of sight, that is how wonderful, and even more, it will be when we who have been born blind and see only this world are granted to really see.

To really see, when we have received our sight, we cannot remember anymore that seamless darkness that was what we thought the world to be. We will be able to close our eyes for a moment—only the demons are eyelidless—and see the world we left behind.

And just as we close our eyes to better pray, so there will we close our eyes for our brothers who live yet in that world born blind, which never since it sold them had eyes nor sighted birth, as we intercede without ceasing for those who await with longing to receive their sight.

And open them again, to receive Him who was always everywhere present, filling all things, the Lord and Creator of Life, to receive Him into our hungry eyes, to become what we behold, finally, finally, after waiting for what seemed for ever, waiting only to be fulfilled, to see only Him.

One

As I was reading the beginning of the letter of James the brother of God, I was touched by the tender care and intimate way of speaking that the apostle employs in writing his letter, and to people whom he didn’t even know face to face—to the twelve tribes of the diáspora—and even to us.

And I thought of how this letter, along with the others, is called the Word of God, is made to be the very words of God to us, even though in its language it is just the words of men. Yet we call the epistles, the writings of the apostles, the Word of God, scripture no less than the Gospels or the Tanakh.

It seems to me that even the holy and divine Scriptures demonstrate the One God who in Holy Triad loves as three, though He is One. The Tanakh, that is, the Old Testament, seems to be the message of the Heavenly Father, who speaks to us Himself, as His holy prophets fade into nothing as they speak.

The Gospels seem to be the message of the Only-Begotten Son who is also the Word of God, which He brought into our midst not by any writing of His own, but by His being: Now the Father whom no man has seen or can ever see becomes visible in the Son, no longer hidden in clouds, but revealing His face.

The Acts of the holy apostles and their Letters, these seem to be the message of the Holy and Life-Creating Spirit, who though invisible Himself, maintains the visible presence of Christ in our midst, as the brother who walks beside us. Invisible God becomes visible Christ becomes tangible brother man.

Like the water-gushing rock that followed Israel as they moved through the wilderness shielded from the heat of the sun by the cloud by day, illumined and warmed and protected in the dark nights by the pillar of flame, our God the Holy Triad has encircled us by the words of His holy and divine Scriptures.

Not satisfied to rule us with laws, He came among us to free us to righteousness by love, and now lives among us, in us, with us, upon us, even as us: we have the Message in its fullness, of the Father in unapproachable Light, in the Light of the Face of His Son, and by the Light of Tabor in the virgins’ lamps.

Where is the God of gods who summons the earth to His people’s trial, who alone does wonders, of whom we sing, ‘Who is so great a god as our God?’ Does He dwell in the misty mountain tops and thunder in the storm clouds? The glory of the Triad has made His home among us then, now, and ever.

Holy apostles, lovingly plant in us the seed that the Master planted in you, that you write to us who live at the end of time, that the Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life causes to sprout and grow in us, that we too may enter into the mystery of life in the Holy Triad with you, one mind, one will, one heart, one love. [*]

When He returns

Anyone who has been the victim of a miscarriage of justice knows what I’m talking about. In spite of all the evidence, or the lack of it, one has been judged guilty of the crime. Tragedy is sown in the mindless inattention to facts, as scarecrows in a melon patch hang uselessly defending nothing from no one. We are satisfied to have reached a verdict that confirms our every suspicion, glad that what we believed all along was proven right. Self-vindication conquers even the mightiest facts. We have won our case.

This is what happens all around us and every day. Sometimes we are the perpetrators, sometimes the victims. It doesn’t matter because it’s usually over trifles. No one is actually sent to the block, nobody is incarcerated. Injustice is unimportant because it is so small, accusation merely a ruse to satisfy our need for self-validation at the expense of another. We think it doesn’t matter. We’ve just trampled someone else’s self image, so that our own can be hoisted higher. We are wise in our own eyes, as we live a lie.

This is what comes of the dictatorship of self. We put kings and queens to death for their alleged vainglory, ourselves presumed innocent, no questions asked. Others are not what they are but what we make them. Light has become darkness, or darkness light, not according to what our eyes tell us, but our hearts. Not the world as it is, but our inner world, is where we choose to live. This can be anything but the truth, but we call the cards. Proud of our personal divine right, we call it the kingdom of heaven.

Every human struggle from day one has been the ceaseless recycling of the same theme. Not what things really are, nothing and no one for its own, their own, sake. All that is outside us is only there for us. ‘All I have is yours, all you see is mine,’ we prefer to remember our personal divine mandate, given by the only god we really believe in, ourselves. This is the state of nature. We are the noble savage. We put kings and priests to death. We always have, and we always will. This is our divine right.

But one day He came from That Other Place, bringing the Message we did not want to hear from One we cannot overcome. We could not paint Him with the colors of our minds, so we ignored Him when, after putting Him to death, He would not go away. We don’t believe in ghosts, nor in mortal men, nor immortal gods, only in ourselves, not yourselves, not themselves, but myself. There is only one piece of evidence that we cannot admit, else our kingdom crashes. He places it before us, yet we will not see.

Sin is not what it is, but what we make it. We snatch the truth out of His hands almost before He lays it down. We hide it quickly somewhere inside the folds of our regal robes or, better yet, we mount it as a jewel in our crown, confirming our authority. Peace at last, the whole world at peace, one world, under us, just as we always dreamed, just as it always seemed. We were right after all. We breathe a sigh of relief. It was a close call. He came, He saw, we conquered. Not who He is, but what we made Him.

Everything goes on as it always has since the beginning of the world. We are still in charge. Nothing and no one can come into our courtroom without our permission. We have won our case, judged aright, vindicated ourselves. He was, He is, and He will be—that man—we are safe from Him. We made even Him do our bidding, be what we said He is. Yes, we even celebrate His birth and capitalize all that pertains to Him. We brand ourselves with His name. But what will we do, if and when He returns?

Designed by mercy

Becoming Orthodox disqualifies you as an Evangelical teaching authority, and I suppose the reverse would also be true: Becoming Evangelical disqualifies you as an Orthodox teaching authority.

It all confuses me, and I am not sure what planet I am on, sometimes. I wish I could express what I know and what I feel, but I cannot.
If I open my mouth to almost anyone, I find they are aiming a stone at me.

There is no conversion, except to Christ, who is Life, the only Life worth living, eternal, certain Life. I pray for you, brethren, whenever I think of you, and I thank God for you, and ask Him only to guard your lives. If you can just stay alive, His will provides everything else.

Sorrow, sorrow but not unhappy, quiet, unworried sorrow, sorrow that waits, sorrow that alone can endure transformation. All else is too weak. Sorrow only is strong enough to endure everything and, enduring all, is transformation.

One day by one day by one day, a cube of time, designed by mercy to be small, because small is safe. Closeness to Him holds us, keeps us safe. Closeness covers us, until the storm passes by.

Confession

The Church of God expects to experience injustice and hostility historically. It is precisely that it is persecuted and does not fight back or take revenge, but prays for the forgiveness and salvation of its persecutors, that qualifies it as possessing the true faith and being the true Church. It is precisely at that moment when the Church takes revenge or remembers the offenses it has endured and passes on hostility and resentment to its next generation that it is betraying Christ and proving to everyone that it follows not the God whose throne is the Cross and who trampled death by death, but the old Adam, whom death tramples.

How can I be a member of a church institutionally some of whose members and even some of whose leaders are betrayers of Christ? Well, because I too am a betrayer of Christ, but by His call refuse to give in to defeat, since He has won the victory for me, and for these others, whose blasphemies they call loyalty to Orthodoxy, while trampling down not death by death as Christ does, but their brothers, whom they hate, as death does. Like it or lump it, I too am a sinner following Christ, and if He picks me up every day, He will pick up these others too. Meanwhile, we all suffer the strain of forgetting Him while we glory in our own ideas, fleshly and blind though they be, and mistake our loves and hates for truth.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Joy, joy

Joy, joy, amidst suffering, 

blending what cannot be with what is,
and all held in fragile friendship in the hands of God,

who for the love of His suffering siblings
joined them to prove on the battlefield of His body
that victory is at the bottom of defeat,
and that redemption can be purchased
only at a price beyond our paying,

and that of all worlds this one is the best and only,
because our Beloved has pierced our defenses
and shown us the way out,
to perfect freedom,
fearless, radiant, unfleshly
and immortal.

He is glorified by the piping of a solitary bird
that now sings, again and again, the threefold call,
‘Holy, Holy, Holy,’
out of the wooded depths.

Your day, O Lord,
Your day that You have bestowed on us,
grant us to behold Your face in every moment,
and feel Your touch.

Savior, come, and do not delay.

— Romanós

Will He know me?

"What matters supremely is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that He knows me." — J. I. Packer

This idea took hold of me one day when as a 22-year-old furniture maker's apprentice in Edmonton, Alberta, my mind took a leave of absence as my body was doing the mindless job of sanding furniture tops on an old-fashioned belt sander. There I was, pushing the sanding table in and out with one hand, the other pulling down on the lever of a sanding shoe, trying to achieve a level surface on each piece.

I was thinking of how important it was to believe that Jesus would come back some day. Funny, though, because I was still not a believer, but rather a philosophic hanger-on to the New Age kind of spirituality that combines ‘belief’ in Jesus with a grab bag of other ‘spiritual’ concepts.

Why should it matter to me that Jesus would be coming back, if he were only one of many ‘saviors,’ as is the teaching of the New Age? I think deep down my original Christian upbringing was pushing its way back into my consciousness. I was starting to see where New Age thought was leading, and it must have been unsettling the real me, the one that would live forever… or suffer the second death.

As I was pushing that sanding table in and out, my limbs automatically sensing the right amount of pressure to get the work done, my mind was drifting into the realm of pure thought.

I kept thinking, ‘He's really going to come back. He really is. What will happen to me then? Will He recognize me? Will He know me?’

Suddenly, in my mind's eye, I could see something like an image of Jesus above me, and a little behind me to my left, looking down at me with a serious but not angry stare, just looking at me very hard. Without moving my head for a closer look, something in me just said, ‘When You come back, will you know me? Will You recognize me?’
Pausing for the answer, there was none.
He just kept looking, almost sadly. All this, you understand, in my mind's eye. I don't know how else to put it.

After a few seconds more, and something external to my thought roused me to physical action, and the chink in time closed. But that moment of kairós time, and that thought ‘Will He know me?’ was the beginning of my conversion to Jesus Christ, which came about after two more years of struggle against the good testimony of others.

Brethren, keep witnessing for Jesus!

"Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven."

Matthew 10:32-33 NIV

Thirty-seven years

I originally wrote and posted this testimony on November 6, 2006, six years ago today, under the title Born again? When? In the intervening years a lot has happened in my life, up and down, but the same Lord who called me at the beginning of my Christian life has faithfully preserved and carried me to this day—blessed be His name! I just want to honor Him today and, like the Gadarene who Christ delivered from ‘legion,’ go and tell others ‘what the Lord has done’ for me (Mark 5:19). In rereading what I wrote, I am embarrassed by some of the language I used, sometimes betraying wrong attitudes I’ve since (God helping!) outgrown. I ask in advance anyone who is offended by any word in this testimony, to forgive me.
‘I’m just a stupid man.’

I had a feeling there was something special about this date, something I should remember… Yes, it started coming clear tonight. November 6th was the day when I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ and the biblical Orthodox faith back in 1975, at the ripe old age of 24!

After being brought up in church until I was 8 years old, when my parents stopped going because we moved too far from our original church and we just couldn’t get grafted into the one in our new neighborhood (although there were other excuses), I was left to fend for myself for the rest of my childhood. Dad seemed indifferent, but now that we’ve talked as adults, I know that he was just too real to waste his time on meaningless ceremonies. In later life he became a Baptist and is a deacon in that church. Mom was a ‘house Catholic,’ that is, she wanted to be a good Christian, but the church was too corrupt and hocus-pocus for her, too. She had a passionately religious mindset, but also realistic, no worthless devotions or rosary type stuff… she just stayed up all night worrying, plucking her eyebrows so she could paint them back in with eyebrow pencil, and praying that all of us kids would somehow make it through childhood without getting into drugs or getting killed. It was Mom who made me and my younger brother promise we’d ‘never do dope.’

So, I never did dope, but… worse things, really. After imitating my Mom as a fervently ignorant house Catholic elitist, in college I lapsed into the New Age religions. I was especially drawn to Hinduism because of a fascination with the god Krishna. As a young teenager, I had picked up and read a novel my folks had left lying around, some book club thing, that was about a teenage girl growing up in India, and there was a chapter entitled, ‘Krishna the Joyous.’ It captivated my imagination, and launched me into the great unknown. Krishna was joyous, but Christ was the ‘man of sorrows.’ Come now, people, who would you have turned to as a confused adolescent wrestling with the hormones?

College years found me orbiting the fringes of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, scorning the hopelessly dull and unimaginative male members (all with one-track minds…Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!), and dating and being patronized by cute but dumb Christian girls (but girls are supposed to be dumb, right? so who cares, they were cute!). Forgive me for this last sentence. I was a dolt. But here’s a testimony for those girls, and maybe even for some of the guys… somehow I knew they were right, even when I was making fun of them. But I also knew that it was Who stood behind them that mattered, not they themselves or whatever churches or doctrines they believed in. At that time, I had a rock-solid belief in the divinity of Jesus that I took in, I guess, with the baby formula (Mom didn’t breast feed). I just didn’t quite understand why Krishna, and Buddha, and Swami Satchidananda, and… yeah, even me… couldn’t also be God somehow. I was beginning to read the bible again, now that I knew there were other versions besides the KJV. And I found verses like, ‘Is it not written in your Law: I said, you are gods’ (John 10:34). ‘So,’ I thought, ‘maybe there are other ways to understand the bible than what’s taught in church!’ (I had yet to discover the Church fathers, particularly the Desert Fathers.)

Moving right along, after emigrating to Canada in 1972 to join a New Age commune that flopped after only about 6 months, I found myself married to a gal that had been born again and was trying to be a Christian. I wouldn’t let her go to church (that is, I wouldn’t go with her, and she wouldn’t go alone), because ‘Christians are just so dumb!’ That's what I thought until we moved back to the States, to Corvallis, Oregon.

While living in Oregon, I could see firsthand what the fruits of the neo-pagan mindset are… ‘depravity, rottenness, greed and malice, addiction to envy, murder, wrangling, treachery and spite…’ (the rest of the list is in Romans 1:29-31). Not that the people out here were all ‘irrational and given over to monstrous behavior’ but that a kind of deathly hedonism, decadence and hypocritical irreverence prevailed among the very people I was trying to fit in with, the New Age folks. Some were almost harmless ‘flower children,’ but others were on the fringes of lunacy, dabbling in witchcraft and magic. Ugh! Seeing all this around me forced me to take a stand, either to continue down the path of hopeless wandering, like ‘a shooting star bound for an eternity of black darkness’ (Jude 1:13), or to repent, like Job, and say, ‘I am the man who obscured Your designs with my empty-headed words… I have been holding forth on matters I cannot understand… I knew You then only by hearsay; but now, having seen You with my own eyes, I retract all I have said, and in dust and ashes I repent’ (Job 42:3-6)

I chose the second option. Out of His love for me, He opened the door to His Kingdom, and I walked through it, on November 6th, 1975.

I was at work. I was a sawyer at the Veal & Son Furniture factory in Albany, Oregon. It was about 10 o’clock in the morning. I just heard His voice, and I knew it was Him. He questioned me. I hurriedly shooed my assistant off on an errand… ‘Go, empty the wood box into the boiler’ (that would take him at least 15 minutes). He questioned me, like He questioned Job, ‘Who is this obscuring My designs with his empty-headed words? Brace yourself like a fighter; now it is My turn to ask questions and yours to inform Me.’ (Job 38:2-3) …No, of course I didn’t hear these exact words, but what He said to me was like them, and when I later read these words in the book of Job, I bracketed them as rhímata, ‘living words.’

After His questioning, the Lord brought me to the point where I could surrender myself to Him, with the help of the Holy Spirit. Yes, there were physical and emotional ‘events’ occurring in me as this took place. Yes, I first felt my body to be on fire, as I struggled against the Truth that spoke Himself to me. Then, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I surrendered ‘all that I am and all that I have’ into His hands, and I felt ice cold water falling on me, as if I were standing under a cold waterfall. I honestly even felt wet. Then, I realised, I was crying. After He washed me in His precious Blood, He left me without departing, and gave me the one gift that I have never lost, though it’s hard to describe… to see Him everywhere I look. I just have to get quiet, and He’s there, more certain and real to me than I am to myself.

So, was this being ‘born again’? Did it happen to me when I was baptised without my knowing as an infant? Did it happen when I heard His voice in the wood shop? I cannot pretend to know the when or the why of this being born ‘from above’ as Jesus describes it to Nicodemus, in the dead of the night. But Someone from beyond the world’s end called me, when I was heedless of Him, and opened a door for me to walk through. ‘Will your body finally be the door to let me in?’ I once wrote in a song. Nai, Kyrie! Yes, Lord! Even while I sometimes cry out for love of You whom I can always see by faith yet not always touch, I know that You care for me. I only ask the question again, not to doubt Your promise, but so that I can hear Your voice again, saying to me, ‘Do not be afraid, for I am with you.’ (Isaiah 41:10)

Saving moments

Psalms for the 6th day were Psalms 30 to 34.

After getting home from work,
I read them and meditated on the meaning they've had for me these many a year. And I spoke them in prayer, and received back, as the Lord never fails me, He's the faithful one.

Hear, Yahweh, take pity on me;
Yahweh, help me! (Psalm 30:10)

Back in 1975, we were still on the trail of that elusive commodity, the "perfect" commune.

Chuck and Tish owned a half section of land on the western slope of a mountain outside of Harrisburg, Oregon, and another half section down in the valley. The upper section was organized as a commune called "Ahimsa" (Sanskrit for "non-violence"), and they had invited us to live there if we could make it work.
They were letting their friends build homes out in the wilds, and the commune was going to be very (as we say in Greek) idio-rhythmic. In other words, people did not share everything in common materially or spiritually. They only shared the land and each other's company. Everyone was expected to have their own income and build themselves a home at their own expense. The ethos of the commune was to be "spiritual", but in the New Age sense—all paths ultimately lead to God.

Before we moved down here, we visited Ahimsa in the spring of 1975. That's when I took the photos that illustrate this post. At that point, I was still a New Age spiritual seeker myself, though Anastasia was a "born again" Christian. We didn't go to church, though, because I had a problem with the hypocrisy I heard tell of. Our visit left us both with a positive impression of the commune, and so we packed up our transportable belongings in about 120 boxes and shipped them via Canadian Freightways to the Portland terminal. Our irreplaceables went into a car carrier that I built out of plywood and mounted to the top of my 1972 Pinto hatch-back. (In the end, we didn't join Ahimsa. Chuck and Tish ended up becoming Mormons. We became Christians. I don't know what became of the others at Ahimsa.)


We arrived in Corvallis the evening of Rosh Hashonah, September 5, 1975, and stayed with a young Jewish couple we had known in Edmonton, Debbie and Harold. (Next morning we drove to Salem with them for our first experience of synagogue worship.)

This is not going to be the story of how I smuggled my wife and child into the U.S., but rather how I found myself, on the Thursday morning of November 6, 1975, ready to meet the Lord.
(Let the reader understand: I'm not now talking about just any Lord.)
Let me cite a verse from the psalms for the 6th day…

Happy the man whose fault is forgiven,
whose sin is blotted out;
happy the man whom Yahweh
accuses of no guilt,
whose spirit is incapable of deceit!

All the time I kept silent, my bones were wasting away
with groans, day in, day out;
day and night Your hand
lay heavy on me;
my heart grew parched as stubble
in summer drought.

At last I admitted to You I had sinned;
no longer concealing my guilt,
I said, "I will go to Yahweh
and confess my fault."
And You, You have forgiven the wrong I did,
have pardoned my sin. (Psalm 32:1-5)

That morning I was at work, a rough sawyer in an old furniture mill in Albany. It was cold outside. The wind was blowing through the cracks in the barn-like plank walls. My fingers were freezing, even though I had gloves on. Behind me, a large planer was roaring. My off-bearer was shivering as he slid the scrap off the saw with one hand into a waste bin, while with the other guiding the good rips onto a cart.
I heard a voice inside my head, "Why do you resist Me…?"

I will instruct you, and teach you the way to go;
I will watch over you and be your advisor.
Do not be like senseless horse or mule
that need bit and bridle to curb their spirit
to let you get near them. (Psalm 32:8-9)

Quickly, I sensed this was not just my imagination. I waved my off-bearer a signal, "Go empty the wood box!" That would take him at least 15 minutes, maybe longer, because it meant dragging a heavy load of wood down to the boiler hut. "He's probably going to want to warm himself there," something in me quipped. As he hauled his heavy load away to be burned, another heavy load was going to be hauled away and burned, one only I and the Off-bearer could see.

You, who have seen my wretchedness,
and known the miseries of my soul,
have not handed me over to the enemy,
You have given my feet space and to spare. (Psalm 30:7b-8)

The talk began, slowly at first, then more heatedly. I argued with the voice. Sometimes I seemed to switch sides. I wanted to surrender, but then, I had investments. How could I give these up? Would I get something to replace them? What? How can you bargain with Him? What are you expecting? He's already told you everything, and you know it's all true.

The Word of Yahweh is integrity itself,
all He does is done faithfully;
He loves virtue and justice,
Yahweh's love fills the earth.

By the Word of Yahweh the heavens were made,
their whole array by the breath of His mouth… (Psalm 33:4-6)

My temperature was rising, in spite of the biting cold around me. With every last ounce of my will, my flesh resisted the voice, and I kept feeling hotter. "This can't be happening to me! You know I want to accept You, but I can't, I can't!" Finally, I asked Him to remove what was binding me.

Hear, Yahweh, take pity on me; Yahweh, help me! (Psalm 30:10)

That which I couldn't do of my own power, somehow He called forth from me. "All that I am, and all that I have, I surrender to You, Lord, to You, Jesus. I don't want anything now, nothing but what You want me to be and to have." This was the jist of what came tumbling out of my lips, along with sobs, because by now my face was a liquified mess. A coolness like a stream of icy water flowed over my head and then my body. I don't know what it was, but it pacified me. The planer with its attendee still roared behind me, none hearing or seeing what was happening to me, and me hearing and seeing nothing outside of me.

Every face turned to Him grows brighter
and is never ashamed.
A cry goes up from the poor man, and Yahweh hears,
and helps him in all his troubles.

The angel of Yahweh pitches camp
around those who fear Him; and He keeps them safe.
How good Yahweh is—only taste and see!
Happy the man who takes shelter in Him. (Psalm 34:5-8)

Something that can't be put into words really, yet I've tried on this and other occasions. This time I'm only hinting at it. What is this thing that happens to us? Once I wrote a post, Born again? When? in which I tried to recount what happened to me that morning. That's my testimony, or at least part of it, because the new life in Christ, the birth from above, is really an event in kairós time—though you can sometimes pinpoint it on a calendar, it really encompasses more than a moment. You can't look at it, you can't even remember it, as it really is, was and is to come, because it's hidden with the One who will give it back to you on the last Day.

Our soul awaits Yahweh,
He is our help and shield;
our hearts rejoice in Him,
we trust in His holy Name.

Yahweh, let Your love rest on us
as our hope has rested in You. (Psalm 33:20-22)

O Gracious Light / Φώς Ιλαρόν

Back in 1975, on November 6, working in an ancient furniture factory in Albany, Oregon, I gave my life to the Lord Jesus Christ, ‘All that I am, and all that I have, Lord, I give back to You. Take, and give back to me only what You want me to be and to have. I am Yours. Save me.’ A simple confession of faith in a dark corner of an old wood shop, pausing from my work at a table saw, having sent my one assistant away to empty the wood box when I sensed the Lord was approaching. After that moment of meeting, nothing looked the same to me ever again, nothing was the same. ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ Yes, Jesus speaks, Jesus is, the Truth.

The very next day I wrote an Old Catholic bishop with whom I was corresponding—this is before the computer age, we actually wrote letters back then—to receive my profession of faith, and asked him for his instructions. I was already baptised, but never confirmed, so when he came to Portland to minister to his miniscule congregation here, he would confirm me and my wife, who was also baptised in the United Church of Canada, and then baptise our, by then two year old, first-born son. Why an Old Catholic bishop? Well, my last church affiliation had been Polish National Catholic, an Old Catholic denomination, popeless.

After our family was bodily joined to the Church by this bishop's sacramental hands on March 21, 1976 in a small house church on Southeast Market Street in old Portland, Oregon, he advised us—since we didn't live there, but in Corvallis, a small town about 2 hours south—to worship as ‘guests’ at the Episcopal Church in that town. That was Good Samaritan, my first church community as an intentional, adult Christian. I learned a lot there, about the Church, about Christ. The clergy were indulgent but supportive. Deaconess Noel had still not been talked into becoming first a ‘deacon’ (non sexist language) and then a ‘priest.’ Father Neville who introduced himself to me at our first meeting as, ‘Father Neville. If you can remember the devil, you can remember Neville,’ was a typical broad church country vicar, like in the story books. It was a ‘nice’ beginning for a life in Christ that would later become quite stormy.

We moved to Portland after perhaps only a year in Corvallis, and joined first St Andrew's church, and then later migrated to St Mark's, a high church Episcopal parish in the inner city. That is where the rest of our sons were baptised as infants, and where I was a lay reader in charge of the Friday evening weekly service. I chanted evensong, and then with a partner or two, we went off into the streets and a coffeehouse nearby to do a kind of street ministry, mostly witnessing, but some helping of the needy. St Mark's, even now, I still consider my ‘family church,’ although we were chrismated into Holy Orthodoxy about twenty-four years ago, and are now Greek Orthodox.

This morning I found a webpage that had a number of excellent large photographs of the interior of Saint Mark's church, which I have posted below. It was, and still is, a very beautiful church. The large painting of the Ascension of Christ on the wall above the high altar was painted by a priest iconographer who was a Native American, and who also painted the large icon of Christ and the Saints which hangs in our first church in Portland, Saint Andrew's.
(Fr David Lounsbury is also in the photo.)

When I was the reader for the Friday vespers, we had quite an eclectic and unique congregation of many talents. One of them was a very excellent young poet, whose name was Tom Nash, which is also the name of a famous poet, a relative of William Shakespeare. He wrote a poem about our evening prayer times together, which has probably never been published anywhere before, and it is one of my treasured literary keepsakes.

The title of the poem, Phos Hilaron, is the name of the ancient hymn that we used to chant in the service. The image of the musical notation is not the melody we used, but it is the same style, a square note kind of music. The poem is a beautiful, simple reminiscence of those candlelit evenings, with evening sun streaming through heavily glazed windows into the romanesque church, into the Mary Chapel, where we held our service. (The photo at the head of this post is of the Mary Chapel.) The poem captures for me, and I hope for you, the feeling of that peaceful gathering we shared together in this sacred space nearly thirty years ago. In this poem, ‘Norman’ is the name of the reader who chanted the service. That's Romanós in his younger days.

Phos Hilaron
by Thomas Nash

In the Lady Chapel's Holy and bright

emblem of the evening light

that even now plays with and braids

the fountain's brightness while dark shades

gather under the walls of the park outside

on this eighth day of Eastertide

Norman, with deep and noble tone

voices the Phos Hilaron.

With trembling note we follow his lead

and through all the prayers gently plead

like mice meekly following mother,

piping together, sister and brother.

Now, for the rest of the photos of Saint Mark's Parish…
(Click them to zoom, click again for very large.)

Follow behind Jesus

Miracles are not seen. The human eye is not large enough to ‘see miracles.’ What the religious person thinks of as miracles are sometimes not miracles at all, but the effect that the presence of the miraculous has on people and things. For example, what is miraculous in a weeping ikon?
Is it the mysterious liquid that oozes out of the wood (or even out of the paper) of the ikon’s eyes? Or is it the opening of a unique doorway to a moment of real faith?

Some Orthodox Christians want to venerate every ‘miracle-working ikon’ that comes their way. Some want to pray before it as well. Some want a miracle in their lives. Some just want to be there, in the presence of the miraculous; for them, that is enough, not even their eyes could ask for more. Others don’t go; they don’t find anything to add to what they already have. For them, the present moment and the place they are standing seems enough.

‘I think I could stop here myself, and do miracles.’
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Song of the Open Road

As for Christians in general, history writes no tall tales about miracle when it writes the truth. Hoping to force God to mimic His mighty acts in the book of Exodus by their ‘faith,’ the children’s crusaders waited in vain for the Adriatic sea to part so they could walk dry-shod to Jerusalem. Compliant helpers were found to transport the infant armies in sea-worthy ships to the slave markets of North Africa, whose harems for decades heard French folk songs sadly sung.

And today, we have faith healers, but to what avail? Do they heal men’s bodies, their minds, or just their souls, or none of these? I have known enough healed, and heard enough testimonies from them of miraculous healing by the likes of these. One sister told me confidently that her extreme nearsightedness was instantly cured when she placed the palms of both her hands against the television screen, while an Oklahoma faith healer cast out the demon in her.

Not long after this, she was also instantly killed along with her innocent daughter, in a head-on collision with a dump truck on the narrow coast highway. Their Pentecostal sisters sang beautifully and in strange tongues over their coffins at the cemetery the morning their bodies were consigned to the earth. She called her instant healing from nearsightedness a miracle. What would she call this?
Yet the Lord was fully present in both moments, all His acts.

Yes, I too want miracle in my life. I want my faith to move the hand of God. I used to pray with the pleading father in the gospels, ‘I believe. Help my unbelief,’ but I pray so no longer. For me, the miracle is to trust God to act according to His will, which is always the best for us. If He should ‘tear the heavens open and come down’ as Isaiah pleads, I am content, no, more than content, for that means it is the end of all things. That, to me, would be the greatest miracle.

Because the end of all things is the end of sin and death, for that is what we are, by our weakness and our bad choices. Miracle springs from the beginning and the end of God’s work in us, and between the First and the Last, all time is filled with His presence. If we do not in fact ‘stop here… and do miracles,’ in whom have we doubted? Of whom have we been afraid? ‘I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more…’

The miracles we seek will always proceed from the miracle that eyes cannot see, that ‘two of you on earth agree about anything…’ That is the hurdle to get over. That has more to do with love even than with faith. That is where all true and permanent healing comes from, from that love, because that is the source of all miracle from beginning to end. By love the universe was made out of nothing. By love, what was lost in the First Adam was restored in the Second.

‘Miracles’ that do not begin in love and end in love are no miracles at all, only magic. The faith that moves mountains is nothing less than the confidence that God can do all things, and that everything He does is for the best.

‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1 Corinthians 2:9). Yes, we walk by faith, not by sight, and yet miracle follows us and precedes us wherever we go, because we follow behind Jesus.

That new river

River of Life, Revelation 22:1

'The world my parish, or my parish my world.' Years ago when I managed Ethos, the Greek Orthodox bookstore in Portland, I remember having a few copies of a book—I think it was a children's book—with a yellow cover and a photo of a Greek bishop in his blacks and skoufi with some children, and the title of the book was something like ‘The World My Parish.’ Trying to find that book again, instead I discovered that this phrase seems to have originated among the Methodists, probably from one of the Wesleys. I'm not surprised. I have a soft spot in my heart—some people would say a soft spot in my head—for basic mainline Protestants of all sorts, especially the small town types, Methodists, 'Piscopalians, Presbyterians and 'Lutherns.' These people have always been kind to me whenever I've interacted with them. The more rigorous types would say these people were 'just being nice' and, alluding to C. S. Lewis' observation in Mere Christianity that it's not nice men but new men that life in Christ produces, consign them to the category of 'probably not saved.' Why kill when slander does the job better and lasts longer? Anyway…

Forgive me, brethren, but back to the topic, is it my parish, or my club, or my cohort or my family that is my world, and let all outsiders stay away, or is it that daring opposite, the world my…? For the second is to have your door blown off in a hurricane and possibly even your house blown down or carried away in the whirlwind, but hey! didn't Elijah leave mother earth in just that way? For to shut your door and bolt it tight is the magnification of what you're doing to your heart, and that open door, if you unwisely keep it unlocked or even wide open, will attract all kinds of unsavory types. Welcome, for all decent people, consists in showing hospitality to your relatives and friends, but as for the others? How could you? You never know who the wind just might blow in. You have only one life to live, so why not stick close to your kith and kin. Let the other guy welcome angels who might possibly be Christ in disguise—but probably aren't, since that only happens in fairytales—while you smile on the deserving.

Why am I thinking of this just now? I have an old friend, someone I've known nearly my entire adult life, and for some reason he has always tolerated me and grudgingly—but sometimes with a surprising hint of genuine warmth—accepted me into his very narrow circle of friends. Yes, he's a Christian, started out a small town, one of the 'aforenamed' Protestants, very mellow, almost a 'Bilbo Baggins of the Shire' sort of man, of hardy English stock. Well, started out that way but married a lass, yes, alas! a no-nonsense, 'my way or the highway' sort of missionary Baptist zealotess, a sweet woman who characteristically could smear Jesus all over your face at the picnic table when she found out you were not exactly a real Christian like herself, and did it with a smiling frown that Da Vinci would've loved painting. Probably would've out-classed even the Mona Lisa, if he had. That changed him for ever after. My friend, that is.

We worked together, and we probably learned a lot from each other, woodworkers as we were, though he would never admit it. I learned a lot from him, of course. It all happened while he carefully tried to polish me up to his standards of Christianity, but he was unsuccessful and finally gave up with a shrug. But I never seemed to learn enough. The thing that irked him most about me was how I kept welcoming people and including them in my life, as promiscuously and shamelessly as a common prostitute or sinner. Of course I didn't 'fool around' with anyone, but I didn't seem to understand that not everyone can be trusted, and I recklessly let people get to know me, and even invited them to my home and church. I didn't seem to know where to draw the line, and lines must be drawn, or else we'll get dragged down the slopes with those galloping pigs. Drowning in a lake may be too good for them, but Christ shows mercy even to demon-filled hogs.

Our lives are nearly over. My friend is retired early, and I may be too, sooner than I think. He has become firmer and more righteous than the rock of Gibraltar, and his dear wife must now be a pinnacle of biblical inerrancy and churchly rectitude. I don't know, as we haven't seen each other in years. She is a brilliant woman and a medical professional. My friend, of course, has remained what he always was, a country squire, just a little more disconsolate at the state of everything and everyone around him. The world was going to hell in a hand-basket when we worked together all those years. Now, it's probably arrived, because the last he saw of it, it was going in the same direction in a dump truck. We do see each other once in a while, and I think we're always happy to see each other, at least I know I am. I see him as I will see him on the Day of resurrection, loaded with only good memories. He sees me, well, I don't know how he sees me, but I sometimes feel pity looking at me through his eyes. Yes, I am a failed human, but because he still likes me, he'll be able to hear, 'Enter into the joy of your Lord…' Who knows, maybe I'll be let in too, as his stray dog.

This is my experience of the world. When I wrote, our lives are nearly over, I meant, from man's point of view, I've done what was expected, and my friend has too. Now we can rest, he on his laurels, me, well, on my futon. The only laurel leaves I have are tucked in the pages of my bible where I use them as book marks. I picked them up off the floor of Hades after they showered down on the Son of God to celebrate His victory over sin, death and hell, as He was emptying the place. I hope that when it's my turn to go down below, I'll be turned away at the door by a sign that says, 'Sorry, hell is too small for you. Please see the Receptionist at Gate 22.' I see those laurel leaves and the flower petals whenever I read the psalms, and I remember all the blossoms that the Lord showered down on me in my long life, all the wonderful human souls whom I tried to make welcome and who welcomed me. Nothing virtuous on my part. I just read what the Lord says, 'Make peace with your adversary while you are on the way with him to the court,' and that's what I did. It's not hard to follow instructions when it's a matter of life and death, and especially when you know that life is with your brother, and death being without him.

This ramble is, of course, just another rant about welcome, about hospitality, about brotherly love, about turning the other cheek, going the extra mile. It's about being willing to see your neighbor as your other self, just as good and just as bad as yourself, just as deserving and undeserving of love, acceptance, even forgiveness, as you are. Yes, we are again approaching the edge of the highest cliff in the universe, the one which Lazarus approached and looked down from, never seeing the bottom, and across seeing the land of infinite sorrow. Like him we will be reprieved, called back temporarily—who knows for how long—from our bodily death, so that having faced it and overcome it through the One that calls us out one by one by name, we can remember to keep open our door to the stranger, our hearts to those who are different and for that reason unwanted. For we are the person that is turned back at the door, we are the unwelcome, we are the stranger in a land far darker than Pharaoh's Egypt, the state of misery. Let's get ready to journey together to that other mountain, not Sinai of the trumpet-blasts and rock-hard commandments, but the place of the Tree of Life, from whose branches more than manna can be gathered, and whose roots do not drink water but deliver it to all who thirst.

Come, brethren, let us drink from that new river…

Had she said ‘No’

The Sunday of the Last Judgment has come and gone. Will I sleep through the Event it represents just as I slept through the services of that day? God knows I’m a sinner and deserve death, but it seems He’s gone out of His way to save me somehow. ‘If anyone orders you to go one mile, go two miles with him…’ (Matthew 5:41). It seems He’s taken His own advice. I suppose that gives Him the right to tell us to do the same. And as for ‘turning the other cheek,’ well, what more can I say?

I keep asking myself the obvious. What is it that makes some of us ‘die, and go to heaven,’ and the rest of us ‘die, and go to hell’? This is not just kidding around. This is an important question. Apparently wars have been fought over it, people dying on both sides and expecting to be included in the first group. Ask any number of church authorities, or read their writings, and maybe find the answer. What? You’ve tried, and you’re just as confused as ever?
That makes two of us…

Being great students of the Bible, we have cleverly discovered the scheme of salvation. Which scheme, of course, depends on ‘where we go to church’ or even whether we go to church at all. If you are a churchable, like I am, you already know that the scheme of salvation is a done deal. There’s nothing you can do to find out any more about it than your church is willing to tell you, and according to them, you needn’t try. Why not? Isn’t it obvious? ‘It’s all writ down…’

We’re so used to being told ‘that’s how it is’ that most of us don’t even come anywhere close to the edge of asking, ‘Is it so?’ That’s what makes people unchurchable, and we must not let that happen to us. What would the neighbors think?

If anyone reading this thinks that next, I’m going to launch out on a diatribe of questioning every teaching handed over to us by Holy Church, you can rest at ease. If this is what you wanted me to do, you may leave now. If any of you want to stay with me and push against the veil of the Temple to see whether or not it’s still attached, and to sneak behind it through the rip made by the Son of God when He entered the Holy of Holies to sprinkle the Mercy Seat with His own blood
(see Hebrews 9), then stay with me…

Beyond the protocols of Zion, those rules and regulations, formulas and declarations made by the Church, following her Master, to show us ‘the Way, the Truth, and the Life’ (John 14:6), since by ourselves we could not find it, we still can read for ourselves the statements that Christ Himself makes in our hearing, that ‘no one comes to the Father except through Me’, and ask Him ourselves, what does He mean? He is not an historical person only, smart but dead like Socrates. He is the living God.

The only place I can think of where Christ tells us openly what is the criterion for our eternal happiness or our everlasting grief is precisely in that parable that was read in the gospel of the Sunday of the Last Judgment. But is it really a parable only, or is it the refining fire set before us, that we might meet the Day as creatures of the day and not of the night? That we might not be sent to the left, but to the right? If so, it’s strange that the Lord doesn’t ask any of the questions we ask each other, to make sure we’re ‘saved.’

Instead, it seems He doesn’t pay attention, or maybe just doesn’t hear, when those He is sending into eternal darkness call Him ‘Lord’ and protest, ‘when did we see You… and not come to Your help?’ (see Matthew 25:31-46). Perhaps they didn’t pay attention, or maybe just didn’t hear Him, when He says, ‘It is not those who say to me, “Lord, Lord,” who will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the person who does the will of My Father in heaven’ (Matthew 7:21). Could it really have been that difficult?

But He does say things like this to us: He tells us, not only the sister of Lazarus, ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life. If anyone believes in Me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die,’ and then He asks, ‘Do you believe this?’ (John 11:25-26). We can read her answer for ourselves, and we can make her answer ours, realizing that it is this confession that produces the promise in us, and really, nothing else. She said ‘Yes, Lord.’ What then, had she said, ‘No’?

This we shall never find out, just as we shall never know ‘what would’ve happened’ had another woman said, ‘No,’ when met with the first words of the Good News that, when first spoken, seemed like anything but good news, ‘You are to conceive and bear a son, and you must name him…’ (Luke 1:31). Why anything but good news? She was a bride unwedded, a virgin. This conception would come about without the agency of a man. Her response? ‘Let what you have said be done to me’
(Luke 1:38).

But salvation, not the life of salvation as it’s called, which means merely ‘Christian life’ whatever that is, but salvation, what Jesus keeps referring to when He says, ‘I am the Gate. Anyone who enters through Me will be safe: he will go freely in and out and be sure of finding pasture’ (John 10:9). Or when He says, ‘I am the living Bread which comes 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).

Holy Church has already told us, over and over, what all this means, has converted it, nuts and bolts, into the system of Christianity that has existed from the beginning until now, so that we can be invited, welcomed, accepted, initiated, integrated, instructed, assigned our places, and guaranteed our salvation. Leaving nothing to chance may be the strategy of the Church, a reflection of what Christ Himself does, but where does it all really start, for me, for you, if not with our own ‘Yes, Lord’?

Waiting is

The phrase ‘waiting is’ is about the only thing that has stayed with me all these years from my reading of the science fiction cult novel Stranger in a Strange Land, by Heinlein. It was a favorite saying of Valentine Michael Smith, the main character in that book, a human who had been raised as an orphaned child on Mars by the inhabitants of that planet. When he is returned to earth, he causes a sensation because his mindset is totally Martian in every respect, as are all of his habits. He ends up becoming a messiah figure who starts a new religion, the Church of All Worlds. I dug up these details from the internet because, as I admit, the only thing that stuck in my mind was the phrase, ‘waiting is.’

Why did the phrase stick? Well, to be blunt, I have spent most of my life waiting for something or someone. Was my intrinsic attitude somehow an unconscious result of reading the novel, or just my heredity expressing itself, the last in a long line of men who have been very, very patient with everyone?

I have had a good apprenticeship at waiting most of my life, but only in these last years has the object of my waiting shifted. Before, I waited only on human beings and their needs; now I wait primarily for Christ. He is the only one worth waiting for, because He brings not only His gifts, He brings Himself.

Books of science fiction, especially from the 1960’s and ’70’s, tend to wander into fantasy about alternative religions, as they are mirrors of the real world in which they arise, where any religion is superior to the simple truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Why is that? Because mankind is a religious animal, and we are by nature shocked and offended by a God who becomes one of us precisely to put religion to death.

And so, these novels tend to promote religions, many of which resemble those we already know on earth, especially Buddhism, which seems to be a favorite. But religion is always only man’s best shot at escaping the horrible mess we find ourselves in, because we can’t accept that to escape our predicament—sin—means death to us, death to the world as we know it. So we take our best shot at whatever it is we’re searching for.

Buddhism is man’s best shot at achieving some kind of personal inner peace, if not salvation, given that there is either no God, or He is far too big and busy to deal with us.

Hinduism is man’s best shot at achieving some kind of personal safety, now and possibly in future lives, by satisfying the need for worship of the myriad hypersomatic beings, devas, that invisibly infest the human world.

Islam is man’s best shot at achieving some level of moralistic order in society for the masses, and justification for the immoral excesses of a select few, at the cost of a total denial of human freedom, while promising an otherworldly reward for the surrendered, and threatening thisworldly punishment for the unsurrendered.

Judaism is man’s best shot at achieving some kind of personal salvation, and a sense of righteousness, given that the only God has chosen the people of a certain lineage, to which they belong, to bring everyone to a knowledge of Him, while remaining outside His promises.

Christianity is man’s best shot at achieving some kind of personal salvation, with the least possible commitment to righteous living or self-sacrifice, by formal adherence to or membership in religious associations, while trampling on the call of the one they call Lord.

In the wasteland that is this world, I have waited, and been fortunate to have met a few followers of Jesus who stand firmly on the Word of God, keep their lamps lit, remain vigilant, wait on the voice of Jesus at every moment and desire to do what He commands, and are willing to suffer for the sake of His name.

I didn’t look for them.
I waited, and He sent them.

And I too can only hope to be one of them, by continuing to open my door when He knocks and to welcome Him into my house, which I want to be His.

Help me, Lord, to seek not my own, but Your will alone, and to be willing to accept everything that happens to me at Your hands, for You alone are the lover of mankind, and Your Word is truth.

I bless You, Lord, at the assemblies.
Psalm 26:12

All things to all men

The holy apostle Paul writes, ‘I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some’ (1 Corinthians 9:22b). He also writes, ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20).

So it is not he, but Christ in him, who does the work. It is therefore Christ who becomes all things to all men in order to save some. This is exactly what He did on the Cross. He became sin for us, that we might be made righteous (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:21).

He descended to the uttermost depths, that we might be raised on high with Him (cf. Ephesians 4:9). So we see that Christ in us is willing to endure every suffering, every shame and degradation, in order to save some of us.

Why some, and not all? Because even infinite love cannot overcome the finite wills of those who reject it.

And so, like Paul, we become all things to all men according to our call, according to the measure of our abilities, according to the breadth of our love. Yet it is never we who do the work, but Christ who is alive in us.

Always, brethren, surrender to the man-loving God who becomes visible in Christ, who in us is still the most active Person in the history of the race. Yes, surrender to the Love that made all worlds and who has descended to free us from our passions.

Surrender, brethren, to His mercy. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall have mercy shown them. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called God's sons.

Two ships

A certain brother coming into Scete asked that he might see the abbot Arsenius. And when the other brethren would have persuaded him to rest a little, he made answer, ‘I shall not eat bread, until I come at a sight of him.’

Then one of the brethren led him to the cell of the abbot Arsenius, and knocking at his door, brought him in. And they were received, and prayer made, and they sat down.

Now since the blessed Arsenius held his peace, he who had brought the brother said, ‘I take my leave.’ But the brother who had come out of a great desire, seeing that the abbot Arsenius had naught to say to him, was sitting silent and confused: and he said, ‘I, too, brother, will take my leave with thee.’ And so they both departed.

Now he had also asked that he might be taken to the abbot Moses, him that had been converted from among thieves. And the abbot Moses received him, and kindly entertained him, and sent him away.

Then the brother who had taken him to both said to him, ‘Behold, thou hast seen both those whom thou didst desire to see: which of the two is more to thy liking?’ And he said, ‘To my mind, he seems to me the better who gave us good welcome and a good meal.’

And one of the Fathers heard what he had said, and prayed to the Lord, saying, ‘Lord, reveal to me this, I pray Thee, how one man for Thy sake withdraws himself from all sight and speech of men, and another for Thy sake is a good fellow with all.’

And behold, in a trance, he was shown two ships upon the river: in one he saw the Holy Ghost sailing together with the abbot Arsenius in silence and peace: and in the other ship he saw the abbot Moses and the angels of God, and they were giving him honey and the honeycomb into his mouth.

— The Desert Fathers,
translated from the Latin by Helen Waddell