Yesterday was Graduate Sunday, and our annual hymn to the gathering of the Carpatho-Russian saints (despite being too poor and politically naïve to keep a country, there turned out to be quite a few of these).
The homily was the usual stuff about staying true to the faith, and not jumping ship as most graduates do (away from the rigors of Orthodoxy, and self-schlocked into something easier like Egyptian cotton and HBO, celery-twizzler brunches at the Radisson, or psychobabble bible skits at the metro mega emporium).
It was also about staying true to credulity. Matters were complicated by the fact that one of the 9 graduates was the priest’s oldest daughter, who was held by him for the first 45 minutes after her premature birth 18 years ago, her cobalt eyes (brown now) open, gazing back most of that duration.
They were complicated because credulity now has a negative connotation – a negativity that figures as a harbinger of societal antipathy, perhaps a Sybillean note of persecution. The homilist was afflicted with the notion, perhaps the logismoi, that he was urging her and the other callow academicians and careerists to deliberately think against the tide, and suffer the pecuniary consequences.
He told them, the shariah-like (at least it looks that way to sensitive sophisticates) priest, to believe simply in the Church’s report of floating axeheads, of creation instead of chance, of meaning instead of truncated matter, of Jonah three days in a fish, of the chariot swinging low in fire, of the ever-virginity of the Theotokos, the Incarnation of the Second Person and the Deity of the historical Jesus, the victoriously obedient Passion and the epochal Resurrection.
He said that greater than all these miracles, which really do stretch the mind, and are embarrassing to any self-respecting scholastic and Hitchens-like secularist who cannot, for the safety of the world’s arena, afford any extra-materialistic data to creep into the transcendent mindset that has thrown off religion as a temporary Nietzchean phase on the way to manhood, is an even more scandalous, intellect-straining incredulity.
This greater miracle makes easy, by contrast, belief in the Virgin Birth, floating axeheads, and the talking severed head of the Baptist. If one can believe in this miracle, said the Father (who never did deserve this title) of the flock, and the father (who didn’t deserve this either) of the girl, that it should be easy to believe in the Body and Blood of the Eucharist, in the immediate “magical” aspect of all the Mysteries (but certainly beyond magic in truth) … easy to believe in joy at funerals … easy to believe in personality change (even for repeat offenders) … easy to believe that babies baptized, even with parents who don’t give a damn, will somehow, someway, sometime, somewhere be rescued by an attentive Guardian Angel.
The greater miracle, of course, is the personal, intimate love that gushes from the Trinity. That should be impossible to believe in, like camels parading through needles, but all things are possible, you know.
Believe in Trinitarian grace, and everything else is easy street.
But there were things not said, because the homilist ran out of time.
Stay tuned: same bat time, same bat channel …
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