Deserted

Lent is always strange, and it is meant to be thus. But this one is stranger.

It feels deserted -- deserted by common sense, a sense of order (that's been shown to have been rather cardboard). In my case, deserted by a familiar calming kindness at the top of my administration.

I refer, of course, to the loss of my hierarch.

And now, that sense of ancient desertion is further compounded by the sodden fact that his good memory is being utilized in the internecine polemic of other jurisdictions.

Good Lord. One rather intense post was even counting which bishops showed up at Vladyka's funeral, and which bishops did not. I must say that all such nutterings (even from respected pens) are no better than furtive whispers in regrettable paperbacks and mildewy church basements.

Show a little reticence for God's sake. Save your soul while you're at it. 

After all, yammering about old geezers traipsing around like Odd Fellows and gasping about politics so close to a coffin and Holy Week is really the proper business of Sadducees and Pharisees.

I guess they never left us -- Sadducees and Pharisees, that is. They just became converts and cradle nasi ludi. There's more than enough embarrassment on both sides of the Orthodox Mason-Dixon line.

In the meantime, if you recognize yourself deserted by the familiar, by old companionships, by customary patterns. If you feel yourself deserted in disappointment, in contretemps, in an agora of adults-behaving-badly,

Well, then, welcome to the desert.

And let us wander in prayer and attention to the simpler things.

I repent and you repent. I forgive and you forgive. Let us sing alleluia, the song of the desert, and prostrate ourselves in the dust of Ephraim's prayer.

Let us look for bishops and follow them. Bishops who have fought against all passions. Who have achieved apatheia and exercise discernment. Discernment, that is, of the real names and logoi, and of the difference between the spirits.

Bishops who have attained theoria.

Who are celibate, who don't need any housekeepers or personal assistants, who live either alone or in a monastery. Who could survive being an anchorite. Who know how to lead as a real man, and not through the legerdemain of committees and consultation. 

Who are mature in the faith (i.e., Orthodox for at least a decade), wise as serpents but innocent as doves.

Who are poor in spirit, who hunger after righteousness, who are meek and merciful.

I will not put up with less. I will pray for more than less.

I was "spoiled" by a true, real bishop. A man of prayer. A man who could sit at a dais one moment, and hobnob with the hoi polloi the next.

Now he's in the land of true, unrelenting, symphonic prayer. Now we wait for what's next.

So here we are. Here you are.

Deserted. In the desert.

Like Mary, with the lion.

Comments

[Ingemar]

Now you'll have to deal with a bishop who is likely to be nothing more than a Constantinopolitan bureaucrat. Welcome to the rest of Christendom.

[Fr. Jonathan]

Don't think so. And rather sure of it, too. I'd rather stay "unwelcome."