Till we leave our tombs

Whenever I look back—and I try not to, but sometimes it happens—whenever I look back at my life, my mind automatically starts up analyzing, measuring and weighing my acts, those of others, judging my mistakes, pushing me to lamenting, but not to guilt—I don't know why, but I've never been able to feel guilty about anything since I met the Lord at age 24. But I remember a talk I had with the Lord in the garden arbor on the evening of Yom Kippur a few years ago, which was a sort of turning point in my life in middle age.

Yes, the past can be looked at as wasted, or as preparation, but the testimony of the Scriptures leans toward the second view, that of preparation.

That we have wasted the opportunities God keeps sending us, that seem inherent in time itself as His gift, is without doubt. That we have been taught by our mistakes and strengthened by withstanding oppressions, that we have patiently endured under trials, even under the trial of our own helplessness and sin, is also without doubt.

God is good, and as the holy apostle says, ‘He turns everything into good for those who seek Him.’

To know that my earthly life will end soon fills me with joy.

Soon? Am I prophesying my own death?
No, but I already find myself at that moment which will be my last on earth, I am experiencing that rapid flipping through the pages of the book of my life that happens as we are judged, watching what I did with Christ walking along beside me, and knowing that His love is unconditional and His mercy infinite. ‘Whoever believes in Me…’

Joy? Am I happy that my earthly life will end?
Yes, because it could not continue, I cannot continue, for ever, as I now am. I know that. It isn't as though we will be magically transformed, ‘dying and going to heaven’ to be angels as some have imagined. No, dying in Christ is to happily be ended as what we think of as ‘human,’ what I think of as ‘myself,’ and to vanish without a trace, to emerge ‘on the other side’ as a being I could never imagine here and now, so different from what I now am, that it would be easier for a baby to remember its life in the womb than it would be for that new creature I will have become to imagine my life on earth.

This is true joy, to be happy to die, knowing real life doesn't begin
till we leave our tombs.

Let not man put asunder

Somehow it seems a brand of specious nonsense to say that you believe in Jesus but not in the Church. Of course, I should say, ‘but not in His Church’ because the Church has no validity or reason to exist if not for Him, if He weren’t its Founder. Yet you say, not His Church because He didn’t found it, others did. You find this in so many writers, this idea that there is a huge disconnect between Jesus of Nazareth and the Christian Church, as if the two were completely unrelated, except for the use of the names ‘Christ’ and ‘Christian.’ We find an excuse for every assertion to the contrary. Notice I changed the target pronoun from ‘you’ to ‘we’? Well, I write as a Christian, and I too fall into the same category as many of my fellow ‘believers,’ except that we act as if Christ and the Church were unrelated without admitting it.

How is this possible? Of course we believe in Jesus and in His Church. We say so every Sunday when reciting the Nicene creed, ‘and in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church,’ some of us making the sign of the Cross while saying this part. Surely, this proves that we believe in the Church, but what, then, does this say about our belief in Jesus? And do we really believe that Jesus started the Church, or do we think as most moderns do, that Jesus did His thing, and the Church was only invented later by a whole different group of people? How else, then, do we explain why the teachings of Christ and much of what goes on in the Church, both beliefs and practices, seem so different? I must be careful here, to say ‘seem’ and not ‘are’ because I am only a layman, and what do I know? Precisely nothing, just what it looks like.

Back to the basic unbeliever’s notion that Jesus, if He existed, has nearly nothing to do with the institutional Church. Some of these basic unbelievers even call themselves ‘Christians’ because they say they’re getting behind the institution and finding the ‘real Jesus’ as if there were an ‘unreal Jesus.’ That’s one set of unbelievers. Another set, slightly more honest, ‘believe’ in Jesus but say that the Church is an invention by Saul of Tarsus, a conniving manipulator and subtle egotist who, having missed meeting the ‘real Jesus’ made up a religion that he could control, stealing the whole show and selling salvation through Jesus as a product. I said ‘slightly more honest,’ because at least they reject religious Christianity as a business, whereas the first group make a living off their interpretation of the Message of Christ.

But what we actually find if we are serious enough to study the biblical record is that Jesus existed, that He taught a supernatural ethic that exceeded the Law of Moses, that He bent the laws of nature to effect miraculous cures, multiply rations, and even bring dead people back to life. Some of us want to stop Him there and follow Him up to that point. Christ Himself didn’t stop there. Though He didn’t promote Himself as ‘messiah’ He consistently moved along a path predicted by the prophets of Israel as that of the Suffering Messiah, while His followers persistently moved along a slightly different path, that predicted of the King Messiah. The two paths converged in a literally death defying event now called ‘the passion and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ’ which ended one phase and initiated another.

What do I mean by ‘phase’? Well, if you read the Bible you will notice, as have those who disconnect Jesus and the Church so readily, that what ‘the Good News’ means as preached by Jesus, and what it means as preached by Paul (and supported by the other apostles who actually did know Jesus ‘in the flesh’) seems different, even disconnected. Salvation in the mouth of Jesus has something to do with being ‘born from above,’ with believing that He is ‘the resurrection and the life,’ and that it represents an idea of living forever more than anything else. Sin is not even mentioned at all. But when we get to salvation in the mouth of Paul (previously mentioned as Saul of Tarsus), it has everything to do with our obedience to the commandments, rejection of sin, and integration ‘into Christ’ through His resurrection.

It is exactly the resurrection that has, it seems, transformed ‘Jesus’ into ‘Christ,’ and that’s exactly what Paul (not Jesus) says when he writes that Jesus was proclaimed Christ through His resurrection from the dead. Yes, if anything, the resurrection of Jesus is to blame for changing the Good News. In fact, it has replaced the ‘original’ message preached by Christ with ‘another’ message preached by Paul. First there was no Church, now there is. So, how can we say that Jesus and the Church are connected? It’s obvious, isn’t it, say they who believe in Jesus but not in the Church, that there is no ‘real’ connexion between them. Jesus said and did one thing, the Church another. To connect the two is begging the question. The historical Jesus, if He existed, cannot have intended to start a new religion, or found the Church.

There are only two points I can think of, but I am sure there are many more, to prove wrong those who say that Jesus did not found the Church. Actually, they are not proofs, only questions to be answered. If Jesus did not found the Church, to what was He telling His apostles to draw men to, when He made them ‘fishers of men’? And if He did not found the Church, why did He, after His resurrection but before His ascension, tell His apostles to ‘go and make disciples of all nations’? I purposely leave out ‘baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ because so many, even within the Church, say that this part of the Divine Commission was added later, and that He didn’t really say these things. What are we left with? It all boils down to who we really think Jesus was, and is, not what He did.

Why did I call it ‘specious nonsense’ to believe in Jesus and not in the Church? Well, it’s because I am not preaching to the choir or trying to start a semantic squall, but trying to reconnoiter my own inner battlefield and engage the enemy within by reckless taunts. It’s just as easy to love the Tree so much that you miss the forest, as to love the Forest so much that you miss the tree. The connexion between Christ and the Church is so integral that it almost cannot be identified. Somewhere around the neck is the Head attached to the Body. We have little trouble believing that, especially when it’s our own. A head without a body, and a body without a head—horrible mess! Let’s not go there!—but nevertheless we’re not always happy about heads and the bodies that go with them, our own in particular.

Finally, what I am thinking about here is division, how there can be things that can be divided mentally but not in reality—physically, socially, historically. If Jesus were to come back today and ‘go to church’ where you live, would He be able to recognize anything? The Church, for its part, goes back in time and place to where Jesus lived, listens daily to His teaching, witnesses His miracles, suffers inwardly His rebukes and is shamed by His love, but claims Him as her Bridegroom for better and for worse, and forever. The fact is, we cannot ask some questions, even though we have the words, because reality is always ‘real’ but our thoughts are not. We cannot propose, ‘If Jesus were to come back today,’ because the truth is, He has never left and, ‘what therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.’

Remember these things

Good morning, sunshine! Good morning, bright Friday! The second and last Bright Friday of the year of our Lord, twenty fifteen, and the next we shall not see till next New Year’s Day, the Bright Friday of Christ’s Nativity. Yes, for this is the Bright Week of the Holy Spirit’s descent, the Day of Pentecost lingering for a week-long Sabbath, a prolonged day of rest for His people, that we may pre-rest for the labors the lie ahead in the Apostles’ Fast, setting on the evening of the next Lord’s day.

I rested in meditation on my restoration. Christ restores me, though once for all as He hangs on the Cross, the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, He restores me daily, now and always, halting to save me when I fall, helping me keep pace with Him when I rise, fleeing with me as we run together from this world, the City of Destruction, toward His Father’s House in the Heavenly Jerusalem. This is not mere poetry, but the New Creation that bursts forth from the Word of God who He is.

Die daily to the world does not mean to abandon the world anymore than in His Ascension He abandoned it, for He is with us as He promises, to the end of time, and so we have to work, we have to eat and drink, we have to procreate, we have to sleep, we have to wear out our bodies of death, so we can be awarded our resurrection bodies on the Last Day. As Christ says of Himself, ‘My Father continues working, and so do I,’ we too continue to work, to do what we see our Heavenly Father doing, in Jesus.

The last meat I have will sometime today be eaten, making room for the provision of fruits, vegetables, roots and seeds that will sustain me for the next several weeks of the Fast. As summer arrives, while the world gathers around the barbecue pit, the saints are praying, fasting, giving alms—What! And waste all that great weather, those sunny skies and the long, bright evenings of the Northern hemisphere? Well, I like to think so, but I know that it will not be done exactly as the Church decrees. I will do my best.

Hospitality can be an excuse for indulgence, in spite of all the good it does, and we weak humans take the long way Home, knowing, or rather trusting, that the Lord will be waiting for us there, mercifully and not scolding, when we finally come Home after our earthly entertainments—I mean, toils. Salvation for Christ may be the work of a moment, for us sinners the labor of a lifetime. That’s why He commissioned the Holy Apostles—and us!—‘Therefore go and make disciples of all nations,’ and why we fast.

I remember the words of an old English hymn I used to sing,

Come, labor on.
Who dares stand idle on the harvest plain,
while all around us waves the golden grain?
And to each servant does the Master say,
‘Go work today.’

Come, labor on.
The enemy is watching night and day,
to sow the tares, to snatch the seed away;
while we in sleep our duty have forgot,
he slumbered not.

Come, labor on.
Away with gloomy doubts and faithless fear!
No arm so weak but may do service here:
by feeblest agents may our God fulfill
his righteous will.

Come, labor on.
Claim the high calling angels cannot share—
to young and old the Gospel gladness bear;
redeem the time; its hours too swiftly fly.
The night draws nigh.

There are two more stanzas, but the crescendo is reached in the fourth, and the remaining are religious filler. I stop and meditate on the closing line, ‘The night draws nigh,’ reminding me of Christ’s words, ‘Night is coming, when no one can work.’ This day, the Bright Friday of the Holy Spirit, of Pentecost, is just beginning. To go forth and gather not the nations into discipleship but my next week’s groceries into my shopping cart, that is my morning mission, even before my morning coffee, even before breakfast.

‘Isn’t this how life in Christ is?’ I ask myself. It is like it was when as a young man I worked on the farm. If I didn’t wake up on time, the cows would wake me by thumping my bed room window with their bulky heads. Then I would quickly wash and dress and go in the dark pre-dawn to milk them. Only after the first job was done was the table laid. We rise. We work. We fast. Then we go to the Table of the Lord. He feeds us with Himself, and then opens the Door He has set before us, our life, and says, ‘Go work today.’

I greet you, beloved brethren, as we approach the bright Feast of All Saints this coming Lord’s Day, when we shall begin the next leg of our Journey, in the company of the Holy Apostles and all lovers of Jesus, with the words, ‘Claim the high calling angels cannot share,’ because greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world (1 John 4:4), and because God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). Remember these things.

Where does it come from?

Politics is not a subject I venture into very much. I just don’t know enough, and I know it. At least, not about what passes for politics these days. Well, I take that back. Politics has been crazy and enslaved to hormones rather than guided by logic for a very long time. Goes back to the European monarchies once they’d forgotten they were supposed to be inheritors of the Christian Roman tradition. Anyone can praise Constantine but when it comes to administering a state, well, something between Nero’s and Diocletian’s policies rules. When revolutions changed monarchies into oligarchies, or worse, the same loss of morality and faith-fulness (hyphen intended) characterized most states. My saying applies to politics as well as everything else down here, ‘This world is like a pot of boiling meat: the scum always comes to the top.’ It would be nice if even one country escaped fulfilling this metaphor, but none does.

I have a young friend whom I admire very much. She writes, and this is one of the things she wisely wrote, ‘Government as a human act of governing oneself and one’s responsibilities and one’s dependents is very different from the modern institution of the State.’ What she says here is, I think, the foundation of all true government, and when one has this kind of government, one needs very little else for the proper functioning and maintenance of the state. The country I live in, (the United States of) America, was designed and established to operate on this model. Our original Constitution and Bill of Rights can only be successfully applied ‘as is’ to a free people, folks who govern themselves and manage their responsibilities responsibly. Every true democracy and revolutionary state started out this way, but none has successfully followed through. They (like we) alter the original documents to ‘make do.’

I like the original Communist idea, that society will evolve in such a way that people of good will can govern themselves and deal with each other responsibly and with high morality to the point that ‘government,’ that is, what we call ‘the state,’ will just wither away. Living in the nineteen sixties and seventies as a young ‘revolutionary’ myself, belonging to various kinds of ‘people’s this-and-that,’ you know, co-ops and so on, I could almost feel what a stateless society would be like. Well, I am a historian and know what actually happened to my generation’s ‘revolution’ and everyone else’s. Flop! At least, in our case, the death casualties were much less than those of the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian which ushered in the Soviet Union. There were casualties, nonetheless. Spiritual casualties, and in the time since then, the worst calamity ever to occur in America, the devolution of education.

You see, a dumb people cannot be a free people. They can only be what ignorance makes them, babies. Well, a baby is a cute and cuddly thing if you don’t mind the dirty diapers, the food messes, the unintelligible bauble and cacophonous crying, not to mention the fact you’re tied down with babysitting or carting them with you everywhere—Whew! I’m glad that’s over! But when a whole nation is gradually reduced to this ‘state of helplessness’ (pun intended), somebody has to step in and manage the menagerie. This is why the saying is pungently and urgently correct, ‘If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.’ Well, let me tell you, we’ve tried ignorance in America, perfecting it as a tool of the political elite for as long as I have been alive. Fortunately, I started my life early enough to see the vestiges of an educated, informed, and free people, before they all died off, and I remember.

It shouldn’t be this way. ‘America’ shouldn’t be something you only read about in history books or an idea that people say is only an impossible ideal. Yes, as I have said many times, ‘America’ is not just a country, it is an idea. It is an idea that any thinking person in the whole universe would want to live for, and want to live in, if it ever were a real country. The hope of that still resounds throughout the world, even though the land of its birth, the United States, now demonized as the moral refuse of the earth, called ‘the Great Satan’ and other less flattering epithets, has fallen from it, still motivates people to want to live here. I’m sure most of them, once they are apprised of the current reality, still want to, not because it’s perfect here in America, but because we still have hope, and free speech. If only those two things remained in America, it would still be worth living in, and dying for (if it ever came to that).

Today I noticed yet another ‘Republican’ candidate announcing his intention to run for President, that office of elected monarch that, in view of its current occupant, makes Napoleon look good. The man that caught my eye today is a proven successful politician, having been governor of the largest of the old states, bringing ‘gold coins by the bushel’ (as predicted a fortune cookie I once opened) to his state’s coffers. Well, none of this impresses me. It’s not that he is a successful politician that makes me disregard him. It’s his stockpile of worthless band-aids. Like almost everyone else who is entering the race, he is focusing on symptoms, not on causes. What has gone wrong with America from top to bottom has nothing to do with jobs, or the environment, or people not getting enough rights, and so on. What’s wrong with my country is its profound and engineered ignorance. We need education.

And education without hindrance by cultural and political correctness, because these false moralities have eroded not only our sense of real morality, but our spiritual (not religious) base, that national character that makes us capable of living as a free people. Just as paper Christianity has little holding power, so does paper Liberty. You can proclaim that we are a free people till you are hoarse, but it will mean no more than the Maoist platitudes puked out by the Chinese politburo during the Cultural Revolution. Politicians, we can see right through you. Your promises are as dear as fast-food commercials, and your faces as beautiful as the rear end of an ass. Please, stay home and play computer games or do your online stock deals to your hearts’ content, but get off the podiums, put down your megaphones, retire your cheerleaders, and leave us in peace to decide our future. We deserve better than you.

Back to education. This is, or should be, the priority that decides the fate of America in the next election. What? Education will pay the bills? Education will preserve the ecology? Education will defend the country against its enemies? Well, uh, yes, it will. But better than that, and if for no other reason, an educated people is a free people. They can really vote in elections, and know how to vote reasonably and not as a response to automatic subconscious stimuli dished out by invisible sociopaths. An educated people knows what is right and wrong. They are not afraid of God or the Ten Commandments. They understand what the Constitution really means, not what they are told it means. They can think, and speak, for themselves. O my God! Can a people really be trusted to be free? I might not think so, if it weren’t for the fact that God actually showed up in person and said, ‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed’ (John 8:36).

Have I said enough? Am I expressing myself politically? Have I incited controversy? Well, no one pays any attention to me anyway, and for good cause. I’ve never really learned how to live successfully in this world, and now I am almost too old to try. But in almost every encounter I have with anyone or anything outside my front door I am disappointed by the ignorance I meet. This is not intellectual ignorance. Not everyone has to speak three or four languages and be able to recite from memory every British monarch since Henry VII in correct order (with the dates). No, it’s an ignorance of a greater magnitude. It’s an ignorance that dissolves ‘the other’ person and makes service a lie, friendliness an act, righteousness a function only of balanced books and a good credit rating. It’s an ignorance that doesn’t know what to do when your house is burning down and there’s an unused fire hydrant right in front of it.

People! Let’s come to our senses, wherever we live, in America of the outer or the inner worlds, people of good will, let’s lay down our false political allegiances which are no more than the shackles of slavery, let’s learn to live by reason, let’s learn before it’s too late how to build our house, how to maintain it, how to guard it and sustain it. Educate ourselves! Free ourselves from the darkness of laziness and apathy. Follow not the swine as they, demon-jockeyed, hurl themselves down the slopes into a lake from which there is no return. Remember the Gospel, Christians! Remember our Freedom. He is that and much, much more, as those who become His friends will discover. But if you’re not able for whatever reason to accept Him as He is, then at least, think on these words penned by one of His also unchurchable disciples,

To the States, or any one of them, or any city of The States,
Resist much, obey little;
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved;
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth,
ever afterward resumes its liberty.

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1860)

Only one face

Just as our bodies, skins containing systematic bundles of living matter, give us a physical definition in space, so our minds, elusive compositions of innumerable strands of thought and memory, weave us into ephemeral persons in time. ‘Who knows if the spirit of man mounts upward or if the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?’ (Ecclesiastes 3:21).

We are born and, without taking thought, are molded into people we think we are, a boy or girl at first, then a man or woman, husband or wife, and gradually our likes and dislikes, our knowledge and our ignorance, our passions and our fears, collect our multiple, often contradictory selves, into a boxful of identity to which we can give a name.

But it is all so fleeting. As the Indian calls it, no more than maya, illusion. Yet what we are is real, is solid, at least to the touch, ours from the inside, and theirs from the outside. The questions, who are we, who do we belong to, are we just ‘dust in the wind’ or are we permanent, and who or what is permanent, if anything or anyone, do not trouble us.

We may be leaves caught up in the wind, but nevertheless we exist, if only for a brief moment in time. Soon, it will all be over. Soon, we will be no more. How do we know this? Just look around. We are a visible between two invisibles, a waking between two sleeps, a day between two nights, a light between two darknesses, meaning caught in the jaws of unmeaning.

The scientist indifferent to God may theorize our physical definition and our ephemeral personality as the result of blind, purposeless evolution, vestiges of events previous equally meaningless, illusory. God, Himself the meaning of the universe He creates, does not stop to examine His own thoughts which we are, or ask Himself what or whom to conceive, His ‘let there be.’

Life unconscious of itself flows from His hands, world upon world. He releases it, and then receives it again unto Himself, with a characteristic that, at its lowest level, we call ‘love,’ and try to emulate. We know somehow that this alone exceeds both time and space, allows movement in the five directions forward and back, and delivers the invisible into our grasp.

Unbox oneself. Disperse the multiple, contradictory selves. Let passions and fears run to waste, knowledge and ignorance lay down their arms, likes and dislikes shrivel into non-entity. Be received back into the arms of love. Invisibly sleep in the night of unmeaning darkness. He hovers over, breathing Himself over that peaceful sea, making home its waves.

The gap unbridgeable has been closed, is no more. The Cross laid down, foundation for all space and time, dissolves the treachery of bent wills and unblindfolds forever the eyes of the universe. With eyes wide open, finally, we can see what we see. Thought no longer works against us, and memory, cleansed forever of its crimes, shines, a bright mirror of only one face, His.

How it is

I have never heard anything but the truth about baptism or any of the other ‘mysteries’ of the Christian faith from an Orthodox priest. Maybe that’s why, in spite of any of its flaws, I cannot get away from the Orthodox Church. Just when you think they’re going to pull some magical nonsense about the Church or the sacraments (I use this word here, though I really prefer to call them ‘mysteries’) out of their hat, behold! What they pull out is what you’ve felt deep inside you was right all along, yet never, or almost never, heard come out of a clergyman’s mouth.

I may as well tell you up front, if you hadn’t noticed this before. Orthodoxy does not accept the doctrine of original sin in the sense of us being guilty of Adam and Eve’s sins, even if we aren’t guilty of anything of our own. This doctrine comes from a mistranslation into Latin of Psalm 51. The Western Church reads, ‘and in sin my mother conceived me.’ The Eastern Church, following the Greek, reads, ‘and in sins my mother conceived me.’ This has been taken to mean that, though the divine image in man was broken, and continues to be broken, by Adam and Eve, and by their descendants imitating their disobedience, man is not utterly and totally depraved, by nature, only by will. A very subtle difference? Yes, but it matters.

‘But the Bible clearly says that anyone who isn’t baptized can’t be saved.’ Well, yes and no. In ordinary circumstances, when baptism means repentance, conversion, and the subsequent ceremonial acts that confirm it for the individual and the community, yes. But even in the gospels we have the example of the good thief who was saved without baptism, without righteousness, without belief in any particular doctrines, saved by only one thing, ‘whoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.’ He had personal trust (the word in Greek we usually translate as ‘faith’) in Jesus as who He said He was. If anyone could tell us whether or not we would be saved, it would be Christ, and if there were stipulations, He would have spelled them out clearly. Was He too busy to do that on the Cross? Wasn’t there enough time for Him to go over the points He talked to Nicodemus about? No, it’s not that at all. Salvation comes through Jesus Christ alone, and it is appropriated by our personal faith in Him, and if nothing else is possible, that faith alone, without works, without knowledge, without self-sacrifice, without membership in a religious body, that faith alone is enough.

When Christ goes to raise Lazarus from his four-day burial, He meets the sister of the dead man, and He tells her the astounding fact that He Himself is the Resurrection and the Life, and He asks her whether she believes that or not. She doesn’t answer with a straight yes or no, but rather declares her faith in an almost dogmatic utterance, ‘I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the One who was to come into this world.’ In this encounter, Christ states first of all, that anyone who believes in Him, even though he dies, will live, and then repeats Himself in slightly more detail, ‘whoever lives and believes in Me will never die.’

What is this ‘never die’ business He’s talking about? Can it be something other than being saved? What was that paradise He promised the good thief when He said, ‘this day you will be with Me in paradise’? Is this different than being saved? Though He says things like, ‘unless a man is born again, of water and the Spirit,’ is He revealing a new legislation, a new Torah, for His would-be followers?

Christ is Himself eternal life, He is Himself paradise, there is no other ‘place’ to go to be considered ‘saved.’ What I am writing here is not my personal philosophy, but what has been handed over to me by the Church fathers among whom I was brought up, in the environment of the Orthodox Church, which I was already beginning to enter long before I walked through the doors of an Orthodox temple or was chrismated.

Why baptise infants? If they die unbaptised, there is no punishment for them, there is no isolation in a place called limbo, which has now been emptied by proclamation of the pope, and there is no hell for them either, because they have not rejected Christ, the Light of the world, through whose name alone under heaven mankind can be saved. So in this the Orthodox would agree with many Protestants, maybe even with some Baptists, though I wonder if sometimes the agreement is flakey, based on the similarity of conclusions reached by quite different logic.

The Orthodox know that a real God does not make impossible demands and is not looking for a reason to condemn us: hence, babies, children, imbeciles, the insane, even the suicides are in no danger of divine wrath. Some of the others may come to this conclusion because they think God is really just a big softy, and His scary pronouncements are only there to trick us into being good. No, God means what He says, the terrible as well as the awesome things He tells us, but in no case is He a heavenly policeman, judge, torturer and executioner all rolled into one.

His revelation is given only to tell us, ‘this is how it is’ and ‘you can’t come Home until you come Home.’

The faith that sings

It seems difficult to enter into discussion with someone who, by the very slips they display in their challenges, demonstrates at the outset an irrational prejudice against things that are patently undemonstrable or arguable on the basis of discussion at all. Orthodox simply do not 'adore' ikons. To even pose such an inquiry begs the question and supplies its own answer.

Archimandrite Vasileios says something to the effect that dogma cannot be understood outside of worship. The same thing, in my experience, can be asserted of holy and divine scripture. Sitting somewhere and studying the bible can lead us to one set of conclusions, experiencing it in worship leads us to sometimes a very different set, sometimes diametrically opposed.

The question then becomes, what is the Bible after all? Is it a book that fell from heaven infallible and ready to be implemented as the rule of a spiritual police state, as the Muslims believe of the Qur'an? Or is it something quite unexpected and different, a verbal mirror reflecting a living God whose will was to become the Man He always wanted us to be?

If it is a kind of mirror, it shows us ourselves as we are, and Him as He is, and bridges the gap between in such a way that migration from death to life becomes a possibility. Then, we realise that it is not meant for us to analyse the reflective surface of the mirror, which is what it is only so that we can become what He is by seeing Him and following His movements reflected in it.

History shows that the Church has understood since the beginning that the scriptures are without doubt the expression of God’s infallible word, paradoxically eternal and before the Church and yet temporal and within the Church, never over it, but rather the ground which supports it and on which it is being built, and a fertile soil for the fruition and harvest of souls.

The argument against the Orthodox faith and church, waged both on a personal and on an institutional basis, is undercut by the testimony of the fruit that it has itself produced, not very good fruit, and the kind of tree that it has proven itself to be. A very old tree that still produces much good fruit is not likely to be cut down in favor of a young tree whose fruit fails to ripen.

Reality, scientific but even spiritual reality, does not yield itself easily to quantification. Not everything perfect can be reduced to numbers and counted. Reality is not about structure but about relationship. A circle exists, and not three of its diameters make its circumference, but the relationship can be expressed only by pi, a constant, though not a number as man thinks it.

All divine things exist and operate in a frame of reference that cannot be encompassed by the human mind. The mistake of proud man is to take ownership and responsibility for what is beyond him in every way, seeking to bend it to fit his expectations. So doing, we kill what is alive, not realizing either what true life is, or that Life has come to pitch His tent among us.

This is the dividing line between religion, whether Christian or non-Christian, and the encounter with Him Who Is. Whether we start out with reams of rules or pages of pictures, neither is complete until we discover that neither was the Truth until both were taken in His hands, transformed by His touch, and given back to us breathing the fragrance of His myrrh-bathed wounds.

Sadly, the Bible’s reputed defenders worship what cannot be worshipped, as they decry us who worship only the Divine Nature, God in Three Persons, for whose love our hearts lean in veneration of all that pertains to Him, even each other, following the only divine commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. A greater love has no man than this, to lay down his life for his friends.

That is the faith that sings.

My sheep know My voice

Brother, I know this nun you are asking me about, I mean, I know who she is, and I have viewed a little of her video presentations. These are my observations.

One, women shouldn’t teach spiritual things indiscriminately. Women should only teach children or other women. To have a program like that is the same as what those feminist ‘Christians’ do, just add a cup of coffee and a veil.

Two, Orthodoxy has become a marketable commodity in America, and everyone wants their cut. The true monastics stay where they are, and we go to find them. They do not come at us, bragging about how many dozen monasteries they have set up, nor do they allow themselves to be worshiped as living saints.

Three, it is those who think what they are doing is going to ‘grow’ Orthodoxy in America that are actually going to destroy it. The Orthodoxy of the converts sticks to itself and forms covens of rubricists, those who would rather worship elders and flaunt their head coverings, prayer ropes, and prostrations, instead of renouncing themselves and loving the brethren.

Four, our Orthodoxy cannot be bought or sold, because living a crucified life with Christ is simply not marketable. Christ does not sell the Cross, He calls us to join Him on it.

Finally, brother, about ninety per cent of what I see and hear at church and on ‘Orthodox’ internet sites can be, and should be, safely ignored.

Here in America we are entering a period of diabolical doubles, what Sergey Fudel calls ‘dark doubles of the Church.’ They cannot harm us, as long as we remain what Christ calls us to be, ‘as cunning as serpents, but as innocent as doves.’

In other words, as serpents can close their ears to the snake charmer’s melodies if they want to, we should likewise be cunning and know when not to listen. And as doves do what they do without bothering a soul, so should we pass through all dangers without trying to fight against them.

Jesus says, ‘My sheep know My voice,’ and brother, He wasn’t lying.

Grace to you, in the Holy Spirit whose feast we celebrated today, and pray for me,

in Christ,
Romanos the sinner

Imagine

Contemplating a passage from something I wrote a day or two ago.

There is no deeper divide between Islam and Christianity than this, that the Divine Nature, God, is One, yet within Himself has existed from eternity in a Threefold relationship that cooperates in the Creation, in the Redemption, and eventually in the Deification of the Universe under the priestly Kingship of the Human race.

Though the occasion of this thought was the comparison of Islam and Christianity, what is more profound in its application is what is hinted at in the last few words, ‘the Deification of the Universe under the priestly Kingship of the Human race.’

Caught up as we are in the flow of events in this our current time and place, planet earth, twenty-first century, we see mostly the threats that come against us, against our religion, Christianity, or if we are secularists, against our world, global warming, or if we are social activists, against equal rights for sexual minorities, or if we are politicos, the lying dogs of our opposite party, and so on.

For these latter groups, engrossed as they are by their earthly fears and hates, there is no alternative to fear, because they know no Savior. For us, Christians, we have no excuse for pessimism. Time is far longer than our minds can imagine, but we have been, first visited by, then integrated with, the Divine Nature, in the person of Jesus Christ.

He is at this moment fashioning us and preparing us for a world that neither we nor anyone can imagine on our own, and that preparation includes everything that is currently happening in our world, our countries, our churches, our families, and ourselves.

We can be blinded to the Truth, sometimes, by the intensity of what we are going through. We can be tricked out of our grasp of the certainty of the Divine Victory that, being won in an invisible way, is soon to be visibly revealed in a complete transfiguration of all things.

Pursuing ‘théosis’ on our own, individually, or not at all, both can still render us insensitive to the Divine transformation that is percolating all around us, which cannot result in anything but the fulfillment of the plan of God—the Deification of the Universe under the priestly Kingship of the Human race.

Yet this is a certainty, this is ‘as it must be’ and in its path, all that we undergo is leading us to overcome. Yes, Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those entombed, bestowing life. If nothing else, brethren, let us imagine this.

Twenty-ninth day

Beautiful, sunny, cool morning. Grabbing a cup of coffee, I settled down comfortably on the small sofa in front of my front room window, and picked up the Bible, opening it at random. The Book fell open at the page where the ikon of Pentecost is shown, opposite the text of Paul’s letter to the church at Colossæ. The header ‘Against False Spirituality’ caught my eye, and I began reading there.

So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ. Let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and worship of angels, intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom all the body, nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments, grows with the increase that is from God.

Therefore, if you died with Christ from the basic principles of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to regulations—“Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle,” which all concern things which perish with the using—according to the commandments and doctrines of men? These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.

Spirituality in the Church

If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God.

Turning the page, I read…

Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.
Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. Because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience, in which you yourselves once walked when you lived in them.

But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him, where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all.

Savoring these thoughts, I left coffee and the New Testament behind on the table, and retreated to my bed room, to pray the Psalms of the twenty-ninth day from my well-worn Jerusalem Bible. My book mark, the calling card I used when I was a street reader (someone who reads the Gospels aloud in public places) fell out as I opened the Book above me where I reclined on my bed. Christ, the Sower of Good Seed, and ‘Mark 4:3-9’ my theme. I took up the first psalm appointed for the day, my favorite. (Actually, every psalm is my favorite when I am reading it.)

PSALM 139
In praise of God's omniscience

For the choirmaster, of David, psalm.

Yahweh, You examine me and know me,
You know if I am standing or sitting,
You read my thoughts from far away,
whether I walk or lie down, You are watching,
You know every detail of my conduct.

The word is not even on my tongue,
Yahweh, before You know all about it;
close behind and close in front You fence me around,
shielding me with Your hands.
Such knowledge is beyond my understanding,
a height to which my mind cannot attain.

Where could I go to escape Your Spirit?
Where could I flee from Your presence?
If I climb the heavens, You are there,
there too, if I lie in She’ol.

If I flew to the point of sunrise,
or westward across the sea,
Your hand would still be guiding me,
Your right hand holding me.

If I asked darkness to cover me,
and light to become night around me,
that darkness would not be dark to You,
night would be as light as day.

It was You who created my inmost self,
and put me together in my mother's womb;
for all these mysteries I thank You:
for the wonder of myself, for the wonder of Your works.

You know me through and through,
from having watched my bones take shape
when I was being formed in secret,
knitted together in the limbo of the womb.

You had scrutinized my every action,
all were recorded in Your book,
my days listed and determined,
even before the first of them occurred.

God, how hard it is to grasp Your thoughts!
How impossible to count them!
I could no more count them than I could the sand,
and suppose I could, You would still be with me.

God, if only You would kill the wicked!
Men of blood, away from me!
They talk blasphemously about You,
regard Your thoughts as nothing.

Yahweh, do I not hate those who hate You,
and loathe those who defy You?
I hate them with a total hatred,
I regard them as my own enemies.

God, examine me and know my heart,
probe me and know my thoughts;
make sure I do not follow pernicious ways,
and guide me in the way that is everlasting.

I offered this psalm, meditating on it quietly, as its healing and forgiving words cleansed me of my transgressions, cringing also when I came to the passage beginning ‘God, if only You would kill the wicked!’ and ending with ‘I hate them with a total hatred, I regard them as my own enemies.’ I cringe whenever I offer these words because, I know who the ‘wicked’ is—myself. I know that I, no less than others, blaspheme the Lord daily. I remember a prayer I once prayed, ‘Share with us who hate You by our deeds but love You by our sorrows,’ and that takes me back to the verse, ‘Yahweh, You examine me and know me.’ What a great God is our God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom we do these things!

After a pause, I continue, ‘I hate them with a total hatred, I regard them as my own enemies,’ and can only ask for mercy. Yes, Lord, though I hate You by my deeds, I love you by my sorrows, knowing that all that happens to me, even those ills I bring upon myself, are for the good of my soul, and heralds of my salvation. ‘O happy fault!’ the saints who know You have cried.

Yes, I regard them as my own enemies, and hate them, the only things that can lawfully be hated, one’s own faults, one’s weaknesses, one’s sin. Yet not I, nor anyone, can languish there, for the psalmist closes with the prayer that hovers over us, even when we are asleep physically or spiritually, ‘Examine me and know my heart, probe me and know my thoughts; make sure I do not follow pernicious ways, and guide me in the way that is everlasting.’

The Holy Spirit, who prays in us to the Father on our behalf in the most-high Name of Jesus, yes, He prays for us when we cannot, or will not, His faithfulness swallowing up our unfaithfulness by the Divine mercy.

I read and pray the remainder of the appointed psalms, then in thought reflect on the apostle’s words, ‘Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory,’ and the words of another well-beloved psalm, one sung on the eighth day, the day of my birth, nurse me through my mortality, as I remember the Day of Pentecost is coming in three days,

I remember,
and my soul melts within me:
I am on my way
to the wonderful Tent,
to the House of God,
among cries of joy and praise
and an exultant throng.

Yes, Lord,
join us with You in that Kingdom,
share with us who hate You by our deeds
but love You by our sorrows
the Power,
that the Glory
that was Yours before the world ever was,
O Christ,
fell the forests of our sinful flesh,
that we might finally cry out to You,
Amen.
Amen, and again we cry, Amen.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us,
sinners.

The day after Judgment Day

Below is the Vatican-provided text of Pope Francis' video message for the Day of Christian Unity in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States on May 23:

Brothers and sisters, may the peace of Christ be with you.

Forgive me if I speak in Spanish, but my English isn’t good enough for me to express myself properly. I speak in Spanish but, above all, I speak in the language of the heart.

[in Spanish:]

I have the invitation you sent me for this celebration of Christian Unity, this day of reconciliation. And I wish to join you from here. “Father, may we be one so that the world may believe you sent me”. This is the slogan, the theme of the meeting: Christ’s prayer to the Father for the grace of unity.

Today, Saturday May 23rd, from 9 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, I will be with you spiritually and with all my heart. We will search together, we will pray together, for the grace of unity. The unity that is budding among us is that unity which begins under the seal of the one Baptism we have all received. It is the unity we are seeking along a common path. It is the spiritual unity of prayer for one another. It is the unity of our common labor on behalf of our brothers and sisters, and all those who believe in the sovereignty of Christ.

Dear brothers and sisters, division is a wound in the body of the Church of Christ. And we do not want this wound to remain open. Division is the work of the Father of Lies, the Father of Discord, who does everything possible to keep us divided.

Together today, I here in Rome and you over there, we will ask our Father to send the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and to give us the grace to be one, “so that the world may believe”. I feel like saying something that may sound controversial, or even heretical, perhaps. But there is someone who “knows” that, despite our differences, we are one. It is he who is persecuting us. It is he who is persecuting Christians today, he who is anointing us with (the blood of) martyrdom. He knows that Christians are disciples of Christ: that they are one, that they are brothers! He doesn’t care if they are Evangelicals, or Orthodox, Lutherans, Catholics or Apostolic…he doesn’t care! They are Christians. And that blood (of martyrdom) unites. Today, dear brothers and sisters, we are living an “ecumenism of blood”. This must encourage us to do what we are doing today: to pray, to dialogue together, to shorten the distance between us, to strengthen our bonds of brotherhood.

I am convinced it won’t be theologians who bring about unity among us. Theologians help us, the science of the theologians will assist us, but if we hope that theologians will agree with one another, we will reach unity the day after Judgement Day. The Holy Spirit brings about unity. Theologians are helpful, but most helpful is the goodwill of us all who are on this journey with our hearts open to the Holy Spirit!

In all humility, I join you as just another participant on this day of prayer, friendship, closeness and reflection. In the certainty that we have one Lord: Jesus is the Lord. In the certainty that this Lord is alive: Jesus is alive, the Lord lives in each one of us. In the certainty that He has sent the Spirit He promised us so that this “harmony” among all His disciples might be realized.

Dear brothers and sisters, I greet you warmly, with an embrace. I pray for you. I pray with you.

And I ask you, please, to pray for me. Because I need your prayers in order to be faithful to what the Lord wants from my Ministry.

God bless you. May God bless us all.

My comments

Roman popes have always (at least as long as I've been alive) called themselves 'the Father of all Christians,' but they have not lifted a finger (not much, anyway) to make those of us that are outside the Roman Church want to have such a 'father', let alone accept him as that.

Pope Francis, though he isn't a spitting image of his namesake, the man of God Francesco of Assisi, and though he is a Jesuit (which most non-Catholics identify as the pope's army), this pope has something of the spirit of St Francis. He is consistent in his own sort of poverty.

And that poverty is the poverty of Truth, which does not need embellishment to be what it is. Neither does it need any earthly authority to establish it. This is exactly what Christ was, and still is—the Truth—and why anyone who genuinely follows Him can be distinguished from impostors.

Francis, the bishop of Rome, its pope and patriarch, is no impostor. Nor does he allow the world to get near him to twist his words. Nor does he countenance divisions between people. Nor does he rely on himself 'to make miracles.' Like the fictional Pope Leo in the film 'Saving Grace' (1986), he says, in effect, 'I cannot make miracles. I can only pray for one.'

The miracle of today is the reunion of the Church, not by theologians in council, but by the Spirit of God, who appears unrestricted by human weakness and amidst suffering and defeat, in all those who work for peace and social justice, and in all those now being slaughtered for their faith.

I am an Orthodox Christian, but what I see in Pope Francis supports what I have always known—well, almost always: I had to grow up 'a little' before I was tall enough to see over the top of my own head—that the Church has never been divided, and cannot be, so—what do we do now?

Christianity lost in the mire of divisive doctrinal controversies helped the progress of Islam at its birth, so that it could take more than half the (Christian) Roman Empire. Modern Christianity is now divided without doctrinal controversy, just by politics, allowing Islam's next move.

What do we believe? That our salvation depends on the doctrines we believe, or in Jesus Christ? Undoubtedly, doctrines have their place, but since nowhere does Christ teach doctrines in the Holy Gospels, He teaches only Himself, why do we not resign ourselves to the Truth?

Truly, as the scriptures state, 'His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will clear his threshing floor, gathering His wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire' (Matthew 3:12). This is what Truth does, what it always does, both now, and on the Day of Judgment.

Listen to this pope, brethren, and watch him closely, and see if he doesn't continue on a path which will unashamedly put all prior popes and churchly authorities to shame, by just being who he is, a man of God in Christ, who has placed him in the breach for us, as a true image of Himself.

Under the form of an angel

Exalted is He who took His Servant by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa, whose surroundings We have blessed, to show him of Our signs. Indeed, He is the Hearing, the Seeing.
Sura 17:1 Qur’an

And [remember, O Muhammad], when We told you, ‘Indeed, your Lord has encompassed the people.’ And We did not make the sight which We showed you except as a trial for the people, as was the accursed tree [mentioned] in the Qur’an. And We threaten them, but it increases them not except in great transgression.
Sura 17:60 Qur’an

And he certainly saw him in another descent, at the Lote-tree of the Utmost Boundary—near it is the Garden of Refuge—when there covered the Lote-Tree that which covered [it]. The sight [of the Prophet] did not swerve, nor did it transgress [its limit]. He certainly saw of the greatest signs of his Lord.
Sura 53:13-18 Qur’an

The tradition of the nocturnal ascension of Muhammad—an ecstasy to which the Qur’an twice alludes—was in his calling a central event that ruled the entire legislative activity of Medina. It was to this that fervent Muslims turned over the centuries and gave their concentrated thought, seeking to rediscover and revive the dispositions of Muhammad’s heart in his search for God.

When the angel to whom the Prophet was entrusted had transported him from Mecca, first onto the esplanade of the Temple of the destroyed Jerusalem and thence to the inaccessible Holy City—the heavenly Jerusalem, where the glory of God resides—Muhammad reached beyond the Supreme Horizon [Utmost Boundary] up to the Lotus of Delay [Lote-Tree], close to which was found the Garden of Eternal Sojourn [Garden of Refuge], while a host of angels covered the Tree. Behind that mystical Tree at an interval of two bow-shots, God was hidden.

Muhammad desired and attempted to reach God through the mystery, but his angelic guide was unable to introduce him into the embracing Union, for the completely naked angelic nature which his guide had assumed did not represent the type of intimate Union with God that is possible only through the crucified humanity of Christ. Ignorant of the true meaning and purpose of the Incarnation, Muhammad remained excluded from the Divine Union [Théosis] reserved to the adoration of sons.

In all sincerity he asked the Deity to manifest Himself to him, at least under the appearance of an angel. But under the features of the angel who guided him he could discover and proclaim only the inaccessibility of the Divine Essence. Thus he remained on the threshold and did not try to advance into the eternity of the Divine Fire, thus too renouncing the knowledge, from within, of the personal life of God through the only Mediator, Christ, who would have sanctified him.

There was in that outpouring of Muhammad’s faith the expression of a desperate desire that he kept during his entire life, ‘to contemplate God, at least under the form of an angel.’

—Giulio Basetti-Sani, OFM

I have performed some minor editing on the passage quoted above by Giulio Basetti-Sani, of the Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans), from his essay ‘Muhammad and Saint Francis’ in The Francis Book (©1980, OFM). The book was packed away for several years, and I had just found it again, and was reading some of my favorite chapters. The one quoted above has always intrigued me, speaking as it does of the so-called ‘night journey’ of Muhammad. This reflection, and another that I read years ago in a book by Idries Shah, describe the ‘event’ in nearly the same terms, differing in minor details.

The gist of it is, that Muhammad approached God in a vision, desired to see Him face to face, but was prevented from passing a boundary in order to do it. Passing that boundary, as I remember it in Idries Shah’s version, had to do with Muhammad giving up something, and being unwilling to. It was intimated that this ‘something’ was his numerical monotheism, for to pass the boundary and see God face to face would have brought him to a vision of the Holy Trinity, a single Divine Essence in three Persons. So he retreated, saying in effect, ‘If that is how it must be, then I must be satisfied with contemplating God under the form of an angel,’ that is, the Christ of the Christians just cannot be God, he must not be, or the Divine Oneness is ended.

The irony, of course, is that Jesus Christ, is the Angel of the Covenant, whose form (unlike the form of the angel that guided Muhammad) as a man exactly represents ‘the type of intimate Union with God that is possible’ precisely because it is, and must be, through this Angel’s crucified humanity.

There is no deeper divide between Islam and Christianity than this, that the Divine Nature, God, is One, yet within Himself has existed from eternity in a Threefold relationship that cooperates in the Creation, in the Redemption, and eventually in the Deification of the Universe under the priestly Kingship of the Human race.

God’s Oneness is beyond mathematical unity. He is so completely One, that it is right to speak of His ‘having no partners’ not only in the form of pagan goddess consorts, but even more so in admitting that there cannot be any other self-originating being. The Holy Trinity, even in His Divine Marriage with the Human race, does nothing to compromise that Oneness. Instead, the Oneness of God takes on an even greater Majesty.

This is the Message that must be grasped by the nation of Islam, that there is nothing they or anyone can do to break the Oneness of God, or to defend or promote it. And this has always been the truth, ever since Yahweh spoke, ‘Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is God, Yahweh is One.’

And there is none greater to contemplate than He, who under the form of an angel, is God and Man.

Just preach Christ

The Orthodox Christian does not proselytize; he evangelizes.
He does not preach Church,
he preaches Christ.
In this he follows His Master, who in the gospels does not seek converts, but seeks that which is lost.

Never do we find that Jesus in His earthly ministry went after people. Never do we see Him arguing a philosophical point to win over an opponent. Never does He proselytize, but He does have words for those who do.

Οὐαὶ ὑμῖν, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι ὑποκριταί, ὅτι περιάγετε τὴν θάλασσαν καὶ τὴν ξηρὰν ποιῆσαι ἕνα προσήλυτον, καὶ ὅταν γένηται, ποιεῖτε αὐτὸν υἱὸν γεέννης διπλότερον ὑμῶν.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are. (Matthew 23:25 NIV)

What do we find instead? Two disciples of a Jewish prophet, John the Forerunner, are directed by him, pointing to Jesus walking by and saying, “That is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29)

What did the two disciples do? They followed after Jesus. Why? Because they believed the word of the prophet. How did they approach Jesus? They asked, “Rabbi, where do you live?” How does Jesus respond? He says, “Come, and see!”

The encounter with the Truth is gentle. There is no compulsion exerted from the outside. Everything is accomplished inwardly. All movement is internal first, in the heart. Then, it is manifested by the feet, running after the Lord.

This is why the Orthodox Christian does not argue semantically to win over an opponent. He does not preach Apollos. He doesn’t preach Paul. He doesn’t preach himself. No, he preaches Christ, and Him crucified, and risen from the dead.

People want to draw us into arguments, wrangling over words, but it is precisely this tactic that the evil one used when he wanted to entrap Christ. To every argument, Jesus responded not with human reason, but with the plain words of scripture.

The Word of God does not need to defend Himself.
He simply is what He is.

In the same way, brethren, all who follow Jesus, all who believe and stand on the Word, who preach, like the angel of the last days, the eternal gospel, just preach Christ, to yourself by submitting all your thoughts to the Word of God, to others by proving on the battlefield of your body that you follow Christ the Victor over sin, and to all those whom the Lord places in your path by your courtesy and generosity, and by always having a spirit of welcome, for men have welcomed angels without knowing it (Hebrews 13:2).

Getting decorated

Scenario. A young professional woman, an engineer, works overseas for two or three years to “get her feet wet,” really wet, after graduating from school. She is a Christian. She’s been brought up that way by church-going parents. She is a product of white, mainline Protestant America, did all the right things, and made a career for herself that she can fall back on when, after marriage and the kids past infancy, she can work again at a job that she likes and that pays well.

Her time at the foreign firm is up, and it’s time to head home to America, the bread basket of the world, where along with wheat, broad evangelical piety is also the export. While she was working, she must have made an impression on the people she worked with and got to know. Aware of it or not, they’ve been watching her round the clock, taking stock of her every word, every move.

They noticed when she went along with them to a pub and socialized. They saw her gathering herself up on the weekends to go to church services. They didn’t go, of course, but she went, to hang out with those religious folks that they liked to keep at arm’s length. But that was okay with them, as long as she didn’t ask them to go too, because she knew how to drink a hearty ale with the best of them.

Now it was time to bid farewell, and they presented her with a gold cross on a necklace as a going away gift. Very nice of them, that they appreciated her and wanted her to know just how much. It was no mere trinket, and besides, it let her know what they thought of her, and her religion. They were right to think she’d like it—probably something she wanted to get herself, but never did.
They noticed her neck was bare.

People have many ways of keeping, not sin but, God at arm’s length. The usual way is by ignoring Him, but if pushed they might push back. They even have figured out ways to bribe Him to stay out of their lives. They do “good deeds” and become “good deed doers.” They run marathons to raise money for breast cancer research. They buy Girl Scout cookies, so girls can go on outings together. They volunteer for “Meals on Wheels” and deliver canned goods to the Food Bank.

People even have ways to reward God for staying out of their lives. One of the ways is by patronizing His devotees. It always amazes me how lavish is the Portland community’s praise of the Greek Festival hosted every year by my church, Aghía Triás. They just love us, and they reward us by spending tens of thousands of dollars at the festival every year. As for them, they love us because we keep our mouths shut about Jesus. As for us, we think we deserve their support for, after all, we are Christ’s people, and our Church, the light of the world.

So her co-workers gave a gold cross on a chain to decorate her for keeping out of their lives, and staying in her own. Christians are welcome as long as they’re not blabbing about God, constantly disrupting the lives and comfort of the people around them.

It goes even deeper. If you let your following of Christ, not your religion, direct you in your day-to-day affairs at home, at school, or in the workplace, even without speaking the Word of God to anyone, people will notice, and they may even reward you like they rewarded the young lady in the story—or they may give you the hatchet, as they have to many friends of mine, and even to me. You just never know what the world’s denizens will do with you.
But either way, they’re still holding you, and ultimately Christ, at arm’s length, so as not to be infected by your disease, pleased to wish you farewell, before they lose any more madmen to sanity, or swine to drowning.

So those who fed the swine fled, and they told it in the city and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that had happened. Then they came to Jesus, and saw the one who had been demon-possessed and had the legion, sitting and clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. And those who saw it told them how it happened to him who had been demon-possessed, and about the swine. Then they began to plead with Him to depart from their region.
Mark 5:14-17

Open Door

We are still the early Christians, at least,
we can be if we want to.

This doesn’t mean trying to set up yet another church denomination to ‘purify’ the Church of all the accumulations of tradition and what not that seems to obscure the Good News. Actually, it isn’t the traditions per se that obscure the Good News. Administered rightly, the traditions do what they were designed to do: amplify the Good News and integrate it into our personal lives.

What obscures the Good News is something so close to us that we can’t often see it. It’s our tendency to want the appearance rather than the reality of anything. The mind awake knows better, knows this tendency and refutes it, saying as C. S. Lewis writes, ‘I want God, not my idea of God.’ This is what the Christian mind awake realizes about God and, this being its starting point, begins to untie the knot of its self-deception.

Acknowledging the holy scriptures formally does nothing to promote our life in Christ. We must with the fear of God, with faith and love draw near to them. We must humbly bow our stiff necks and tender our tough hearts into the faithful care of the Word of God. Studying them in this way, we are drawn to the same life that the holy apostles and early church brothers lived. Why? Because we realize we want it.

When I read the first letter of holy apostle Paul to his spiritual son Timothy the other day, I didn’t read a daily portion. I couldn’t read any less than the whole book, cover to cover, short as it is. It drew me into itself, not in the imagination, but in the spirit of the life it contains. Reading it this way, I was placed right then and there, living the same church life that they live, with them. Why? Because it’s still happening.

As I said at first, we are the early Christians, and that’s that, but only if we want to be. Once you discover that through living in the holy scriptures, once you have had a taste of that life, that real Church life, you realize there really isn’t any other kind, everything else seems fake, seems contrived. Fellowship with the saints becomes more than a review of history, and you realize what it means to have an indelible baptism.

Christ is not religion to me, nor are He and His holy apostles and saints too exalted to be my friends, nor is the Holy Spirit an excuse for me to rest in comfortable exile from my heavenly home.

Instead, the Book is the door that was left open in my path, and I walked through it to find that all it says is true, that there is a heavenly country, that paradise still exists, that the Church has never changed, never been divided, and that it’s my Home now, and to the ages of ages.

Behold, I have set before thee an open door,
and no man can shut it.
Revelation 3:8

Ιδου, δεδωκα ενωπιον σου θυραν ανεωγμενην,
και ουδεις δυναται κλεισαι αυτην.

Healing rain

I awoke in the dark night, the cool air drifting into my room through two wide opened windows, the soft sounds of a gently falling rain soothing to my mind and soul. Healing rain, the heavens liquefying to lay down on hard, unyielding pavements and dry, thirsty soil a moist blanket of peace in the night, peace after a day satisfied with its work, peace and stillness.

Always welcome to me, rain by night or by day invites me to pause, to return to my inner home. I would curl up in a cushioned chair in a corner between two windows, maybe a light blanket over me, and read a good book, or the Good Book, or even just the book of my memories. Taking pause, the selah of the psalms, after words or work, to stop and consider, it is enough.

This night the rain remembered another day when it healed the earth and those that live upon it and are buried in it. That bright day many years ago when, after a week of my wife’s family reunion at Buffalo Lake, Alberta, some of us turned aside to a graveyard in Camrose to commit to the soil the ashes of one of its own, my father-in-law James Raymond Mabbott.

He had come home from Australia to die. After a stormy marriage that produced five children in short order, he had disappeared, leaving his wife and oldest daughter to manage a fatherless family. Canadian farm boy of good stock, he was descended from Christian people from England’s smallest county, Rutlandshire, that came to settle in Wisconsin before the Civil War.

That family fanning out over the great plains, always west and north, to the Dakotah Territory, then spilling over to fill the prairie provinces, to Saskatchewan, to Alberta, leaving sturdy sons and swarthy but fair daughters to build homesteads, first from sod houses, at last produced the generation that was cast into the fiery furnace of the second world war, turning farm boys into killers.

After that war, wishing to forget, one took to alcohol and riotous living, but obligations to kith and kin must still be met. A young man took a wife, daughter of Ukrainian settlers who wished to become ‘white’ as quickly as possible. To be like other Canadians, my wife’s grandmother Domka, daughter of Father Theodosius Taschuk of the Russian Orthodox mission, became Doris.

She sent her children to the Protestant school and church, never spoke the ancestral tongue, the better to make Canadians out of them. When my mother-in-law was six, the old country reappeared in Father Theodosius coming to the settlement, rounding up all the children who hadn’t been baptised, and giving them the triple dunk in a large washbasin. Nancy became Anastasia in a hidden moment.

Then, back to Nancy as she grew up, a nice ‘white’ girl like all the other Smiths and Gordons and MacDearmids, when she became ripe for wedding, the young school mistress became the missus Mabbott, and started bearing children for her gallant young man. But the war had left large scars on his soul, and Christian though he was, what little faith he had was traded for drink.

Before long, the inevitable happened. Paper Christianity doesn’t have much holding power, and the young family was torn in two. As usual the children weighted down their mother’s boat, almost capsizing it. And the father, clinging to his piece of driftwood, was finally lost at sea. They never saw him again for a decade, hearing only rumors that he, like many others, had gone down under.

When he finally returned, it was to come home to die. The family was mostly grown. His oldest daughter had just become my wife. He went about trying to gather his sons and daughters together, and to make amends, tried to give them what he thought they needed, but money can’t atone for missing years. Before long he couldn’t hide his throat cancer any more. He had to pay the piper.

I knew him very little, but I could see what sort of man he must have been, and could have been. He was no stranger to virtue, but even loaded with virtues, a man can still be felled by one carefully aimed vice. Not wanting to ‘be buried in the cold earth’ he requested, and was granted, to have his remains cremated, so his bones would not feel the frozen clay, but his ashes had no resting place.

Not even an urn, just a cardboard box contained him, or what was left of him, as we opened the trunk of my car parked at the roadside. His oldest son was angry, was outraged that his father had nothing to show for him but a box of ashes. It was a bright day, its sharp outlines blunted by the steady drizzle that drenched the ground and muddied our boots as we walked into the cemetery.

There was a grave opened and ready to receive his ashes. I don’t remember how they were interred, but someone took charge of them. My part was to perform the memorial service. James, my father-in-law, was not a religious man, but he was a Christian, not a victorious one, but a crushed one. He was a man who had to go through a dark wood by night and was attacked, robbed and killed by a brigand.

No one else in the family knew what to do, and the church affiliations of those present at the interment were sketchy, so it fell to us, to my wife and me, to ‘do something’ for a memorial. What we did was the Greek Orthodox memorial service, singing parts of it in Greek for that little crowd of pious but undiscipled Christian relatives. ‘Meta pnevmaton dikaion teteleiomenon…’

I had printed out the memorial service and the few parts that were in Greek I translated, but no one holding a copy in their hands was looking at it. Something I learned early about the rain: you can cry in it and not be ashamed, because no one can tell the tears from the raindrops on your face, unless they look very closely. One of my wife’s sisters joined in as we sang ‘Aionia i mnimi…’

That simple melody, Aionia i mnimi, ‘Eternal be his memory,’ still hung in the air as we slowly parted from each other and returned to our cars. Some of the family had stayed in their cars because they were afraid of the rain. It made me wonder at the time, and even now, what people think is important, and why. Me, I am as much an Indian as I can be, bare-chested I love to go out in the rain.

As I sit here by my open window, that beautiful, constant sound of water plays music on the dark hardness outside, finding echoes within me, and I hope that when the sun rises in about an hour, the rain will continue. The world and I both need healing right now, and we cannot heal ourselves. Our memories cannot heal us, our doctrines and covenants cannot heal us, only the rain.

The rain, no, not the water falling that I love to run in or sit quietly under cover and listen to, not that rain, though it can be the harbinger. No, the real rain, that which God sends to water the earth, to water the heart, that is the rain I am talking about. We know the name of that red rain that washes away all stain of sin and the sting of pain. It is blood. It is grace. Healing rain.