Presidentially rambling

When the Voters’ Pamphlet arrived in the mail this week—I got two of them, lucky boy!—I sat down and seriously pored over one of them. I pulled my worn and tattered precinct card out of my wallet to see which electoral districts I am in, and then began looking for the slate of candidates I could vote for.

Of course, the first pages of candidates were for the candidates for United States President. I have already voted, in principle, and so I knew that there would be nothing in print that was going to change my mind. Sometimes one just knows what’s behind a candidate, regardless of what they try to project.

Click to zoom

All of the candidates for President and Vice-President had written statements. My pamphlet shows six candidates total, two Republican, two Democrat, one Green, and one Libertarian. I don’t know why the Greens and Libertarians aren’t running candidates for Vice-President. What if one of them were to win?

Nonsense! Jill Stein is just flexing her feminist muscle garbed in Pacific Green proclaiming ‘Power to the People’ and other out-of-date clichés. Gary Johnson’s statement claims he is best known for resisting temptation (to solve every problem by throwing money at it), but I remember him for ‘What is Aleppo?’

Truly, I am very sorry for the hams who think they can wiggle their tails backwards into the big chair in the Oval Office, but then, they’ve seen it done before, and everyone should live in hope. The Democratic candidates pushed the same old polite rhetoric on the theme ‘Americans are stronger together.’

A nice truism, but hardly a flag pole around which we can gather for morning prayer. ‘Hillary and I have a plan,’ was the Democratic VP candidate’s intro to an assortment of recycled and partly rehabilitated old political promises which everyone’s heard the last eight years and already forgiven and forgotten.

The Trump and the Pence—sounds like a team for British currency reform!—their two statements, running as Republicans, read almost like a political version of the Nicene Creed, full of ‘Trump believes’ and ‘we need, we must, we will,’ possibly echoing in first person plural Caesar’s ‘veni, vidi, vici.’

It seemed that the Republican presidential and VPal statements, using Trump’s famous ‘Make America Great Again’ as a flag pole—yes, I think we could pray around this one! kumbaya!—spoke of our country’s brokenness and offered a down-to-earth therapy to fix it that would appeal to many voters.

In  contrast, the Democratic statements cheered on the great accomplishments of the incumbent (Democratic) presidency with promises to protect and extend them, starting from a vantage point of an already great America that under our continued management can only become greater. Ahem, yes.

Enough has been batted back and forth about this probably ugliest presidential contest in America’s long history, and everyone who knows me or has the psychic powers of my best friend’s cat already can tell who I’m voting for in this contest, so I only want to make one other observation, my main one.

Perusing the pages of candidates (there is also a hefty section on ballot measures), what struck me as very odd was that many of the offices up for grabs did not have at least two candidates running. Where I live is a blue city in a red state, and the reds almost never win, because we’re all rednecks and cowherds.

No, that’s not why. It’s because enough of us aren’t willing to take on the blue party machine. Admittedly, when people egg your house or threaten you on the street for sporting a Trump sign on your lawn or your laundry, who wants to put their life at risk? No, that’s not the real reason.

And I am not limiting this just to why Republican or local parties aren’t running opposite Democratic candidates. True, one Democratic senator running for reelection has four opponents, but a very high profile Democratic US representative is opposed by a sole fringe party candidate with wild ideas.

Many local offices have but a single, generally Democratic, candidate. I think this is symptomatic of a non-engaged public. Reading the statements of most of the candidates of all parties what I found was a rhetorical casserole of political jargon that might’ve been written by political candidacy helper software.

Where can I buy a copy? Maybe I can drum up a polite plate of promissory pieties that can get me into office, never mind which party, they’re all pretty much the same at the lower level. But here and there, I found a candidate whose statement was written as if by a person really awake, really determined.

Too bad, none of those were people I could vote for, but it still warmed my heart to see that they had the courage to have ideas of their own and run with them. They are, I fervently hope, the first signs of the recovery of our institutions and the restoration of our national spirit, which is one of integrity.

I have integrated some visuals in this essay, strips of pictures of all our presidents, showing their terms of office in years, in days served, and which ones expired or were assassinated in office. Looking at each President singly and at the whole lineage as it continued, I became aware of the devolution of the Office.

The earlier presidents look like men of honor, dignity, truthfulness, faith. If I had lived in their time, perhaps I would read other things from their portraits. As the terms succeed each other, well-known portraits gradually become more ’modern’ like the men they represent, a little less virtuous at times.

Somewhere along the way, the presidents begin to look like what I would call career politicians. This seems absent in most of the earlier presidents, who look instead like patriotic citizens putting their personal and family lives on hold, so they can serve their country. Perhaps this is just an illusion.

Even among the modern presidents, I see faces that remind me of the heroes of the past, men whose leadership really was a kind of painful self-sacrifice, no matter what it appeared to their contemporaries or to later historians. I wonder what impression you will have of these presidential portraits.

Abraham Lincoln

Meanwhile, the election looms near, and it will be a wonder if it doesn’t end up in some kind of crisis.

Will there continue to be a United States,
e pluribus unum, or will the political centrifuge that has started its revolutions blow apart this ‘one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’?

Cold War games

So  we won the Cold War, right? Godless international communism was dealt a serious blow when the Soviet Union’s puppet states, Poland, Hungary, Romania in 1989, and Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and East Germany in 1990, caved in, and one by one the Soviet republics themselves started breaking away, leaving a massive rump, Russia alone, as the ‘Soviet Union.’ Then that resolved itself into a new, non-communist entity, the Russian Federation. We won the Cold War, right? Think again.

Communism is not, and never was, an exclusive property of the Soviet Union, even though from 1917 to the end of World War II, only the former Russian Empire, and the Great Khanate of Outer Mongolia (and for a short period a lesser Khanate of Tannu Tuva) were communist states. There always was a ‘spectre,’ as The Communist Manifesto of 1848 calls it, behind the visible communism that takes over countries. As it was losing its hold on Russia, it was increasing its hold on America and Western Europe.

The world we have now is not the Cold War world, divided between the Soviet Union, Red China, and their allies on the left, and the United States, Western Europe and their allies on the right. No, something amazing has happened. The spectre of communism is a notorious shape shifter. It is also very much a social climber. Run-down Russia and its sovietized satellites were not a rich enough prize. Glittering America, the land whose streets were paved with gold, and its rehabilitated allies were better.

So while the Cold War was going on at the surface, enemy states facing each other and threatening each other’s very existence, the spectre of communism was quietly subverting the social, the educational, and finally the political infrastructures of America, Canada, Western Europe, and their allies all over the world. The spectre has given us the slip, you might say, and the tables have been turned. ‘Who’s communist now?’ never mind the dictionary and schoolbook definitions of communism, but really.

In the grossly un-American, un-Canadian, un-British, and un-European governments that are running those countries into the ground culturally, socially, and even economically, we have the seeds of those countries’ destruction. Meanwhile, Russia, and many of the states of the former Soviet Union, are poised to regain their national identities and their historic dignity. We in the West who are ignorant of the history and culture of Russia are unable to see what is happening in a positive light.

From the frontispiece
of the book Catacomb Saints

We were caught for so long in the Cold War mentality that we seem to be unable to give it up. Growing up in that era, we always felt that the reason we opposed and contained Russia, the Soviet Union, was precisely because it was communist, because it wanted to take over the entire world and make communists out of all of us. That’s what we were told, anyhow. So, what is now the reason we are making ourselves Russia’s enemy? Their communism is over. They’re free. Ours is just beginning.

We should be rejoicing with Russia in that they are now free to be themselves, to be Russia, not some monster mega-nation whose goal is to gobble up the rest of the world. Instead, we oppose them on every front. Without understanding the history of the Russias—yes, it’s a plural—we cannot properly assess their recent moves, in Crimea, for example. Ukraine, a Soviet-era construct predicated on a linguistic basis, is one of the Russias. Crimea is a Tatar homeland mostly inhabited by ‘Great’ Russians.

Ukraine, formerly called ‘Little Russia’ is the spiritual center and the bread basket of the Russias. Though ‘little’ it is what makes ‘Great Russia’ great, in much the same way as Scotland is the ‘great’ in Great Britain. It’s hard for us in North America to even imagine the British Empire without the Scots, a distinct people and culture which has contributed more to the Anglosphere than its size would expect. The same is true of the Russian Empire. It’s hard to imagine it without Ukraine and its plenteous contributions.

Maybe it’s part of the ignorance of America and the West about the history of Russia. Maybe it’s the fact that we feel we have won the Cold War and now have everyone, including Russia, deservedly under our thumb. Maybe it’s because our leaders really are the slaves of the spectre of communism, even though they are not its legal heirs. But we are clearly on the wrong side in almost every struggle for safety, liberty and justice in the world. And why wouldn’t we be? We’re on the wrong side even to ourselves!

Face facts, spectre-haunted houses of Congress and Parliament, and White House, and less guarded commanderies of (false) European Union. Russia is not the enemy. It doesn’t need your land, your people, or your resources. You are on the wrong side in Syria. Stop trying to revive the Cold War. Stop trying to shift the blame for your failures onto somebody else. You have no one but yourselves to blame if you open your doors to your real enemies, while closing them on your potential allies and friends.

No, we didn’t exactly win the Cold War. A generation ago we had leaders who knew what Truth is, what Freedom is, what Conscience is, yes, even who God is, and in the face of those leaders and the people they mustered, the spectre of communism was revealed even to its dupes how powerless it is, powerless to bring positive change, powerless to produce anything real, and so its prison gates were busted open, and the prisoners released. Where have we seen this pattern of liberation before?

Christ is risen from the dead,

trampling down death by death, 

and to those in the tombs bestowing life.

Rescued by wedding guests

Whenever I return to a stint of reading the early fathers, that is, those before and just after the peace of the Church wrought by Constantine, I’m always struck by their modernity and the freshness that leaps out at me as I read. It makes me wonder just what ‘modern’ means.

I’ve read somewhere that the beginning of ‘modern’ times occurred in different centuries in different places. Some say in Europe they began in AD 1300 with Dante, others that Francis of Assisi is the first ‘modern’ man in the West: it all depends on when the writer thinks the medieval age ended. In the Far East, modern times are said to have begun during the Northern Sung dynasty, around the year AD 1000, and the criteria are such things as the appearance of printing, paper money, and machinery.

In my view, what I mean as ‘modern’ has to do with machinery definitely, but even more with the frank and unafraid willingness to question everything to get at the root of truth. This is something that I think we lost during the ‘Church Age’ in the West, when other priorities were substituted for it. The religiosity of medieval Christianity did not even make room for real questions to be asked, hence, the stagnation that took centuries to overcome.

Back to my topic, the written testimonies of the early Christians.

Eusebius’ History of the Church was my leisure reading matter this morning. His text reads as fluently and frankly as if it were written just yesterday, and the events he recounts are both easy to picture and believe as accurate. What a far cry from the miracle stories of Christian piety, always avid to believe anything as long as it’s monstrous—like St Nicholas of Myra reassembling and revivifying the bodies of some boys who had been hacked to pieces and concealed in barrels of pickles—or was it wine?

I read for a long while about the Church Father Origen of Alexandria who escaped being canonized as Saint Origen for some of his eccentricities of belief or at least of expression. One of his funnier speculations was that our resurrection bodies would be perfect spheres, but he also speculated on pre-existence of the soul and other ideas bordering on pagan philosophy. This speculation, in spite of his sufferings in the Decian persecution, earned him the indignity of being a suspect of heresy. Looking at him through the ‘modern’ approach that one finds in Eusebius’ history, I’d say that Origen deserves better from his ‘carping critics’ as Eusebius calls them. I guess Origen will just have to be classed with Martin Luther, who also falls under the axe of true piety, as he cries out, ‘Let the saints canonize themselves!’

Now, for the real topic, a story that I found both exciting and interesting, written in History of the Church, Book 6, Chapter 40, entitled What happened to Dionysius. The account itself was written in a letter by Dionysius, and it is quoted in the book.

I speak as in the presence of God, who knows whether I am lying. I did not act on my own judgement or without God when I made my escape; but even before that, when Decius announced his persecution, Sabinus then and there dispatched a frumentarius to hunt me out, and I stayed at home for four days waiting for him to arrive. But though he went round searching every spot—roads, rivers, fields—where he guessed I was hiding or walking, he was smitten with blindness and did not find the house; he never imagined that when an object of persecution I should stay at home! It was only after four days, when God commanded me to go elsewhere, and by a miracle made it possible, that I set out along with the boys and many of the brethren. That this was indeed a work of divine providence was proved by what followed, when perhaps we were of use to some.

Let me interject two observations:

Dionysius tells, almost casually as if it were nothing remarkable, that God commanded him to go elsewhere. These early Christians like us had, and knew they had, direct access to God, without having to resort to a chain of command as later develops in the Church, eventually making it unimaginable in the Dark Ages that anyone but a perfect saint could actually talk to God and get His personal attention, as does Dionysius. This, to me, is a sign of modernity.

The other thing I want to notice is his use of the word miracle. As he continues to tell his story, the miraculous aspect reveals itself to be the acknowledgment that God was personally and intimately directing the flow of events. This too strikes me as modern, that is, frank and honest, not given to exaggeration or tale-spinning.

Now, to finish the story, Dionysius continues…

About sunset, my companions and I were caught by the soldiers and taken to Taposiris; but by the purpose of God it happened that Timothy was absent and was not caught. When he arrived later, he found the house empty except for a guard of servants, and learnt that we had been captured without hope of release…

And how was God’s wonderful mercy shown? You shall hear the truth. As Timothy fled distracted, he was met by one of the villagers on his way to attend a wedding-feast—which in those parts meant an all-night celebration—who asked why he was in such a hurry. He told the truth without hesitation, whereupon the other went in and informed the guests as they reclined at table. With one accord, as if at a signal, they all sprang to their feet, came as fast as their legs could carry them, and burst in where we were with such terrifying shouts that the soldiers guarding us instantly took to their heels. Then, they stood over us, as we lay on bare mattresses.

At first, God knows, I thought they were bandits who had come to plunder and steal, so I stayed on the bed. I had nothing on but a linen shirt; my other clothes that were lying near I held out to them. But they told me to get up and make a bolt for it. Then I realised what they had come for, and called out, begging and beseeching them to go away and let us be. If they wanted to do me a good turn, they had better forestall my captors and cut off my head themselves. While I shouted like this, they pulled me up by force, as my companions who shared all my adventures know. I let myself fall on my back to the floor, but they grasped me by hands and feet and dragged me out, followed by those who witnessed the whole scene, Gaius, Faustus, Peter, and Paul, who picked me up and carried me out of the village, set me on a donkey bareback, and led me away.

Now, in conclusion I ask you, brethren, isn’t this a great story? Doesn’t it ring true, and even entertain us in a way that doesn’t offend true piety, by the candid artlessness of the author? Here we have an example of what a Christian was like in the third century, before the beginning of the Church Age. There’s a lot here to be learned, and also to help us examine ourselves, to make sure that the faith that we have is the same as that of these early Christians. Reading books like these makes me think that what we have known as the ‘modern’ age has not so much to do with an era of chrónos time, but rather with moments of kairós time scattered through human history.

If this be true, what of those who call the present ‘post-modern’? Must we, like Dionysius, have to be yanked out of our resignation by Christ’s wedding guests, flung bareback on an ass, and set free?

Even of the Sabbath

Thinking about a close friend of mine, a fallen-away Episcopalian and somewhat impoverished member of a local ‘old money’ family, whose libertine lifestyle was, at least in middle age, rather more philosophical than physical, his attitude toward sexual morality was that, except for a very restricted class of offenses, there really wasn’t any—sexual morality, that is.

In our youth, he would have hidden his real lifestyle from me (perhaps), because our friendship was still in its early stages, still very much on the surface. From his viewpoint, I was a somewhat fawning young Episcopalian, with new convert zeal (I had only joined the Church a few years prior), and he would probably not have wanted to offend my (as he thought) pious sensibilities.

By early middle age we had gotten to know and love each other quite well. At that point, we were co-workers talking amateur ethics and theology, as well as aesthetics, history, science, and politics in our off hours. Our shared Anglican past (by then I had joined the Orthodox Church) gave us many common points of interest and, though temperamentally different, much sympathy for each other.

I didn’t quite believe him when he told me that he’d been with a few hundred women in his time. I mean, unless it were assembly-line whore-mongering (which would’ve been beneath his sensitive nature), it was an impossibility, and he never confessed to living in a large free-love commune. What I did see was the tail end of one disappointing relationship and the start of another.

Does it seem that I meant ‘and the start of another’ disappointing relationship? Well, that’s not what I meant, but in fact that is how it turned out. The second relationship of his which I did see was with a woman he’d known most of his life, and whom he had rescued from a very harsh and abusive relationship with another mutual friend. I think it might’ve been a marriage.

If it were a marriage, then, because of their circle of like-minded lapsed Catholic and Episcopal intellectuals, it would’ve been a marriage just to satisfy some other motive, because the woman and her husband had never had an intention to start a family. They were socialites and left-wing party hoppers. Alcoholism and drug abuse incinerated their ‘marriage.’ My friend came to the rescue.

They didn’t immediately get married after her divorce, my friend and this woman, but just set up house together. They became ‘a couple.’ It didn’t bother them that they weren’t married. Their sex life was no one’s business but their own. Both had flawed personalities, even what could be termed personality disorders, mental and emotional dispositions that made their lives actually very unhappy.

Neither had ever been involved in a real marriage themselves and so had no experience of what it takes. Each of them had always used niceness to get through all of life’s roadblocks on the way to their own personal happiness—as individuals. When they spoke of each other’s happiness and how much they wanted it, what they meant was, happiness on their terms, not on the other’s.

My object is not to single out unmarried sex, or childless marriages, both of which I do believe are moral issues, nor to point out the sinfulness of one or both, but simply to give an example of ‘life beyond the (possibility of) moral laws.’ I do believe that the moral laws are Divine in origin, but only those we call the Ten Commandments. All others, even in the Bible, are adaptations, some good, some bad.

These friends—now both my friends, as they are a couple, and I believe they did get married (though I accidentally missed the wedding)—would not admit to living beyond the moral laws, only that they follow a different standard of morality. To be sure, by Christ’s standard in His sermon on the Day of Judgment, they would probably be among the sheep who enter paradise on His right.

‘Whatsoever you do to the least of these, that you do unto Me,’ is the line that sticks with me, and I know of at least one instance where this couple would be directed to the right. A mutual friend of ours, a young lawyer from another ‘old money’ family, married and started to live the lifestyle of his class. One day he was diagnosed with a disease that would eventually incapacitate him.

His wife stayed with him as long as it did not inconvenience her personal and social life, but when it did, she promptly abandoned him to his fate. My two friends, by then living together (in sin, from the Christian viewpoint) began to tend him in his apartment, so he would not have to be transferred to a nursing home. At the end, it amounted to them doing home hospice care—for free.

This lawyer was someone they’d known almost all their lives. He had been abandoned by his wife. What else could they do? This demonstrates something more than loyalty, perhaps touching on that real moral standard, maybe even going beyond it. In the end, of course, the lawyer died. My friend and his girlfriend got married sometime after. Why? He was heading towards early dementia.

Unless his girlfriend and he were married, she could not properly care for him and, when his dementia possibly slid into Alzheimer’s, she could still be there to care for him. Again, is this natural loyalty, adherence to the moral law, or what? The bottom line here is that, knowingly or unknowingly, these people were following the word of Jesus, ‘How blessed are the merciful…’

I am thinking about laws, about the moral law, the standard that God has created along with creating us, for whom it was made. As long as we are in rebellion against that law, we cannot take our preordained place as ‘lords of the Sabbath,’ as Jesus Christ Himself did. Only by fulfilling the law, letting it teach and regulate us as a society of persons, do we become masters of ourselves, and lords over it.

Then the words of Jesus, spoken in prophecy about Himself first and then about us, be fulfilled, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath’ (Mark 2:27-28 ESV).

Astonished at His teaching

In  the news this morning I read, the United Kingdom has decided to grant pardon to all the men it has on record, whether alive or dead, who were convicted of the crime of sodomy. The article didn’t use that word, but that’s what it meant. Sodomy as a word has fallen out of favor, another ‘N’ word that mustn’t be used around polite, that is, politically correct, society. In fact, I’m tired of the cliché-ridden term ‘politically correct’ and from now on I’m just going to use the word ‘polite’ to mean the same thing, except when describing the behavior of children.

At any rate, my personal views on homosexuality aside, if what was once illegal and punishable is now legal, then that means somebody has the power to reverse long-standing laws, that the laws, in fact are admittedly just something we make up as we go along, and not in the least related to any pre-human, that is, pre-existing, moral standard. If this is true, then I think that the United Kingdom should not be issuing pardons but rather apologies, and the gay men should be issuing the pardons. In fact, the whole human race should be asking gays for forgiveness.

On a less intimate note, but still in the same vein, here in Oregon the production, sale and consumption of marijuana products was, until very recently, against the law. When the law was reversed and contoured to fit within a parameter that would benefit the government, a marijuana establishment suddenly appeared, ready-made, generations deep, and ubiquitous. No one apologized on either side, not the state for prosecuting apparently innocent people, nor the marijuana-enthused for having been breaking the law all along because it was wrong.

Or was it? The law, I mean. Was the law wrong when it made marijuana use illegal, or was it just being dictatorial, autocratic, arbitrary, and just plain power-obsessed? Well, since the law is not a person, but generally, people, civic-minded people acting on behalf of society at large to enact laws for the preservation of social well-being, none of those adjectives cataloged above, applies. Society has a right to defend itself. In true monarchies, an individual is invested with the responsibility to defend it. In republics, that responsibility is shared among many.

What I have noticed about laws, human ones but also those believed to be of Divine origin, is that they are usually framed with the good of human society as their object. They may be framed with the good of the individual, or of nature, or of some other good in mind, but always with social good, that is, the health and welfare of society, as the priority. The best laws balance social good with individual happiness. I am not here going to even mention liberty and equality, as these never make people happy if those people are not genuinely seeking happiness.

But good laws establish harmony and facilitate free functioning of society in such a way that fewer laws are needed as the society matures. Fewer laws, not more, equates to less regulation, not more, and this, because good laws are made that educate the public as well as regulate them. Going back to the Bible, which is, like it or not, the ultimate source of Western jurisprudence, we can see that the laws written therein are established for the good of society, not for the good of the individual, which is pure nonsense unless by ‘good’ you mean ‘happiness.’

Modern man chafes under the notion that God has the right to legislate on such personal matters as what we do with the people whom we sleep with. Once, a very dear friend of mine laughed at me and said, ‘Nonsense, God doesn’t care whom we sleep with!’ when I naively said something that supported the idea of sexual morality. For him, sex was outside the realm of God’s prerogatives. My friend ‘believed’ in God and enjoyed talking about Him as a form of intellectual stimulation, but morality for him was what he thought right, not what God does.

But I believe there is a concrete, a very definite, standard of morality, something on which good laws depend and to which they point us. That invisible yet universally recognized standard is something that came into existence at the same moment that humanity became aware of itself and of God, that threshold immortalized in the story of the creation of Adam and Eve. I am not saying that this standard wasn’t always there, uncreated just as God was always there, Uncreated, but that part of the standard which has to do only with us is co-temporal with us.

After centuries of human progress in every other area of endeavor, as a society we now find ourselves suddenly bereft of a conscience that is in accord with that standard. Individuals still have it. Some people still recognize the voice of the human conscience—which is the same in everyone as it starts out—unaffected by the currents of imaginary ideologies that come against it, but society has once again been subverted by the tyrannical voices that know no moral standard, only their desires, and the pursuit, not of happiness, which they no longer want, but power.

Happily—yes, there are still people who want happiness—society is still part of nature, still part of God’s creation just as the individual is, and like the rest of Nature, it has built-in mechanisms to heal itself, and like any biological being, will always right itself when it goes wrong, in preference to just giving up hope and perishing. Society, as we see around us today, is again becoming self-aware. The enemies of humanity, themselves human only in form, brand those who oppose them ‘populist’ and accuse them of backwardness, but it is these others who stand on rock.

If it is backward to stand on rock rather than sand, let me be backward. I know that I have no happiness unless the society I live in is happy. The same goes for everything else in life. We are truly individuals only by being part of society, so let’s put ourselves back on the road that leads to health and happiness.

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.

And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at His teaching, for He was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.
Matthew 7:21-29 ESV

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 (for You have redeemed me, God of Truth)." 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.

Never refuse to listen when He speaks

The teaching of the holy apostles…

Take care, brothers, that there is not in anyone of your community a wicked mind, so unbelieving as to turn away from the living God.
Hebrews 3:12

Every day keep encouraging one another so that none of you is hardened by the lure of sin.
Hebrews 3:13

We shall remain coheirs with Christ only if we keep a grasp on our first confidence right to the end.
Hebrews 3:14

The Word of God is something alive and active: it cuts like any double-edged sword but more finely; it can slip through the place where the soul is divided from the spirit, or joints from the marrow; it can judge the secret emotions and thoughts. No created thing can hide from Him; everything is uncovered and open to the eyes of the One to whom we must give an account of ourselves.
Hebrews 4:12-13

We must never let go of the faith that we have professed.
Hebrews 4:14b

Be confident in approaching the throne of grace. We shall have mercy from Him and find grace when we are in need of help.
Hebrews 4:16

Through the blood of Jesus we have the right to enter the sanctuary by a new way which He has opened for us, a living opening through the curtain, His body.
Hebrews 10:19b-20

Let us be sincere in heart and filled with faith, our minds sprinkled and free from any trace of bad conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us keep firm in the faith we profess, because the One who made the promise is faithful.
Hebrews 10:22-23

Let us be concerned for each other, to stir a response in love and good works.
Hebrews 10:24

Do not stay away from the meetings of the community, as some do, but encourage each other to go; the more so as you see the Day drawing near.
Hebrews 10:25

Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for or prove the existence of the realities that at present remain unseen. It was for faith that our ancestors were commended.
Hebrews 11:1-2

With so many witnesses in a great cloud on every side of us, we too, then, should throw off everything that hinders us, especially the sin that clings so easily, and keep running steadily the race we have started.
Hebrews 12:1

Let us not lose sight of Jesus who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection.
Hebrews 12:2

Think of the way He stood such opposition from sinners and then you will not give up for want of courage. In the fight against sin you have not yet had to keep fighting to the point of death.
Hebrews 12:3-4

When the Lord corrects you, do not treat it lightly; but do not get discouraged when He reprimands you. The Lord trains the ones that He loves and He punishes all those that He acknowledges as his sons. Suffering is part of your training; God is treating you as His sons.
Hebrews 12:5b-7a

Always be wanting peace with all people, and the holiness without which no one can ever see the Lord.
Hebrews 12:14

Be careful that no one is deprived of the grace of God and that no root of bitterness should begin to grow and make trouble; this can poison a whole community.
Hebrews 12:15

Be careful that there is no immorality, or that anyone of you does not degrade religion like Esau, who sold his birthright for one single meal.
Hebrews 12:16

What you have come to is nothing known to the senses: not a blazing fire, or a gloom turning to total darkness, or a storm, or trumpeting thunder, or the great voice speaking which made everyone that heard it beg that no more should be said to them.
Hebrews 12:18-19

What you have come to is Mount Zion and the City of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole Church in which everyone is a first-born son and a citizen of heaven. You have come to God Himself, the supreme Judge, and been placed with the spirits of the saints who have been made perfect; and to Jesus the Mediator who brings a new covenant and a blood for purification which pleads more insistently than Abel’s. Make sure that you never refuse to listen when He speaks.
Hebrews 12:22-25a

We have been given possession of an unshakable Kingdom. Let us therefore hold on to the grace that we have been given and use it to worship God in the way that he finds acceptable, in reverence and awe. For our God is a consuming fire.
Hebrews 12:28-29

Continue to love each other like brothers and remember always to welcome strangers, for by doing this some people have entertained angels without knowing it.
Hebrews 13:1-2

Keep in mind those who are in prison as though you were in prison with them; and those who are being badly treated, since you too are in one body.
Hebrews 13:3

Marriage is to be honored by all, and marriages are to be kept undefiled, because fornicators and adulterers will come under God’s judgment.
Hebrews 13:4

Put greed out of your lives and be content with whatever you have.
Hebrews 13:5a

Remember your leaders who preach the Word of God to you and, as you reflect on the outcome of their lives, imitate their faith.
Hebrews 13:7

Jesus Christ is the same today as He was yesterday and as He will be forever. Do not let yourselves be led astray by all sorts of strange doctrines.
Hebrews 13:8-9a

Jesus suffered outside the gate to sanctify the people with His own blood. Let us go to Him outside the camp and share His degradation. For there is no eternal city for us in this life, but we look for one in the life to come. Through Him let us offer God an unending sacrifice of praise, a verbal sacrifice every time we acknowledge His Name.
Hebrews 13:12-15

Keep doing good works and sharing your resources, for these are sacrifices that please God.
Hebrews 13:16

Obey your leaders and do as they tell you, because they must give an account of the way they look after your souls. Make this a joy for them to do and not a grief. You yourselves would be the losers.
Hebrews 13:17

All texts are taken from the Jerusalem Bible (1966).

Train yourself spiritually

The teaching of holy apostle Paul…

Insist that people stop teaching strange doctrines and taking notice of myths and endless geneologies; these things are only likely to raise irrelevant doubts instead of furthering the designs of God which are revealed in faith.
1 Timothy 1:3b-4

The only purpose of this instruction is that there should be love, coming out of a pure heart, and clear conscience, and a sincere faith. There are some people who have gone off the straight course and taken a path that leads to empty speculation.
1 Timothy 1:5-6

Here is a saying that you can rely on and nobody should doubt: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.
1 Timothy 1:15

Fight like a good soldier with faith and a good conscience for your weapons. Some people have put conscience aside and wrecked their faith in consequence.
1 Timothy 1:18b-19

There should be prayers offered for everyone—petitions, intercessions and thanksgiving—and especially for kings and others in authority, so that we may be able to live religious and reverent lives in peace and quiet. To do this is right and will please God our Savior: He wants everyone to be saved and reach full knowledge of the truth.
1 Timothy 2:1-4

The Spirit has explicitly said that during the last times there will be some who will desert the faith and choose to listen to deceitful spirits and doctrines that come from devils; and the cause of this is the lies told by hypocrites whose consciences are branded as though with a red-hot iron.
1 Timothy 4:1-2

Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales. Train yourself spiritually. Physical exercises are useful enough, but the usefulness of spirituality is unlimited, since it holds out the reward of life here and now, and of the future life as well.
1 Timothy 4:7-8

The point of all our toiling and battling is that we have put our trust in the living God, and He is the Savior of the whole human race, but particularly of all believers.
1 Timothy 4:10

Be an example to all the believers in the way you speak and behave, and in your love, your faith, and your purity. Make use of the time by reading to the people, preaching and teaching.
1 Timothy 4:12-13

Take great care about what you do and what you teach; always do this, and in this way you will save both yourself and those who listen to you.
1 Timothy 4:16

Anyone who does not look after his own relations, especially if they are living with him, has rejected the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
1 Timothy 5:8

Never make yourself an accomplice in anybody else’s sin. Keep yourself pure.
1 Timothy 5:22b

Anyone who teaches anything different and does not keep to the sound teaching which is that of our Lord Jesus Christ, the doctrine which is in accordance with true religion, is simply ignorant and must be full of self-conceit, with a craze for questioning everything and arguing about words. All that can come of this is jealousy, contention, abuse and wicked mistrust of one another, and unending disputes by people who are neither rational nor informed and imagine that religion is a way of making money.
1 Timothy 6:3-5

We brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. As long as we have food and clothing, let us be content with that. People who long to be rich are a prey to temptation. They get trapped into all sorts of foolish and dangerous ambitions which eventually plunge them into ruin and destruction. The love of money is the root of all evils, and there are some who pursuing it have wandered away from the faith.
1 Timothy 6:7-10a

Aim to be saintly and religious, filled with faith and love, patient and gentle.
1 Timothy 6:11

Warn those who are rich in this world’s goods that they are not to look down on other people and not to set their hopes on money which is untrustworthy, but on God who out of His riches gives us all we need for our happiness. Tell them that they are to do good and be rich in good works, to be generous and willing to share.
1 Timothy 6:17-18

Have nothing to do with the pointless philosophical discussions and antagonistic beliefs of the “knowledge” which is no knowledge at all.
1 Timothy 6:20

God’s gift is not a spirit of timidity, but the Spirit of power and love and self-control.
2 Timothy 1:7

You are never to be ashamed of witnessing to the Lord.
2 Timothy 1:8a

God has saved us and called us to be holy, not because of anything we ourselves have done, but for His own purpose and by His own grace.
2 Timothy 1:9

Keep as your pattern the sound teaching, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. You have been trusted to look after something precious. Guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.
2 Timothy 1:13-14

Accept the strength that comes from the grace of Christ Jesus.
2 Timothy 2:1

You have heard everything. Hand it on to reliable people so that they in turn will be able to teach others.
2 Timothy 2:2

Put up with your share of difficulties like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.
2 Timothy 2:3

Remember the Good News: Jesus Christ risen from the dead.
2 Timothy 2:8

If we have died with Him, then we shall live with Him.
If we hold firm, then we shall reign with Him.
If we disown Him, then He will disown us.
We may be unfaithful, but He is always Faithful, for He cannot disown
His own self.
2 Timothy 2:11b-13

There is to be no wrangling about words: all that this ever achieves is the destruction of those who are listening.
2 Timothy 2:14

Have nothing to do with pointless philosophical discussions. They only lead further and further away from the true religion. Talk of this kind corrodes like gangrene.
2 Timothy 2:16-17

God’s solid foundation stone is still in position, and this is the inscription on it: “The Lord knows those who are His own,” and “All who call on the Name of the Lord must avoid sin.”
2 Timothy 2:19

Instead of giving in to your impulses, fasten your attention on holiness, faith, love, and peace, in union with all those who call on the Lord with pure minds.
2 Timothy 2:22

Avoid futile and silly speculations, understanding that they only give rise to quarrels. A servant of the Lord is not to engage in quarrels but has to be kind to everyone, a good teacher, and patient. He has to be gentle when he corrects people who dispute what he says, never forgetting that God may give them a change of mind so that they recognise the truth and come to their senses, once out of the trap where the devil caught them and kept them enslaved.
2 Timothy 2:23-26

You may be quite sure that in the last days there are going to be some difficult times. People will be self-centred and grasping, boastful, arrogant, and rude, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious, heartless and unappeasable. They will be slanderers, profligates, savages, and enemies of everything that is good. They will be treacherous and reckless and demented by pride, preferring their own pleasure to God. They will keep up the outward appearance of religion but will have rejected the inner power of it. Have nothing to do with people like that.
2 Timothy 3:1-5

Anybody who tries to live in devotion to Christ is certain to be attacked.
2 Timothy 3:12

You must keep to what you have been taught and know to be true. Remember who your teachers were.
2 Timothy 3:14

All Scripture is inspired by God and can profitably be used for teaching, for refuting error, for guiding people’s lives and teaching them to be holy.
2 Timothy 3:16

Before God and before Christ Jesus who is to be Judge of the living and the dead, in the name of his Appearing and of his Kingdom: Proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. Refute falsehood, correct error, call to obedience. Do all with patience and the intention of teaching. Be careful always to choose the right course. Be brave under trials. Make the preaching of the Good News your life’s work in thoroughgoing service.
2 Timothy 4:1-2, 5

Bring those whom God has chosen to faith and to the knowledge of the truth that leads to true religion, and give them the hope of the eternal life that was promised long ago by God, who does not lie.
Titus 1:1b-2

Have a firm grasp of the unchanging message of the tradition.
Titus 1:9a

To all who are pure themselves, everything is pure; but to those who have been corrupted and lack faith, nothing can be pure.
Titus 1:15

Preach the behavior which goes with healthy doctrine.
Titus 2:1

In everything you do, make yourself an example of working for good.
Titus 2:7

When you are teaching be an example in your sincerity and earnestness, and in keeping all that you say so wholesome that nobody can make objections to it.
Titus 2:8

There must be no petty thieving. Show complete honesty at all times.
Titus 2:10a

God’s grace has been revealed, and it has made salvation possible for the whole human race, and taught us that what we have to do is to give up everthing that does not lead to God, and all our worldly ambitions. We must be self-restrained and live good and religious lives here in this present world while we are waiting for the blessing which will come with the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus. He sacrificed himself for us in order to set us free from all wickedness and to purify a people so that it could be His very own and would have no ambition except to do good.
Titus 2:11-14

Be ready to do good at every opportunity.
Titus 3:1b

Be courteous and polite to all kinds of people. Remember, there was a time when we too were ignorant, disobedient, and misled and enslaved by different passions and luxuries.
Titus 3:2b-3a

If a man disputes what you teach, then after a first and a second warning, have no more to do with him.
Titus 3:10

Faith will give rise to a sense of fellowship that will show you all the good things that we are able to do for Christ.
Philemon 1:6

All texts are taken from the Jerusalem Bible (1966).

What shall it profit a man

The Temptation of Christ, by Eric Armusik

We can increase in empathy, if we take the time to consider what it must be like for a certain soul in his or her situation. That’s what the saying means, ‘walking in another man’s shoes.’ Some religiously minded people practice this kind of meditation with the life of Christ—of course we all do during the services of Holy Week when we relive Christ’s final week on earth with Him—but some do this often, even daily, to sharpen their compassion and empathy. The hoped for result of this contemplation is that we should grow in compassion and empathy for fellow man, but oddly this isn’t always the case.

For me, my meditation on the souls of others is what forces me—yes, ‘forces’ is not too strong a term—to pray for them, sometimes for people who would not be objects for intercession in the daily flow of events. For the past several days I have been considering this: What must be the state of his soul when a man, in this case, Donald Trump, is engaged in a fight to the finish for the United States presidency? And the state of her soul when a woman, in this case, Hillary Clinton, is fighting tooth and nail for the same? Both are poised on a pinnacle of ultimate danger, much like the parapet of the Temple, as was Jesus.

Or atop the peak of a very high mountain, as He also was. From the parapet, or guard-railed roof of the Temple, the tempter suggested He throw Himself down, since, if He really was the Son of God as He knew Himself to be, certainly angels would come to the rescue and not let Him be harmed by His fall. And from the mountain top, the tempter suggested that all the world could be His, if only He would bow down and worship him—a disgusting thought! but one that many a mortal man and woman since that time and before has caved in to, and which forms the major narrative of most of the Bible stories.

Back to the two souls I’ve been thinking about. The state of their souls. What must it be like, what must it feel like, to have to be targeted in such frivolously fierce bombardment with missiles from the past, to have the people who are propping you up on that precarious pinnacle loading your mind (and therefore your soul) with poisonous darts of treachery, some of which you must personally launch? And somewhere on the edges of your daily muse is lurking the knowledge that much of this barrage of assassinoids is simply rubbish, prefab’d for the occasion, fantasy-fused, and for your opponent, fatal.

No one is actually going to get killed—at least, not yet. Is that the thought that edges the soul of each of them, Mr Trump and Mrs Clinton, closer to the abyss, nearer that point where their souls no longer matter to them, because either they’ve taken the plunge into the arms of guardian angels and disappeared into the vault of invincibility? Or because they’ve already bowed down and worshiped the mirage-making, powerless master of illusion that promises everyone only those things they can never really have, whilst handing over to them the very tools of their own literally restless annihilation?

Yes, what is it like to be super-human? For that is what two people, a man and a woman, must be who have to face the perpetual and persistent warfare that is this election year in the United States. And what is it like when each of them, momentarily out of the public eye, must face themselves, whether in a mirror or in the reflection of their consciences? Each of them is still a human soul, but both are poised by forces outside their control for either victory or defeat. Only one will taste the first, the other the second. But when the final vote is tallied, not in this or any election, but at the Judgment Seat, who will be the winner?

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Mark 8:36 KJV

Keep the traditions

The teaching of holy apostle Paul…

We know that God loves you and that you have been chosen because when we brought the Good News to you, it came to you not only as words, but as power, and as the Holy Spirit, and as utter conviction.
You observed the sort of life we lived when we were with you, which was for your instruction, and you were led to become imitators of us and of the Lord, and it was with the joy of the Holy Spirit that you took to the Gospel.
1 Thessalonians 1:4-6

As soon as you heard the message we brought you as God’s message, you accepted it for what it really is, God’s message and not some human thinking, and it is still a living power among you who believe it.
1 Thessalonians 2:13

What God wants is for you all to be holy.
He wants you to keep away from fornication, and each one of you to know how to use the body that belongs to him in a way that is holy and honorable, not giving way to selfish lust like the pagans who do not know God.
He wants nobody at all ever to sin by taking advantage of a brother in these matters.
We have been called by God to be holy, not to be immoral.
1 Thessalonians 4:3-7

Give encouragement to each other and keep strengthening each other.
1 Thessalonians 5:11

Be considerate to those who are working among you and are above you in the Lord as your teachers. Have the greatest respect and affection for them because of their work.
1 Thessalonians 5:12-13

Be at peace among yourselves.
Warn the idlers.
Give courage to those who are apprehensive.
Care for the weak and be patient with everyone.
Make sure that people do not try to take revenge.
You must all think of what is best for each other and for the community.
Be happy at all times.
Pray constantly, and for all things give thanks to God.
This is what God expects you to do in Christ Jesus.
Never try to suppress the Spirit or treat the gift of prophecy with contempt.
Think before you do anything.
Hold on to what is good and avoid every form of evil.
1 Thessalonians 5:14-22

God chose you from the beginning to be saved by the sanctifying Spirit and by faith in the truth.
2 Thessalonians 2:13b

Stand firm, and keep the traditions we taught you whether by word of mouth or by letter.
2 Thessalonians 2:15

Pray that the Lord’s message may spread quickly and be received with honor.
2 Thessalonians 3:1

Keep away from any of the brothers who refuses to work or to live according to the tradition.
2 Thessalonians 3:6

Never grow tired of doing what is right.
If anyone refuses to obey, have nothing to do with him, so that he will feel that he is in the wrong, though you are not to regard him as an enemy, but as a brother in need of correction.
2 Thessalonians 3:13-15

All texts are taken from the Jerusalem Bible (1966).

For mine eyes have seen

I read recently, that there are about two hundred million galaxies in the observable universe, and that each galaxy is composed of millions of stars like our own sun. The same article made the astonishing claim that this means, there are more stars in the universe than the number of grains of sand on the planet earth. The scientists who discover these things also tell us, that everything in the known universe emerged from a singularity of infinite density and in size very nearly (if not) nothing, and that in the first unimaginably small fraction of the first second of existence, the ‘big bang,’ an event that initiated the expansion of that singularity, had already pushed the limits of all created matter and energy to a circumference far beyond the outermost orbits in our solar system. They did not see it happen. They do not claim to understand what caused the singularity to explode (if that is the right word). It is on the basis of experimentally derived physical ‘laws’ and the logic of (very much) higher mathematics, that they say these things, trying to create models of natural processes that fit human thought patterns.

Now, it has taken scientists about eight thousand years to arrive at this point. Not much progress was made in the first seventy-nine hundred years, but in the last hundred or so, they have finally arrived at the place where they are today. What they tell us about the creation of the universe takes for granted that everything that exists is evolving. People knew this long before Darwin applied the idea to his theories on natural selection, the survival of the fittest, which have come to be known in the aggregate as ‘the theory of evolution.’ Now, I believe in the first kind of evolution, and am even open to the possibility that the second kind (that of living entities, including man) is also true. But my belief is only that—a belief, or even an opinion, based on the best information I find available. It is still only a belief. What creation is, what existence is, neither I nor anyone else can really know, at least not as we now are.

There are other ‘technologies,’ if I may call them that, which have arisen and coexisted with the scientific method, even from antiquity. In a very general way, and for lack of a more precise term, I have called them ‘spiritual technologies.’ Ironically, though, they are not really spiritual, well, not exactly. Scientists use devices which they have made to measure what can be measured, and using logic and mathematics, have developed our knowledge of the physical universe. Spiritual technologs (I have to create a new word—sorry!) use the human being as their only device of discovery, and then proceed to do exactly what scientists do, with the exception of using higher mathematics, they logically organize their discoveries into systems. I said that calling this ‘spiritual technology’ is ironic, and indeed it is, because this body of knowledge is still primarily concerned with nature, with physical realities.

Because the only device or tool of discovery is the human being, in singular and en masse, the body of knowledge is as holistic as a human being is. Not everything about a human being is discoverable by the scientific method. Where that discipline ends, another ancient one begins—theology. Yet even that term is imprecise, because it is one sided. Theology by the meaning of the term should be the body of knowledge about God, but it is actually only about God in His interactions with man, in other words, about nine-tenths about human nature, and one-tenth (if even that much) about Divine Nature. Still, it is what it is. To the scientist God hides Himself absolutely. To the spiritual technolog He reveals Himself—in human flesh!—so amply and pervasively that He can be overlooked. ‘What forest? All I can see are trees!’ But for eight thousand years this other discipline of discovery, call it what you will, has delivered to us moderns at least as much, if not more, information about the universe.

The universe was created out of nothing by ‘X’ in a series of time sequences or ages, except for the last and current age, in which all instantaneous creation has abruptly stopped. We who live in this current age have not ever seen anything like the instantaneous creation that occurred in the previous ages, so we can only conclude that things just don’t work that way. Everything evolves. Just as we have noticed evolution, that is, change, happening all around us and within us for the past eight thousand years, we just assume that’s how it’s always been. The human being as instrument of discovery, though, has given those who thus use it, more information than that which can be measured and weighed externally. Something inside us, if we care to look—which is what we were created to do: we are the eyes, ears and mind of the living universe—something inside us has discovered other realities, even the ultimate Reality by coming into contact with It within our own being.

This is a place where space and time dilate until they become meaningless. Size, or better yet, scale is irrelevant. Zero and infinity are experienced as extremities of the here and now. We go to a lightless field on a cloudless night and look up. Our eyes see, gradually more and more, the visible universe. There are stars beyond all reckoning, and distances unfathomable. Yet something inside us, comforting, says, ‘All that you can see is still contained within the plates of your own skull.’ Like a young Mother who once bore within her womb the Child who is pre-eternal God, we know inwardly that we are ‘wider than the heavens,’ and that the Sign we bear within us is the key to comprehending the whole universe. There is no being at all without meaning, and it is this meaning that makes all life possible, and all endeavors, even encompassing every discovery of science that has ever been or shall be made. Encompassing all, giving meaning to all, revealing that everything is a function of the one we call ‘X.’

Yes, once not long ago, only a few centuries, there was a single pursuit—discovering who or what ‘X’ is, and that pursuit uncovered everything else that exists. This pursuit is the main function of the human mind, an intelligence which inhabits the body organ we call the brain. The brain was created, or evolved—whichever you prefer it doesn’t matter—principally so the universe could discover its reason for being. Anything else that the brain does is ‘thrown in’ as a bonus. Well, almost. Brains can’t live in a vacuum, at least not yet. The mind lives in a brain which lives in a body. We live in houses for the same reason, that same Reason whose pattern is indelibly imprinted on the whole universe, that Reason which wants us to discover It. Yes, I am speaking of that ‘X’ again. Bodies were made for the brains to live in, so that the mind could use everything else in our human nature to do what it was made to do—discover.

Whatever or whoever we call ‘X’ in any particular place or moment of time, it is the same, operates the same, and welcomes all the same, envyless, unprideful, inexhaustibly merciful is its nature, and for what we are, it is the perfect fit. Everything points to it. We only have to look. I termed it ‘X’ to emphasize that I don’t know how it will fit you, and to give you time and space to find it. As for me, I know who, not what, He is, but not why, except that everything He has made calls me by name and welcomes me to His side. Something in me has disclosed the door of the age to come, and to enter that door I want to be ready, as ready as him who said, ‘Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace according to Thy Word, for mine eyes have seen…’

Keep them in Thy power

When I was still working for a living—I am now retired—when I motored to and from work every day, part of my route took me up Portland’s N.E. 82nd Avenue, a major north-south boulevard infamous for its connexion to prostitution, adult video parlors, and strip joints.

One morning, a forty-ish looking prostitute with long, curly auburn hair, wearing skin-tight blue jeans, and taking a drag on a cigarette, was walking along the road with a man. I just happened to notice her and in that fleeting moment, she stared me in the eyes with an intense look of mixed contempt and anger, and then was gone.

Another morning, a man in a shabby linen suit, looking about fifty years old, with a shock of red-gold hair and a very thick but trimmed beard to match, was standing on that same sidewalk right at the road’s edge shaking his fist at on-coming traffic and shouting angry words. He wasn’t standing at a corner or at a bus stop. He made no move to jay-walk the busy avenue. He was just expressing himself.

One night about seven years ago, a friend of mine who happens to be Orthodox, was homeless and staying with me for awhile, was sitting in my livingroom. I was upstairs in my bedroom. I thought I heard the sound of the front door being opened and shut, and I heard him talking to someone, then—silence. I waited a minute or two, and then came downstairs and asked him if there was someone at the door. His response was, ‘No.’

‘Well, who were you talking to then?’ I asked. ‘I was talking to the man who has been tormenting me for the last ten years,’ he answered in an annoyed tone of voice, then mumbled as if to himself, ‘who’s been tormenting me for the past forty years…’ and then trailed off. ‘What are you talking about?’ I responded. ‘Spirits! There’s spirits outside! Roman, the world is full of spirits!’ he retorted in an angry, panicky tone of voice. I left him there and went back upstairs to my evening ‘quiet time.’

It seems that the world we inhabit is full of insanity or, as my friend put it, spirits. Even though he was a Christian, his mental illness continued and worsened. The Church could do nothing for him, because everything it can do must be done with his full consent, and he wouldn’t give it. Thinking about him and his condition makes me wonder if an insane person actually has free will.

Once, writing about mental illness, I said, ‘Turning to Christ means sanity; turning away from Him means insanity.’ The world that I used to see every day on one leg of my drive to work was (and still is) an insane world, and that world can get very, very close sometimes. It intrudes on my Church, on my own family, even on me. It all comes down to this: Do we turn to Christ or away from Him?

It’s not hard to see how those who live in the world without Christ can be insane, but how can an Orthodox or any Christian be insane? Well, we still have choices and we make them. Some insanity, maybe most of it, is caused by disorders deeper than the level of will, but there are those forms of insanity which we welcome by our persistent rebellion, our refusal to accept help.

We can see it in small doses affecting ourselves, but the same rebellion repeated and unrestrained seems to lead us to a point where we no longer have the will to resist it. Insanity, then, becomes our ‘normal’ state, from which we emerge only as necessary to survive interactions with others, and into which we retreat when we find ourselves alone.

How could my friend be insane and a Christian at the same time? In his case, it seemed to me, it was a disorder of the will, a bent towards the rebellious, a turning away from the real Christ combined with a turning towards an idolatrous image of Christ. He would spend his time ‘praying’ and reading the bible aloud in Greek (he didn’t understand Greek, he just knew how to pronounce it) when he couldn’t find anything else to do. He couldn’t bring himself to actually work (hold a job) because everyone ‘out there’ was out to prevent him from working and leading a normal life. He couldn’t see how he could possibly be responsible for any of his misfortunes.

It’s the mercy of Christ, coming to him because of his confession of His name, that has kept my friend from total insanity, but it’s like he is hanging on to life by a shoestring. We see him now and then as he cycles through a round of different Orthodox parishes, staying only a short while, and then disappearing again.

It makes me wonder just how much of what we do and what we are is only because of God’s grace, and how it is that some find themselves turning to Him, and others turning away.

And so my prayer, tonight and every night, drawn from the Night Litany in the Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book (Anglican), is ‘For the insane, Lord, keep them in Thy power.’

Renewed in the Image

The teaching of holy apostle Paul…

You will be able to lead the kind of life which the Lord expects of you, a life acceptable to Him in all its aspects, showing the results in all the good actions you do and increasing your knowledge of God. You will have in you the strength never to give in, but to bear anything joyfully, thanking the Father who made it possible for you to join the saints and with them to inherit the light.
Colossians 1:10-12

He has taken us out of the power of darkness and created a place for us in the Kingdom of the Son that he loves, and in him we gain our freedom, the forgiveness of our sins.
Colossians 1:13-14

The mystery is Christ among you, your hope of glory. This is the Christ we proclaim, this is the wisdom in which we thoroughly train everyone and instruct everyone, to make them all perfect in Christ.
Colossians 1:27-28

Make sure that no one deceives you with specious arguments.
Colossians 2:4

You must live your whole life according to the Christ you have received, Jesus the Lord. You must be rooted in Him and built on Him and held firm by the faith you have been taught, and full of thanksgiving.
Colossians 2:6-7

Make sure that no one traps you and deprives you of your freedom by some secondhand, empty, rational philosophy based on the principles of this world instead of on Christ.
Colossians 2:8

Since you have been brought back to true life with Christ, you must look for the things that are in heaven where Christ is sitting at God’s right hand. Let your thoughts be on heavenly things, not on the things that are on the earth.
Colossians 3:1-2

You must kill everything in you that belongs only to earthly life: fornication, impurity, guilty passion, evil desires, and especially greed, which is the same thing as worshiping a false god. All this is the sort of behavior that makes God angry.
Colossians 3:5-6

You must give all these things up: getting angry, being bad-tempered, spitefulness, abusive language and dirty talk, and never tell each other lies.
Colossians 3:8-9a

You have stripped off your old behavior with your old self, and you have put on a new self which will progress toward true knowledge the more it is renewed in the Image of its Creator. In that Image there is no room for distinction. There is only Christ. He is everything, and He is in everything.
Colossians 3:9b-11

You are God’s chosen race, His saints. He loves you. You should be clothed in sincere compassion, in kindness and humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with one another. Forgive each other as soon as a quarrel begins. The Lord has forgiven you. Now you must do the same. Over all these clothes to keep them together and complete them, put on love. And may the peace of Christ reign in your hearts, because it is for this that you were called together as parts of one body. Always be thankful.
Colossians 3:12-15

Let the message of Christ in all its richness find a home with you. Teach each other and advise each other in all wisdom. With gratitude in your hearts sing psalms and hymns and inspired songs to God. Never say or do anything except in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.
Colossians 3:16-17

Wives, give way to your husbands, as you should in the Lord.
Colossians 3:18

Husbands, love your wives and treat them with gentleness.
Colossians 3:19

Children, be obedient to your parents always, because that is what will please the Lord.
Colossians 3:20

Parents, never drive your children to resentment or you will make them feel frustrated.
Colossians 3:21

Whatever your work is, put your heart into it as if it were for the Lord and not for men, knowing that the Lord will repay you by making you His heirs. It is Christ the Lord that you are serving.
Colossians 3:23-24

Be persevering in your prayers and be thankful as you stay awake to pray.
Colossians 4:2

Be tactful with those who are not Christians and be sure you make the best use of your time with them. Talk to them agreeably and with a flavor of wit, and try to fit your answers to the needs of each one.
Colossians 4:5-6

All texts are taken from the Jerusalem Bible (1966).