Cease from struggle

When I am confronted by Christians, well, by anyone but particularly by Christians, who are anything from indignant to militant and antagonistic as they report to me this or that latest outrage against morality, or freedom, or the faith, or the church, I cannot help but become very calm and, though I see I do not speak, I think of the words of Jesus Christ, 'Offer the wicked man no resistance…'

This is not the verse I remember when I read in history or in the news all sorts of accounts about wars between nations, or people defending themselves against violent crimes. Though many kinds of struggle look the same, often they are very different and require very different responses. The words of Jesus are always there to aid us, and though they seem to be saying one thing now and later the opposite, this is why.

The truth is, we seem to be a contrary and contentious people, the human race as a group, but I don't think we are born that way. It is something we learn to be. Argument and confrontation surround us, and almost nowhere in human society can we find peace. One would hope that peace might be found within the Church enclosure but, alas, it is not. Instead, that seems to be where the worst bickering and backbiting occurs.

Lord, help us! So an American Christian missionary of Iranian origin goes back to his ancestral country and gets in trouble somehow. He is put under arrest and confinement, and hundreds of thousands of people sign a petition to induce the American government to press for his release. The State department doesn't even show up when the petitions are presented. That's what I heard from a fellow Christian 'struggler' anyway.

I get quiet inside. I suffer inwardly, knowing a man is wrongly held somewhere, but then, he's one of many millions who are now, and through time, wrongly accused, held, punished, even executed. I can't rouse myself to the indignation my informant feels as he adds, 'We have to protect the brothers!' His words remind me of Charlemagne's knights declaring, 'We wouldn't have crucified Christ like those Jews did, if we'd been there!'

I think of the words of Saint Basil, 'We are all deceived.' I think of my own life, my own situation. I joke with my friend, 'Who will sign the petition to get me released from my imprisonment?' nodding at the workshop where I spend most of my day, making machinery parts. He doesn't get it, but continues his diatribe with another co-worker who listens and adds a bit of affirming chit-chat. The struggle goes on. Us against them.

When really, this is not a struggle we can win. I mean, we almost never win these kinds of conflicts. True, sometimes we do win, or at least appear to; taking the long view which is denied us by the present moment but which history affords us in retrospect, very few of our wins, even when the winners are righteous, can be maintained. All victories but one include concealed slippage. All must pay the piper in the end.

That one victory, though, didn't look anything like victory when it was won: A naked corpse that was once a man, so disfigured we couldn't even tell who He was to look at Him. No one knew what struggle was being fought in His hanging on the Tree, nor what was won when He spoke, 'It is finished' and breathed His last. Even now that we think we know, we really do not. Otherwise we would not be fighting, struggling as we do.

Causes, there are always causes that we must support, wars we must fight, whether with swords or words only. Now, in this enlightened age, it's a wonder we don't wear our tongues out with incessant complaint or lose our voices by raising the hue and cry every morning and evening. What of the real struggle, the one that goes unnoticed within us and ingloriously? He revealed it to us and showed us the way to win: the Cross.

Hanging on the Cross, we cease from struggle. The war of words falls silently on deaf ears. To see all, and yet to say nothing. 'As a Lamb is dumb before its shearers,' that is our model. Peace there is in this, to cease from struggle. Wars wear themselves out around us, finding in us no enemy, no one to attack, no one to subdue. Morning and evening, ours is the victory song, 'Holy, Holy, Holy Lord of Sabaoth…'

To become theology

True theology is not about doctrines, but doctrines can be a by-product of true theology. Doctrines can also be the product of human thinking, of philosophical speculation. But theology is not about doctrines. Theology is about struggle. It is the result of man struggling with God.

And what of ikons? For those unacquainted with struggle, they are merely pictures to be venerated, doctrinal statements in paint to be affirmed with a kiss. ‘The Bible says this and this, and we’ve painted a picture of it. Here it is. Prove you believe it. Kiss the picture.’

But ikons are images of true theology. They are images of struggle, of man’s encounter with the living God, of what happens when the finite meets the Infinite, the mortal meets the Immortal, the created meets the Uncreated. There is always struggle. There can be nothing else.

‘The hospitality of Abram’ is an example of this. Those depicted do not seem to be struggling, but the formula is there: Man, woman, and unearthly Triad, two serving Three as One. Where is the struggle? Invisible but not inaudible.
She laughed, He heard.
Doubt bears faith, but not without a fight.

An event so completely ikonic as the wrestling of Jacob with the angel of Yahweh, yet we rarely see it. And why not? Can theology so immediate be depicted visually? And if it could be, could we venerate the image without being drawn into its fiery heart? That would be a miraculous ikon.

There is always struggle. There can be nothing else. This is the meaning of our entire existence as humans, else there is no meaning.

The very thought only hints at the reality, but if we run from it, we voluntarily commit ourselves to annihilation. We either face Him—look Him in the eyes—or vanish into His shadow.

A poem I once had memorized but after many years have mostly forgotten ended with the line, ‘for I am man so I must fight, but You are God so You must win.’ The author of this poem, Orthodox presbyter Ihor Kutash, a few years my senior, was the first priest I ever met. I am sure that He wrote what he knew.

There is a single purpose for every man and woman ever created, and that is to become theology. No, I did not say ‘to become a theologian.’ Nobody becomes that, except in name. Go to school and study theology, add letters after your names, and you are no wiser unto God than you were before.

To become theology, to struggle, to fight as befits your nature, to observe the Passover not in word only but in complete and perfect act, to expend yourself, to be consumed in the heat of battle, to be crushed and buried deep underground, to be sacrificed: That is what man is, else he is nothing at all.

‘For I am man so I must fight, but You are God so You must win.’

Glory to Jesus Christ!

Struggle

Although one falls, he does not forget the love of his Father;
and although he is loaded with trespasses of every kind,
his zeal for the service of good is not held back,
nor does he desist from his course,
nor abhor to stand in struggle against these things anew
and with the same chance of being vanquished,
nor cease from demolishing every day his building
and beginning a new foundation.

And the word of the Prophet is in his mouth:
‘Till the hour of my departure from this world,
rejoice not against me, O mine enemy;
when I fall, I shall rise;
when I sit in the darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto me.’
(Micah 7:9)

And he will not cease to struggle until his death.

— Isaac of Syria

O Lord, my strength

My elders taught me, when I was a youth,
to cling to heaven and earth, lest I stumble.
For a long time I remained a child,
and for a long time I used to lean on the crutch that they gave me.

But once eternity flooded through me
and I felt like a stranger in the world,
heaven and earth snapped in two in my hands like a frail reed.

O Lord, my strength, how frail are heaven and earth!
They look like palaces built of lead,
but they evaporate like water
in the palm of the hand in Your presence.
Only by their bristling do they conceal their frailty,
and frighten uneducated children.

Get out of my sight, suns and stars.
Sunder yourselves from the earth.
Do not entice me, women and friends.
What help can I receive from you,
who are helplessly growing old and sinking into the grave?

All your gifts are an apple with a worm in its core.
All your potions have passed through someone's entrails many times.
Your garments are a cobweb that my nakedness mocks.
Your smiles are a proclamation of sorrow,
in which your feebleness is screaming to mine for help.

O Lord, my strength,
how feeble heaven and earth are!
And all the evil that men do under heaven
is an admission of feebleness and infirmity.

Only someone strong dares to do good.
Only someone who is nourished and watered with You,
my strength, is filled with strength for goodness.

Only someone who sleeps in Your heart knows rest.
Only someone who plows before Your feet
will enjoy the fruit of his labors.

My childhood, nourished with fear and ignorance,
came to an end; and my hope in heaven and earth vanished.

Now I only gaze at You and cling to Your gaze in return,
O my cradle and my resurrection.

—Prayers by the Lake, IV - Nikolaj Velimirović, bishop of Ohrid

“Remember who your teachers were…”

2 Timothy 3:14

Too much death

A couple of years ago my son wrote that he was upset by the number of deaths that have occurred within our circle of family, friends and acquaintances. Between us both, I am sure that as many as eight people we know had died, one way or another. Within our own family, the two surviving grandparents finally passed away, first my father in late January, then my mother-in-law the following March. Two young people we knew of committed suicide, both young women, one of them being the mother of a six year old boy. It's one thing when the elderly pass away—two others were also aged grandmothers of friends—but when the young, or even the middle aged (like me!) pass away, it seems somehow tragic. In the case of the young because their potential was never realised, in the case of the middle aged, because they worked their whole lives and were cheated out of enjoying their ‘golden years.’

Of course, we can piously say, ‘God is in control, and He knows what He is doing.’ Of course He does, yet even God doesn't desire the death of anyone, as scripture says, ‘Death was not God's doing, He takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living’ (Wisdom 1:13). Myself, I have somehow escaped the feeling of grief when it comes to the death of my loved ones. I sometimes wonder, was it because I never loved them at all? That can't be it. It's quite possible that years of trusting in the promise of Christ that ‘If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die’ (John 11:25-26) has worn down any possibility of me feeling grief. Probably not. I think my prayers to God to protect and prolong the lives of my loved ones have been answered. To me, our God has been a truly gracious God, and though His blessings have sometimes contradicted my desires, He has never ‘left me lying in the dust of death’ (Psalm 22:15c).

I wrote my son that death doesn't have to be awful, that it can be beautiful, and that those who are truly alive have nothing to fear in death. That may sound alright on paper, and such an explanation may work for the dispassionate person, but I think, for most people it simply doesn't hold water. In fact, even for Jesus Himself, such an explanation doesn't work. How do we know? Because in the shortest verse in the bible, considering the death of his beloved friend Lazarus, scripture says of Jesus, ‘He wept’ (John 11:35). Yet this same God-man—though at the time He asked this question, no one knew for sure or exactly what or who He was—said to the sister of Lazarus, ‘whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ At the same time that He truly grieved and really wept for the death of His friend, He still knew that He could, and would, raise him.

Martha said, ‘I know he will rise at the last day.’ Well, to her that was no consolation, and by her words and tone she let Jesus know that that was not enough. She wanted her brother back alive, now, though she didn't say it aloud. Christ, knowing everything about her just as He knows everything about all of us, testified, ‘I am the resurrection,’ even though He knew that unless He demonstrated it, what He said was just words. People then and now had some kind of belief in the afterlife, though no one ever has a clear picture of it. Some say it's just an extension of life on earth, where we appear the same and know each other, and live forever, carrying on as we did on earth, only without end. Just as the resurrection on the last day was not enough for Martha, so this kind of imagination about the afterlife is not enough for me.

God is real. Jesus Christ the God-man is real. Paradise is real. Therefore, all that we can think about or imagine of the life hereafter is at best a kind of pill we swallow to keep our anxieties quiet. The fact is, we can't know, we can only believe, and so sometimes we let our beliefs carry us away into fantasy. Whatever else death is, it is without doubt the end of our lives on earth, all that we are and were is no more. We will be seen here no more. There is only one of each of us, and nothing about us or anything else in the universe really repeats itself or can continue forever as it was. I once wrote, ‘The perfection of anything solely human consists in the fact that it must end,’ and I meant what I wrote. We exist only to run our courses to the finish line. When we break through that line, our utter exhaustion from the final effort to finish sends us careening into ‘the great cloud of witnesses’ who catch us as we fall, completely out of breath and, if we were still alive, close to suffering a heart attack.

But we are dead—thank God!—and so a heart attack is simply out of the question. We made it to the finish, but we're no longer what we were, not at all. As we lie there dazed for a moment in the arms of the heavenly host, for a moment we remember what we were on earth as one almost remembers the figments of a waking dream, and then, as we come back to ourselves, we are as different from our earthly identity as uncreated is from created. Where once we were contained in our bodies, now our bodies are contained in us. It would not be an exaggeration to say we are no longer human, but only as we say that an oak tree is no longer an acorn. Lord have mercy! Here I go imagining the afterlife and what we will be just like the next guy! And after all I just said! What I really wanted to write was something I just feel, something I just ‘know in my knower,’ but there aren't any words for it. Holy apostle Paul writes something that gives me the same feeling, ‘We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed’ (1 Corinthians 15:51).

It's that word ‘changed’ that comes closest, without defining, to what it is that we are, after we have expired in the body of flesh. But, back to grief. We are right to be sad, to mourn, the death even of an aged parent or grandparent, just as we grieve for the death of a child or still-born. Why? Well, again, because He who created all, who knew us all before we appeared on earth, and who by knowing us after we have disappeared holds us forever suspended in a new and unknowable life, He too grieved, He wept, He was sorry that His beloved friend had to physically die. And did He weep knowing Lazarus was just dead, or even more so, because He must raise him temporarily again so that he must endure that same disembodiment and transformation again? Only God knows all, including the answer to this. ‘Memory eternal,’ that hymn with the haunting melody, tingeing the air of purply pre-dawn with expectation and transformation: ‘Awake, my soul, to the real life!’

God became man, that man might become God. We can say the words and even imagine, but there is nothing we can say truly, until happens to us what holy apostle Paul wrote, ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Birth pangs

The Christian Message—I don’t want to call it ‘Christianity’ just now—is an incarnational faith. It is this heresy against pure monotheism that aggravates the Jews and makes some Muslims very warlike and antagonistic. We believe—for here I have to confess I am one of them—that the self-existing, eternal, living God who creates, sustains and destroys all things, is One in being but, as far as His personality is concerned, He is a triad, a threesome, officially ‘the Holy Trinity.’ Besides confusing those who want to reduce God’s being to a mathematical formula, it makes some people think a Christian is a tri-theist. All that aside, no, we are monotheists, not as man would have it, but as God defines His own nature. Regardless of how many ‘persons’ share the Divine Nature, God is One.

Back again to our incarnational faith, we say that God became man. Well, that seems to be nothing new. The Hindus and other religious peoples have long known that the gods incarnate as humans or even other life forms. Vishnu has had nine incarnations so far, some of them animals, and the tenth one, yet to come, is amazingly similar to what many fundamentalist ‘end timers’ of all stripes—Christians, Jews, and Muslims—believe about ‘the second coming of Christ,’ or ‘the Messiah,’ or ‘the Mahdi.’ Their ‘end times Lord’ is Kalki. He rides a white steed and is heavily armed. He comes to destroy the miscreants and bring the Kali Yuga, the ‘iron age,’ to a fitting conclusion. Incarnations of the gods always seem to ‘come to the rescue,’ usually violently. Not so for the Christians.

The kind of incarnation that we Christians believe of God, well, yes, He does become a man in order to rescue us, even to save us, but He doesn’t stop there. Another thing is, He doesn’t come armed and dangerous and ready to kill, though the psalmist sings ‘Smashing their skulls, He heaps the wide world with corpses. Drinking from the stream as He goes…’ (Psalm 110). No, that’s not what the Christian God-man does. He comes to re-enact in time, and before our eyes, the Sacrifice of Himself which He made on our behalf before the universe ever was. Scripture calls Him ‘the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world’ (Revelation 13:8). And the strange thing about this incarnation of God and His Sacrifice is, that we aren’t meant to just watch the Divine life. We are to participate in it.

What does this mean for us, then, and for the human world, this incarnational faith? It means that God has come among us in a real and demonstrable way, and that He provides for us not only an escape from sin and death, but also the means to transform the world. He makes us co-workers in His creative plan. Did you think that God was all finished creating the universe? Far from it! In those six days, yes, He unfolded the space-time envelope, and then as scripture says, ‘He rested.’ And that’s where we come in. Being made masters of the earth is our entry level position. The human race was made for this, and though we’ve been in the habit of avoiding our responsibilities, that time is almost over. Can’t you feel it? Scripture itself says that the universe is waiting for us to take our proper place in the created order (see Romans 8:19).

Sometimes it seems hard to keep track of all this—that is, if we are instructed Christians—while we see our world falling apart. When they hear of people claiming to be the Second Coming of Christ, or of wars and revolutions, or of weather anomalies and earthquakes, or outbreaks of dangerous diseases, or of the increase of general lawlessness, the ignorant skip over Christ’s words, ‘but the end is not yet,’ and they get ready for ‘the rapture’ or the end of the world. Some of them even abandon themselves to irresponsible behavior since ‘it doesn’t matter, and Christ is coming back soon,’ and they lay waste the earth. But those who have listened to the Lord and put His words into practice, seeing this chaos, remember that ‘these are only the birth pangs’ (see Matthew 24:8).

The birth pangs of what? Aren’t these just the signs that a new world is coming? Yes, of course, but not the way some people think. A new world, that is, a new human world, is coming. In fact, it’s what the universe has been waiting for so patiently. The human race is closing in on the Day of the Lord, when we take that step as a world into that new humanity of which Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, is the first example. And more than an example, because He has the power not only to conquer sin and trample death by death, but also to make us, all of us, sons and daughters of God just as He is. This is not the ‘same old, same old’ message of religious Christianity, but the Message that Christ Himself preached, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’ (Mark 1:1).

Scripture says, ‘The world of the past is gone’ (Revelation 21:4), and though this is not true yet, we’re almost there, ‘for the time is close’ (Revelation 1:3). The human race has evolved, by God’s creative plan, and in Christ the new humanity appears, and evolution itself is abandoned as the agent of change—but not without one final surge, one last assault by the forces of the First Adam, the old humanity, habituated to darkness, to the medieval madness of violence and slavery. They fight hardest and most brutally because they know they are defeated. They are about to disappear from human history, never to be remembered or brought to mind. They know, that to be forgotten is to die the second death.

Birth pangs, without which a birth cannot occur. Our future as a race is as certain, no, even more certain, than our past. Death for the race was taken on by Jesus Christ. He disappeared into the abyss, and reappeared, the Victor over death. Brethren, this is the evening of the Last Passover. We are about to leave Goshen forever. Night is almost upon us, just one more night, and then the Day without night. Let us prepare ourselves. A door is about to be opened.

This is not about religion. This is about the Truth, the Truth that will finally make us free.

Glory to God.

Read the Psalms

There’s trouble everywhere we look. The world is going to hell in a hand basket. We’re teetering at the brink of economic catastrophe, not to mention war. Racial tension, police brutality, school shootings, car bombs, and then, if all that weren’t enough, global warming and the weird weather that’s happening everywhere. Now there’s the earthquakes, twice or three times as many as there used to be, and volcanoes flaring up as well. Closer to home, drought and forest fires. Even closer to home, burglaries that empty a house of all valuables, emotional illnesses, work-related problems, and—worst of all, intolerable loneliness and a sense of being abandoned, unloved. Is it the world, or are we going mad?

I counsel myself and my co-suffering neighbor, ‘Read the psalms.’ What I mean to say is, ‘Pray the psalms,’ but not everyone is comfortable with that. Reading them is enough, doesn’t put you in the hotspot of having to actually believe God will do something. So I say again, ‘Read the psalms, there’s something in them that will calm you, reassure you, maybe even strengthen you to survive all these disasters as they come down.’

I know that’s what they do for me. If I feel myself getting anxious about what is going on around me, but even when things seem to be going ‘just too good to be true,’ I try to pull myself away, out of the flow, or rather the push, of life, and stand on that pebbly bottom of the stream, the psalms. That’s what they are for me. A solid surface that is broken up into pebbles just as I, who seem solid, am really broken. Their brokenness mends mine, and the waters that flow around me (and when I’ve fallen, over me) feel cool and refreshing again, because of that solidity beneath me. And I realize, everything is as it must be, and I am no longer afraid.

As bad as things can get, as deep and unrelievable our sorrows, or the sorrows of the world, though we hope for the end to come, that’s not the way it happens. ‘When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be frightened; those things must take place; but that is not yet the end. For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will also be famines. These things are merely the beginning of birth pangs’ (Mark 13:7-8). The birth pangs? O my God! Here we are wishing we could die and get it over with, and we’re told, ‘Get ready! You’re just about ready to be born!’

As for the end of all things, the end of the world, the end of war, the end of my oppressive marriage, bad relationship, or frustrating job, though we wish we could have it over and done with, that’s just not how it happens, not for the world, not for us as people. Things don’t get worse and worse until the end comes, no, they get worse and worse, you think you can’t take it anymore, and then—you’re out! If this is the end, if this is the death we sometimes long for to kill our sorrows, we’re in for a surprise. As Uncle Walt says, ‘To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.’

Yes, the end is near, but not the end we think, or the one we sometimes hope for. The year ahead is going to be one of the most challenging the world has seen in many a year, and our personal lives are not going to slip through unscathed. But this is why I say, again, ‘Read the psalms,’ and if you can stomach it, ‘pray them.’ Why do I say, ‘if you can stomach it’? Well, because the abdomen is the ‘seat of the soul,’ which we will notice if we recite the ‘first and great commandment’ when we make the sign of the Cross.

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind (head), with all your soul (abdomen), with all your strength (right shoulder), and with all your heart (left shoulder).’

In the midst of every trouble opens a door to get out of it. That is faith. That is trust. Yes, try trusting the God you say you believe in but don’t, or the One you say you don’t believe in, but maybe secretly do. You may be surprised, at yourself, for your foolishness, and then at Him, for existing. For He doesn’t hold grudges, no matter what. He tells us, as He told the Jews, ‘If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father’ (John 10:37-38). What are ‘the works’ that Jesus speaks of?

Well, no matter how dark it gets, ‘read the psalms,’ and you’ll always have Light.

Calling down God's wrath

You must understand this, that in the last days distressing times will come. For people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power. Avoid them! 
2 Timothy 3:1-5

When I saw the image of a man and woman wearing matching T-shirts printed with a provocative message, and smiling, the passage from 2 Timothy came to mind. I too am a sinner, and my heart still harbors prejudices and resentments. Even when I rise up to defend my God—an impossibility!—or righteousness—something I only see in Jesus—I offend both God and righteousness, because I have no business doing either. It is my own sinfulness I am actually defending.

We are always glad to stone ‘the other adulteress,’ not the one that lives inside us. That’s why Jesus comes and humbles Himself even further, by crouching down and writing our sins in the dust our feet have trodden upon. He does not want to shame us publicly by verbal reproach, as we like to do to others. Instead, He writes out our sins and covers them with His shadow, leaving it to us to recognize our sins and escape the judgment of others, till we meet Him again.

For we will, we must, meet Him again, and in that rendezvous we shall hear either, ‘I have never known you,’ or ‘Enter into the joy of your Lord.’ All our righteousness, the filthy rags we wore when we proudly contrasted ourselves with other sinners, will be visible to everyone, but most horribly by Him who will ask us, ‘How did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ and then command, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him out into the outer darkness, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

We do not know whom we are injuring when we do the sort of thing that couple is shown doing. Themselves ignorant and untaught by wisdom, they flaunt their righteous rags tainted with the blood of their brothers and sisters. They do not know that it is Christ they are mocking because they deny that He has come in the flesh, even in the flesh of the lowest sinner, as immoral and as criminal as the thief that hung beside Christ on the Cross, whom He gathered into paradise, because of his trust.

Let God be God, my brothers and sisters. Let God be God. Let Him come to judge the world in righteousness and in truth, for One alone is worthy, One is Lord, Jesus Christ, by whose mercy and forbearance we are still alive, still have time to repent, to learn how to love the way our heavenly Father loves, to become perfect. If you can be safe, do not put yourselves in danger. To follow Jesus, to do what we see Him doing and to speak what we hear Him saying, is to be safe.

Yes, blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. 
Matthew 5:6.

Maintaining standards

Much of the dissatisfaction and insecurity of the average man today is caused by what we perceive as the failure to keep to our standards. I know it is for me. My personal gripe is not about ecological recklessness, economic or social injustice, or ‘sliding scale morality’ taking hold of us, but about the complete breakdown of public education in America, which I believe is the root of the other problems. I am not going to entertain my personal gripe, but examine the one currently at the top of the country’s list—sliding scale morality.

What I mean by this, is the collapse of what used to be called ‘normal’ (we are constantly told, there is no ‘normal’), but worse yet, the complete abandonment of moral absolutes. Signal events characterizing this trend are, for example, the battles over images of ‘The Ten Commandments’ being set up in public buildings, and the ‘marriage equality’ conflict recently (and perhaps temporarily) decided by the United States Supreme Court. Earlier signposts were similar rulings that seemed to overturn former moral absolutes, Roe versus Wade, opening the door to legal abortion.

Ask anyone, and though the lists may differ in details, almost everyone feels that standards are not being maintained. Even those who wholeheartedly deny the existence of moral absolutes, believing in relativity of customs and morals, if they are honest, will admit that they feel some standards are being let slip or let go. They may be atheists or just believe in a God who couldn’t be bothered with so insignificant a matter as human welfare. They may believe ‘right and wrong’ are merely functions of our ‘herd mentality’ or instinct. Still, most believe in maintaining standards.

As a Christian, I believe in the law of God. By this, I mean that I accept it as fact that the Divine Nature has a definite personality, will, and plan. The plan is evident in the very structure of the physical universe. The will is perhaps less evident, but still reveals itself in the flow of human history. As for the personality, well, that I am a person and am sitting here thinking and writing is enough proof for me. The God I believe in makes things just like Himself, just on a different scale. As a consequence, I believe that the law of God is a function of His personality, will, and plan, and not of anything else.

Yes, there are human laws. Of course, there have to be. Made in the image of God, man imitates Him even when we don’t intend to. God is a lawgiver and so are we. That’s why there are six hundred twenty three mitzvot (commandments) in the Torah (the law of Moses). The famous Ten Commandments are at the core of these, but I don’t think that all of our man-made laws, even when attributed to the God of the Bible, are necessitated by These. To me, the Ten Commandments represent the irretractable moral law. They are universal and inalienable, not because they were written by God’s finger on the stone tablets, but because they are inscribed on every human heart, what we call our ‘conscience.’

Even the conscience, however, is overlaid, sometimes displaced by, the man-made laws and customs, many of which are counter to the Ten Commandments, but it is still there, waiting to be discovered, or to be freed. Human society, when it holds the Ten Commandments as a moral absolute, can still subvert them out of accidental or intentional legislation, and when it does, will find itself in exactly the dilemma we now are in. Hence, our dissatisfactions and insecurities, even when we do not want to admit it.

The Ten Commandments. I say they’re valid because they’re ‘written on the heart.’ Others will say because ‘they’re in the Bible.’ Either way, their substance simply cannot be ignored without consequences. Some of them cannot be enforced by human legal systems because they are too deep, though societies have tried, without success.

The first, ‘I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ seems to impose the strict, dogmatic monotheism of the Semitic peoples on everyone else. I think that it is deeper. It is the call that all humans hear echoing inside their inner silence, in the ‘monotheism’ of their own personality, what motivated the poet Walt Whitman to write his ‘Song of Myself’. No state or church can enforce this, and it needs no enforcement. It is vital. It is the ground of human personality and the key to understanding it.

The second, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,’ seems to be a corollary of the first, and I believe it is. You cannot follow the first without following the second. Yes, historically, it has been used to prohibit man-made representations of ‘God’ in the round and even in the flat, and just as historically been beaten back by human nature itself which, like the living God, still wants ‘face to look upon Face.’ This leads me to believe that misrepresentation, even substitution, of the Being by anything not intrinsic to Him, is the moral imperative of the second commandment, again, unenforceable.

The third, ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,’ though seeming to have nothing really to do with anything at all in the modern world view, is still, in my opinion, an ineradicable moral value. Yes, I cringe when I hear anyone joining the Name of Jesus in a curse as much as a Jew is scandalized by one articulating the syllables of the Tetragrammaton YHVH. But this commandment is as much a prohibition of taking your neighbor’s name in vain, that is, disrespecting his or her personhood, hence a universal transcending religious borders.

The fourth, ‘Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,’ like the first, seems to have nothing to do with anyone except the Jews to whom it was first given, but the speed with which a ‘day of rest’ has conquered the world seems to testify that this, too, is a moral imperative that cannot be denied. Yet, as with the other Commandments, we try to bend this one to our uses, even though ‘deep down’ we know we shouldn’t. Shopping on Sunday, or working for pay, still feels strange for many people who live in countries where once all activities except ‘church’ were banned on that day. Though we have legislated the ‘weekend’ and do whatever we please, the pattern of human life is regulated by a seventh day ‘rest,’ which we find ourselves taking, out of expediency, any day of the week, proof again of its inviolability.

With the fifth, ‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’ we transition out of commandments many think merely formal and ceremonial, into those which most consider moral and enforceable. This is also the only one of the Ten Commandments which has a blessing, or reward, attached to it, ‘that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.’ Bridging the ceremonial and the moral, this becomes the proof text for many human laws relating to our obligations to authority, again a universal nonetheless. When we dishonor, or even kill off, our roots, what can we expect but that we should wither and die?

If the fifth commandment can still be regarded as a ceremonial, and unenforceable, standard, the following five cannot. We know instinctively that they are true and with the necessary energy try either to enforce them or to find our way around them, depending on our purposes. It is on these five that all man-made legal systems are built, even when the foundations are so overlaid and ‘remodeled’ that they are unrecognizable. Even moralities and legal systems completely unrelated to the Ten Commandments have these five at their core. How is this possible? Again, not on stone, but on the human heart, are they indelibly inscribed.

‘Thou shalt not kill… Thou shalt not commit adultery… Thou shalt not steal… Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor… Thou shalt not covet.’ That homicide, infidelity, theft, dishonesty, and greed are prohibited should surprise no one. In no country or culture anywhere on earth, knowing the Ten Commandments and the God of Abraham or not, are any one or all of these five held up as an ideal to be achieved—except in the modern world. There may have been human societies in the past in which some of these were considered virtuous and deserving of praise, but they have been known aberrations. In the modern world, however, legal systems seem to be designed to actually protect the breakers of these five commandments from any punishment, again proof of their validity.

The collapse of moral absolutes under the weight of our man-made legislation should hardly be a surprise to anyone, but the way back seems to be undiscoverable, because everyone has his own idea now of what is moral and what immoral, and I am no different. I may believe that only the Ten Commandments are really from God and everything else just man-made expedients. Whether I am right or wrong about this, the world struggles on, either maintaining standards, or dismantling them. Meanwhile, daily life under the watchful eye of Divine Providence continues, and even in the briefest moments allowed us, we can make a difference by doing what deep down we know is right.

Make-believe

Oh my gosh! They’re coming back for another round at snagging the biblically illiterate and speculation-obsessed, people whose lives are in a permanent tailspin as they plummet, out of control into the open jaws of these money-grubbing religionists.

As a younger Christian trying to keep an open mind and trying to see the good in everybody’s ‘ministry’ or witness, I too once fell for the crash and dash modern mystery plays churned out by Christian porn mills like Trinity Broadcasting, creators and promoters of The Omega Code and Megiddo: The Omega Code 2.

I knew they were a genre of action films with carefully encrypted ‘Christian’ messages, meant to entertain and deceive simultaneously, but I was curious, so I looked. As action films, cheesy. As gospel messages, soft porn. In the final analysis, though, dangerous, cynically subversive of authentic Christianity, and spiritually lethal.

If there are some who may be lost, it would probably be them. Why? Because, separated by pseudo-gospel guile from the real Good News of Jesus Christ, people can stay trapped in a cinematic fantasy, believing it to be Christianity, and never find the Church, or salvation through Christ. Sickening, suffocating, sterilizing, and stupid.

And the latest, which caused me to reflect on this, Christianity’s dark side (if you can call it Christianity at all, but we must, because Christ descended even to Hades to empty it of its dead), is this new installment of the continuing saga of the ‘Bible Code’—A Richard Shaw Film, Torah Codes, End to Darkness.

Living in a lying world, a follower of Jesus is refreshed, no, really, revived by only one thing, that which revived Mary the sister of Lazarus—sitting at the feet of Jesus, drinking in His divine and holy words, words of pure truth and life, words of power and light. Compared with those words, what can a disciple find in such things as ‘Torah Codes’?

Make-believe Jews seducing make-believe Christians, lying through their teeth, making promises and prophesying what never went forth from the lips of God to anyone’s ears, except to the owners of ears spiritually uncircumcised. God help us!

Once finding every mundane news item secretly coded into the dimensions and angles of the Grand Gallery of Egypt’s Great Pyramid, now with computer technology the new sellers of secrets can read similar things in the Hebrew letters of the Torah. Amazing!

A real no-brainer. Everyone should try it. Perhaps between the letters of some Old Testament book, read sideways of course, you know, from top to bottom, or the reverse, you’ll find written your name, today’s date, and exactly what you had for breakfast!

Forgive me, brethren, the heat of the last several days must be getting to me. I am not a little distressed. As if it weren’t bad enough what real events in the real world are tearing humanity apart, destroying hope, and putting faith to the test, we ignore these and run after fantasies.

Pray, and pray hard, very hard: For the humanity suffering at the hands of satan’s warlords in the Middle East. Yes, for humanity not just for Christians. For the whole of the human race is included in the salvation won for us by Christ-God when He ascended His Throne, the Holy Cross.

Pray, and pray constantly, pray without ceasing: No, not reciting pious entreaties while mechanically inching yourselves closer to heaven, but for the spiritually and materially homeless, for the pierced and branded bodies of the hopeless youth, for the elders abandoned to loveless loneliness.

Watch, yes, watch and pray. Look out where Christ is to be found wandering the earth as the unwelcome, the defenseless. Watch for these, not wasting your precious eyes on spectacles of speculation. Watch, for the time is close, otherwise shutting your ears to what is not read aloud and what cannot be kept. Watch, but not as a spectator. Watch, be vigilant.

For the Word of God, not any studious subjection to pious fallacies, is our inheritance, our lot in this world. It was not written to be dissected by computers and reassembled to make some magi’s ends meet, but to be read, to be integrated with our thoughts, words, and deeds, so that we can become living stones built into the Temple of the living God.

As for secrets hidden in the letters of the Torah, or the Bible, or whatever is for sale today, nothingness. Secrets there are, yes, even buried treasure, for within us is the Light that enlightens everyone who lives, upon us all is the Anointing that teaches us everything, and the eternal, divine Law is written on our hearts. We are the encoded Book in which all God’s hidden plans are not hidden, but revealed. For we cannot be anything but what He has made us, a City set on a hill that cannot be hid.

‘Shine! Shine! O New Jerusalem! 
For the Glory of the Lord has risen upon you!’

ορατων τε παντων και αορατων

…ορατων τε παντων και αορατων, oratón de pándon ke a-oráton, all things seen and unseen, visible and invisible. Thus the first confession of the universal Church forced out of it by the Christian emperor in pursuit of a difficult vision of one empire under one God and of one faith—an impossible dream then as now. Yet it shows that Christianity was, and still is, a faith with intellect, despite what its detractors and its fanatics believe. The Creator that we believe in made everything that is, both things we can see and those we cannot. We're not here speaking of such speculative entities as angels and devils, heaven and hell, and the like, but of things that we know for sure really are there, even though we cannot, at least without special instruments or frames of reference, see them. Of course, we are also using sight as a placeholder for any number of senses, not merely vision. We will never see an atomic particle, but our instruments tell us they are there, and tell us some of their characteristics. The early Christians may not have known about such things, but they did know about other things just as invisible yet incontrovertibly real.

Thus arises another idea, that of the real and the unreal. Obviously, we cannot say that the Creator who made everything there is made the real and the unreal. At least, I don't think so. Philosophy can ponder such things, being and non-being, and there is a long tradition of such speculation, stronger in Judaism and some other religions than in Christianity. But it is not God who made the unreal. It is we ourselves. And what is or are the unreal? Isn't it at least what we may call, the world of ideas? Yet, this world too, when God is thinking it, is a real world. God's ideas are real, even if ours are not. In fact, the universe we live in, along with ourselves and all other life, are in some sense God's ideas. But in our case, though made in God's image and thus capable of creating ideas, our fall can be defined by the fact that many if not most of our ideas are not real. They are unreal, though they are not powerless to trap us and drag us into themselves. The linguistic continuum of idea > ideal > idol is no accident. Where stop our wills along this continuum determines our trajectory into being or non-being.

There are many things that we believe or accept as real that are not, and yet believing is beneficial, at least, serves some good purpose. Other unreal things we believe have the opposite effect. We may laugh at such things as papal infallibility or unscientific creationism, yet they have an effect on those who believe in them, and that impacts us. Others may laugh at the concepts of human rights, individual liberty, or free market economy, also invisible and not incontrovertibly real, but these ideas, even ideals, have an effect in the real world, shaping it and us. I believe that there is money in my bank account, but rationally I know it is just numbers. Those numbers, though, can buy me many real things. If I believe that those numbers are real and make them my prime directive, I will fail to notice that my real life is draining away while I chase after what is actually nothing. Thus the world of the unreal, made not by God but by us, even by me, is always around us, outside and, if we're not vigilant, inside us, an invisible ulcer bleeding us to death. As scripture says, 'Greed shrivels the soul,' and this need not be about money.

What exists, and what does not exist, 'to be, or not to be,' yes, that is the question, and for reasons we cannot know, He who made us gave us the power of choice, to follow Him into full reality, into real being, or not. It is not a question of opposites. There is only One, and nothing else. How can we hesitate?

To true freedom

The fourth of July. The morning is still refreshingly cool, and I am enjoying it as I ponder and write. Later, the sun promises to scald us from a cloudless sky, and if our fireworks don’t start a grass fire here or there, perhaps the heat will. The birds, too, outside my window are pillaging their prey from the yellowed lawns around me. The sky is so bright, even at this hour, the cone of Mount St Helens is practically invisible across the Columbia Gorge.

On this day, and on at least one other, Columbus Day, there are many who self-righteously try to rob the country of any honor we can claim for our achievements in the New World, and dampen our spirits that are seeking some relief from our failures by celebrating our successes on these days. They remind us of the genocide of the ‘first nations’ and of the current, unhappy conditions under which some of them live, using history as their weapon.

There is not a single person alive at this moment who took part in the undeniable genocide. There is also nobody alive in these United States at this moment who would be here today, but for every action, benign or atrocious, committed by our ancestors. A large minority of our citizens have ancestors among both the ‘first nations’ and the ‘newcomers.’ There are very few ‘pure blooded’ members of the first nations left.

Assailing what is clearly indefensible, detractors never tire of spoiling the good of the people around them, and to no purpose. History cannot be reversed, only learned from. True reparation for all the crimes against humanity that humanity has inflicted on itself can never be paid out. What benefit do the survivors of the Holocaust receive in exchange for their relatives’ lives? They are perhaps a little richer than the Greeks and Armenians, that’s all.

We have made the country, and indirectly, most of the North American continent, and perhaps even the world, a better place to live than it would be, had we and our forbears never existed, in spite of our mistakes and, yes, even our crimes. The majority of us have benefited and, alas, the minority has been and still is, in some places, neglected. But neither we, nor any race, by our own inventions can establish perfect justice and righteousness. We can only try.

The past is irretrievable. The good and the evil deeds committed by our ancestors—yes, no one alive today did not have an ancestor in every generation since Adam and Eve—still affect us and the world, just as what we do, for better or for worse, affects our unborn descendants until the world’s end. There is only one option for us as there was for past generations—to do our best, to encourage each other to establish liberty, justice, and peace here and now.

The framers of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution that followed were imperfect men living in a savage and merciless age. Many owned slaves, perhaps some had taken part in wars against the first nations, but all were motivated by some ideal of good. They wanted for others what they wanted for themselves, ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Were black and red men included? Unfortunately not, not much different than today.

But they did achieve something good, something so good that people all over the world still celebrate it, still desire it or something like it for their own countries. Will the lost world of the red Indian ever return? No, I’m afraid not. Nor will the lost world of my central European Jewish ancestors. Nor will the glory of ancient Rome, nor the brilliance of Athens and the reckless heroism of Sparta. ‘The world of the past is gone’ is no mere opinion, but a word spoken by the Lord Himself.

Everything good, everything beautiful, that ever was, is, or is yet to come, everything will be ended in time, either by gradual decay or by ruthless cataclysm, yet nothing and no one that we have truly loved will not be resurrected. The mercy that we could not manifest because of our weakness is still an unconditional reservoir from which all can draw, who want to, both now in part, and in the world to come, fully. That mercy is infinite, even if ours is not.

On this day, I salute all for the love of that Life which we all share, given us freely by the Creator. I salute all, the living and the dead, for their achievements and even for their failures, for they did not do nothing, but tried to better their world, as best they knew how. I salute all, my friends and my enemies, in spirit and in truth, asking their forgiveness just as I give it. And I commend mercy and respect for all, for these are the paths to true freedom.

The Declaration of Independence

Except for the Bible itself, whose words when read and understood and acted upon are death to the world system but life to mankind, what follows, taken from the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen United States, is to be feared by all persons or governments that would be God on earth, from Pharaoh to the tyrants of today's world, whether outside or inside the borders of these now Fifty United States. I am no patriot of this nation only, but of the ideas that framing it still speak to every human heart, forging all into one humanity, not under men but under God, whose word, whose law is awaited by all the islands of the earth, praying ‘Thy Kingdom come.’

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Excerpted from The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America, in Congress, July 4, 1776.

Although I am an Orthodox Christian, that does not stop me from loving and respecting not only other Christians, but those of other faiths, or no faith. Although I am an American, my patriotism is not limited to the geographical or the cultural fifty United States, but upholds every land and culture of humanity, not as a citizen-worshipper of the 'one world' but as a member of the Kingdom of God, the only domain where men are truly free, truly equal, and truly brothers.

The spirit of all real revolutions comes from That Place, and leads us thither, and when the King of kings of kings returns, the One whom some call 'the Revolutionary', we will know for certain that He was behind this Declaration, as well as behind all true struggles waged since the beginning of time against unlawful authority, against Pharaoh in all its forms.

Happy Fourth of July, to all who know and love what is worth dying for, for God Himself did not back away from the Sacrifice.

The peace of Christ

Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin?
The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
—Edward Henry Bickersteth

Hymn writer

Peace, that which comes from above and is granted by God alone through Christ is not easy to define, but it definitely does not mean something like ‘all's well’ or ‘peace and quiet’ in the usual sense. Peace from God does not necessarily mean that there is no trouble anywhere in our life, nor that we are not faced with problems to which we cannot find a solution.

It's easier to talk about this peace that comes from God through Christ and is bestowed on us in prayer than it is to actually have it. Why? Because we usually talk about it when we are not in any great distress, emergency or need, but after we have been delivered from it. We look back in retrospect and thank God for the deliverance and find words of testimony to give about God's faithfulness.

What is the best definition of and the most convincing testimony to the ‘peace from above’?

When we are presently in distress, in danger, at risk, beset with problems we see no end of, when we are suffering persecutions, slander, unjust accusations, when no one believes us, when no one cares about us, and we are not sad, not unhappy, not anxious, not disturbed, not reproachful, uncomplaining, unmoved to anger or revenge, still hopeful, still forgiving, still loving our enemies, still seeking God’s Kingdom first and His righteousness, never giving in to despair or abandonment. When we are in this place, and can define ‘the peace of God which passeth all understanding’ not only by the word of our confession, but also by our passionlessness, then we have understood and accepted what that peace is. It's the same peace that Jesus knew when He was crucified and when He uttered with His last breath, ‘It is finished. Into your hands I commend my spirit.’ It is the same peace which Jesus gave to His disciples when He said, ‘My peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give.’

This is the peace of Christ.

Utterly unlike

There’s lots of things, even persons, who are, or will soon be seen to be, utterly unlike what we have imagined them to be all our lives.

Firstly, of course, there’s God. Whatever you conceive Him or Her to be, and even if you have memorized and understood everything the bible and all theologians have said about Him, and even read what the pagans have said about Him, you still (I should say, we still) are going to find out that though in everything that really mattered we knew Him quite well, there will be a whole lot about Him that will just take us by surprise—mostly, things that we couldn’t have even begun to know about Him, due to our puny brains and sensory apparatus not having a way to process the information. Ants may know that we’re there, and they may even have a good idea that we’re big, clumsy, slow-moving and dangerous. In everything that really matters to them they know us quite well. They won’t understand why some of us avoid stepping on them. They won’t begin to suspect that we compose and listen to something we call music, even though they may have something analogous to it on a very minor scale. Unfortunately for them, one of us hasn’t been transformed into an ant like themselves, so as to give them a better idea of what those big shadow-casters are that pass over their trails.

Secondly, there’s our own human nature, that which we seem to be while we are alive “in the flesh.” As a young man, I spent many hours observing my body and my spirit in function, long hours lying quiet but wide awake in the night. The result of my observations was a gradually increasing awareness that “I am not that” in reference first to my body, then even to my spirit, even to my mind. Anything that I was able to observe, watch and study, was yet experience outside whatever it is that I am. All these observations and my non-verbal thinking about them only demonstrated to me what holy scripture teaches, “For that which is,” that which exists, the world of things in its essence and with its causes, “is far off,” far removed from the sight of man, “and it is deep, deep; who can discover it?” (Ecclesiastes 7:24) How ironic, that even our very own selves, that we (think we) can know first-hand, should still be beyond our ken! Most of us don’t want to put the label “utterly unlike” on our cache of life experience, but I think that what life really is is utterly unlike our perception. We only know what we need to know and can know, and that’s not much.

Thirdly, or maybe I should say lastly, there’s death. Whatever you conceive it to be, or not be, and even if you’ve had a near death experience, or even been dead and through miracle or modern science been resuscitated, you still can’t come closer to knowing or understanding what it is than the distance separating East from West. My youthful experiments in observation also impinged on death. I used to withdraw my energy from my bodily extremities to experience “this is a hand, not my hand” and even “this is a body, not my body.” I tried to observe what remains when all senses, sight, hearing, touch, and finally even all thought, become inaccessible to a mind. What is left? Locked in a realm of being which cannot exist, yet does, I imagined the body I once inhabited, breathless, unfeeling, unmoving, as a formless numbness, and the existence of the outer world (where life was still going on) as an inaccessible “it,” not a thing or a place, just a nothing that somehow is, and beyond my penetration. That was as close as I came to apprehending death. It was very unlike what my normal mind envisions when I think of death, but it was still not “utterly unlike.”

It is this kind of approach that brings us, I think, to the threshold of at least sensing that what awaits us after this (what we call) life is something and Someone “utterly unlike” everything we have ever seen, heard, felt or thought. It makes even spelling the Name with a capital letter pale as insolence and ignorance before the reality of Him Who Is, and of As It Must Be. Not even speaking of God or of what we know about Him and His plan of salvation as written in His Word, the scriptures, we can still know Him as He reveals Himself to us and through us without our help or our imagination, and knowing Him thus, the “utterly unlike” gradually dawns on us, and of that, no man living can speak.

Happy — Μακάριοι — אשרי

Psalms for the 2nd Day
9 10 11 12 13 14

Psalm 11

The confidence of the virtuous

B’Adonáy chasíti, eych tom’rú l’nafshí, ‘Núdi harchèm tsippór…’

In Yahweh I take shelter.

How can you say to me,

‘Bird, fly back to your mountain:

‘see how the wicked are bending their bows

and fitting their arrows to the string,

ready to shoot the upright from the shadows.

When foundations fall to ruin,

what can the virtuous do?’

Yahweh is in His holy Temple,

Yahweh whose throne is in heaven;

His eyes look down at the world,

His searching gaze scans all mankind.

The virtuous and the wicked are under Yahweh’s scrutiny,

and His soul hates anyone who loves brutality.

He rains coals of fire and brimstone on the wicked,

He serves them a scorching wind to swallow down.

Yahweh is righteous, He loves virtue,

upright men will contemplate His face.

…ki tsaddík Adonáy, ts’dakót ahév, yashár yechezú fanéymo.

μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι …

‘How happy are the poor in spirit:

theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Happy the gentle:

they shall have the earth for their heritage.

Happy those who mourn:

they shall be comforted.

Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right:

they shall be satisfied.

Happy the merciful:

they shall have mercy shown them.

Happy the pure in heart:

they shall see God.

Happy the peacemakers:

they shall be called sons of God.

Happy those who are perecuted in the cause of right:

theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Happy are you when people abuse you,

and persecute you,

and speak all kinds of calumny against you

on My account.

Rejoice and be glad,

for your reward will be great in heaven.

This is how they persecuted the prophets before you.

Matthew 5:3-12 Jerusalem Bible

Psalm 14

The godless men

Amár navál b‘libbó, ‘Eyn Elohím…’

The fool says in his heart,

‘There is no God!’

Their deeds are corrupt and vile,

there is not one good man left.

Yahweh is looking down from heaven

at the sons of men,

to see if a single one is wise,

if a single one is seeking God.

All have turned aside,

all alike are tainted;

there is not one good man left,

not a single one.

Are they so ignorant, all these evil men

who swallow My people

as though they were eating bread,

and never invoke Yahweh?

They will be struck with fear,

fear without reason,

since God takes the side of the virtuous:

deride as you may the poor man’s hopes,

Yahweh is his shelter.

Who will bring Israel salvation from Zion?

When Yahweh brings His people home,

what joy for Jacob, what happiness for Israel!

…B’shuv Adonáy sh’vut ammó, yagél Ya’akóv, yismách Yisra’él!

Tossing golden crowns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Elder Paisios

Kindred spirits

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

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

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

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

Psalms - תהילים

Psalms for the 1st Day
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Psalm 1
The two ways

Ashréy ha-ísh ashér lo halách ba’atzát resha’ím…

Happy the man
who never follows the advice of the wicked,
or loiters on the way that sinners take,
or sits about with scoffers,
but finds his pleasure in the law of Yahweh,
and murmurs His law day and night.

He is like a tree that is planted
by water streams,
yielding its fruit in season,
its leaves never fading;
success attends all he does.

It is nothing like this with the wicked,
nothing like this!

No, these are like chaff
blown away by the wind.

The wicked will not stand firm when Judgment comes,
nor sinners when the virtuous assemble.
For Yahweh takes care of the way the virtuous go,
but the way of the wicked is doomed.

…v’dérech resha’ím tovéd.

My most intense, and tender, connecting with God, is through my Bible, particularly the Psalms. When I lie down on my bed and have my old Jerusalem Bible beside me, and when my eyes see the words printed on the page, any page, and I start reading them, I just get an indescribable something, it's not even really a feeling. It's just a knowing that He is here with me, that the printed words I am reading are from Him directly, with nothing between Him and me except themselves, and even they are Him because they are His Word in the form of verbal icon, just as Jesus is His Word in the form of a Man. That Bible has been with me since I met the Lord, and I haven't parted from it all these years. It is my Rock of safety, the place where I meet God and He touches me, and feeds me.

Praying the Psalms, or even reading them, can seem irrelevant to some people, even to some Christians—they say that they cannot relate to what is contained in them. They see them as only historical documents arising out of specific events.
What has that to do with me?

Though it may be true that we are not bible characters, our lives can be found in the pages of scripture. My life-long love for and relationship with the Psalms had a beginning. It was when living in the world, I started being attacked for following Christ, and in turning to the Psalms I found their contents spoke to my condition and the situations I found myself in. That never stopped but has continued growing to the point where I can say that of all the books of scripture, the Psalms I read, and pray, the most.

The Psalms have this unique characteristic: They are like a revolving door with God. They both convey the prayer of our hearts to Him, and convey His response to our every prayer.

After reading and praying the Psalms for thirty-three years out of my Jerusalem Bible, I finally began reading and praying them from the Tehillim, the Hebrew version of the Psalms. Now, along with my Jerusalem Bible, a copy of the Tehillim rests with me on my prayer couch, and the blessing of reading and understanding the Hebrew cannot be adequately described.

Psalm 4

Evening prayer

B’kar’í anéyni Elohéy tsidkí…

God, guardian of my rights, You answer when I call,

when I am in trouble You come to my relief;

now be good to me and hear my prayer.

You men, why shut your hearts so long,

loving delusions, chasing after lies? Selah.
Know this, Yahweh works wonders for those He loves,
Yahweh hears me when I call to Him.

Tremble: give up sinning,

spend your night in quiet meditation. Selah.

Offer sacrifice in a right spirit,

and trust Yahweh.

“Who will give us sight of happiness?” many say.

Show us the light of Your face turned toward us!

Yahweh, You have given more joy to my heart

than others ever knew, for all their corn and wine.

In peace I lie down, and fall asleep at once,

since You alone, Yahweh, make me rest secure.

…ki attá Adonáy l’vadád lavétach toshivéni.