Soon and very soon

Soon, my office window filled with a bare dogwood, I will go out and prune the tree. The pussy willows need looked at for Palm Sunday a month away. The detritus from the dead November winds should be raked away. Soon.

It is hard to believe in Spring. A succession of winters will do that: bury the evidence, the actual experience of surprise, the burst of April scattering the remnants of January. Not only do the slate horizons of winter dull memories of Spring, but so also the Sirius heat of August. Somewhere lost in the familiarities of gray chill and bronze burn is the cool, fresh brightness, the juvenescence of lilac, honeysuckle, lilies and apple blossoms whispering, sighing in the first pleasant evening, when I can walk hand-in-hand in the soft darkness on our brick lane. Soon.

But now, coke trains lumber on the long viaduct to the Edgar Thomson No. 1 & No. 3 blast furnaces in Braddock, past the empty hulks of the interminable Westinghouse plant, the background of my foreground dogwood tree. We hear them day and night, and the Port Authority buses that growl night and day, coaching the workers in and out of the City. These are the sounds of death and heat, inhumane necessities, wrath and want. Whitman was off by a long shot in his versification of industry: the sounds do not cheer me, they do not betoken human activity. They, too, obscure the Spring. Which is to come. Soon.

There are white women who bemoan black men, and wars waged for increasingly arcane, industrial reasons. There are hierarchs who have forgotten meekness and have remembered lesser rubrics at the expense of the greater dogmas. There are webmasters who knit shawls at guillotines, despots who assign guardian angels and saints to nukes, revisionists who would be happy to refashion a dusty old patriarchal hasbeen church into their own egalitarian, professional, uptodate image, where every bishop will answer to an oversight committee. There are 1 in 4 female adolescents stricken with STDs, fired admirals, embarrassed governors, shuttered McMansions, unpopular embattled Orthodox, Creed-ignorant ecstaticians.

These are the sounds of death and heat. They, too, obscure the Spring. Which is to come. Soon.

Only a community that is apostolic in sacrament and mystical work can sustain the life of Christian dogma through history. In other words, the Gospel of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation – theology and economy proper – can only be articulated through a Body that actually believes this Gospel. Such a Body is led through history by bishops that see, with their hearts, the apostolic vision: they, and their clergy and faithful, can do this only through knowledge mediated by grace and works, in fear and trembling.

Time corrodes – as is characteristic of all Grace – all attempts outside the veil, or the “covering” of the sacred order, the authority of the Pillar of Truth. Bishops can be bishops, Church can be Church, only in the Biblical, Patristic sense – through ascesis, kenosis, the radically conservative Gospel revolution, mystical charisma. If otherwise, as has been seen too often in the deathworks, then these men and institutions will tend, inexorably and carnally, toward the abysmal poles of mainline (and sidelined) American anti-nomianism; or neo-Borgia-Medici-Frankish statism; or quasi-caesaro-papism that yearns for a third Rome. There is Rome enough, and that one is in Italy. There was once a New Rome: it did its ordained work of establishing Orthodoxy. It is gone. There was, and is, and will be, no other.

There is the state, of course, and I am not at all sure anymore that I know what, or where, it is. But it sure makes lots of money.

Culture has never been so loud and empty, so strident in its obfuscation, its mystification, its blinding and whining. It has a million ways to stand between the soul and the appearances, a million virtualities.

The Trinity, though, is beautiful. Christ is beautiful. Man finds his beauty (that is, meaning) in the redemption won by Christ. Church is this beauty, and redemption is Spring. Soon.

I have been despondent over death, and I have felt the winter as I have felt no other. But I remember the beauty of mercy this first week of the Fast, in the Canon. And I remember the Spring.

Soon.

Comments

[Fr. Gregory Long]

Wow. May the beauty of the Trinity always be in your midst. And thank you for reminding us all what this is really all about.